Pardon my ignorance, but how is this “creole” different from the “Ebonics” that California wants to be studied in schools?
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Well, I’m no linguist, but I’ll take a stab at it.
According to an article in Discover magazine last year, linguists consider both to be separate languages – grammar, syntax, and vocabulary are different enough to qualify.
“Creole,” as stated, is an amalgam of two or more languages.
“Ebonics” is derived from a single language – English – with minimal influence from other tongues. I’m not sure what the linguistic term for this is. Basically, a group of speakers is isolated from the mainstream of a language, and over time evolve in a new direction. If the isolated group and the mainstream can still understand one another, then the isolated group is said to be speaking a dialect of the main language. If they cannot understand one another, then we have separate languages.
It’s my understanding that the European Romance languages eveolved out of Latin in a similar fashion. Again, perhaps a linguist can fill in some of the details.
As stated in another post, the Oakland schools were not trying to teach Ebonics to students. Rather, they wanted money to establish ESL classes for children who grew up speaking Ebonics, on the theory that standard English would be just as foreign to them as it is to children who grew up speaking Spanish, Tagalog, or whatever.
> It’s my understanding that the European
> Romance languages eveolved out of Latin in
> a similar fashion. Again, perhaps a
> linguist can fill in some of the details.
All languages evolved in this fashion. How else could two languages diverge from each other? Two groups of speakers of the language develop different dialects. These dialects continue to evolve on their own until they are mutually incomprehensible. At that point they can be considered separate languages.
As other people have pointed out, what the Oakland school board was trying to say in its Ebonics policy was that Ebonics (more commonly called Black American English or African American Vernacular English among linguists) is a distinguishable dialect of English and teachers should learn a little about it in order to be able to teach their students Standard American English.
That they needed to tell English teachers about this at all is what’s really bothersome. It’s as if engineers were allowed to get a bachelor’s degree without learning basic physics formulas like F=ma. But high school English teachers frequently get out of college without a single linguistics course.
The following is a basic linguistic fact: People speak different dialects of languages. The separation between dialects can be along regional or social-economic class or ethnic boundaries. People do not speak differently because they are inherently stupid, ignorant, or willfully evil. There may be good social reasons for learning to speak another dialect, but no dialect is linguistically better than another.
It’s amazing the number of English teachers who do not understand this. It is, as I said, as if engineers were not taught basic physics formulas.
This column reminds me of an incident that happened here at the University of Missouri-Columbia a few years ago.
Some campus group put out a brochure about something or other (I was never really up on the details). The brochure featured a number of caricatures of famous people. Someone on the team producing the brochure realized that all the famous people featured were white, so the team decided to alter the picture of Ross Perot and label it Eddie Murphy.
When the brochure came out, there was, if not a firestorm, then at least a small blaze from the black community on campus complaining that the cartoon of “Eddie Murphy” looked like a monkey, among other descriptions.
So, it was a case of someone actually causing offense because they tried to be sensitive to the feelings of the people they ended up offending.
Kind of silly, actually. Can’t we all just get along?
The question of whether Creole is a written language or not is a very interesting one, on which I have done some research. In fact there is a lot of writing done in the Caribbean English-based creole languages (especially Jamaican Creole) although at the moment, this mainly takes the form of poetry, song lyrics or other ‘literary’ type writings. There is no generally accepted and used method for writing these languages, though there is a system, developed by Frederic Cassidy in the 1950s, which is widely used by academics who study creoles (creolists). It is not much used outside academia, and you are right to say that creole speakers nearly always learn to read and write only Standard English, not Creole. Creole mostly has low status, though some people are trying to raise its status; writing more in Creole is part of that.
The HUD brochure is not at all funny but it looks like it might have started as a joke which went too far. Salikoko Mufwene pointed out that it accurately represents some features of a Creole like Jamaican Creole. However, there are also some odd things which suggest it might be the work of someone who knows (or thinks they know) a little bit about pidgin and creole languages: for example, on the last page we find yuhfellah and M. Cuomo fella. This suffix -fella is actually a part of some pidgins spoken in the South Pacific, including New Guinea Pidgin, which (under the name Tok Pisin) is one of the official languages of Papua New Guinea. However, it is never used in the way it is used in this brochure, and is completely unconnected with the Caribbean creoles which the brochure seems to be trying to represent. To me it suggests someone trying, not very successfully, to write a parody on the basis of a little bit of information about what pidgins and creoles are like.
Mark Sebba
(Lecturer in Linguistics, Lancaster University, England; author of Contact Languages: Pidgins and Creoles. )
[[The HUD brochure is not at all funny but it looks like it might have started as a joke which went too
far. Salikoko Mufwene pointed out that it accurately represents some features of a Creole like
Jamaican Creole. However, there are also some odd things which suggest it might be the work of
someone who knows (or thinks they know) a little bit about pidgin and creole languages: for
example, on the last page we find yuhfellah and M. Cuomo fella. This suffix -fella is actually a part of
some pidgins spoken in the South Pacific, including New Guinea Pidgin, which (under the name Tok
Pisin) is one of the official languages of Papua New Guinea.]]
Apparently the HUD brochure translation was done by a Canadian of Jamaican ancestry. I am pretty familiar with Jamaican patois, and was also confused by the use of the term “fella” which is not used in the Caribbean.
Jill
This episode reminds me of an experiment by a Massachusetts school district a few years back. According to an article in Reason a couple of years ago, school officials actually sat down and created an alphabet for a spoken-only Portugese dialect, Kriolu. Classes are (or were) taught in Kriolu and report cards and announcements sent home in the language. The parents, of course, can’t read the stuff because it’s not really a written language. Schools in the Cape Verde Islands (home of the dialect) “stubbornly” continue to teach in Portugese.