As a black male I speak both, but it depends upon the person that I'm speaking with. If I'm speaking with my professors or employers, obviously I use standard English. With friends, depending on the importance of the conversation I will most like speak a mixture between standard English and AAEV. The thing is, all people who speak AAEV understand standard English, it would be impossible not to. No child who grew up in a household that speaks AAEV will be confused by the statement "I do not have any time for that", even though in their home and in their neighborhood they hear it as "I ain't got no time for that." This issue is that when entering elementary school, students who grow up with AAEV simply use the dialect that they are used to. I will venture to say that there is no (Adult) person who speaks AAEV that doesn't know proper English. Some simply speak primarily in AAEV because everyone else in their inner-circle does. Others do so as an act of rebellion against the larger white society. Speaking standard English is seen as "Acting White" (assimilation), which is deeply frowned upon in certain circles.
When my Historical Linguistics professor mentioned that determination of dialect/language difference is mostly political I was amazed and argued with him for half an hour and still wasn't convinced after that. I thought there should be a way wherein a linguist can collect and then analyze corpora, then scientifically discover and label dialects, isoglosses, languages, etc. Later, I learned that although there are tools for doing this analysis, the resulting labeling is mostly based on political/ideological distinctions.
The common examples of the difficulties in determining language vs a dialect are: the "dialects" of Chinese; Macedonian vs Bulgarian; Swedish vs Norwegian vs Danish: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect.
I think most linguists would consider AAEV to be a dialect of English.
I found it quite true when you look at cases like Dutch vs. Afrikaans or Swedish vs Norwegian vs Danish. Declaring your dialect a "language" can be a tool of nationalism.
This is pretty true in India, which is divided into states mostly by linguistic lines. I've heard "dialects" which sound distinct enough to be separate languages (Marwari versus Hindi) and "languages" that sound similar enough to be dialects (Urdu and Hindi).
I can understand the argument for supporting AAVE in schools, but at the same time, I strongly feel that this kind of split is exactly what leads to less diversity and more segregation in the long run. In an ideal world, we'd all be neutral about which dialect we hear and speak whichever we're more used to ourselves. In the real world, it just gives people another data point by which to divide the rest of their world into "us" and "them".
>I can understand the argument for supporting AAVE in schools
I can't. Schools are supposed to teach you the official language and all the skills you need to succeed in society. AAVE won't help you (or be useful) at work, or in academia, unless you are studying AAVE as your job.
I agree that it will be divisive in the long run, I think you are right that encouraging AAVE to continue and legitimizing it and calling it a language is the wrong way to go.
Was the cockney English slang of 1800's England a language? I think most would say no, it was simply the bad English of the uneducated. I think AAVE is simply modern America's cockney slang.
AAVE speakers exist, and their dialect is not going anywhere anytime soon. If decades of schoolteachers telling black children to speak "correctly" hasn't eradicated the differences, another decade isn't going to make the difference. Our only choice is how to treat it.
What we do in schools now hardly works against segregation. We simply ignore that AAVE exists. The result is that we treat white students' English as "correct" and black students' English as "wrong", as if they are trying to speak Standard English and making careless errors rather than following the self-consistent rules of their own dialect. They're being told to follow rules that they never learned, but everyone seems to expect them to know.
The alternative is to acknowledge that these differences exist and do our best to help AAVE speakers learn Standard English as what it is to them: a non-native dialect that is the gateway to power in our society. And maybe, sometimes, when a black student says "he ain't got none" during a history class, the teacher might respond to the contents of the students words rather than their form.
Thanks for the submission. This is an interesting article about applied linguistics for primary education in the United States. Approximately around 1900, the United States reached its peak period of receiving immigrants who were not English-speaking when they arrived. Today, nearly all Americans speak one variety or another of English, even though only about one-fourth of the United States population consists of persons whose ancestors spoke English before arrival in the United States. English has been assimilated by almost all inhabitants of the United States precisely because it is the only language that unites all those inhabitants. (Three of my four grandparents, all of whom were born in the United States, spoke a language at home other than English. My two maternal grandparents received the entirety of their schooling in church-operated schools in the German language, one in Nebraska and one in Colorado. But they spoke English just fine as adults, and that was the language I communicated with them in both by direct conversation and by postal letters. My Norwegian-speaking paternal grandmother went to college, majoring in English, and relied on her knowledge of another Germanic language to help her progress in reading Beowulf in the original Old English. I still have her college edition of Beowulf at home.)
The worry in the United States today is about the primary education of young people who grow up in cohesive communities of speakers of varieties of English that differ from broadcast standard General American English. The cases of African-American speakers and Hawaiian speakers of dialectal English are both mentioned in the article. To me, as someone who studied linguistics in my university studies, it seems a "no brainer" to meet elementary school pupils on common ground and to make sure their teachers understand the home language background of the pupils as the pupils are taught standard English in school. (Everyone appears to be united in the cause of making sure school pupils learn the standard national language, with the only serious dispute being about means.) There are, alas, social disadvantages in the United States from having nonstandard speech patterns
even if those speech patterns are well accepted in some social subgroups here. Just as my grandparents were free to use German or Norwegian to communicate throughout their long lifetimes, let today's children speak however they like in their private lives, but let's meanwhile provide all learners the opportunity to learn the speech patterns that are most expedient to adopt here.
"There are, alas, social disadvantages in the United States from having nonstandard speech patterns"
This is, of course, true not only in the US but in many other countries and often popularized in plays, movies, etc., Eliza Doolittle. In German, where people are quite possessive of their regional dialects, Bayerisch speakers are sometimes derided.
The article makes it very clear - AAVE is superficially the same as General American English so neither the teachers or the students realize that that the kids need to speak two different languages. Instead you have the teachers insisting that there's only one language and they're using it incorrectly. That's quite a bit different from the German and Norwegian your grandparents had to deal with.
One side of my family has roots in the Great Smoky Mountains part of Appalachia. The English spoken there has its own rules and vocabulary. I have a book, "The Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English", that my sister gave me and it's fascinating. Speakers of this variation of English are often perceived as uneducated, not unlike AAVE speakers. Some features of Smoky Mountain English, like the double negative, are quite similar to AAVE.
I live in Maryland now and have visited Tangier Island and the English dialect spoken there is yet another interesting story.
Sadly, the Southern accent I had from growing up in Huntsville, AL, is now all but gone.
Speaking as an African-American male I can say I've spoken both for a long time. When I’m around friends and family I speak AAVE and when I’m around ‘judgmental others’ and for business purposes I speak American English.
This was fascinating. Folks should leave their bigotries behind and read it, rather than seeing the word ebonics and using it as an excuse for racist comments.
I think that it isn't well regarded as a language because at root it is simply an adaption of another language (English). There's differing vernaculars anywhere you go, depending on the culture and the demographic. There's no use in regarding them each individually as "languages", they are termed correctly as just being vernaculars. When I started working at a factory when I was 18, I was suddenly bombarded with blue collar vernacular. By the time I was 21, double negatives, particular "ain't got no.." were fairly ingrained in my speech and I still talk like that in informal situations. I certainly wouldn't advocate that becoming a nationally recognized language. AAVE is perpetuated culturally but almost any AA you meet can speak formal English just fine, being necessary for success outside of their cultural enclave. Making it a separate language per se doesn't serve any real function and will really only cause another level of division on a national level.
AAVE gets no respect because of the social status of those who speak it, not because it's "ungrammatical". Of the stratified [1] dialects of American English, it's a basilect; "standard" American English, spoken on TV and taught in schools, is the acrolect. Pro tip: if you want to get ahead, learn and speak the acrolect.
I've only lived in Hawaii for three years, but I've definitely gained an appreciation for HCE (Hawaiian Creole English) or pidgin as it's more commonly called.
There is lots of great linguistic research regarding pidgin done at University of Hawaii, and the language itself provides a great historical context, as it reflects the combined cultures of Hawaii (Anglo, Japanese, Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, Portuguese, etc.) through vocabulary and intonation.
The public schools are these kids' last and only hope to learn the communications skills (aka standard English) they will need to make it to the middle class. Don't ruin it for them.
That's not what he's suggesting. Rather, he's suggesting that the schools separate teaching how to communicate amongst themselves v. how to communicate in a middle-class manner, and not label the former "wrong" and the latter "right," but rather the former "personal" and the latter "formal." That's not different from students of yore having to learn Latin to get along in college: it wasn't that they were speaking English (or French, or German, or whatever) poorly, but rather that Latin was required to get ahead in the world. Same thing here.
You should really read articles before commenting on them.
She says that these kids are speaking AAVE because that’s what they know; it’s not wrong — it’s their language. She thus advocates teaching students who speak AAVE at home the concept of code-switching. The general idea is simply the notion of switching between two different languages as needed.
No one is advocating that students aren't taught formal English, but that the language they speak is properly recognised. Doing this will actually improve students' ability to learn formal English.
I think ebonics if a load of crock, but as an aficionado of linguistics, I don't understand the resistance to double negatives in "proper" English. The "ain't got none" construct exists in many other languages. The double negative reinforces each other, instead of canceling each other out.
You have to define what you mean by "Ebonics". The term is awful... :-)
According to the article's definition it doesn't sound like a crock at all. When a young person writes Spanish words and grammar in an English essay, sane people don't assume a degraded intelligence. We realize that this person is a native Spanish speaker. They are probably reasonably intelligent, but ignorant of certain normative rules of English and when and where a particular language/vocabulary is appropriate.
That all Ebonics is -- not unlimited acceptance of non-normative english in the wrong contexts, or teaching people to write with black slang (unless that's part of the point of essay). The whole point is to teach kids who speak a different dialect to code switch when writing, for example. These students are wrong to use certain verbal constructions in (formal) written english, but it's the language in a particular context that is wrong -- not the language itself.
Wow, I'm a bit disappointed in the HN community here. There are a lot of <i>idées reçues</i>[1] that seem to come up over and over again (anti-homeopathy being one, not that I'm pro-homeopathy, so don't get off-topic over it). But this whole anti-Ebonics is new to me (in this community), especially after the OP explained it in such understandable terms.
Secondly, the whole interpretation of "double negatives" as being logically equivalent to (not(not TRUE)) is quite unfortunate. When languages use double negatives, it just means that that language expresses a negative using 2 helper words in separate parts of the sentence. It's a pattern for expressing a single negative, not a formula that doubles (or cancels) the negative.
Luckily, I can understand where programmers are coming from, that they're using their "native" languages, and that we can help them understand that those languages aren't appropriate in other contexts :-)
There's some research[1] that suggests that some dialects of Old English used double negation reliably, but that this got phased out in 'proper' Middle English.
It's interesting that double negation is standard in French, but not used in Germanic languages. In this case, it seems like the Germanic influences on English won.
I found myself nodding at the explanations of the grammer given in the article. I've never deeply thought of AAVE as a language, more of a corruption (which is a natural part of how living languages grow and evolve), but the article gives some depth to the discussion.
At the very least it's worth a read through to help you make your own decisions about the structure of this language. Although I don't necessarily believe the claim that most AAVE speakers use the same grammatical structure, I believe this is somewhat of a liberty taken by the author. I've heard many variations on AAVE grammar working at college tech support, and my ability to understand the grammar being used fluctuates from person to person. This isn't a single cohesive language; it's much more ad hoc than that in my personal experience, even in a small geographic region.
As a programmer, double negatives make me reel with horror. I cannot parse an English sentence with a double negative as being a single negative; it's utterly illogical. At best, they're an unnecessary hindrance.
Yes, the double-negative construct exists in other languages. It doesn't exist in English. You may as well be asking why people insist other people use English words instead of German words when talking to them.
Why not white redneck english then? I've met numerous people in West Virginia, Alabama, Georgia, etc. that speak as different a form of english as ebonics represents. It's perfectly fine for the english language to spawn related children, but the purpose of language is understanding / communication, and it's ideal for the people of a country to be able to communicate in a standard language to maximize efficiency (in trade, social interaction, you name it). I'd argue it's ideal to navigate people that speak broken english (whether they're caucasian, african american, hispanic, asian, whatever) back toward speaking a more standardized version of it.
Why not Spanish? You can't get here from there. If a child speaks a coherent first language at home, you can't "navigate them back" to ASE, it will only confuse them (and further reinforce your preconception that they are speaking "broken" English). You need a teacher who speaks their first language fluently to instruct them on the standard language, and when it is appropriate to use.
(And, as stated in the article, this is not a new nor should be a controversial idea; it has been school board policy in Oakland for 17 years.)
I think that English has a challenge because there is no defined "correct" English, there is no clear distinction between dialect, accent, and formal speech.
In some languages there is a clear and understood role for dialect, in those countries it is understood that most people speak both a dialect and the formal language. You choose the most appropriate mode for the context. More importantly, there isn't a necessary judgement on hearing someone speaking dialect that they "must be ignorant".
I only learned about AAVE in the last few years and it was eye opening. I realized I do have a sort of instinctual prejudice against it, though. From the article:
Many of us unfairly judge others based on how they speak. Kenneth the page, on the late, great 30 Rock, spoke with a southern accent meant to exemplify his yokel-ness. Maybe you think that British accents sound dignified, or that the Minnesota accent on display in Fargo betrays its speakers’ intellectual inferiority.
I'd like to snap out of this, and I thought a good way would be to watch videos of articulate, smart, (preferably math/science-based discussion in AAVE). This post talks about Feynman[0]:
Feynman’s accent, one of America’s more stigmatized, becomes a strength rather than a weakness. It is a sad fact that we easily underestimate people because of their accents.
but since my first exposure to that accent was Feynman videos, I've naturally associated it with intellectualism. I'd like to have similar positive connotations with AAVE. Anyone have any video suggestions?
Could you share with us "videos of articulate, smart, (preferably math/science-based discussion in AAVE)"?
Perhaps this is the missing link for us sceptics - we associate it with poor uneducated individuals. Ie - by definition, if someone whose primary language was AAVE wants to sound articulate and smart they will resort to SE?
[+] [-] novacole|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jun8|13 years ago|reply
The common examples of the difficulties in determining language vs a dialect are: the "dialects" of Chinese; Macedonian vs Bulgarian; Swedish vs Norwegian vs Danish: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect.
I think most linguists would consider AAEV to be a dialect of English.
[+] [-] SideburnsOfDoom|13 years ago|reply
I heard that expressed as "A language is a dialect with an army and navy"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_an...
I found it quite true when you look at cases like Dutch vs. Afrikaans or Swedish vs Norwegian vs Danish. Declaring your dialect a "language" can be a tool of nationalism.
[+] [-] twelvechairs|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hkarthik|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brown9-2|13 years ago|reply
A few years ago, researchers discovered that schoolchildren in Baltimore had invented a new gender-neutral singular pronoun: http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/grammar-yo-pronoun.aspx
[+] [-] pacaro|13 years ago|reply
"Yo" seems to feel more natural than the usual Spivak options.
I was mildly amused at the "pause/unpause" word pair mentioned in the article, I had always assumed that the pair was "pause/resume"...
[+] [-] tomku|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Hairy_Sandwich|13 years ago|reply
I can't. Schools are supposed to teach you the official language and all the skills you need to succeed in society. AAVE won't help you (or be useful) at work, or in academia, unless you are studying AAVE as your job.
I agree that it will be divisive in the long run, I think you are right that encouraging AAVE to continue and legitimizing it and calling it a language is the wrong way to go.
Was the cockney English slang of 1800's England a language? I think most would say no, it was simply the bad English of the uneducated. I think AAVE is simply modern America's cockney slang.
[+] [-] bvk|13 years ago|reply
What we do in schools now hardly works against segregation. We simply ignore that AAVE exists. The result is that we treat white students' English as "correct" and black students' English as "wrong", as if they are trying to speak Standard English and making careless errors rather than following the self-consistent rules of their own dialect. They're being told to follow rules that they never learned, but everyone seems to expect them to know.
The alternative is to acknowledge that these differences exist and do our best to help AAVE speakers learn Standard English as what it is to them: a non-native dialect that is the gateway to power in our society. And maybe, sometimes, when a black student says "he ain't got none" during a history class, the teacher might respond to the contents of the students words rather than their form.
[+] [-] tokenadult|13 years ago|reply
The worry in the United States today is about the primary education of young people who grow up in cohesive communities of speakers of varieties of English that differ from broadcast standard General American English. The cases of African-American speakers and Hawaiian speakers of dialectal English are both mentioned in the article. To me, as someone who studied linguistics in my university studies, it seems a "no brainer" to meet elementary school pupils on common ground and to make sure their teachers understand the home language background of the pupils as the pupils are taught standard English in school. (Everyone appears to be united in the cause of making sure school pupils learn the standard national language, with the only serious dispute being about means.) There are, alas, social disadvantages in the United States from having nonstandard speech patterns
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5123171
even if those speech patterns are well accepted in some social subgroups here. Just as my grandparents were free to use German or Norwegian to communicate throughout their long lifetimes, let today's children speak however they like in their private lives, but let's meanwhile provide all learners the opportunity to learn the speech patterns that are most expedient to adopt here.
[+] [-] Jun8|13 years ago|reply
This is, of course, true not only in the US but in many other countries and often popularized in plays, movies, etc., Eliza Doolittle. In German, where people are quite possessive of their regional dialects, Bayerisch speakers are sometimes derided.
And it's not just nonstandard speech patterns, either. Unique names that flag people to a certain minority group may also bring social disadvantages. This is generally the case with the tradition of inventive/unique names among African-Americas (http://www.salon.com/2008/08/25/creative_black_names/ or see the paper at http://ideas.repec.org/a/tpr/qjecon/v119y2004i3p767-805.html).
[+] [-] mark-r|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rootbear|13 years ago|reply
I live in Maryland now and have visited Tangier Island and the English dialect spoken there is yet another interesting story.
Sadly, the Southern accent I had from growing up in Huntsville, AL, is now all but gone.
[+] [-] cvjones360|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chimeracoder|13 years ago|reply
([0]It's not really - it's a line from HIMYM - but the video clip is a good depiction of it anyway, if you watch the whole thing).
[+] [-] jennyjenjen|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] richardjordan|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattsfrey|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mhartl|13 years ago|reply
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basilect#Stratification
[+] [-] EvanKelly|13 years ago|reply
There is lots of great linguistic research regarding pidgin done at University of Hawaii, and the language itself provides a great historical context, as it reflects the combined cultures of Hawaii (Anglo, Japanese, Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, Portuguese, etc.) through vocabulary and intonation.
[+] [-] auctiontheory|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gecko|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blocking_io|13 years ago|reply
She says that these kids are speaking AAVE because that’s what they know; it’s not wrong — it’s their language. She thus advocates teaching students who speak AAVE at home the concept of code-switching. The general idea is simply the notion of switching between two different languages as needed.
No one is advocating that students aren't taught formal English, but that the language they speak is properly recognised. Doing this will actually improve students' ability to learn formal English.
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jinushaun|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ezy|13 years ago|reply
According to the article's definition it doesn't sound like a crock at all. When a young person writes Spanish words and grammar in an English essay, sane people don't assume a degraded intelligence. We realize that this person is a native Spanish speaker. They are probably reasonably intelligent, but ignorant of certain normative rules of English and when and where a particular language/vocabulary is appropriate.
That all Ebonics is -- not unlimited acceptance of non-normative english in the wrong contexts, or teaching people to write with black slang (unless that's part of the point of essay). The whole point is to teach kids who speak a different dialect to code switch when writing, for example. These students are wrong to use certain verbal constructions in (formal) written english, but it's the language in a particular context that is wrong -- not the language itself.
[+] [-] 205guy|13 years ago|reply
Secondly, the whole interpretation of "double negatives" as being logically equivalent to (not(not TRUE)) is quite unfortunate. When languages use double negatives, it just means that that language expresses a negative using 2 helper words in separate parts of the sentence. It's a pattern for expressing a single negative, not a formula that doubles (or cancels) the negative.
Luckily, I can understand where programmers are coming from, that they're using their "native" languages, and that we can help them understand that those languages aren't appropriate in other contexts :-)
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictionary_of_Received_Ideas: "automatic thoughts and platitudes, self-contradictory and insipid"
[+] [-] paranormal|13 years ago|reply
I was under the impression that modern linguists generally agreed that good linguistics is descriptive, not prescriptive. Could you elaborate here?
[+] [-] wildwood|13 years ago|reply
It's interesting that double negation is standard in French, but not used in Germanic languages. In this case, it seems like the Germanic influences on English won.
[1] http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2006-11-08/features/06110...
[+] [-] freehunter|13 years ago|reply
At the very least it's worth a read through to help you make your own decisions about the structure of this language. Although I don't necessarily believe the claim that most AAVE speakers use the same grammatical structure, I believe this is somewhat of a liberty taken by the author. I've heard many variations on AAVE grammar working at college tech support, and my ability to understand the grammar being used fluctuates from person to person. This isn't a single cohesive language; it's much more ad hoc than that in my personal experience, even in a small geographic region.
[+] [-] eroded|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WalterBright|13 years ago|reply
"Interesting, now try it without the quadruple negative." -- Amy
[+] [-] eridius|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nursie|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adventured|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Cushman|13 years ago|reply
(And, as stated in the article, this is not a new nor should be a controversial idea; it has been school board policy in Oakland for 17 years.)
[+] [-] pacaro|13 years ago|reply
In some languages there is a clear and understood role for dialect, in those countries it is understood that most people speak both a dialect and the formal language. You choose the most appropriate mode for the context. More importantly, there isn't a necessary judgement on hearing someone speaking dialect that they "must be ignorant".
[+] [-] losvedir|13 years ago|reply
I only learned about AAVE in the last few years and it was eye opening. I realized I do have a sort of instinctual prejudice against it, though. From the article:
Many of us unfairly judge others based on how they speak. Kenneth the page, on the late, great 30 Rock, spoke with a southern accent meant to exemplify his yokel-ness. Maybe you think that British accents sound dignified, or that the Minnesota accent on display in Fargo betrays its speakers’ intellectual inferiority.
I'd like to snap out of this, and I thought a good way would be to watch videos of articulate, smart, (preferably math/science-based discussion in AAVE). This post talks about Feynman[0]:
Feynman’s accent, one of America’s more stigmatized, becomes a strength rather than a weakness. It is a sad fact that we easily underestimate people because of their accents.
but since my first exposure to that accent was Feynman videos, I've naturally associated it with intellectualism. I'd like to have similar positive connotations with AAVE. Anyone have any video suggestions?
[0] http://dialectblog.com/2011/09/03/great-minds-accents/
[+] [-] omonra|13 years ago|reply
Perhaps this is the missing link for us sceptics - we associate it with poor uneducated individuals. Ie - by definition, if someone whose primary language was AAVE wants to sound articulate and smart they will resort to SE?
[+] [-] Evbn|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neeee|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] duskwuff|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] freehunter|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hawkharris|13 years ago|reply
Friends who are also black have shared anecdotes about employers sounding put-off during phone interviews.
Until this bias is addressed, young people should be aware that speaking Ebonics can have negative professional consequences.
[+] [-] Evbn|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tadhg|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pothibo|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pothibo|13 years ago|reply