A mother tongue spoken by millions of Americans still gets no respect

http://the-magazine.org/12/aint-no-reason

by nathan_long • 13 years ago

187 249 13 years ago

the-magazine.org

neeee• 13 years ago

The huge black bar at the bottom is obnoxious.

duskwuff• 13 years ago

$(".freepass").hide();

jdmaresco• 13 years ago

$(".message").hide();

But it still doesn't give you the full article

freehunter4• 13 years ago

It beats having a huge advertisement at the bottom (and everywhere else that is whitespace). Although yes, Adblock could be used to get rid of it.

Hermel• 13 years ago

German?

smallegan5• 13 years ago

I think in order for a language to gain any significant amount of respect it needs to be used in commerce and more than just illegal commerce.

jennyjenjen2• 13 years ago

Well that wasn't a bigoted comment at all.

freehunter4• 13 years ago

Is your argument that AAVE is only spoken by traders in illegal services? I think we have two different matters at hand, the first being the world that speakers of AAVE are raised in teaching them to speak AAVE, and the socioeconomic status that much of this world occupies. People raised speaking AAVE are not inherently raised to be criminals like your statement seems to imply, that's a completely different factor. Of course AAVE is not widely used in legitimate commerce, the argument that the article makes is that the speakers of this language are being unfairly punished for the language they speak, which leads to a poorer socioeconomic status.

Either these people are trained to speak prescriptive English or they are barred from academic success. The argument of the article is that the treatment of the language causes this ongoing social issue, not that the social issue is preventing people from speaking American English.

HarryHirsch• 13 years ago

I think it's fair comment to say that AAVE is spoken by people of low socioeconomic status, and that is why anyone speaking it carries a stigma. The keyword is "code switching".

richardjordan2• 13 years ago

With a comment like that, either you didn't read the article or you just brought your own bigotry to it and left with it in tact.

jholman• 13 years ago

In ASE, we spell that "intact". Tact is what he lacks. ;)

(Sorry to be a prat, but it was so deliciously topical.)

smallegan5• 13 years ago

I did read the article and was expounding upon footnote #1: "These are sometimes pidgins or creoles, such as the Chinook Jargon of the Pacific Northwest, and sometimes fully realized natively spoken languages, like Swahili or French, that become the de facto tool for commerce or diplomacy in larger areas." This ain't got nothin to do with bigotry and actually I don't got nothing against no "Ebonics"/AAVE.

mpyne2• 13 years ago

Some of the nicest, hardest-working, and most experienced people I've had the pleasure of working with in my current job speak AAVE. Don't let your preconceptions cloud your judgment as to the validity of a language.

smallegan5• 13 years ago

This was ONLY a comment on what I think it takes for a language to grab hold and not a comment on the people who speak it.

javanscala• 13 years ago

Wow, I believe that was an overtly bigoted comment. So there is no legal commerce conducted in 'ebonics'? I had no idea when I was a kid that all those people making grocery purchases at the corner store were engaging in illegal activities.

smallegan5• 13 years ago

It was an observation and clearly not a rule, same could be said for other dialects like Cockney in England.

nandemo• 13 years ago

There's a bright side to bigots publicly announcing their bigotry. For example, now I know I don't need to bother applying for work wherever Ryan Smallegan works.

jennyjenjen2• 13 years ago

Thanks for sharing. This was a good read and I think a lot more people could use to read it instead of just blindly commenting with rude remarks...

richardjordan2• 13 years ago

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.

jinushaun• 13 years ago

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.

freehunter4• 13 years ago

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.

LeeHunter• 13 years ago

"I don't necessarily believe the claim that most AAVE speakers use the same grammatical structure"

That doesn't mean much. Mainstream speakers of standard English also use a variety of grammatical structures. Some speakers of standard English will even argue till they're blue in the face that certain grammatical structures are wrong, wrong, wrong even after you show them examples from Dickens, Twain, Hemmingway et al.

ezy2• 13 years ago

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.

paranormal• 13 years ago

> I think ebonics if a load of crock, but as an aficionado of linguistics...

I was under the impression that modern linguists generally agreed that good linguistics is descriptive, not prescriptive. Could you elaborate here?

ledge• 13 years ago

You are correct.

A lot of this discussion is a complete embarrassment, I expected better from HN :(

Evbn14• 13 years ago

"Aficionado" != "scholar", which might resolve your confusion.

eridius5• 13 years ago

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.

derleth7• 13 years ago

> Yes, the double-negative construct exists in other languages. It doesn't exist in English.

Are you insisting Shakespeare didn't speak English?

> I never was nor never will be.

-- Richard III

http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2012/02/grammar-myths-3/

eroded• 13 years ago

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.

blocking_io8• 13 years ago

Do you read French? As the article explains, the structure is identical. There is no ambiguity.

ezy2• 13 years ago

This is the problem with being a "programmer" with no domain. This is sort of like the one true programming language debate ("blub") where people want to evaluate mathematical notation as to their qualitative worth completely devoid of any context.

Computer languages are not spoken languages. No one should accuse English of being "illogical" because it's redundant. It isn't as terse as mathematical notation because most people don't speak completely in mathematical notation. And it's all very logical, actually -- just not in the way you might expect. You might want to look into the effects of redundancy on transmission errors in communications before you pass judgement. :-)

smsm426• 13 years ago

Only English language is logical, it's known. I mean, just look at the spelling...

breadbox• 13 years ago

Think of the AAVE negation, not as an operator, but as a tense. It's like in Standard English when you change a sentence from singular to plural, or from first-person to third-person: several words are required to change in lockstep or else the sentence isn't grammatical. Negation in AAVE works like that.

drivers99• 13 years ago

A double negative is not double negation (in other languages), it's called agreement[1]. Just like you have to have agreement between numbers in English (It is / They are) you can also have languages that require/support agreement in terms of negative/positive. Yes, it's redundant information, but all human languages have a lot of extra information built into them at every level to make them easier to use.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agreement_%28linguistics%29

wildwood• 13 years ago

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.

[1] http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2006-11-08/features/06110...

hrktb• 13 years ago

Double negatives are recommended in proper french, but using only the first negation is actually grammatically correct(ex: je ne sais pas -> je ne sais) and keeping the second negation only is usual in casual speak (Je ne sais pas -> Je sais pas).

I always thought double negatives were a waste of time and ink, but come to think of it this kind of redundancy seems optimized for quick parsing. There is more effort on the speaker for building coherent sentences, but it's easier to catch the speaker's intent even if some parts got lost or couldn't be understood.

notahacker• 13 years ago

In this case, those attempting to standardize English grammar decided double negation should be used to achieve subtle shades of positive (as in Italian) rather than negative emphasis (as in Catalan) so double negatives are not conveying nothing (unlike in French or Castilian where the standard extra negative no comunica nada). Perhaps the divergence between the Romance languages is more immediately surprising...

What's interesting is that normal use of negation seems to have changed over time within many individual languages, repeatedly http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jespersen%27s_cycle which is perhaps part of the reason why the AAVE double negative has so many parallels in British regional dialects and the writings of Chaucer

WalterBright• 13 years ago

"Sir, you are employing a double negative." -- Mr. Spock

"Interesting, now try it without the quadruple negative." -- Amy

205guy2• 13 years ago

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 :-)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictionary_of_Received_Ideas: "automatic thoughts and platitudes, self-contradictory and insipid"

derleth7• 13 years ago

> idées reçues [snip] anti-homeopathy

No, this doesn't fit: Being opposed to homeopathy isn't an "automatic thought or platitude" and it certainly isn't "self-contradictory". It's an acknowledgement of basic science. Grouping it in with the kinds of thoughts "idées reçues" was intended to refer to makes the term entirely meaningless.

And, since we're talking about language, this is entirely on-topic. ;)

Nursie• 13 years ago

Sometimes double negatives do cancel or change meaning though - "I can't do that" and "I can't not do that" have distinct meanings.

Jun82• 13 years ago

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.

twelvechairs• 13 years ago

As the famous saying goes "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy".

akavi• 13 years ago

Which was said first, ironically, in Yiddish (a language that gains its status as such through its connection with an ethnic group, not military presence).

SideburnsOfDoom4• 13 years ago

> determination of dialect/language difference is mostly political

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.

dyno123453• 13 years ago

As counterexample I would still call American English and Brazilian Portuguese dialects, even though they have armies and navies. I'm not sure if I would call Afrikaans a dialect.

hkarthik• 13 years ago

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).

nsns• 13 years ago

"Hindi" is made up of Marwari, Mewati, Bhojpuri, Magahi, Maithili, Bundeli, awadhi, chhattisgarhi... all of them different language with their own history and literature. This was done in '47 mostly for political reasons, to stop Bangla from becoming the Indian national language. In a way the Italian situation is similar [0]. [0] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/03/Italian_l...

tomku• 13 years ago

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".

Hairy_Sandwich3• 13 years ago

>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.

jlgreco3• 13 years ago

I don't really disagree, but I'm not sure you could call English "official" in the US. De facto standard at most.

JoelSutherland• 13 years ago

I don't think you read the article.

"Schools should recognize the legitimacy of AAVE as a language for their students, and teach those students to recognize when and how to switch between AAVE and American English as appropriate. But most schools don’t do that. They simply teach students that the way they speak is wrong. Don’t talk this way; talk our way.

Wheeler says we’re still not doing right by children who grow up with AAVE. “The consequences are that students are being terribly misassessed in our schools. Teachers think that black kids are making mistakes, when really they’re re-creating what they hear and learn at home,” Wheeler says. “They’re counting as mistakes things that are patterns and rule-based, so [the students are] being placed in lower reading groups.”"

The point of recognizing AAVE is not to teach it as a replacement language. It's to treat it similarly to Spanish for example. By recognizing where kids are coming from, the system will better be able to direct them to where they need to be.

zieski• 13 years ago

If by /supporting/ we mean to accept that a large class of students speaks a divergent dialect of English at home, then I am all for it. Instruct children on American English but don't demean, discourage, or devalue them because of the dialect they grew up speaking.

I don't think the article or comment really supported teaching AAVE to the exclusion of American English, the article at least tries to point out that teachers often view AAVE as an indicator of low intelligence instead of a separate dialect and supports changing that stereotype.

blocking_io8• 13 years ago

As the article points out, if it were 'bad English', the rules of AAVE would not be consistently applied. However, speakers know how to use the rules and they always apply them. Saying that 'calling it a language' is bad is truly ignorant. As far as linguists are concerned, it is a language. If you say otherwise, you are simply wrong. There is nothing inherently better about the English you speak compared to their English.

nollidge7• 13 years ago

> I think AAVE is simply modern America's cockney slang.

Well, what linguists think is that it's at minimum a dialect with consistent grammar and using features of many other forms of communciation that you'd probably consider "real" languages.

Just because it's not what you were taught doesn't mean it's "bad" English or slang.

warfangle• 13 years ago

There is no official language in the United States.

seanmcdirmid2• 13 years ago

> Was the cockney English slang of 1800's England a language?

I thought the posh Queen's English was a relatively recent invention (1818)? Your argument is kind of rediculous.

Anyways, is a Shanghainese uneducated because they speek Shanghainese at home rather than the standard Beijing-ish dialect?

erikpukinskis• 13 years ago

> Schools are supposed to teach you the official language and all the skills you need to succeed in society.

What makes you think SAE is the only language you need to succeed in society? I live in Oakland, and I wish I learned AAVE in school. It would absolutely be useful to succeed in society. Ditto for Spanish.

bvk2• 13 years ago

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.

cvjones3602• 13 years ago

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.

chimeracoder• 13 years ago

I believe the scientific name for this is 'revertigo'[0] : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n74O3GXRtbY

([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).

spolsky• 13 years ago

The scientific name for this is actually 'code switching' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code-switching)

cvjones3602• 13 years ago

Not really, I guess I should have added that I speak AAVE when I meet some African-Americans for the first time.

brechin• 13 years ago

Ahh... this brings me back to my college days (I also majored in Linguistics).

I wonder what the current feelings are about the benefits/drawbacks of establishing an official US English dialect and/or declaring US English as (one of the) official language(s) of the United State?

Thoughts?

EvanKelly• 13 years ago

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.

brown9-2• 13 years ago

This is only barely related, but I read something a few weeks ago that I think those interested in this topic would also find interesting:

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

pacaro2• 13 years ago

An interesting article, thank you.

"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"...

pbhjpbhj• 13 years ago

I'd say there are "pause/unpause" and "pause/resume". The former details that resuming is by releasing the pause state, eg repeatedly pressing on a pause button. For "pause/resume" the resumption can be achieved by pressing play, for example, rather than by unpausing.

It's analogous to "mute/unmute" and "mute/resume[sound]" where the unmute is by pressing the "mute" button, ie releaseing the mute state, whilst the resumption of sound can be achieved by pressing a volume up or down button.

joshrotenberg6• 13 years ago

Two unrelated (to this) but interesting linguistic things I've discovered recently:

Boontling: http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Boonville-s-quirky-dia...

(Cockney) Rhyming Slang: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhyming_slang

Not necessarily on topic from a political standpoint, but both good illustrations of how language forms and changes to suit the needs of those who use it.

auctiontheory2• 13 years ago

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.

gecko• 13 years ago

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.

blocking_io8• 13 years ago

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.

mattsfrey• 13 years ago

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.

jlgreco3• 13 years ago

> 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.

To add to this, I have experienced similar. Years of working on farms/in food processing plants has left my informal speech riddled with expletives. I switch that on or off depending on the setting, but in situations that I am comfortable in that are not professional settings (for example, my mothers dinner table), it can slip through without me noticing.

derleth7• 13 years ago

> I think that it isn't well regarded as a language because at root it is simply an adaption of another language (English).

As Italian is simply an adaption of Latin. So, was Dante writing bad Latin or good Florentine?

> I certainly wouldn't advocate that becoming a nationally recognized language.

Why not?

unhammer5• 13 years ago

> I certainly wouldn't advocate that becoming a nationally recognized language.

The US has no official language, so it's a moot point. The article talks about how _teachers_ should recognize the language. Not teach the language, recognize it as a language, and not assume you're dumb just because you grew up speaking a different language (assumption like that have a definite negative effect on student performance).

pacaro2• 13 years ago

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".

tokenadult• 13 years ago

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

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.

Jun82• 13 years ago

"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.

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).

grannyg00se• 13 years ago

"We find, however, no negative relationship between having a distinctively Black name and later life outcomes after controlling for a child's circumstances at birth."

mark-r• 13 years ago

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.

SilentStump• 13 years ago

I really like the distinction between two languages and a single language. A lot of the kids I've worked with were able to switch from the way they talk with friends, AAVE, to how they talked with teachers and staff similarly how a student might switch from using spanish and english. Pronunciation changes, words change, etc.

rootbear• 13 years ago

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.

DannoHung• 13 years ago

Theory: AAVE doesn't get respect because the vocabulary size in most AAVE corpuses is smaller than common English corpuses.

dsfasfasf7• 13 years ago

No, it does not get respect because that is how people from a lower socioeconomic level speak. And if you come from a higher socioeconomic level you might not want to speak like that so as not to be confused from the lower socioeconomic level because it can kill off many opportunities in the work place or love relationships. Unfair? maybe, but this is how the real world works.

omonra9• 13 years ago

To be fair, people who speak ebonics do not want to sound 'white'. So both sides are doing this on purpose.

novacole• 13 years ago

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.

pothibo3• 13 years ago

Second french example is not a double negation. As for the other french examples, I'm ambivalent.

pothibo3• 13 years ago

"I ain’t never eat no sushi." Does this means you 'will never eat sushi?'

agscala• 13 years ago

No, it means "I've never eaten sushi"

mhartl• 13 years ago

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basilect#Stratification

rayiner2• 13 years ago

When people ask how Bangladesh fought a war to separate from Pakistan just because they spoke different languages, I want to point them to some of the comments in this article to show how deeply language can be tied up with prejudice, classism, power, etc.

hawkharris2• 13 years ago

I grew up using expressions that might fall under the umbrella of Ebonics. However, I tend to avoid using them in work settings.

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.

Evbn14• 13 years ago

So can having a black name or black skin. It is a bug in our society, and acting white is a workaround, not a fix.

hawkharris2• 13 years ago

You're creating a false dichotomy between using Ebonics in the workplace and "acting white."

voxfrege• 13 years ago

> No modern linguist embraces the term Ebonics.

Too bad. As a non native english speaker, I could intuitively understand what it means. While "AAVE" doesn't tell nobody nothing.

fusiongyro• 13 years ago

An interesting book on this topic is "Twice as Less," which deals with manifestations of the mismatch between English and AAVE in math and science.

tadhg• 13 years ago

David Foster Wallace covered this really well; his spiel to his students on this topic is included here: http://instruct.westvalley.edu/lafave/DFW_present_tense.html... (the whole essay is definitely worth reading).

latj• 13 years ago

I know its not a mother tongue but a tiny part of me thought this was going to be about Perl.

Evbn14• 13 years ago

If someone here would stand up and say the Perl is a valid computer language but AAVE is not a valid human language, my head would explode.

adventured• 13 years ago

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.

Cushman18• 13 years ago

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.)

pekk4• 13 years ago

You didn't answer the question. Why not Standard Redneck English? Is it not a different language? Isn't its lack of status due to the lack of status of its speakers? Other than race, how is this different?

EamonLeonard• 13 years ago

I'm not an expert, but find this fascinating. A somewhat related subject, English as spoken in Ireland is referred to as Hiberno-English:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiberno-English

ComputerGuru• 13 years ago

Is no one else seeing a paywall?

archagon• 13 years ago

The Magazine used to be subscription only. Now you can read one free article per month online: www.marco.org/2013/02/24/the-magazine-sharing

losvedir4• 13 years ago

Excellent article, uncharacteristically poor HN comments.

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/

omonra9• 13 years ago

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?

losvedir4• 13 years ago

Well, that's just it. A native-AAVE speaker will use SE when speaking to me, even if their preferred dialect at home is AAVE, so I don't get exposed to it. Think of this reporter [0].

However, I'm sure he's an intelligent men, and I'm sure when speaking informally he'll fall back to AAVE. What I'd love to see is someone at, say, PhD Math or Physics level speaking in AAVE, preferably about that subject.

I'm studying a bit of Arabic, and I see parallels. In Arabic, there's the formal register, called Modern Standard Arabic. This is the dialect used in the Quran and printed in newspapers and such. However, people don't routinely speak in this register -- they speak in their local Gulf or Levantine or Egyptian dialects, which are pretty different from each other and from MSA. The pronunciation of letters is different, the vocabulary is different, hell, in Egyptian the question word goes at the end of the sentence whereas in other dialects it goes at the beginning.

They, too, think of their local dialects as "wrong" or "beneath" MSA, even though it's the native tongue of themselves and everyone around them, and they have to study for years to be comfortable with this somewhat artificial MSA dialect.

It's not quite as regimented in English, because the dialects are more similar, and because no one natively speaks the formal register, but the principles are the same.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ti1dHabjH3k [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJ3dk6KAvQM&t=4m31s

Evbn14• 13 years ago

Watch The Wire, through at least Season 1. Those guys ain't dumb. Most of the AAVE speakers are villains, though.

losvedir4• 13 years ago

Ah, what a good idea! Thanks.

anateus• 13 years ago

I see a mention of it below, but none in the article, and I wanted to highlight that there is a term for this: Diglossia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diglossia

A mother tongue spoken by millions of Americans still gets no respect

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