African American Vernacular English Is Not Standard English with Mistakes (1999) [pdf]
web.stanford.edu
web.stanford.edu
Geoffrey Pullum is a research professor specializing in the description of English and a contributor to the always-excellent Language Log. He is, as a friend of mine described him, an "Internet Linguistics Super Hero".
This is the nerdiest and most interesting piece on African-American dialect you will ever read. Every Standard-English-speaking elite with an opinion on AAVE is wrong about it! And when they're wrong about it, they're wrong in funny ways! The payoff towards the end with William Raspberry trying to mimic AAVE is worth all the build-up --- not that it needs to be, since I couldn't stop reading that build-up either.
The central thesis of the essay is this: elites dismiss AAVE as simplified or "street-talk" English. But it isn't: its rules are rigorous and intricate. You can't simply simplify Standard English and arrive at AAVE. You have to learn it, like any other dialect. Some of AAVE's rules are shared with other dialects, like Cockney. Some of its more idiosyncratic rules, like double-negatives, are mainstream features of other high-status languages. Whatever your political affiliation is, it's hard to read this piece and come away thinking anything other than AAVE should should take its place among all the other well-accepted English dialects.
Having read the whole thread here, I'll take a second to point out what the essay is not about:
* It's not about "teaching AAVE at school". The only case it makes for AAVE's role in education is to suggest that AAVE-aware instruction will improve outcomes for learning Standard English.
* It's not about whether we should take special efforts to preserve AAVE, which makes about as much sense as contriving a long argument about whether we should preserve Cockney or Quebecois.
* It's not about whether AAVE speakers should speak only AAVE. In fact, the essay heavily implies the opposite. Had it not been written before the mainstreaming of the term "code-switching", I imagine code-switching would factor heavily in the essay.
Maybe, but the fact that you have to learn it, or that it has "rigorous rules" does't mean it's not a simpler variety of English. It's both a variety of English, and simpler.
Again, the essay is about what AAVE actually is, not about whether AAVE is better or worse than Standard Written English.
What's interesting is how this thread demonstrates some of the same effects the essay comments on. As overwhelmingly non-AAVE speakers of Standard English, we seem to have powerful cognitive biases working to convince us that AAVE is, if not broken, then at least an intrinsically lesser form of our own language.
Most of us probably have no trouble dismissing the notion that Persian is intrinsically inferior to English. But because AAVE is so close to our own dialects, we're convinced we understand it well enough to judge it.
Obviously if a dialect or language is the primary or only means of interaction with a population group (as Persian is with Persians) it is not inferior - it is what it is. But if a borderline unintelligible dialect coexists with the understandable main language, its inferiority is not a moral judgement by evil racists, but a straightforward utilitarian rejection.
It also doesn't matter how high-prestige the group speaking a hard-to-understand dialect is. Swiss German is mocked and looked down upon by non-native-speakers, as is speaking the Swabian German dialect - though you likely won't find any population groups with higher social status (+wealth/prestige) in Germany.
In fact, it was the AAVE that's derived from English and not the other way around. Without English there would be no AAVE.
Plus it's also tied to a particular subgroup (and not even for all of its communicational needs).
Oh, and about all that racism stuff that easily flows, I don't have a horse in this race (no pun intended) as I'm not American, and we didn't really do slavery. If anything, when my people came to the US they were treated exactly like blacks were treated at the time by the racist white majority, KKK-visits included.
Most of which (British, American, Irish, Australian, etc) are trivial variations of the single originating British English language.
>I'm not aware of any single dialect that has anything close to a billion speakers.
English, the language, however, has. Dialects are just regional and group variations of it.
AAVE isn't particularly notable, other than the politics surrounding it.
That's not surprising, since I don't agree with the essay in the first place, including the very premise (common to modern linguistics) that all languages are created equal as long as they serve the communication needs of their groups.
I also disagree to dispensing with "moral judgements about language" (or the way modern social sciences rush to dispense with moral judgements about almost everything -- and I mean this in a Christopher Lasch way).
>Most of us probably have no trouble dismissing the notion that Persian is intrinsically inferior to English. But because AAVE is so close to our own dialects, we're convinced we understand it well enough to judge it.
Persian is an ancient language, of a historically great empire with an important literary canon, written rules and more than a couple of millennia of refinement by speakers, scholars, poets, etc. If anything, it could be superior to English.
An ad-hoc minority dialect of a couple of centuries vintage that slaves and ex-slaves had to adapt and develop to establish group identity and as a secret code against the racist white population, is not the same thing at all.
When you say Persian is likely superior to English, you're using the word in an abstract, philosophical sense, as if you're comparing two pieces of ancient art, not concerned with their practical uses. You say Persian could be "superior", but if anyone asks which language one should learn, you will have no problem suggesting English, as that's the practical choice with much more utility.
Similarly, if anyone suggests English speakers should change their linguistic habit to match the superior grammar of Persian, I'm sure you will (like me) just roll your eyes.
Yet when you compare Standard English and AAVE, I have a feeling that you will encourage people to speak Standard English because it is "superior", and you will likely tell AAVE speakers to adopt the rules of Standard English because it is more sophisticated.
Sounds to me like you're mixing two different meanings to win one argument and then the other.
That's correct.
AAVE, on the other hand is both (for me) poorer in the philosophical sense (which I tie to overall cultural significance), and to utility. It's a very special purpose group language, that even its speakers abandon in different contexts.
So I don't see the conflict you mention. If practicality wasn't an issue, I would suggest people study Persian (or Chinese, or several others beautiful and rich ancient languages), not English. But as it is, I would suggest English (besides, in terms of cultural significance for the modern world, it holds quite well, ever since the 20th century -- before I might have suggested French).
Similarly, for English vs AAVE, I would suggest English both for their overall cultural significance over AAVE and their practicality.
You haven't so much "disagreed" with the essay as you've opted to pursue an orthogonal concern to which it doesn't expend any attention at all: whether AAVE is "good" or "bad". Pullum, in this piece, doesn't care. All he's saying is that when considering AAVE, we should at least understand what it is.
Yeah, but what we're pushing under the carpet is that they were forced, by racism, to be raised with it as their first language.
>Pullum, in this piece, doesn't care. All he's saying is that when considering AAVE, we should at least understand what it is.
In the essay he basically collects its syntactic and lexicographical differences, to prove that it's "a whole other language".
That it may be, what's of interest to me is its standing as a language in general (and its historical roots and development), not whether it has coherent rules and thus it cannot be said to be just "mistaken english". That I can give him, but it's far from the real essence of the matter.
Separating from the society at large is how you create and enforce such dialects to particular subgroups.
And segregation didn't end in the 60s: "Despite recent trends, blacks remain the most segregated racial group. The dissimilarity-index indices in 1980, 1990 and 2000 are 72.7, 67.8, and 64.0, respectively.[8] Blacks are hypersegregated in most of the largest metropolitan areas across the U.S., including Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York, Philadelphia and Washington, DC.[4] For Hispanics, the second most segregated racial group, the indices from 1980, 1990 and 2000 are 50.2, 50.0, and 50.9, respectively".
And: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_segregation_in_the_Uni... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining
And that's part of what makes a language significant or not.
If by some strange accident humanity totally lost Latin, for example, a great deal of cultural knowledge would be lost. If humanity lost Navajo, not so much.(Of course as a language extremely important for the Navajo and their culture).
In the very first response I got, I was asked to clarify "simpler", and I explained that I mean the overall "ecosystem" (history, culture, literature, vocabulary, applications) of the language.
Maybe a better word instead of "simpler" would be "poorer" and "richer". In the sense of the Java and Nim ecosystem's for example.
So, not the syntactic/etc rules (of which I don't care much at all -- anybody can create a full set of syntax rules for a new language, that doesn't make his language important).
AAVE is simpler is that it's a special purpose dialect with a smaller history, less applications, and limited development (due to racism, lack of an official state, non representation in most forms of writing, etc). It's more an artifact of racism (and a group identity thing to combat it) than an actual language (even if it has the "complex syntax" that some people thing is the only thing that matters).
This thread, interesting as it may be, was germinated in that argument, not the new one you introduced 38 minutes ago.
Please do not follow me around in different threads and try to police my comments in different contexts, with earlier quotations taken out of context.
I am more than able to reply in a single thread to any objection you want to raise -- so that the narrative of the thread is kept intact and people can follow what each party said.
Also, you can criticise my points and disagree or totally consider them BS, but criticising my commenting, with whatever assumptions you made and didn't check with me (e.g. that I "moved the goalposts") I find rude.
My "simpler" and "less significant" refer to the same criticism. Pretending that I meant "simpler" in some "simpler syntax/tenses" way, and now I've "moved the goalposts" to "less significant" is disingenuous given what I've written in this thread.
I made it absolutely clear from the start of the thread that by "simpler" I meant less significant overall.
I was asked "by which criteria I say it's simpler", and I said "Vocabulary size for one. Applicability in different social contexts. Historical roots. Volumes of works created in it".
And I also extended that reply in follow-up comments, e.g. going on to say that standard english "is a more established language, with a longer history (literals and otherwise), written rules, plethora of books, and billions of speakers the world over. In fact, it was the AAVE that's derived from English and not the other way around. Without English there would be no AAVE. Plus it's also tied to a particular subgroup (and not even for all of its communicational needs)."
Where are those "changing goalposts"? I was talking about a language being less developed (simpler) from the beginning, and I articulated quite clearly what I meant by that, which is the same as the language's general significance, not just as a organized way of talking (syntax/etc) but as a historical/cultural artifacts.
If anything I find the opposing team playing with invisible goalposts, as if only syntax/grammar/etc counts in evaluating a language, that is, as if a language is just some formal linguistic construct, and does not have an associated culture, applications, history, literature, etc.
I guess this is part of the continental divide in thinking about culture.
Besides that, as I'm sure you know, such discussion is often skewed by unspoken agendas around why people want to call one thing 'simpler' than another in the first place. I'm not imputing that to your comment here, just pointing out that it's frequently in play, probably the more so as a topic is more politicized.
* (as, offtopically, is rampant in the software business)
Yeah, because literary history and written culture is a trivial matter when speaking about languages.
What's important is if we can find syntactic rules, tenses, etc, in them to classify them as languages.
Because any language, whether Klingon or French, is the same thing, a language, and we don't need anything more when we have that tautology...
I also don't think you do your your argument, whatever it may be at this point, any favors by comparing AAVE and Navajo to Klingon.
Isn't the parent's question:
"yet your standard on a languages complexity favour of "how many books do those people write""
snark in the first place, as if that's unimportant, and as if literary history is merely a quantity issue? Sorry, but to my European eyes that's not even in question.
And how is the "surprising complexity of the tense system" relevant? Surprising to whom? Racists who thought an african american dialect couldn't be formal enough? Perhaps they haven't heard of creole languages either.
Racist expectations aside, what's "surprising" about its complexity? At best it is more or less comparable to that of English. That's not some "surprising complexity" that can help us access a language, except in the lowest level, of it's internal workings. Of course the main claim of the original article is indeed only that "it's a language too".
To which I say, this doesn't say much.
I'll probably get downvoted for posting that. But I don't see how this essay supports any notion that AAVE is simpler than standard English, and coldtea doesn't supply any alternative source to support the claim.
Is calling it "simpler" a rigorous statment of some measurable quantity? If so, which one?
Or is it a way to impose a value judgment on the dialect and the people who created it and speak it today?
There is certainly a giant pile of American cultural precedent for the latter.
If you need any more evidence of this dynamic, recall Harry Reid before the '08 Election. He characterized Obama as a ‘light-skinned’ African-American ‘with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.’
Do you really need sources to tell you that a subgroup's language is poorer than a mainstream language with a many times its history, speakers, artifacts and literary works?
>Or is it a way to impose a value judgment on the dialect and the people who created it and speak it today?
No, it's a value judgement on the people who enslaved them and deprived them of opportunities for education and participation in the mainstream culture and language for centuries.
And who continue to oppress them through faux-progressive, but essentially condescending, praise for their make-shift language they were forced to come up with.
Perhaps you, like several other commenters on this thread, believe the point of the essay is that AAVE should be nurtured, or even spread to students not acquainted with it. Nobody is making that argument. The closest the essay comes to a moral judgement about AAVE is in pointing out that if AAVE-aware educational strategies produce better outcomes for learning Standard English, our ignorance and prejudice shouldn't prevent use from creating those outcomes.
But most of the essay is spent making fun of people who feel they understand AAVE well enough to dismiss it. It's a funny piece, by an universally respected authority. You should read it again with an open mind!
It has a lot of linguistic traits of those dialects. Which would make sense if the Irish and Scottish slaves taught them their english.
I don't think that makes it "simple", that is a judgement I think is invalid and ignores the reality of the dialect.
To non-AAVE speakers AAVE has the appearance of simplicity because its productions "look like" simplified English. This is actually what Pullum debunks in the article: the rules to produce "simplifications" like dropped consonants and auxiliaries are actually complex (i.e. it's not at all arbitrary as you would expect if it had less rules).
But even if we put all that aside and assume you (and the racists you're being lumped in together with based on that assertion) were right. How exactly is "simpler" worse? Is Finnish superior because it has fifteen noun cases?
This is basically the line of thinking that resulted in generations of English students being tortured by self-styled (prescriptivist) "linguists" who were convinced that English is only "correct" when you try to pretend it is actually Latin (giving us nonsensical rules like "don't split infinitives" and "no dangling prepositions" -- although they are entirely based on limitations of Latin).
I 100% agree about the quality of this paper and the quote above. It took me years of trial-and-error in black schools to learn to spot or speak correct versions of their language. I won't even say I mastered it or anything: just passable. I watched plenty of times when people transfered in, talked like they're hood, slipped on some little rule, and had a whole room stare at them. They almost always got called out then usually admitted they were faking it to be cool or blend or whatever. Even the whites like me learned to spot what was authentic or fake due to those intricate details you mention.
Fun to finally read a detailed analysis of it. One thing that might be worth more research and writeups is one of reasons even I resisted it to a degree: changing words with a common meaning to mean the total opposite. It was really hard to keep up with without watching shows or listening to music they did... my guess at where many trends started. Confirmed it for some. I nearly got into a fight over a guy I was told acted "so cold" to a specific woman I was friends with not knowing they redefined it to mean something like "awesome." Usually just awkward situations rather than violent but it did and still seems like a foolish practice. Interestingly, they later made same recommendation in a different form about rebel flag: had intrinsic, established, and negative meaning that can't be erased by merely using it in different meaning/context.
Rest was just how they talk far as I figured. The country whites had their own form of English, too. There was the "true Southern" accent some upper-class people had. People in from the cities in the North had theirs. Some whites and blacks stayed speaking Standard English. My words and style are a combo of all these as is probably obvious. Once exposed to enough styles, I never let myself get to hating AAVE as it was clear many people just spoke differently. More like just straining to keep up with its changing definitions so I could seize a good opportunity or avoid an assault.
Note: Strange enough, this is also the first time I've ever heard "AAVE." I don't follow linguistics or the debates in the papers since I figured it would just be closet racism. I just listened to what people around me said since they followed all that. The blacks themselves, including English teachers, explained the AAVE concept in school by saying (1) it wasn't broken English, (2) it was their own language/culture, and (3) it's called Ebonics. Reading Pullum's education on that word was ironic and funny given blacks, not whites, spent years hammering it into my head. Whites just said "talks/talked black" with a few using "ebonics" for mockery. Now, I'm going to try to forget it in favor of AAVE which is indeed a better term. Just can't believe I haven't seen it or heard it so little from blacks that it went away with my memory. Strange.
Flammable is a word, invented several times over history (most recently in the 1940s), to mean that same thing as "inflammable" (able to become inflamed) because it's important to get correct and the in- prefix confuses people into thinking it means the opposite.
French and Italian apparently have words beginning ininflam- which mean "not-inflammable". Americans prefer an the less ambiguous concoction: "non-flammable".
I can see only advantages in using the same word again.
This is a word that's changing pretty rapidly because nobody's pushing back against it. No one shouts "you're stupid and wrong" at people who use the word "flammable" instead of "inflammable". Every sensible person can recognize that "flammable" is the clearer version of the word, and being clear is important in this case, so who cares what the word used to be.
So as opposed to cases where people get angry about language changing, this is a case to get angry that language hasn't completely changed yet.
In that case, I know Japanese. Just not the same one that anyone else knows...
While there is a definite meme around exasperation at this (and apparently some dictionaries are on board), I think they have it wrong.
In every example I've seen, including those proffered by those promulgating the meme, the difference intended by addition of "literally" is emphasis. Omission would not have lead to the listener/reader being more likely to conclude that the utterance was literal. It's simply hyperbole. "It was figuratively X so much that it was almost literally X, but obviously you understand that it was still only figurative."
This doesn't mean it's completely harmless - overuse of the word in that role does make it marginally harder to convey that something was actually, literally the case when it's expected that it would be figuratively the case. But it's not a reversal of sense.
When someone says, "I've walked miles around the store looking for you", we don't conclude that there is a new use of the word "miles" to mean "hundreds of feet". We say they were exaggerating for emphasis.
"That book was well wicked mate!" "That book was extremely good friend"
In other words, in the UK the word "wicked" always stands on its own, could be replaced by "good", "excellent", "amazing" or indeed, "sick" (in the modern sense of the word.)
I think "wicked" is not a bit cliched now though. It sounds quite quaint to me. I wouldn't use it anymore except to be ironic.
But on the other hand, I only hear US usage more like "wicked cool" - which sounds very artificial and "Dadspeak"(1) to me. Can the US usage be stand alone, or is it only used as an adjective?
(1) Dadspeak - when a Dad tries to sound cool and fails horribly by incorrectly using slang terms they don't really understand.
I had the immense pleasure of meeting him once. My favorite quote from the interaction: "With a shell you have all the expressibility of a language. With pointy-clicky you're reduced to pointing at things and grunting."
It's mostly unconscious. If I'm in Memphis, TN and someone on the street asks for me change, I'd probably respond "I ain't got none." If I were in Richmond, VA and someone asks me for change, I'd probably respond "I don't have any."
I learned "proper" English quickly because the dialect spoken in my home wasn't far removed from it, and a result I had a much easier time with grammar than my peers. I also have far less trouble communicating with a broader audience online.
A coworker saw it not long ago. We were talking about a party or something I was at. He's white guy that loves movies, D&D, and so on. We walk past two, black coworkers cutting up. I keep talking with stories about the party. He stops to ask me, "Did you just start talking really black because you walked past a black person?" Black schools teach people to recover quickly and dismiss when hit with something like that. I recall basically doing just that then focusing the guy back to the party while talking whiter haha.
Later, I thought about it. I knew I consciously did that sort of thing when I was around different people. I know my language is even a blend. Still, looking back, I did in fact change how I was wording things, increased gestures, and went for more energetic presentation the second my peripherals spotted blacks who I normally acted that way toward. Just switched in mid conversation without me even realizing it.
I'm thinking some confused looks in conversations with rednecks could've had something to do with that. I'm a little more self-conscious of it now. Try to stick with one style or the blend I use that works well enough in diverse crowds. Except Standard English speakers and academics. I can't speak 30 seconds around them before an interruption unless they're unusually understanding or non-judgmental.
A friend argued that it's still the same language, so you can understand what others are saying even with a different dialect. Please. The average person can't understand all of Scouse, AAVE, Southern American, Geordie, cockney, Hiberno‐English, etc. I still find myself rewinding dialogue in shows like Peaky Blinders.
The only reason people have a problem with AAVE is some sort of racial pretentiousness. Even the use of the phrase "Standard English" in this article is pretentious. Standard to whom? Brits certainly have a different perspective of what "Standard English" is from Americans.
Yet... There are instances where two Norwegians simply cannot understand each other. They are more likely to switch to english or try very very hard to stick to plain language.
I have less luck with the dialects - I can understand some with a few alterations.
On the other hand, I now understand different dialects of English much better.
A former co-worker told me about moving from one (dialect) end of the country to the other, and working as a teacher. For two days the children in her class basically didn't understand her, then they had learned to map her phonemes to theirs and it was okay.
In this situation, it is said: a language is a dialect with an army and navy
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3328218-the-story-of-huma... - is a great and enlightening read
The commonly accepted - but rather tenuous - criterion for distinguishing between language and dialect is speakers of different dialects being mutually intelligible to each other when making the effort.
That can be said for Scouse, Southern American, Geordie, Cockney and Hiberno‐English, even though understanding speakers of those dialects talking among each other often is difficult for an outsider.
Unlike these varieties, AAVE technically isn't a dialect but a an ethnolect and sociolect, so race definitely is a factor here. Maybe, AAVE can some day become a generally accepted dialect that's not dependent on speaker ethnicity. However, I think it's more likely that AAVE influences other - considered more standard - varieties of English. In fact that's likely already happening to some extent through culture, music in particular, and of course people just talking to each other and taking up linguistic quirks and habits from each other.
What's interesting is that I've seen Spanish and Portuguese speakers do this (enough to have a conversation, though I can't say how well that went). On the other hand, there are certain Chinese dialects (though maybe not considered dialect by linguistics) where the speaker of one finds it just about impossible to understand what the speaker of the other is saying.
Spanish speakers are a huge group and many simply don't know their own language. It's like going to Alabama and expecting to find Shakespeare.
I'll grant you that mutual intelligibility is difficult to define but I'm using it in the sense that my wife is conversational with folks from Portugal and Italy when we travel there. That's a decent standard.
But then I am a poor benighted bastard living in Alabama.
Of course, I lived in Texas until about 8 years ago, when I moved to AL.
Of course there are not. They may not know whatever it is you are talking about, but it's tautologically true that a group of people communicating with a given language know the language they are using to communicate (the language that they would likely refer to as "their own language"). I guess no one will care if you don't want to call that language Spanish (they won't heed your opinion, they just won't care).
Edit: typo
I didn't present numbers because those are hard to prove but I agree with your assessment. Anytime you're over 60% (at least 1-way which is what you were describing, your personal comprehension, not the Italian's), you're in great shape. 60-90% (a low estimate because it's one side) is getting into dialect territory. Simple statements and conversations are not a problem and that's definitely mutual intelligibility. Yes it is a bit of a stretch, but everything in one way or another is a stretch. As a general judgment call I think it stands. My point was, as a native English speaker and conversational speaker of Castellano myself- my English enables me to understand exactly zero other languages. Mutual intelligibility is indeed real in the Latin world. There's little to no mutual intelligibility with English, except maybe to Frisian, I've never heard it in person. But there is definitely mutual intelligibility between the former Roman Empire except France and Romania. I do understand some Italian. Absolutely nothing compared to you or my wife. My wife has the roughly 60-90% comprehension ability you do with Italian.
On the 'mutual' side of mutual intelligibility, from what I've seen educated Portuguese and Italian speakers understand her even better than she understands them. At least, again, an educated speaker who doesn't get confused with their own language first.
By that definition, Norwegian and Swedish is the same language. Danish is intelligible too, if written, not spoken.
Interesting. I'd call this language Scandic (IC), with the sub locale codes ic_SV, ic_NO and ic_DK.
Therefore the argument 'How come X is a language while Y is not' doesn't make sense if X has their own country and Y does not.
Ie same way that people in Luxemburg want to point out that they have their own language different from German, rulers of Morocco (who are Arabs - majority of Morocco's population native language is Berber) want to stress that they share same language & culture with rest of the Arab world.
In other words - if you are a country, you have the option to have your own language (even if it's mutually intelligible with a major other language). If you are just a part of a country, that option seems off the table (ie you need a non-mutually intelligible language to make that claim).
[1] http://matadornetwork.com/abroad/why-hindi-urdu-is-one-langu...
It's easy to imagine Norwegian and Swedish being considered the same language if they were the same country. It'd be a language with multiple written forms, but Norwegian already has two of those anyway.
But you can only get so far by simplifying the issue to say that language borders are national borders. That erases a lot of the linguistic complexity of Europe, it defies reality in Africa and South Asia, and it just wouldn't make sense at all in North America. (What's the Canadian language, besides a joke on South Park?)
Its funny but Peaky Blinders accents make me feel at home - ok I do have connections to pre legalization bookies :-)
Most regional variation these days is what's colloquially called an accent: the exact same words, just with slightly different sounds (strictly speaking: the same phonemes produces slightly differently). Sometimes a few idiosyncratic words are mixed in for good measure.
What seems most surprising to me as a German about English is actually that in the UK there seem to be vastly more dialects compared to Germany but each seems to share much more vocabulary and grammar. The differences often entirely consist of pronunciation.
I guess this is because Germany is historically not one country but several: Bavaria really is something entirely different from Swabia, Saxony, Rhineland or Westphalia. It's just in modern times (literally only in the late 20th century) that most German speakers no longer speak their full regional dialects.
That said, "standard" English is simply a matter of definition. In the UK "standard" means RP, in the US it means GA. There's nothing special about these "standard" versions, they're just a specific dialect that is defined as the standard to be used as the official language. They're still dialects, though.
"Language" really just means "spectrum of mutually intelligible dialects". And that definition is already contradictory because not every pair of two languages within the spectrum is as mutually intelligible as any other. And sometimes different "languages" can be somewhat mutually intelligible (e.g. Afrikaans and Dutch) or even asymmetrical (e.g. Dutch speakers understand Afrikaans better than vice versa).
Heck, in everyday conversation it's probably best to always read "language" to mean "dialect". It's just a useful abstraction that mostly leaks too much to be actually useful.
Even if you cannot understand it, it remains the same language. Language is defined by the syntax rules and vocabulary, not the exact way those are pronounced (which can vary even between the same dialect).
>The only reason people have a problem with AAVE is some sort of racial pretentiousness. Even the use of the phrase "Standard English" in this article is pretentious. Standard to whom? Brits certainly have a different perspective of what "Standard English" is from Americans.
There are still majorities and minorities, and the first define what's "standard". Besides, even the Brits have their standard and their not so standard English.
Syntax rules like "no double negatives" or vocabulary like "fleek" and "pneumococcal" and "dreich"? All of that is English, and I can point to dialects of English that have each and dialects of English that don't have each.
> There are still majorities and minorities, and the first define what's "standard".
Where? In the neighborhood I grew up in, the majority uses double negatives. In the UK "colour" is the majority way to spell "color". If you want to argue that the majority determines the standards, then the standards are contextual, because different segments of the population are the majority in different contexts.
To be clear, I'm not saying that's how it should be, I'm merely describing what exists.
Technically every person has a so-called idiolect, which has a shared subset with what you would call the standard language but both includes vocabulary (and likely grammar) that is non-standard and also excludes some vocabulary (and again likely grammar) that is standard.
Just like a statistical average it's incredibly unlikely (and sometimes even possible) any one person matches that standard. The notion is only really useful when talking about groups -- as is the entire concept of a "language" (or even dialects).
The entire notion of whether something is "correct" or "incorrect" ultimately depends on mutual intelligibility and whether some authority (even supposedly "descriptivist" authorities like dictionaries effectively act as authorities) acknowledges it or not.
"Language" is a lot like "species". It's a useful concept at scale but it brakes down when you try to talk about relations between individuals and if you try to define the borders too clearly it becomes apparent that it's all just a leaky abstraction to make sense of the far too complicated mess you are trying to reason about.
And it's a damn good thing that we have The Universal College of English Grammar, Vocabulary, Weights, and Measures to tell us how to talk good and what pseudo-words should be expunged. Otherwise, we'll end up speaking a weird bastardization of German, French, Latin, and who knows what else.
We speak the english language, for which dictionaries that cover almost all of its vocabulary (spare some neologisms) do exist.
That English has borrowed words from other/older languages (and incorporated them into its own syntactic scheme and vocabulary) does not mean those words are still German, Latin etc in the context of English.
They are just english words of German, Latin, etc etymology. And more often than not, even their spelling and meaning has changed from their originating language.
The US has a long and proud history of rationalizing the perceived inferiority of black people using scientific-sounding arguments. Evolution, physiology, and psychology have all served this role, and linguistics is just another way to do it.
This topic naturally includes discussion about the use of Standard Written English (SWE) at university/college level.
In one chapter the author talks about how he teaches a remedial English class to instruct students in Standard Written English (SWE), and always begins by stating that while there is nothing incorrect about their own dialects, the fact is (and whether they are happy about it or not) SWE is the only way to communicate on a level playing field, and if they were even to consider trying to change this fact they'd have to argue their points through SWE in the first place in order to be taken seriously.
[1] http://wilson.med.harvard.edu/nb204/AuthorityAndAmericanUsag...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garner%27s_Modern_English_Usag...
Of course, the essay doesn't disagree (or agree) with DFW's prescription for SWE; it mostly just concerns itself with what AAVE actually is.
I think that the fundamental idea that AAVE and SWE are distinct things with their own prescriptions is pretty strong agreement.
What Does It Mean to Sound Black? [1] featured Columbia professor John McWhorter as a guest, and discussed the "black accent" in terms of phonemes as well as AAVE.
Rules Are Made to Be Spoken [2] with John McWhorter now guest-hosting, covers "variationist sociolinguistics", the study of how linguistic cues are interpreted as a signifier of class and socioeconomic status.
0: http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley.html
1: http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2016/0...
2: http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2016/0...
The politics of the debate were interesting and should not be ignored. For many people around Oakland the question of whether Ebonics is a dialect was a canard. At least for me the real issue was that the Oakland schools were doing an awful job providing basic education to their students. The Ebonics debate was a distraction from fixing real problems. Oakland schools ended up being taken over by the state a few years later [1].
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/cZHd4yrC7DV2sdyndn3...
> [...] all little indicators of social difference quickly become incomprehensible. If, for instance, a theatre director today put a middle-aged man on stage wearing low-slung jeans, everybody in the audience would know it was both inappropriate and funny. In 50 years time they probably won't understand it at all and the object I'm looking at now carries just such a social meaning, self-evident to an Elizabethan, hard for us to read today. It's an English woollen cap of the 16th century, a sort of flat chocolatey brown beret, and it was found about 150 years ago at Moorfields in London. It was probably worn by a young man.
[...]
> Our hat unlocks a whole language of social difference and a whole structure of social control, both expressed through clothes and sometimes enforced by law. A Parliamentary statute of 1571 stipulated that every male over the age of six had to wear a woollen cap like this one on Sundays and holidays. The law was a shrewd device for supporting the English wool industry, but it was also designed to reinforce social divisions by making them visible.
No Fear Shakespeare is really great, though. Not comprehensive, but the best free resource for quickly understanding Shakespeare. Once you understand the meaning, you'll appreciate the poetry of the original language.
Of course if it was spoken out loud in the original pronunciation I would probably understand very little of it.
In fact, plenty of nonexperts think it's obviously not the case. I reckon this is because people speak language throughout their lives and therefore believe themselves to be experts, and by extension, any linguistic judgments they make (which almost always line up with some old fashioned racial/regional/class- or even gender-based bigotry) are facts. So it goes.
It's common about everything people tend to do regularly. It's like many are missing the distinction between being good at doing something and being good at the meta-level, being good at reasoning about that something. One helps with the others, but they're distinct skills. Sure, most people are experts in communicating using a language, but they're no more experts of the language itself than a person digging ditches their whole life is automatically a shovel expert or a civil engineer.
(Similarly, the time when most programmers could be called "computer experts" are long gone.)
For example, what would you call a small piece of break baked in a broadly spherical shape? The University of Manchester decided to find out: http://projects.alc.manchester.ac.uk/ukdialectmaps/lexical-v...
Your evening meal, what do you call that? That varies, too: http://projects.alc.manchester.ac.uk/ukdialectmaps/lexical-v...
What about grammatical "errors", such as "The dress what I bought"? They looked at that too: http://projects.alc.manchester.ac.uk/ukdialectmaps/syntactic...
I encourage people to explore the menus on that site. It's fascinating, genuinely.
English is a dynamic language, particularly in its first birthplace, structured as it is after multiple invasions from Latin speakers, Germanic/Anglo-Saxon speakers, Vikings, the French, and more recently African, Caribbean, Sri Lankan and Indian/Asian migration from the former empire and commonwealth.
It is why we can turn anything into an adverb and immediately make it rude/suspect ("I am so going to have a good penguining tonight"), or delightfully ambiguous on the one hand, but the intent obvious on the other ("This track is so brick, mate, you should listen to it").
English is not French. There is no official version of it. We talk about "proper" English as being "The [King/Queen]'s English", perhaps, but only to identify it as being distinct from the English used by many others. People aspire to use it as royalty does for obvious reasons, but it is churlish to dismiss variations.
The fact that this issue happened in Oakland, that it was an issue relating to African American children in particular, that it is divorced from the reality of English and its traditions, all of this makes me suspicious the underlying cause was a form of implicit/subconscious racism. It may even have been explicit.
That said, I've noticed America in particular has held onto a form of English and developed it in a way that is quite divorced from the UK. It's thought that the modern New York accent and vernacular is not wholly dissimilar to 18th-century English South West, for reasons perhaps obvious to those who understand a little of the history of New York and its earliest settlers. Likewise, Canadian accents have more than a hint of Scottish in many parts: 1950s Canadian films to me sound almost 100% Scottish.
What is the point I'm making? It's a language for all of us. Yes there is a standard English. But those who seek to deny its development within sub-cultures and regional variations are not just denying its tradition and history, but avoiding a possibly very beautiful future.
But I like the original Yiddish, because it illustrates the point rather clearly (transcribed to the latin alphabet): "a shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot"
There's a nice, relevant discussion of the origin of the quote on the Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_a...
Considering the history of the quote it's probably a direct dismissal of the "just broken German" assertion (because German had an army and a navy but Yiddish obviously did not).
There isn't really an official version of French either:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgiNoNqYXMA
Or rather, both English and French have prestige dialects. If you want to adhere to high social standing, you try to emulate the speech of BBC or CNN reporters, or you try to follow the constraints of l'Academie.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prestige_%28sociolinguistics%2...
I like that in Spanish the corresponding Royal Spanish Academy has gotten a bit laxer in recent years and rather than trying to tell people all around the Spanish world how to talk, they just document variations in their official dictionary. To do this, they are aided by other Spanish academies around the world, including the US Spanish Academy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_Spanish_Languag...
They still publish articles on how to spell, but I find that more tolerable, as spelling is artificial but speech is natural.
Yes, yes there is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acad%C3%A9mie_fran%C3%A7aise
The very video you link to calls Quebec French "Joual"... not French. It criticizes those who say they don't speak properly. They speak Joual proprely :)
Joual is a dialect of French, sure, but not proper French.
PS: I've never before heared the term "Joual" before (I'm a native French speaker). Thanks for the TIL!
France does not have the exclusive right to define what "French" is.
Québec and other parts of the Francophonie have many differing versions of French, and not all Quebeckers speak Joual exclusively (nor do all New Brunswickers[1] speak Chiac exclusively). The French spoken in Québec has the same rich history and origins as the French spoken in Québec. You can read more about the history of Québec French here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oyf8tz_IoyQ
----
Quebec is not the only non-France part of the world where French is spoken, and as a citizen of one of these parts, I still believe (like most French speakers) that French is, indeed, formally defined.
You are free to speak whatever dialect of French you like (or come up with your own), nobody is arguing against that. I'll speak my own just as well. That doesn't make it proper French.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_language#Dialects
EDIT: Failed at linking to the appropriate section, which would have been ok if it didn't make my reply excessively pedantic. If you read it before my edit, sorry.
The rest of the time I'm quite happy to speak my dialect instead.
Ergo: I don't consider dialects (mine or others) to be French. They are dialects of French. Not French.
Not all Québec french is "Joual" FYI.
Also there is nothing credible that makes Parisian French[1] the official correct one.
The academy can prescribe all it wants, it doesn't mean it has to be followed.
Language belongs to and is made by the people, not by Coanan the grammarian at the Académie.[2]
If linguists want to study it and create dictionaries, and descriptive grammars, great. But I don't care to listen to them once they start to prescribe: don't tell us how to speak.
[1] Which one anyway, St. Denis accent is 'Parisian'.
[2] There are studies demonstrating that in mixed language environments, it is the second generation children who 'creolize' the mostly unstructured pidgin spoken by their elders. This creole has fixed grammatical rules and is the beginnings of a new language.
[1] http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/deplorable-queb...
From "educating the ignorant natives" to "keepin' it real" we all seem to make this mistake when transiting other cultures at one time or another.
In the same way English is (especially spoken one), "mistakes" from the languages that preceded it.
I have a long-lost-now-found sister who grew up in French Switzerland and in black culture in NYC . She's basicaly bilingual in both standard English and in AAVE (as well as Spanish and Swiss French). It's really interesting to hear her switch from AAVE with her rapper friends and coworkers to standard English with everyone else. She will conjugate verbs differently, which is the most obvious change to me, as AAVE has a richer verb system than standard English:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_American_Vernacular_En...
On a side note, as a non native English speaker, the double negative always sounds really awful to me :) You can call it dialect all you want, it just doesn't make any sense.
Two negations on different parts of the sentence also don't reinforce each other: "not everyone is not doing it" if equivalent to "some people are doing it".
To me treating double negative as reinforcement of the negation is a weird, unintuitive corner case that doesn't fit in the broader framework of the English language.
But be aware that these kinds of arguments bear striking similarities to the arguments we have about the singular "they", which someone on a message board will always seem to have ironclad logical arguments against, only to find their argument foiled by incontrovertible evidence of its acceptability in Standard English.
http://www.macmillandictionaryblog.com/aint-nothin-wrong-wit...
It's amazing how difficult it is for people to get past the trap of thinking that what's familiar is "correct."
That's why when people who don't speak AAVE try and "fake it", it doesn't sound right at all. It's not just an accent with some slang words thrown in.
The English I am using to write this comment would be incomprehensible to my great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents.
The version we are using here is acceptable because it is the form that those in power have accepted. To assume a variation is incorrect because the elites have rejected usage of that version makes the argument extremely political.
Perhaps we should just accept it is an evolving language and vernaculars, dialects and variations are perfectly fine. If it is useful to a community to teach one of those in their schools rather than RP/Queen's English/Standard English, to decry that and insist it is wrong is to make a political argument about the right to identity as a community.
But, surely, some variations are mistakes, whereas others might have come about as a deliberate and thought out breaking of an existing rule.
What? It's what the post is about.
I'm not. I'm perfectly fine with saying that language A (be it well established or not) is language B with mistakes, even if language B itself came about through mistakes.
Not necessarily. For example, take this: "Harold is swift. His hand is strong and his word grim. Late in life he went to his wife in Rome."
That's grammatically complete and fully intelligible Old English. It would be perfectly readable to anyone from 1200+ years ago who had mastered the modern alphabet and spelling conventions.
By the way, that's a made-up example from an Old English textbook. How about:
Lord's Prayer I (Exeter Book,10th c.) [....]g fæder, þu þe on heofonum eardast, geweorðad wuldres dreame. Sy þinum weorcum halgad noma niþþa bearnum; þu eart nergend wera. Cyme þin rice wide, ond þin rædfæst willa aræred under rodores hrofe, eac þon on rumre foldan. Syle us to dæge domfæstne blæd, hlaf userne, helpend wera, 8 þone singalan, soðfæst meotod. Ne læt usic costunga cnyssan to swiðe, ac þu us freodom gief, folca waldend, from yfla gewham, a to widan feore. (The Exeter Book, ed. Krapp and Dobbie 1936)
http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~kemmer/Words04/history/paternoster....
Evolution is not always just by way of mistakes!
[1] http://www.wvculture.org/history/journal_wvh/wvh30-2.html
However it's insane to think that this means speaking Scots is sufficient if you want a good job. I don't think anyone attempting to get by in life and pursue a career in business or politics or academia would be taken serious if they only spoke Scots.
Actually Scots probably has the advantage of nostalgia. AAVE on the other hand is (ultimately) an artefact of American slave ownership -- that's something we would much rather undo than remember.
I think there's an argument to be made for the preservation of obscure languages (and a pidgin that is being threatened to be displaced by a dominant language it is partially based on certainly qualifies) but ultimately I agree exactly with what you are saying: reassuring AAVE speakers that it is okay to only speak a minority language when living in a country that is entirely based on a different language is cruel to the speakers.
For comparison (according to Wikipedia's numbers): Irish Gaelic is spoken by 18.3% of people on the Irish island (i.e. both Republic and Northern); Welsh is spoken by 19% of people in Wales.
Again according to Wikipedia's numbers, 12.8% of Americans speak Spanish at home, while 17.4% of Americans identify as Hispanic or Latino. If we assume AAVE is as widespread among black Americans as Spanish is among Hispanic and Latino Americans (because there are no official numbers) that would mean only 9.3% of Americans speak AAVE.
Even assuming every black American is an AAVE speaker (and that seems extremely bold as even linguists admit that "AAVE" is more of a spectrum than a clearly defined language) that would still be only 12.6% of Americans who speak AAVE. In other words: even by the most generous estimate 87.4% of Americans don't speak AAVE -- and likely don't comprehend the more idiosyncratic variants of AAVE.
So, even if AAVE is a "real" language, it's not widely useful outside of the small circles of AAVE speakers. It's just not realistic to expect 87.4% of the population to accommodate the "native language" of the remaining percentage if they already both speak General American English (or some approximation thereof).
Actually, you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who doesn't use Scots to some degree. I realise the 30% figure came from census data, but most people here use Scots without recognising it themselves as a distinct 'Scots' language. It's a tricky thing to word in a census to get real numbers.
> However it's insane to think that this means speaking Scots is sufficient if you want a good job
Absolutely true. Myself and everyone I know use Scots in daily life, both at work and at home. But most recognise that (rightly or wrongly) it's not socially acceptable to use it in formal situations, such as during a job interview, talking to clients etc.
Scots or AAVE might not actually be "deficient English" but to a non-Scots or non-AAVE speaker of English they might as well be because the only thing that matters (biases aside) is intelligibility.
For an absurd example: if you're a German company and hire a sophisticated Dutch native speaker who doesn't speak a word of German it doesn't matter how sophisticated their Dutch is, you'll still only understand a fraction of what they say and think they have a really strong accent (because the words you understand as German are actually Dutch and just happen to have the same origins).
Of course it's less of a problem with Dutch because there's actually a language where Dutch is the official language and there is a large regional population of people all speaking the language and learning standardized rules for the language in schools.
Scots at least has the large regional population. AAVE outside majority-black areas might as well be Scots because the majority of people won't find it mutually intelligible.
Almost no one is suggesting that. What is being suggested is that AAVE shouldn't be derided as talking "like hoodlums" (to quote the parent comment). Employment discrimination based upon someone retaining elements of AAVE is considered acceptable to some, but I've never seen them argue that discriminating against someone who speaks New England English is acceptable (or seen them address how showing the influence of one dialect is much more harmful to your employment chances than showing the influence of the other).
It makes sense that people should learn General American and try to use it to facilitate communication, but the negative stigma attached to particular dialects and not others is problematic and encourages bigotry.
I think New England is a red herring. There's a similar negative stigma to the Southern Drawl -- and that's really as white as it gets. "White trash" or "redneck" is an actual existing stereotype.
Both AAVE and Southern American English have negative connotations. The only difference is that AAVE also marks the speaker with an ethnicity that also has negative connotations (going by studies into biases, even black Americans have negative associations with black people).
Fix the negative connotations of that ethnicity and people think of AAVE speakers no less than of uneducated white people.
The reason that AAVE even in isolation "sounds uneducated" is that it is not only related to Southern American English (which already "sounds uneducated" on its own) but also that it simplifies some grammar and phonemes from English. No matter what complexity it brings to the table by itself, those changes make it look simpler in comparison and speaking simplified language makes a speaker appear less sophisticated.
AAVE by itself sounds unsophisticated to GA or RP speakers. That simply cannot be helped. It's inherent to the language itself. The only thing you can hope for (short of replacing GA with something that makes AAVE sound less jarring -- or having AAVE somehow become the language of the sociopolitical elite) is that the association moves from "hoodlums" to "inbred rednecks".
Note: I'm not saying AAVE "is" objectively less sophisticated. I'm saying it objectively sounds less sophisticated to a speaker of GA or RP. Even if you had never met a black person before and never heard AAVE before, as a GA speaker you would think AAVE sounds less sophisticated than GA because of the objective reasons I laid out.
If you can think of a scenario where AAVE becomes a language everybody wants to speak in order to show off how sophisticated they are (like French in medieval England) or where GA is replaced by a language that is different enough to simply make AAVE sound completely foreign (like if the official language of the US was Chinese or Spanish), I don't see any plausible way to fight its negative connotations (unlike those of blackness in general).
Not sure how you can see this as a red herring. It's a pretty good example of how variations that aren't General American aren't held to the same standard. Some are considered a sign of poor education, while others are merely considered regionalisms. This reflects an underlying bias.
The fact that rural Southern dialects carry a stigma that New England dialects don't only provides more evidence of this.
You can say that it seems less sophisticated to you, but I doubt that this is merely an objective statement entirely disconnected from the culture that treats these dialects as less sophisticated. Linguists don't seem to consider them less sophisticated (kind of the point of the article, which was written by a linguist).
I never said AAVE is less sophisticated. I even went out of my way to make it clear that I'm not saying AAVE is less sophisticated.
AAVE contains grammar that is based on simplified English grammar. Simplified grammar sounds less sophisticated to a speaker of the original grammar. This makes AAVE sound less sophisticated to English speakers. Quod erat demonstrandum.
I'm not even a native speaker of English and this is obvious to me. Heck, this is immediately obvious if you try to learn English (or any language) as a second language: if you don't speak the language well people will treat you as less intelligent because you are not able to communicate at the same level of sophistication (simply because you lack the words and the grammatical details).
This isn't awesome. This certainly isn't how you'd want it to be if you could just define how things are. But this is how things are and it's certainly not unique to English. The same is true for German, Chinese, Japanese and I'm fairly certain I've heard similar anecdotes from people studying indigenous languages.
Please don't simply ignore my entire argument because you think I'm trying to go full Hegel and claim black people are less intelligent. You couldn't be further from reading me.
Again, this is showing inherent biases. An AAVE or Southern dialect speaker speaking GA as well as a speaker of a New England dialect will be treated quite differently. The former is much more likely to be thrown in the "not speaking the language well" category; the latter is much more likely to be dismissed as merely a regional variation.
> AAVE contains grammar that is based on simplified English grammar.
But that's not true, as the paper mentions. Again, shouldn't we be deferring to the linguistics here?
> Please don't simply ignore my entire argument because you think I'm trying to go full Hegel and claim black people are less intelligent.
I honestly have no idea how you got this from my comments.
I'm assuming you mean speaking perfectly fluent GA but throwing in a few loanwords. Indeed then the speaker isn't using simplified grammar, but they're still signalling that they're a speaker of the language they're importing loanwords from and this leaks into how people assess them -- just like using French loan words is often used (often unsuccessfully) to signal being "cultured".
I initially already said that people who speak AAVE also happen to fall into a socioethnic group who have negative connotations outside of their language. This is perfect evidence for that: speaking AAVE signals you are part of that group, so all biases against that group are applied to you. In that case AAVE itself isn't even relevant and might as well be Mandarin or French (as long as it uniquely signals association with the group).
Heck, you even see white kids try to emulate some form of AAVE to associate themselves with what they perceive as "black culture" (often based on their exact stereotypes).
> But that's not true, as the paper mentions.
It's actually not what the paper argues. Pullum argues against the misconception that AAVE is "English with mistakes" and gives examples how these idiosyncracies GA/RP speakers perceive as "mistakes" actually follow consistent rules.
Note how I said it is "based on" simplified English grammar. Dropping consonants and auxiliaries is superficially a simplification even if it follows rules. The production rules may be actually more complex because these rules come on top of whatever rules there were to begin with, but the produced result is simplified. The outcome is, to a GA but non-AAVE speaker's ears simplified (if only because they don't understand the additional production rules).
> I honestly have no idea how you got this from my comments.
You picked a single sentence from my comment and presented it out of context -- a context in which I clarified the exact meaning of that sentence and rejected what you were arguing I was saying.
I thought it was safe to assume you did this in bad faith. I may have thought wrong, in which case I apologize.
--
To reiterate: the reasons AAVE has negative connotations are twofold:
1. America really has problems with black people. As an outsider the entire situation seems absurd but there are a lot of historical nuances that have ultimately resulted in a standstill where white people pretend they're not racist and black people pretend everybody hates them. This is probably not easy to solve but is the real problem that needs solving (preferably by reducing the racism, not simply using less blatantly insulting language to discriminate black people).
2. AAVE to a GA/RP non-AAVE speaker sounds like a dumbed down version of GA/RP (because they parse it as GA/RP and it's close enough to work in "error compatibility mode"). There is no way to fix this but it's less of a problem if non-AAVE speakers don't already think the "kind of people" who happen to speak AAVE are stupid/criminal/undesirable (see #1).
Trying to fix #1 by fixing #2 or trying to fix #2 in isolation is futile and is simply not going to happen.
There's no doubt AAVE sounds, to users of SWE, like a "dumbed down" version of the language. But as the essay points out repeatedly, the irony is that it's the SWE-users who are demonstrating ignorance. AAVE is just close enough to SWE to trigger the cognitive biases that trick people into making judgements they aren't qualified to make.
So we are in agreement.
> But as the essay points out repeatedly, the irony is that it's the SWE-users who are demonstrating ignorance.
Because they don't speak AAVE and thus parse it as GA/RP/whatever. Yes.
> AAVE is just close enough to SWE to trigger the cognitive biases that trick people into making judgements they aren't qualified to make.
In other words: non-AAVE speakers look at AAVE and see broken GA/RP/whatever. So we are in agreement.
EDIT: I'm beginning to sound like a broken record, but: I'm not saying AAVE is dumbed down GA/RP; I'm not saying AAVE is unsophisticated; I'm just saying that how non-AAVE GA/RP speakers perceive AAVE is a result of their inability to speak AAVE (mixed in with the racial problems in the US because AAVE usage signals race) and that the gut reaction "semi-intelligible = stupid" is not unique to English or a race thing.
EDIT2: Also, for the umpteenth time: I'm not disagreeing with the article. I didn't comment on the article. I commented on someone (flagged) who disagreed with the article and actually argued that treating AAVE as a "real language" would result in bad consequences. Apparently my comment was deemed interesting enough to be detached, which is why you think I'm responding to the article itself.
No he's not! He's been extremely clear on this. He's saying that some rules are simplified, and other rules are more complex, and that when someone that doesn't understand the added complexity hears it they think it's a simplification.
EDIT: Also, that's not even quite what I said: I said the rules of AAVE can produce sentences that can be parsed as simplified English. I didn't even say there are rules that are simplified. AFAICT and as far as the article goes, there aren't actually any rules that are simplified at all.
I think it's very important to distinguish between the underlying rules and the product. A speaker knows the rules. A recipient only receives the product. As this comment thread unfortunately shows, meaning can be lost completely no matter how much care is put into the production if the recipient isn't able to properly extract it from the product.
You can't simply "simplify" Standard English and arrive at AAVE. If you try, you'll end up in the same hilarious place William Raspberry ended up in the Washington Post.
There's no question that Standard English speakers consider their dialect superior to AAVE, just as UK Standard English speakers consider theirs superior to Cockney, and Parisian speakers consider their dialect superior to, well, every other place French is spoken. What's worth noting is that the belief in the intrinsic superiority of one dialect over another is usually not well-founded.
It's this constant conflation between usage and morality that David Foster Wallace concerns himself in his review of Garner's dictionary. Your comments here are prime example of that confusion at work. You should consider reading DFW's piece --- but do it after re-reading this one. I read the AAVE essay today for the first time, and then re-read DFW's, and had a very different take on DFW as a result.
Those cognitive biases are called "understanding GA/RP" and "not understanding AAVE". As I have said elsewhere, this is no different from a German attempting to parse Dutch, except a Dutch speaker can actually point to a country that has Dutch as official language.
This is not a fault of AAVE. This doesn't make Dutch "realer" than AAVE. This is just how humans work. It's apparently relatively universal and not new, so it's naive to imagine we can "fix humans" to eliminate that bias.
The real problem is that Americans have negative associations with black people. That is fixable because it is largely an artefact of the US's incredibly unfortunate history. Once that is fixed the bias against AAVE is no less worth delving on than the bias against Southern American English in general.
The phenomenon you're trying to call out is called a "sociolect". These days almost every "non-standard" dialect acts as a kind of sociolect because the "standard" dialect is expected to be followed in all kinds of formal or even informal settings from political speeches to the workplace.
I'm not arguing anything is superior. I don't understand why you keep responding to every single one of my comments by arguing I'm making some kind of claim about superiority.
You can't simplify Standard English and arrive at AAVE, yes. That's what I am saying. But you can simplify Standard English, put it alongside actual AAVE and a non-AAVE speaker will likely find the two indistinguishable and think they're both "just simplified English". I'm talking about appearances in the context of another language here.
Of course no language is "superior". I'm making a pragmatic argument about why people act the way they do, not about some nonsensical cultural shouting match.
At any rate: thanks for clarifying. I think I have a nitpicky disagreement with your characterization of AAVE as sounding simpler because of actual simplifications, as opposed to misapprehensions SE speakers have about what constitutes simplicity. But it's just a nitpick.
Also, Pullum himself suggests, towards the end of the essay, that it's just an accident of history that we're all not speaking something closer to AAVE than SE.
As to the nitpick: as a non-native speaker of English I'm well-aware that intuitions about actual mistakes people make are often wrong if that's what you're hinting at. I actually saw a nice example of that in a course on forensic linguistics back in university: a suspected criminal wrote a letter containing a number of glaring grammatical mistakes and the investigators at the time assumed it must have been a German immigrant but to us Germans it was obvious that those mistakes couldn't have been made by a native German speaker no matter how bad he was at English: even "broken English" follows rules.
Fun fact: the only person I've ever met who had a true Hollywood movie villain WW2 German accent in English was actually from Eastern Europe and had a thick accent in German as well.
The "even if" part of your concluding paragraph was a nice touch, suggesting as it does that there might be a live dispute about whether AAVE is a proper dialect of English. I have a hard time understanding how someone could get even 3 pages into this (incredibly fascinating) essay and retain any doubts about that.
If you skimmed the essay and jumped to HN to make a political argument, you've cheated yourself. Go back and read it more closely. It's fantastic.
I don't know what beef you think you have with me and maybe this is my failure to communicate clearly (English is not my native language) but you seem rather hostile to me and it reads like you think I'm somehow questioning AAVE's status is a distinct dialect of English alongside GA, RP, Scots and so on.
BTW, my comment was a response to a comment that has apparently been flagged and my comment seems to have been detached, which is why my argument reads like it's in opposition to the article rather than the comment I responded to (which in turn was actually in opposition to the article): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12030560
It's that tangent I reacted to here.
Elsewhere on the thread I simply disagree with your description of AAVE.
My comment was not a top-level comment when I wrote it. That is why it doesn't seem to be relevant to the article. I actually responded to a top-level comment that has since been flagged. Apparently the moderation fairies saw something useful in it and detached it without leaving any traces. Or I'm an idiot and managed to respond to the article instead of the comment I was actually replying to.
The comment I responded to introduced an ideological tangent on whether AAVE harms the job prospects of its speaker, not me. I merely agreed that regardless of the status of AAVE and its acceptance (which really only seems to be a problem because of ideological reasons -- it's literally self-evident that AAVE is a "real language" if that qualifier carries any meaning at all) there's no point in trying to give AAVE a special status in the expectation that it helps its recognition or the preservation of black cultural heritage (which is the general idea behind minority language movements like those in Europe).
That indeed has nothing to do with the article and only re-iterates the specific point from the parent I responded to with something more productive than simply "if you teach AAVE in school black kids won't find a job because they think knowing AAVE is all they need".
I actually find your argument that recognition of AAVE as a distinct language can help teaching AAVE native speakers English in school interesting and wonder if the creole children from Turkish immigrants in Germany speak has been studied similarly and if treating it as a distinct language and teaching German as a second language would work here as well.
Lastly, please note you're not disagreeing with my description of AAVE. You're disagreeing with what I described as the (obviously biased) perception of AAVE by non-AAVE speakers of GA/RP. Of course it's disagreeable, but it seems like you mistake my "is" for "ought":
* AAVE sounds stupid if you only know GA/RP. This impression is caused by AAVE being close enough to GA/RP to be intelligible but different enough to feel wrong, like a linguistic Uncanny Valley. This is just what happens if you feed unexpected input to the built-in language parser in your head.
* AAVE is not actually stupid. This should be obvious but apparently I need to repeat this statement every time I make the previous statement.
* Because of the race problems in the US and because AAVE signals being black, AAVE speakers face special discrimination even beyond those other non-GA speakers of English (or non-fluent non-native speakers of GA/similar) face in the US.
Sorry I made discussing this so tedious for you!
Teaching AAVE in schools is not going to help the students in black communities, it's just going to further alienate them from the rest of society. Accepting papers written in AAVE isn't going to prepare people for reality: no one cares about social justice for a dialect, they care about effective communication.
Why not? It would help understanding how many people talk.
This kind of snobbery can be seen in Canada. Many English-speaking Canadians have to take some years of French schooling. However, due to whatever the opposite of "cultural Marxism" (edit: okay, the opposite of "nihlism", per your own edit) is, English Canadians are mostly taught the prestige dialect of France, which is not nearly as useful to Canadians as learning how Quebeckers actually talk would be. Sure, the prestige French dialect isn't completely useless either, but without this linguistic snobbery we could be doing a lot better to understand each other.
Also, nihilism is impossible. A belief in nothing is still a belief.
The bulk of the essay is an exploration of what AAVE actually is. Some of what emerges debunks the notion --- casually tossed off in your comment --- that the rules of AAVE are somehow lower-class; many of them are shared by other dialects of English, and even more are present in the primary dialects of other languages.
Even more persuasive is the essay's central implied point: contrary to your description of AAVE as "street talk", AAVE is an intricately and rigidly defined dialect of English. You can't speak or write it simply by mangling Standard English. Well-educated writers who have samples of AAVE to work from fail comprehensively at replicating it, as the essay demonstrates in its hilarious payoff.
To the extent the essay concerns itself with AAVE education, it's to point out that AAVE-aware education produces superior results in outcomes for Standard English education, in the same sense that teaching French people to speak Standard English is easier when you allow the speakers to acknowledge the French language.
> Civilization is about bringing order to chaos
Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12030324 and marked it off-topic.
Taking two quotes out of context and presenting that as the reason for marking the comment off-topic is a bit bizarre. Are you saying that any comment that appeals to broader philosophical arguments is necessarily off-topic?
I don't understand why I am being downvoted.