In this age of compulsory education how does black ghetto grammar survive?

In My Humble Opinion
61

[QUOTE=Zsofia]
So, nashiitashii, I see you have some of my ignant chirren who go sneaking around to your side of the desk?

There are social norms that might be “distasteful” to some, but they help you get along in life. Speak up, don’t call the librarian “shorty”, and stay on your side of the damned desk and we both keep our side of the social contract.
[/QUOTE]

If by “ignant chirren,” you mean middle aged people with bad breath/BO and who possess a fetish for being close enough to get throttled if I so much as move a milimeter, you’ve got it. Kids doing this is not as irritating, but it is a bit disturbing to have a five year old repeatedly pat you on the butt to get your attention; however, I understand that the one or two kids that do this can’t reach any higher than that. If only they’d stop doing it while I’m in the middle of helping someone else for the third time after I told them that I’d help them as soon as I was done with the other person…

62

I’ve been thinking about the understandability issue that people have been bringing up, and which **Indistinguishable **touched on before. AAE is not really all that ununderstandable by non-speakers if the listener just takes a moment to listen and not give up automatically, which I tried to stress in my first posting. The only thing I can think of as a serious impediment is slang. I think the idea of nonstandard dialects as being incomprehensible is a bit of a canard. As one of my prof’s always said when it came to double negatives, when Mick Jagger said, “I can’t get no satisfaction,” did you really believe that he could get satisfaction?

What the problem truly is with AAE and employment is not incomprehensibility but a basic dislike and disapproval of nonstandard dialects, a bit of linguistic gate-keeping if you will. Since we can usually tell if someone is uneducated by how they speak, we need not take their job application seriously after we have heard them speak. Since AAE has been linked to a lack of education (along with a host of less savory things), that dialect has been mostly ruled out as an acceptable dialect for business and customer service. Other dialects which are equally hard to understand but do not carry the same stigma are not subject to the same unacceptability, as **Indistinguishable **aptly pointed out with his Scottish accent example. I’m not going to argue the goodness or badness of this situation; that is a debate for a different thread.

I know a bunch of people are going to jump in and say how much trouble they have found in trying to understand speakers of AAE. I’m not going to debate that point based on anecdotes, but I have a bit of skepticism for such tales.

63

[QUOTE=nashiitashii]
If by “ignant chirren,” you mean middle aged people with bad breath/BO and who possess a fetish for being close enough to get throttled if I so much as move a milimeter, you’ve got it. Kids doing this is not as irritating, but it is a bit disturbing to have a five year old repeatedly pat you on the butt to get your attention; however, I understand that the one or two kids that do this can’t reach any higher than that. If only they’d stop doing it while I’m in the middle of helping someone else for the third time after I told them that I’d help them as soon as I was done with the other person…
[/QUOTE]

Mostly it’s twentysomethings here. There was once a girl sitting at one of our staff computers behind the really obvious desk for like five minutes, because she was so confident that I assumed she was from Technology or something and we all just figured everybody else knew who she was. I don’t mind actual kids who haven’t learned stuff like “not behind the desk”.

64

[QUOTE=liberty3701]
I’ve been thinking about the understandability issue that people have been bringing up, and which **Indistinguishable **touched on before. AAE is not really all that ununderstandable by non-speakers if the listener just takes a moment to listen and not give up automatically, which I tried to stress in my first posting. The only thing I can think of as a serious impediment is slang.
[/QUOTE]
How can you separate the slang from AAE? That’s what it is, right? When I listen to people using what the OP called “black ghetto grammar,” my problem isn’t so much the pronunciation of words; it’s the words I simply don’t comprehend. I’ve looked through printed lyrics of rap songs, for example, because I couldn’t understand the song. The printed lyrics make no sense to me either. It’s not a matter of the way someone talks–I just don’t understand the words and the way they’re strung together.

[QUOTE=liberty3701]
What the problem truly is with AAE and employment is not incomprehensibility but a basic dislike and disapproval of nonstandard dialects, a bit of linguistic gate-keeping if you will.
[/QUOTE]
I disagree. When I’m speaking to someone face to face, I rarely have a problem with mutual understanding. We interact, and we each modify our dialect so the other can follow it better. On the other hand, I spoke on the telephone to a customer service person who spoke AAE, and had to give up and ask for someone else because I truly couldn’t understand her. If we had been sitting across a table from each other and taken time to really get a conversation going, we probably would have been fine, but in my opinion, she had no business working a national customer service line.

65

[QUOTE=InvisibleWombat]
How can you separate the slang from AAE? That’s what it is, right?
[/QUOTE]
No. AAE is a dialect with a different syntax and phonology than standard English, but is just as regular and rule-based as standard English. It is not just slang. No dialect is just slang. And, if you’ll notice, I did not separate the slang; I merely said it was the one component I could see causing a serious problem in understanding.

66

[QUOTE=liberty3701]
It is not just slang. No dialect is just slang.
[/QUOTE]
I misphrased that. I didn’t mean to imply that AAE was “just” slang. I meant to say that the slang is an integral part of AAE. If you don’t understand the slang, you don’t understand AAE. You were saying that AAE is understandable but slang isn’t, and that’s what I was responding to.

67

[QUOTE=twickster]
So I’m the only one bothered by the misspelling in the thread title?
[/QUOTE]

Apparently everyone else was able to get over this and have an intelligent discussion regarding the topic at hand. Imagine that.

68

[QUOTE=Zsofia]
Bill Cosby used to talk about how young black people have forgotten “code-switching”, which is how most people (not just urban African American) people act in society - I talk one way to my friends and another to my boss. The problem isn’t when you use nonstandard English at the corner with your buddies; it’s when you can’t use anything else in a job interview. I do see a lot of young urban (not just black) teenagers who seem incapable of code switching. (I am a librarian who you’re asking for help. Last time I looked, my name was not “Shorty”. And stop mumbling!)
[/QUOTE]

This is an issue that really isn’t confined to race. You’ll find non-standard English in lower class people of all races. I grew up in an almost exclusively white area which was rural and very poor. As a result, when I’m talking to close friends or people I grew up with, my English is liberally sprinkled with “ain’t”, “don’t got”, and other remnants of the speech pattern I picked up as a kid. It’s certainly not AAE, but it shares similar characteristics. But, as you point out, it’s necessary to recognize when you can use that type of language and when it isn’t proper. I write for a living and you’ll never see that type of lower-class English in my writing. You’ll also never hear me speaking it to someone in a work situation or to someone who doesn’t share my background. It just makes one seem ignorant to be saying “I ain’t got nothing to do” or something like that.

Speaking AAE or other non-standard English isn’t a sign of ignorance. Speaking it exclusively certainly is.

69

[QUOTE=InvisibleWombat]
I misphrased that. I didn’t mean to imply that AAE was “just” slang. I meant to say that the slang is an integral part of AAE. If you don’t understand the slang, you don’t understand AAE. You were saying that AAE is understandable but slang isn’t, and that’s what I was responding to.
[/QUOTE]
I think integral is too strong of a word. Yes, it’s a part of the dialect, just as it is a part of every dialect. To nonspeakers, it may be particularly salient. But it doesn’t make the dialect ununderstandable, just those particular words if you’re not familiar with them.

70

I don’t know if I can see what you call AAVE to be a dialect. I haven’t spent much time around blacks from poorer black neighbourhoods, in fact I am a Canadian who sees the majority of American culture via the TV.

The American and Canadian blacks I meet speak standard English, and the black kids I see on the transit system speak standard English. The only people I see speaking like that are white kids or native kids up here in Canada imitating Rap videos.

If you want to hear a dialect, visit Newfoundland!

I can only understand about 65% of what Newfoundlanders are saying when they talk to each other. But all the Newfoundlanders I know can also speak standard English.

71

[QUOTE=lexi]
I don’t know if I can see what you call AAVE to be a dialect. I haven’t spent much time around blacks from poorer black neighbourhoods, in fact I am a Canadian who sees the majority of American culture via the TV.

The American and Canadian blacks I meet speak standard English, and the black kids I see on the transit system speak standard English. The only people I see speaking like that are white kids or native kids up here in Canada imitating Rap videos.
[/QUOTE]
How does any of this make AAE not a dialect?

72

For me - I think I dialect should be more distinct - AAVE isn’t that different from English to me - what I see of it is only slang

73

[QUOTE=lexi]
For me - I think I dialect should be more distinct - AAVE isn’t that different from English to me - what I see of it is only slang
[/QUOTE]

Of course AAVE is not different from English. It is a dialect of English. (That is, it is English).

74

[QUOTE=lexi]
For me - I think I dialect should be more distinct - AAVE isn’t that different from English to me - what I see of it is only slang
[/QUOTE]
You say that the only people you hear speaking anything like AAE are TV characters and white people imitating rap. Then, to you, it is only slang. In actuality, AAE is a dialect of English (ergo, it’s not different from English), with some different phonological and syntactic and semantic rules from standard English. Wikipedia’s article on it is not horrible, and will give you some idea of how AAE is more than just slang.

Also, we all speak a dialect (or dialects) of a language. Standard Canadian, American, and British English are dialects, just like AAE, Newfoundland English, and Scottish English is an accent. It merely means a variety of a language.

75

In my opinion (IANA Linguistic Expert) a dialect should distinctly differ from standard language without the use of slang.

I see Quebecer french, swiss deutsche, hutterite german, and newfoundland english as dialects. I do not see texan, cockney, geordie, boston english as dialects. My view of a dialect require more historic validity of separation of language plus less differences between other slangs.

Cockney, Geordie, Texan, and Appalachian are not dialects to me. These vernaculars have their own slang and rules of grammar, but the difference between the standard language, other slangs and their use of language are not distinct in my opinion. Same for AAVE.

Now to slip into my own vernacular, I come from poor farm folk and have heard the vernacular of my grandparents and other family members. Although the usage of grammar and pronunciation is not standard, I do not see it as a dialect. In fact I see the undereducated language of rural people as very similar to AAVE.

Dropping a few consonants, pluralizing words instead of of using “ing” is far from unique. I have heard the same usage of “ain’t”, “I be”, “I done”, in rural speak as I have heard in AAVE. The only difference to me between rural undereducated language and AAVE is the slang words such as “Bling and Ho and Biatches”.

I theorize if the AAVE speakers has a slow drawl, and dropped the slang, the use of language would not differ. And that is why I don’t think AAVE is a dialect.

As for Canadian, American, and British English they are less of dialects than Scottish English IMHO. The rules of grammar do not differ enough to be more than slight variations in regionally specific words. And yet - Scottish English - that is quite different.

76

I … I don’t even know what to say. It’s taking longer than we thought, indeed.

I’m sorry if that’s rude, but your “definition” of dialect is idiosyncratic to say the least, and it is clear that you have no background in linguistics or AAE. Please re-read this thread if you truly want to know more about this subject. Or re-read the Wiki article. Or not.

77

[QUOTE=lexi]

I see Quebecer french, swiss deutsche, hutterite german, and newfoundland english as dialects. I do not see texan, cockney, geordie, boston english as dialects. My view of a dialect require more historic validity of separation of language plus less differences between other slangs.

Cockney, Geordie, Texan, and Appalachian are not dialects to me. These vernaculars have their own slang and rules of grammar, but the difference between the standard language, other slangs and their use of language are not distinct in my opinion. Same for AAVE.

[/QUOTE]

I have no idea what you think ‘dialect’ means.

78

Please, I know the slogan of the site… To use an idiom of my own culture, there’s no use in slagging.

I prefaced my statements with “In my opinion”, I read the thread and the wikipedia article. I have yet to have proof that linguistically AAVE is different from any other vernacular of a poor undereducated group, other than via the slang. The majority of the wikipedia article deals with pronunciation of words - which is more accent, and dropping a few words between the noun and verb. I’ve seen the same drops in the rural relative’s speech patterns.

I’ve seen more extreme in the Germanic farmers of the area I grew up in.

In other words - cite?

79

[QUOTE=lexi]
In other words - cite?
[/QUOTE]

A cite for what, exactly? That professional linguists overwhelmingly classify AAVE as a variety of English, on par with any other you could care to name? You could drown in it; check out the references in that Wikipedia article, for example.

Or perhaps what you want is a cite that AAVE meets your idiosyncratic criteria for being a “dialect”? Well, perhaps it will, perhaps it won’t, but to tell you, we’d really have to know better what it is that you think “dialect” means. [And it might be nice if you could explain why we should care about whether something meets your particular, unorthodox definition, while you’re at it]

80

[QUOTE=Jamaika a jamaikaiaké]
I have no idea what you think ‘dialect’ means.
[/QUOTE]

I suspect the word dialect has become too socially loaded, and perhaps more inclusive.

Is the jargon of programmers now a dialect?

If jargon, slang, an mispronunciation make a dialect - then I guess I could call myself versed in many dialects.

I have asked openly of friends (one who is a masters in linguistics), and I am willing to accept if the definition of linguistics should be more inclusive, but from my own reading, I see that among linguists there is debate over what constitutes a dialect.