by closer2fine 129 Replies latest jw friends
Flower,
Language is something that evoluate and get mixed by every influence (it's own charme) ... I'm just happy that we do not still talking the same way than before (old French ... interesting but not more than the one we have now), and now I can enjoy both, if I want to.
I see nothing wrong with a child having both a home language and a language for the prevailing culture. I think african-american children would be better off treating English as a foreign language necessary for the job, and learn it (without abandoning their home language).
I agree with you 100%. Except that this does not apply because we are not talking about people who are from other countries who have a 'home language'. Were talking about Americans. The home language is American English. The language needed to get ahead in the country is the same language. Its about whether lazily pronounced, grammatically incorrect words and phrases should be called Ebonics and presented to the world as acceptable and somehow 'cultural' instead of being seen as a lack of education.
This is the moment I want to bring Celtic in to the conversation! My ancestors are from Britain - scottish Britain! I think the northern scots maintained their culture and their language better, because they maintained their home language and culture, while assimilating to the British ways at school and work.
And also I agree 100 % With JGNAT about :
I see nothing wrong with a child having both a home language and a language for the prevailing culture. I think african-american children would be better off treating English as a foreign language necessary for the job, and learn it (without abandoning their home language).
Now Flower, if you are black this is "where", "what" Bill Cosby and alike said have it "effect" on you ... you considere you're own people langage as shit !
Frenchy (by the way your language makes me melt ),
You still are not getting it hon. I am black. My ancestors were AFRICAN. That would make my 'peoples' language one of the African languages...NOT Ebonics! Africans DON'T speak Ebonics. Uneducated Americans do! And DATS DA TROOF.
LOL Flower thank you (I'm bad ... but sorry - maybe a bit lazy also ... Geeezzzz !)
Yes, is see clearly where you put the difference ... it is your choice, I would even say, your right (you like it or not after all) ... I like all languages, because they are like pictures that you can enjoy every tones but moreover practice to get closer relationships nor understanding ; and there is the point : somehow the priority is to talk the right way (to be understood and not being rejected - I do agree with that) depending on the situation. it is true also about the manor we talk to others (not related to the language it is a question of perception : very personnal)
But a language in itself - is ain't shit ... (Couldn't hold it ) ... I like the "ain't" stuff and other "gonna", "wanna", y'a know ?
Dat aint no Ebonics, dats jus bad grammar and Iffin I waz ta talk like dat in my job innerview, it aint no wondah i aint git offered da job.
I think its insulting for one to insist that this disgusting display represents 'black language' where as speaking as though you have an education is considered 'talking white'.
One of the basic concepts in linguistics is the difference between descriptive and prescriptive grammar. It is one matter to state a linguistic fact or demonstrate that a language does in fact exist, it is a whole different matter to say that it should be used exclusively, or worse, should be used in place of standard English. I certainly hope you recognize that I have been very clear in stating the social NECESSITY of standard English and how everyone must be taught at a young age to respect it and embrace it as their language, to become fully bidialectal to lay claim to as many advantages as possible. It is then that one code-switch with ease, and use the "proper" speech and pronunciation and grammar for the appropriate situation. I agree that it is a dangerous fallacy that people think of standard English as "talking white", and it is not at all hard to understand where that comes from. It comes from over a century of language subordination and segregation, when the standard was very deliberately withheld from blacks. Since economic advantages come from controlling the standard (non-working class jobs requiring it), it comes as no surprise that language was used as tool for maintaining white power and privileges. That was my big point several posts ago that the peer pressure among black teens against using standard English, especially teasing those who do use it as "acting white" is very harmful precisely because it does perpetuate this legacy of racism. And it is a hard thing to combat because the attitude itself is a response to ongoing racism, such as the linguistic profiling I described, wherein whites discriminate against blacks on the basis of their speech. But my point in the last few posts is to describe the situation in more lingusitically accurate terms, that Black Vernacular is indeed a dialect of English, closely related to white Southerner English, as well as certain regional dialects in the UK. It is not nothing but slang, and it is not "anything goes", but has clear phonological and grammatical rules that have been described and studied for decades. It is nonsensical to say that it is not dialect because it is "nothing but bad grammar".....for "bad grammar" refers to the speech being "non-standard", as not being standard English, and that is precisely what non-standard dialects are. I guarrantee you by this standard that all the other dialects I compared Black Vernacular to have lots of "bad grammar". Ever seen any Scottish English? In comparison to Standard English, it has far more atrocious grammar than Black Vernacular. So in asserting that Black Vernacular is a real dialect, I was trying to bring the discussion out of lay, common-sense notions into the realm of where much research has been done in sociology, education, and linguistics on this very subject. By no means was stating this fact imply that I was advocating what you implied, for I already stated I believed the opposite. To give a comparison from politics, pointing out that the Bush Administration does in fact exist and pointing out evidence that George W. Bush is not just some random guy but in fact a person in the formal office of President, stating this mere fact in no way should be taken to mean that I advocate voting for Bush this November. You see, there're two different things. One does not need to argue that the Bush Administration doesn't exist in order to advocate voting for Kerry, anymore than one needs to say that Black Vernacular isn't a language in order to advocate standard English as the language that all must master.
Apart from the desire to correct an oft-stated myth about language, part of me is so opposed to this notion that Black Verncular isn't a real language because it reminds me of the claims of Arthur Jenson, the Bell Curve, and the "language deficit model" of education, who point to the "lack of verbal ability" as evidence of cognitive deficits among blacks, either because of environmental factors or genetic ones. The stuff written by educators in the '60s under the deficit model were especially ignorant and scientifically groundless, inferring that school-age blacks lack real language, who talk only to vocalize basic emotions, and who lacked the ability to reason (because logical thought, they claimed, was only possible through standard English). Such pseudoscientific ideas have been since rejected by most educators, thanks much in part to proof provided by linguists showing that the vernacular, while being non-standard, is in fact not logically or referentially deficient.
Leo, point taken, I guess we have to agree to disagree on this one.
I still dont recognize ebonics as a language even by this definition for two reasons.
One, it is not a geographical language spoken by a group of people in a particular region like scottish english or southern english. Its spoken by uneducated people everywhere in this country. Or it is spoken by educated people all over who just speak more casually when they are not in a professional situation which is fine.
Second, how can we call it Black or African American Vernacular English when educated, successful, professional Black Americans do not even understand let alone speak it? And I dont mean successful sports players or entertainers. I mean doctors, lawyers, ceos ...professionals. I highly doubt you will hear any of them speak this way even at home.
Black is race not a nationality. Like Asian, Caucasian, Hispanic ect. They all speak the language of the region they happen to come from. That people who have darker skin speak their own language is absurd to me and not at all comparable to regional languages.
Either way Cosbys point is one we both agree on. These people need to learn standard english if they want even a chance at success. It may not get them the American dream but unless they can sing, dance, or play sports extremely well they have no shot at any dream without learning english.
flower....I should also say that I completely respect your opinion because it is a common one, and I'm glad we can disagree amicably... And I definitely agree with you and Cosby about Standard English, he's totally right of course about that....it is what he has said about Black English (from the '70s to the present) that I disagree with.
To respond to your questions, Black Vernacular is in a sense a regional dialect like Scottish or southern English. It developed in the South, and of all the English dialects, the one that it most closely resembles is white Southern English. They share many of the same features, like the way certain words are pronounced, ain't, adding a- to words like a-runnin', adding fixing to to verbs to indicate intention (which is today often pronounced fitna or finna), the use of done for completive (I done read the book), double modals like might could (which you might hear more in the South), pronouncing "ask" as aks, etc. In many respects they are non-standard in the same way. The reason why the Black Vernacular is spoken across the US with a fair degree of uniformity that no longer makes it look like its a regional dialect is the fact that the Great Migration to the North and West was relatively recent, between 1914-1930. That may seem long ago to us, but in linguistic terms, it's just not enough time for local regional varieties to develop. It took hundreds of years for that to happen in England, and in the Eastern US and South. In fact, if you look at white vernacular English dialects, the speech west of the Rockies is also likewise uniform -- because it was largely settled in the 1870s and 1880s onward -- relatively recent in linguistic terms. Most dialectologists treat the West as one giant dialect area with only minor differentiation. And since blacks who migrated largely settled in urban areas in the North, the concentration and intense mutual contact would lead to further convergence and similarity among the speakers forming the new communities and a relatively uniform urban vernacular.
Your second point is definitely true, and this is the problem with language labels. A name like "Black Vernacular" does not imply that all blacks speak it (obviously false) or only blacks speak it, but rather that most of its speakers are black and that the language has a history within the black community and it originated in the black experience. Not all Cajuns or those descended from Accadians speak Cajun (few do today), but the language originated with this people and is called "Cajun" for that reason. It is a little different with labels like "Black English", "African-American Vernacular English" since these are formal names that are generally not used by speakers to refer to their speech. I know of some local Vietnamese kids and Latinos who learn and speak Black Vernacular, and of course a good proportion of blacks are raised without a knowledge of it.
Black is race not a nationality. Like Asian, Caucasian, Hispanic ect. They all speak the language of the region they happen to come from. That people who have darker skin speak their own language is absurd to me and not at all comparable to regional languages.
The problem here is the word "black" which is used synonymously with "African-American". No, it would be silly to talk about all people of color speaking a certain way. That of course is not what is meant by the term, but rather the dialect spoken by many African-American descendents of the former black population in the South. It was the regional language spoken a hundred, two hundred years ago in the South (cf. the ex-Slave recordings) by blacks. It was distinguished in many ways from the regional language spoken by whites in the South. It is not at all silly to talk about the southern blacks developing a distinct dialect, for slavery and segregation indeed kept them separate and blacks subordinated. As Rickford & Rickford wrote:
Josiah Henson's remembrances of his own forceful separation from his mother at an auction block in Maryland in the early 19th century, when he was five or six, make painful reading: "I seem to see and hear my poor weeping mother now. This was one of my earliest observations of white men; an experience which I only shared with thousands of my race, the bitterness by the frequency of which to any individual who suffers it cannot be diminished by the frequency of its occurrence, while it is dark enough to overshadow the whole after-life with something blacker than a funeral pall." Such traumatic separations were probably similar to the ear-nailings of the 18th century that we cited earlier, in the sense that they would have created or increased the psychic distance betwen blacks and whites. Blacks experiencing, witnessing, or even hearing about such cruelty would probably not have wanted to talk like their oppressors, and they would probably have become more determined to develop or maintain their own communicative and expressive styles.
To add more on how African-American Vernacular English arose, African slaves were speakers of many different West African languages (e.g. Fon, Gbe, Ewe, and many others), and indeed they learned the English spoken by their masters....but their masters did not speak standard English!! Indeed, they learned their English not from the aristocratic plantation owners but the white indentured servants who worked directly with Africans in the fields and who also .... in the very early days of the plantations. Africans learned the kind of nonstandard English that most other whites spoke in the South, though Africanizing it to various degrees. Thus the masters themselves did not "pronounce words" the standard way or "use proper grammar". Michael Montgomery has studied old writings of the poor white settlers from the 1600s and found that their writings contained many words and grammatical features of Black Vernacular. Much of it comes from English dialects (such as done for completive, I done read this book). Even the word "cracker" for whites comes ultimately from the English dialect of Ulster (from craic "talk, boast", which then became a term for whites of Scottish-Ulster background, and finally just referring to whites). Salikoko Mufwene in his recent book THE ECOLOGY OF LANGUAGE EVOLUTION shows that Black Vernacular developed as a nonstandard dialect in much the same way as White Southern dialects also developed as nonstandard dialects through the same process. What then happened is that as later generations of whites (such as those of a Scottish background) gained wealth and property, more of them learned standard English through education and became bidialectal in both..... while the Southern blacks were denied basic education and denied the means to acquire the standard. As for what the later generations of black slaves spoke in the South, the ex-Slave recordings show precisely how they spoke -- a nonstandard dialect much like white non-standard English containing all the usual vernacular features like done, be, etc. but less frequently than one might hear today. There is also much evidence that Black Vernacular had a deep impact on White Southerner English.
Finally, on the subject of the necessity of Standard English, why Black Vernacular is still useful to some black professionals, and why it is a real language, let me again quote from Rickford & Rickford, Spoken Soul:
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"That mainstream English is essential to our self-preservation is indisputable. Without it, how could we have wrested judgeships and congressional seats and penthouse offices from those who have long enjoyed such privileges almost unchallenged? We have come this far thanks in part to a distinguished lineage of men and women who used elegant Standard English as a template for their struggle against the very oppressor responsible for imposing the language on them. Malcolm X's speeches show his command of Standard English, especially a black Standard English that, like Jesse Jackson's, is non-vernacular in grammar but soulful in its rhetorical style and pronunciation, including intonation and emphasis. (Malcom himself was quite critical of "ultra-proper-talking Negroes", including "those with their accents so phonied up that if you just heard them and didn't see them you wouldn't even know they were Negroes.") But in making the transition from the street to the podium, brother Malcolm also had to develop his expertise in speaking and writing Standard English, and his initial discouragement is described in his Autobiography:
"I became increasingly frustrated at not being able to express what I wanted to convey in letters that I wrote, especially those to Mr. Elijah Muhammad. In the street, I had been the most articulate hustler out there -- I had commanded attention when I said something. But now, trying to write simple English, I not only wasn't articulate, I wasn't even functional. How would I sound writing in slang, the way I would say it, something such as 'Look, daddy, let me pull your coat about a cat, Elijah Muhammad.' "
We must also remember Frederick Douglass' "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? An Address delivered in Rochester, New York, on 5 July 1852." Drawing his imposing form upright before the president of the United States and other assembled statesmen, Douglass declared that:
"This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak to-day? If so, there is a parallel to your conduct. And let me warn you that it is dangerous to copy the example of a nation whose crimes, towering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrecoverable ruin! I can to-day take up the plaintive lament of a peeled and woe-smitten people."
By bequeathing to us such eloquence, Douglass commands us not only to master Standard English but also to learn it in its highest form. And we must. For in the academics and courthouses and legislatures and business places where policies are made and implemented, it is as graceful a weapon as can be found against injustice, poverty, and discrimination. Like Douglass and Malcolm X, we must learn to carry Standard English like a lariat, unfurling it with precision. We must learn to use it, too, for enjoyment and mastery of literature, philosophy, science, math, and the wide variety of subjects that are conducted and taught in Standard English, in the United States, and, increasingly, in the world. We must teach our children to do so as well. This, as you know, is no mean feat. It requires time, money and other resources, patience, discipline, and understanding, all of which tends to be tragically in short supply in schools with huge black populations. But treating Spoken Soul like a disease is no way to add Standard English to their repertoire.
In the 1970s, education specialist Mary Hoover polled 48 parents of elementary students in East Palo Alto and Oakland, California, about their attitudes toward vernacular and standard Black English. Standard Black English or Black Standard English is a variety in which the speaker uses standard grammar but still sounds black, primarily because of black rhetorical strategies and selected black pronunciations, especially intonation. Hoover also asked about Superstandard, in which the speaker sheds all traces of black pronunciation and affects a stilted syntac. She found little support for Superstandard, long the butt of humor and deprecation within the black community, but plenty of support for Standard Black English and a distinct preference for it over the vernacular in the classroom and at work. However, there was strong support for the vernacular at home and in the community, especially with black family members and friends.
One of the most frequent explanations that the parents gave for wanting to retain the vernacular was its role in the preservation of their distinctive history, worldview, and culture -- their soul. The sentiment is not unique to African Americans. Another reason for blacks' accepting and preserving the vernacular is its usefulness in "getting down" with other blacks. A black professor at a midwestern university, interviewed in a study in the early 1990s, explained that she not only used Spoken Soul with her black friends as a release from the stresses of her white-dominated professional life, but also employed it at times to create a positive relationship interaction with her black students: "I think it can be a unifier in developing a certain kind of rapport with them. The personal rapport perhaps gives them a great sense of 'I am on your side, there is no barrier between us, I can identify with you' -- it's a kind of signal with the language." We should remember that for many, speaking the vernacular is a source of great pleasure, as well as great utility. As Toni Morrison pointed out, there are some things that soul speakers cannot say, or say as well, "without resource to my language".
Neither is it intrinsically lazy or careless, which are uninformed and absolutist judgments. You can't speak soul simply by being lazy or careless about speaking Standard English. They are two different dialects, and all languages and dialects are systematic, rule-governed, and righteous, incorporating rules for pronouncing words and rules for modifying or combining words to express different meanings and to form larger phrases and sentences. African vernacular has, for instance, a rule of grammar that allows speakers to move negative helping verbs such as ain't and can't to the front of the sentence to make the sentence more emphatic, so that "Nobody ain't going" can become "Ain't nobody going!" (This is an emphatic utterance, not a question, and usually such a phrase ahs the falling intonation of a statement or exclamation). The verb can be moved to the front only if the subject of the sentence is a negative quantifier such as nobody or nothing. If the subject is not a negative quantifier -- say, John or the boy -- the rule does not apply. You can't convert "John ain't going" into "Ain't John going," at least not as an emphatic statement (With rising intonation, of course, "Ain't John going?" would be an acceptable question). Every human language and dialect studied to date -- whether loved or hated, prestigious or not -- has regularities or rules of this type. A moment's reflection would show why this is so. Without regularities, a language variety could not be successfully acquired or used in everyday life, and this applies to Spoken Soul as much as to "BBC English" of the British upper crust. Characterizations of the former as careless or lazy, and of the latter as careful or refined, are subjective social and political evaluations that do not reflect the actual linguistic nature of the language."
Leo, thanks for your research and thought into this. I really don't understand the level of passion this subject generates. I become gay just contemplating how very different we all speak compared to our forefathers.
I could never, in a million years, pick the ebonic dialect apart by examining the structure the way you have Leolaia, but I know that when I listen to it, I can understand it. It may take me a few seconds to get the meaning, but I almost always do. That means that it is working as a language. I guess I find it creative and rather fascinating to see it evolve so quickly on the street.
Will it hold a black person back in the business/social world? Of course.
Should the black community have charted a different course for their language? I guess you could say "of course, given that it is of detriment to them", but it seems to me that would be asking of the black community something that has never happened in any community, ever. They didn't conspire to create ebonics, it just happened, like any and every dialect or language. Asking them to conspire against ebonics, it seems to me, is asking a bit much. OTH, asking them to conspire to make their children "be all that they can be" is reasonable and helpful.
