Ebonics, language, dialect

I came across this passage today from a linguist professor-

"What does Ebonics look like?

These distinctive Ebonics pronunciations are all systematic, the result of regular rules and restrictions; they are not random 'error'--and this is equally true of Ebonics grammar. For instance, Ebonics speakers regularly produce sentences without present tense is and are, as in "John trippin" or "They allright". But they don't omit present tense am. Instead of the ungrammatical *"Ah walkin", Ebonics speakers would say *"Ahm walkin." Likewise, they do not omit is and are if they come at the end of a sentence--"That's what he/they" is ungrammatical. Many members of the public seem to have heard, too, that Ebonics speakers use an 'invariant' be in their speech (as in "They be goin to school every day"); however, this be is not simply equivalent to is or are. Invariant be refers to actions that occur regularly or habitually rather than on just one occasion."

This caused me to think about the nature of language and when it's "proper" or not. Is "proper" English simply standard English that is generally accepted by society including professors who teach it? If language evolves over time, at what point should a language or dialect be considered legitimate? Obviously there needs to be standards including the ability to grade students based on these standards. But can one say that a student is speaking improperly outside the context of what is taught in school?

Post 1

Thursday, August 4, 2005 - 6:26pm

Its not that big of an issue in the long run: I'm thinking there will be automatic translators like in star trek in 10 years.

Talking about the present... all that matters is the person communicating is able to transfer the information they mean to transfer to their desired audience. School should be focused towards achieving goals, goals chosen by the individual parents and their children. Grading would then be based on the child's ability to achieve these goals.

Post 2

Thursday, August 4, 2005 - 6:41pm

That linguist professor is a damn fool or a damn lier. Ebonics pronunciations are hardly systematic, they change from city to city. Its not a dialect and its not a seperate language, its slang pure and simple. At best, its an accent. Of course you'd expect rappers and the like to use it, they have a persona to project. Look at P. Diddy for instance, he speaks one way when rapping and completely normal english when engaged in some professional work. Same with me, I spent several years up north and did debate so when I'm speaking business with someone from the North, I lose my Southern accent (I don't bother when I'm down here). I guarantee you this, all that slang their using now is going to be gone in a few decades to be replaced with something else.

Post 3

Thursday, August 4, 2005 - 6:57pm

I agree. I think ebonics is an infantile rebellion. The sad part of it is that those like you mentioned, i.e. P Diddy, have the intelligence to know that it is slang and choose not to use it in serious dealings, but they further it as legitimate and apropriate upon thousands of followers. Most of these followers being highly impressionable teenagers.

Post 4

Thursday, August 4, 2005 - 7:31pm

Here is a Jewish joke, better told in Yiddish:
"What is the difference between a language and dialect?"
Dialects do not have armies.

The official national language is only the dialect of the place that controls the army: Berlin, Paris, London... In America, interestingly, the one place without an accent is the Midwest. Announcers on national TV learn to sound like Clevelanders, Detroiters and Chicagoans.

Personally, I decry the ignorances in our common language. Apostrophes with plural esses, for instance. People who say "assessorize" for "accessorize." Laxadaisical... ekscape... ekcetera... For all intensive purposes... What really grinds me is people who force the verb to agree with the nearest noun, even when it is a prepositional object: None of the men were going.

On the other hand, there was a time when English had three past tenses and you still heard this a generation ago from Appalachians: help, helpt, halpt, holpt.

We decry double negatives, but in the days of Henry II, it was good Anglo-Saxon.

I wanted to slap a Green Party speaker upside the head when she reported that the group "concessed." I was stopped by the fact that Shakespeare said, "He dukes a good duke." We verbify nouns and nominalize verbs.

So, yes, Ebonics "changes" from town to town. In the main, it is still a valid subset.

However, there is a wider context. As the universal second language, English carries a lot responsibility. If you want to learn English, rather than insisting the patois of your neighborhood, you need to understand everyone else's ways of using it. When Gulf War II broke out, I started getting my news from the websites of Indian newspapers. One headline ran something like "Bush ploy foxes pundits." I learned to really appreciate the true finesse that Indians show with English.

"Indian" words: mulligatawny... succotash... catamaran... moccasin... bungalow... tomahawk... nabob ... chipmunk ...

We be learning English. (And, oh, yes, how about "ize" for "ise"? Is that regional ignorance or what?)

Post 5

Friday, August 5, 2005 - 8:05am

Yes it is, them British have no clue how to spell English worlds rights. :) They even call things differently then what they are; like what the hell is a flat? Ain't that a verb? And whats a lory? Sounds like a girls toy, I'm sure as hell ain't gon' call my Ford F-150 anything but a truck (insert Tim Allen grunt).

Post 6

Friday, August 5, 2005 - 10:52am

" Its not a dialect and its not a seperate language, its slang pure and simple. At best, its an accent."

According to the same professor-

Some emphasize its English origins, pointing to the fact that most of the vocabulary of Ebonics is from English and that much of its pronunciation (e.g. pronouncing final th as f) and grammar (e.g. double negatives, "I don't want none") could have come from the nonstandard dialects of English indentured servants and other workers with whom African slaves interacted.

Others emphasize Ebonics' African origins, noting that West African languages often lack th sounds and final consonant clusters (e.g. past), and that replacing or simplifying these occurs both in US Ebonics and in West African English varieties spoken in Nigeria and Ghana. Moreover, they argue that the distinction made between completed actions ("He done walked") and habitual actions ("We be walkin") in the Ebonics tense-aspect system reflects their prevalence in West African language systems and that this applies to other aspects of Ebonics sentence structure.

Other linguists are drawn to the similarities between Ebonics and Caribbean Creole English varieties, for instance, the fact that both frequently drop is and are , and that both permit dropping word initial d, b, and g in tense-aspect markers (Caribbean examples include habitual/progressive (d)a, past tense (b)en, and future (g)on). These traits suggest that some varieties of American Ebonics might have undergone the kinds of simplification and mixture associated with Creole formation in the Caribbean and elsewhere. They might also suggest that American Ebonics was shaped by the high proportions of Creole-speaking slaves that were imported from the Caribbean in the earliest settlement periods of the thirteen original colonies.

Thomas Sowell writes-

But few people are aware of how much of what passes as black identity today, including "black English," has its roots in the history of those whites who were called "rednecks" and "crackers" centuries ago in Britain, before they ever crossed the Atlantic and settled in the South.

Saying "acrost" for "across" or "ax" for "ask" are today considered to be part of black English. But this way of talking was common centuries ago in those regions of Britain from which white Southerners came."

So I doubt it's simply an accent.

Post 7

Friday, August 5, 2005 - 5:49pm

Bah, you find all of that in ANYONE with a standard Southern accent. This argument really one works if you can find a racial aspect to it, and you can't. Sowell and your professor contradict each other, one saying their influenced by Africa, the other by Britain.

Post 8

Saturday, August 6, 2005 - 3:06pm

Perhaps there are several origins involve concerning ebonics. The broader question I'm interested in is the evolution of language how it ought to accommodate change. Are the universities and professors responsible for creating objective standards as the basis for what is "correct" English is language so fluid that it's pointless to have concrete permanent standards? Are different dialects (think of all the Spanish varieties) valid or are they perversions of the traditional language?

Post 9

Saturday, August 6, 2005 - 7:02pm

Ebonics (or, as the American Speech-Language Hearing Association calls it, Black English Vernacular) is very much rule based. When I do any standardized assessment of language, there are chapters in the back of the manual showing alternate ways to score if a child has a heavy BEV dialect - i.e. tests are standardized in Standard English as well as BEV (and Southern English and Spanglish, etc.) so that I can determine whether a kid actually has a language impairment or whether they are developing as any other kid typically develops in their dialect group.

That is not to say that any person is not well-advised to learn to speak more Standard English so that they can communicate in professional settings (as someone already noted on this thread). There are times when I need to tone down my Oklahoma dialect so that I can be taken a bit more seriously. However, black kids using BEV is not simply ignorance of the rules of English. Many blacks who are perfectly capable of speaking standard English still use BEV a lot of the time. Actually, my white girlfriend grew up in South Philadelphia and she be talkin' real gully up in here.

Post 10

Saturday, August 6, 2005 - 7:30pm