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Comment by bedobi | Hacker News Reader

"Hoodlum lingo"... Reminds me a bit of something a random thought I had:

How would you feel if you were constantly told your manner of speech was "wrong" and you constantly felt pressured not to use it?

Would it be OK for Australian employees to be pressured to not speak Australian English, since it's indisputably in many ways different from "Standard English"? (whatever that is)

Of course not, right? To the contrary, it's kind of expected that people who work with Australians make an effort to get used to and understand the Australian variety of English.

But for some reason, stigmatizing and not making an effort to understand African American Vernacular English is to this day kind of widely and subtly accepted, even in the US.

It shouldn't be! And most of us could probably use making an effort to understand it better.

Langfocus is one of the most popular language channels on YouTube, they made a really good video on AAVE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZpCdI6ZKU4

There's also this awesome lecture by linguist Daniel S Ferguson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btSxzfB_98M

Obviously, I myself am not African American. But I couldn't help but share these and encourage everyone to take a moment to learn a bit about it!

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Bad example. Here in Australia, I call my mate a cunt all the time.

But if my mate and I worked as store cashiers in the US, we'd be expected to refrain from doing that. Or we would have to look for new jobs in short order. And that's fine.

Yeah nah mate, the example is good. Assume you're not dropping the c bomb all the time.

The point is, no one would say it's OK to pressure speakers to not speak Australian English.

And not only are they not stigmatized the way AAVE speakers are, in addition to that, it's kind of expected that people who work with Australians make an effort to get used to and understand the Australian variety of English.

That certainly isn't the expectation for AAVE - with AAVE, it's them who should make the effort to speak like everyone else, not anyone else making an effort to get used to and understand them.

Even those who speak perfectly grammatical Standard American English, but with an African American accent only, are still stigmatized. So it's not enough for speakers to speak grammatical Standard American English, they have to completely change they way they speak in order not to be stigmatized.

This is very revealing, because Standard American English, just with an African American pronunciation, is less foreign than Australian English, which has not only different pronunciation but different vocab etc as well.

Maybe because AAVE is just bad English and is intrinsically understood by people that going to a place and learning localisms is not the same as impersonating another individual. Furthermore, in the current social spectrum it would take no time for someone even trying to be accused of cultural appropriation... no thanks.

But that's the thing, AAVE is not "just bad English", or a localism. (unlike Australian English, which really is just bad English, and a localism)

You really ought to get off your high horse, watch the video. You might learn something.

For anyone triggered by the above comment saying Australian English really is just bad English...

I don't actually believe that, I just wrote it trigger you on purpose. Now go and think long and hard about why it's ok for you to be upset when someone says your variety of English is just bad English, but it's totally OK for you to say AAVE, or even just Standard American English spoken with an African American accent, is just bad English.

You perceive it to be bad English, others perceive it as the language and colloquialisms they grew up with, making it part of themselves. Some white guy like you coming in and scoffing at it as bad english really isn't helping and shows both your perceived privilege and elitism, and your ignorance.

Dont hold back...

This is called relativism and it’s a natural position to take if you think there are no useful prescriptive standards, only descriptions of how people act.

I guess that might be appealing for some people, but for others the ideas of quality and correctness are important. Unfortunately this has been mixed up with discussions about race which makes it basically impossible to publicly support any sort of language standards.

> ideas of quality and correctness are important

Quality and correctness are important! And AAVE does have and enforce both. If you answered a question like "where be the car?" with "it be on the road" or "it's on the road" when in fact it be in the garage, you would be grammatically incorrect. I bet you have no idea what habitual be even is or how it works. (I didn't)

And it all begs the question, why, in the US, is Standard American English (which is overwhelmingly native to white people, and usually the ones with the most privileged positions in society at that) more quality and correct than any other variety? Is there something magical about their speech that makes it quality and correct? Keep in mind English itself is a hodgepodge of butchered other languages.

Is Australian English not quality and correct?

How come grammatically standard English, just spoken with an African American accent, is still not quality and correct?

It’s considered incorrect because the combined cultural output of the previous five centuries established an educated baseline as to what is considered proper. It’s not simply an arbitrary designation or a consequence of “privilege” and culture isn’t just an empty variable that is selected randomly.

The point about Australian English is irrelevant. Australian English is correct in Australia and incorrect in America, just as American spellings are incorrect in Britain. Language is culture-specific.

Again, if you have no interest in the idea that some things are correct and others are incorrect, this will not appeal to you. But that is a postmodern relativistic position and not one that everyone agrees with.

Even if none of that is appealing to you, the simple fact that is the overwhelming majority of the US agrees that a certain dialect is “proper” English. It’s unclear to me why a small percentage of the population would be justified in having their dialect be on equal terms with the society-wide one. This really has nothing to do with race inherently and the same situation applies to say, Appalachian dialects.

The notion of a standard language is a modern idea (not in the sense of modern vs. postmodern, but historically).

The idea that the only valid basis for distinguishing between dialects is geography strikes me as odd, but suppose we accept it as a premise. Why is it less valid to allow correctness to be defined, say, with respect to local borders as opposed to the borders between countries?

I didn’t say it was geography. American culture is mostly separate from Australian culture. As the US is a unified cultural element, it’s not surprising that a single standard had been established. The downsides of the lack of this are easy to observe: just look at the EU. No single unified language, no unified market, less economic power. Making a Netflix for America requires 1 language, while making a Netflix for the EU requires 29. China isn’t pushing Mandarin everywhere just for chauvinist “cultural superiority” reasons.

It ultimately comes down to politics and economics.

This seems like a very strange position to take.

For one, I think what you're attacking here is usually called "descriptivism", as opposed to prescriptivism. Relativism is already a term of art in linguistics for something unrelated.

For two, it's hard to follow what point you're trying to make. If you think Australian English is correct in Australia, why not similarly say that AAVE is correct in a place where people speak it? Do Australians make up a "culture" in some way that people who speak AAVE don't?

AAVE is correct in a place where people speak it?

I didn’t say it wasn’t. Certainly dialects are “correct” in their specific regions.

That isn’t the same thing proposed by the original commenter, who insists that it is correct everywhere.

It would quickly become unwieldy if every cultural subgroup wanted their dialect to be given equal standing with the majority’s agreed-upon standard. Communication would become impossible. Political fracturing would probably happen.

> Certainly dialects are “correct” in their specific regions.

But they're not. AAVE and many other dialects are stigmatized even in their own geographic areas and social contexts. The speakers "know" they're not speaking "right" even when they're just speaking akngst themselves in their own communities. (despite them actually speaking AAVE perfectly correctly - the only way you can speak AAVE wrong is if you make grammatical mistakes like thinking "we be working" means the same thing as "we are working", which it doesn't, that's grammatically incorrect...)

And no, I didn't say it's the "correct" version of English.

I have already said that it is incorrect from the perspective of the society-wide accepted version of English. Not from within the dialect itself.

> Certainly dialects are “correct” in their specific regions. ... It would quickly become unwieldy if every cultural subgroup wanted their dialect to be given equal standing

Arguments like these can't support their own weight. For example, how do the two quoted statements resolve when applied to a region where the majority of people mainly speak AAVE? Are we to conclude that standard English is "incorrect" in that region, because the cultural subgroup that prefers it doesn't warrant equal standing? Or is the AAVE-speaking majority of that region a "subgroup" for some arbitrary reason? Or are we instead saying that AAVE and standard English are both correct in that one particular region - but once an AAVE speaker travels to the next town over their usage turns incorrect again?

The whole topic makes a lot more sense if one just embraces descriptivism. There's no such animal as "correct usage", only "usage that people consider correct" - which varies with both the person and with the context. What's correct in an essay isn't necessarily correct on the playground, and vice-versa. Sure it's more complicated, but it has the benefit of accurately modeling how people actually use language, and prescriptivism doesn't.

> Again, if you have no interest in the idea that some things are correct and others are incorrect, this will not appeal to you. But that is a postmodern relativistic position and not one that everyone agrees with.

Sorry, but you're just wrong. Everyone agrees grammar and correctness is important. AAVE has and enforces both. This has nothing to do with postmodern relativism.

I bet you can't translate or understand the difference between these sentences

We working We be working We stay working We steady working

eg, most people think AAVE "we be working" means "we are working". But it doesn't, and if you use or understand it that way, you're not being correct or grammatical.

Would it kill you to familiarize yourself with what's correct and incorrect in, and the grammar of, AAVE?

First off, there is no established standard as to what is correct or incorrect in AAVE. It is like other dialects in America, such as Appalachian English or Louisianan English. It’s also not spoken by a large percentage of African Americans.

Secondly, I really don’t know what you are trying to argue for. AAVE is an interesting dialect and something that makes America a richer place, just as all the other dialects do. That doesn’t make it equal to the common established standard, just like Appalachian English or Louisianan English are not “official.” Especially when these dialects have nowhere near the level of historical or cultural development and influence that standard American English does. What literature is there in Appalachian English? What movies? What historical documents?

Do you understand why treating every dialect as equivalent to the standard one is an extremely unwieldy thing to do? Are we to treat every new dialect that appears as completely equal to the standard historical language?

> First off, there is no established standard as to what is correct or incorrect in AAVE

Apologies, but it's now clear that you simply have no idea what you're talking about, I literally posted above textbook examples about what is the standard of what is correct and incorrect in AAVE, but you don't care to understand, so I'm gonna end this particular reply chain here.

If you actually read the Wikipedia article, you’ll see the words “continuum” and “frequently used” often. It’s similar to a creole.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_Vernacular_...

And again, I really have absolutely no idea what you are trying to argue for.

+ I think you're wrong about this too

> Australian English is correct in Australia and incorrect in America

Then how come, in the US, Australians are not stigmatized and pressured into speaking Standard American English? Because, well, they're not. If anything, there's an expectation that people who work with Australians make an effort to understand their variety of English.

Or it’s because the differences between the two are smaller than the differences between regional American dialects and standard American English? Not conjugating be is a pretty big difference.

And yes, if an Australian started using certain vocabulary words like cunt in a professional context, it would not be acceptable.

> Or it’s because the differences between the two are smaller than the differences between regional American dialects and standard American English?

clearly not - Australian English is far more different to Standard American English compared to... Standard American English, just spoken with an African American accent.

Are you talking about AAVE or the standard English African American accent?

These are not the same thing and you seem to be deliberately misleading about it.

Whatever you’re trying to argue for, state it clearly.

Both.

The argument is AAVE is incorrect, or at least different from, Standard American English, that's why it stigmatized.

That doesn't explain why Australian English, which is also different, is not stigmatized in the US. In fact, there's an expectation that even in the US, people make an effort to understand Australian English.

It also doesn't explain why even Standard American English, just spoken with an African American accent, is also stigmatized. It's literally just Standard American English with different pronunciation! Australian English is far more different to Standard American English than Standard American English is to itself just spoken with an African American Accent.

Anyone who thinks about this with a shred of honesty will see that there's something very revealing about that.

No, I don’t think so, and I also don’t think that everyone who disagrees with you is being dishonest. That’s why ideological viewpoints like yours are so misleading.

1. Australians are a tiny minority in America. Most people have never met someone from Australia. Whether they are stigmatized or not is frankly irrelevant. They play almost zero cultural role in American English.

2. Having different pronunciations by default makes it not standard American English. Not sure why this is controversial. If 90% of the country uses a certain pronunciation, why is the 10% one just as valid? Is the avoidance of it discrimination? I don’t think so. More like basic practicality.

3. Again, you seem lost in a loop here. Either AAVE is a separate dialect with its own internal grammar, or it’s an extension of Standard English that uses incorrect grammar. Which is it?

4. Considering that pretty much every other dialect is treated exactly the same way (Appalachian, etc.) it’s pretty clear this has little to do with race, as you are ideologically trying to shoehorn into your argument.

You see some grand conspiracy when the reality is that standard American English has a longer history, more cultural works, and is agreed upon by the majority of the population. It’s really that simple.

> Australians are a tiny minority in America. Most people have never met someone from Australia. Whether they are stigmatized or not is frankly irrelevant. They play almost zero cultural role in American English.

This is an odd counter argument. If there's so few Australians in the US, and they're so insignificant, you'd expect them to be more pressured into not speaking Australian English. But again, they're not being pressured into not speaking Australian English, if anything, Americans are expected to accommodate and make an effort to understand them. Why is this not the case for AAVE, which is very commonly spoken by far more people and a far more important variety of English in the US?

> Either AAVE is a separate dialect with its own internal grammar, or it’s an extension of Standard English that uses incorrect grammar. Which is it?

AAVE is a variety of English. Some of its grammar is different to Standard English.

Standard American English spoken with an African American accent is not AAVE, it's just Standard American English spoken with a different pronunciation.

Both are curiously stigmatized in ways Australian English is not.

Where are you getting this information?

Where are Australians not pressured into speaking Standard American English? On the street? Well, I don’t think anyone pressures people to not speak AAVE on the street either.

In schools? Certainly an Australian kid going through American schools will be taught to lose his Australian spellings, pronunciations, irregular vocabulary. Unclear to me how this is any different.

In the media? Well, if an Australian newscaster working in the US starting saying cunt, I assure you, he’d be forced to adopt Standard American English.

As I said, you have a highly ideological view and seem to be looking for anything to justify your conclusion.

> And it all begs the question

Does it beg or prompt the question? I ask because the meaning of the rest of the paragraph changes depending on which one you meant to use.

I am an immigrant in the U.S. I do my best to communicate with everyone else in a common language. It does not matter what the common dialect is at any given time. The benefits of using the common dialect are independent of how it came to be the common dialect.

It seems to be more or less uniquely an American issue? As far as I know, no-one is going around demanding that people from Yorkshire or Kerry or other places with significant language variation speak standard English.

> ideas of quality and correctness

What does this mean, for English? For instance, you say "I guess"; that's a neologism, and would probably upset really extreme prescriptivists. Where should the line be drawn?

I don’t know enough about the UK to give you an educated answer. It’s my impression that variations are mostly in the accent and vocabulary, not the actual conjugation of verbs like “to be.” Is that correct?

The conflict would be if Kerry dialect speakers started insisting that the BBC write articles in their dialect and not in the society-wide one.

> It’s my impression that variations are mostly in the accent and vocabulary, not the actual conjugation of verbs like “to be.” Is that correct?

No, not necessarily. Some examples here: https://www.bl.uk/british-accents-and-dialects/articles/gram...

> The conflict would be if Kerry dialect speakers started insisting that the BBC write articles in their dialect and not in the society-wide one.

Kerry's in Ireland, not the UK. However, the BBC has had newsreaders with regional dialects for a while (since WW2!: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-north-england-... )

In terms of written news, the BBC has news in West African Pidgin (which is on the cusp between being a dialect and a language; it's comprehensible to English speakers): https://www.bbc.com/pidgin . They also have some content in Scottish English (a dialect) and in Ulster Scots (generally considered a separate language, but largely comprehensible to English speakers).

This can’t possibly be only American unless you’re suggesting chavs and kevs stopped existing overnight.

DFW wrote about this decades ago: https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-2001-...

English has various dialects. Anyone not educated in the "standard" dialect is at a disadvantage, but it's better to teach the standard dialect as a dialect, because that's what it is.

Instead of telling a student that his English is wrong, instruct him in the differences been his vernacular and the standard dialect.

This practice applies broadly across vernacular dialects and is not just limited to AAVE.

That's why I deliberately used Australian English as an example. It's not clear why most people would intuitively not stigmatize a speaker of Australian English, but (consciously or otherwise) simultaneously stigmatize a speaker of AAVE, or even someone who speaks perfectly grammatical Standard American English, but merely with an African American accent. In the latter case, they're both just grammatical standard english with different pronounciation. (if anything, an African American speaking grammatical Standard English, with an African American accent only, is less foreign, since the speaker is speaking, well, standard American English, whereas the Australian would be speaking not only with different pronounciation but with slightly different grammar and vocab etc as well) Is it because Australian English is an official prestige standard, albeit not in North America?

> Instead of telling a student that his English is wrong, instruct him in the differences been his vernacular and the standard dialect.

I agree, but sadly while this seems to be the consensus advice from linguists, in practice, telling people their manner of speech is wrong (explicitly or through just stigmatizing them in other ways) is still widespread both in schools, at work and in other contexts.

It doesn't seem shocking to me that AAVE is stigmatized (not that it's right to do so). AAVE re-uses Standard American English words and grammar in different ways. I think it was you up above that brought up the habitual be. If you're not familiar with AAVE, you're probably going to misinterpret it. That stands in contrast to many of the other English dialects, where things are generally either clear from context, or so foreign you have no idea what to make of it and have to ask.

That ability to misinterpret creates confusion, which people don't like. "She be working" could either mean that she's been working a lot recently in AAVE, or a strange way of saying that she is currently at work. Appalachian English, for example, doesn't have pitfalls like that. "They was a-going way over yonder" has grammatical differences, but they don't particularly change the meaning. I would expect most people to be able to infer the meaning of that (presuming they know what "yonder" means).

The second, and probably more important, factor is people's exposure. The portrayal of AAVE in media is not good. I couldn't tell you the last time I saw a character in a show or movie that spoke AAVE, was well educated or prestigious, and wasn't some kind of a shaman, voodoo priest or similar. I don't think I've ever seen a doctor or lawyer on TV that spoke AAVE. The characters that speak AAVE are almost universally poor, usually not very smart, and often involved in either crime or some kind of mysticism. It builds a stereotype around people who speak AAVE, especially since I think most of us have very little exposure to it.

Fwiw, there are other English dialects that are similarly stigmatized. Appalachian English is heavily stigmatized, as is the more general southern dialect, though to less of a degree. The Cockney accent/dialect is similarly stigmatized, and it seems like for similar reasons.

Some text to complement the videos.

>It is impossible to conclude with a balance sheet of plusses and minusses which would add up to a final decision on the creole origins issue. To my mind, there is enough persuasive evidence in these data to suggest that AAVE did have some creole roots. The very fact that copula absence is widespread both in AAVE and in mesolectal creoles, but not in White Englishes outside of the American South (where it can be argued that Whites adopted the speech patterns of Blacks) strongly suggests that at lest some of the predecessors of modern AAVE arose from a restructuring process similar to that which produced the English-based creoles.The fact that the constraint hierarchy for following grammatical environment is so similar across the vareties shown in table 16 further reinforces this conclusion.43 The fact that AAVE varieties which might be considered closer to their creole origins on historical grounds (18th century varieties, Samaná) also behave more like creole varieties in some respects (for instance in permitting some deletion of first person am and/or in permitting some degree of past tense copula absence) is also a plus for the creole origins hypothesis.

https://web.stanford.edu/~rickford/papers/CreoleOriginsOfAAV...

I wonder if there’s any information on how the Australian dialect (if there was any) was accepted when it was still a penal colony?

Cockney would also be a great comparison as both it and AAVE can be seen as class signifiers while the Australian dialect currently isn’t.

> Would it be OK for Australian employees to be pressured to not speak Australian English, since it's indisputably in many ways different from "Standard English"? (whatever that is)

At least Australians spell colour properly, with an 'u'…

These sorts of objections always seemed superficial to me. To the former point, I gurantee you that parts of Australian English are in fact discouraged whether rightly so or not. Australians casually use expletives that are heavily frowned on in the USA for example and I gurantee you 'hoodlum' English does as well.

To the ladder and imo more significant point, the reason a lot of the sort of African American vernacular you're addressing is discouraged is because there is no inherently african/black language. It's an outcome of societal factors. It's frowned upon by institutions, albeit for pettier/racist reasons by individuals, because it implies a racially biased failing by the systems of education which are otherwise viewed as having successfully (to a degree) normalized the prestige grammar with other enrolled pupils.

Whether or not the prestige grammar should be held in such high esteem is red herring, imo anyway, when compared to asking why the systems of education are so obviously able to yield the desired outcome for students so long as they have the right skin color. We'll never be able to achieve antiracist goals with tools and systems that have racist effectiveness.

> the reason a lot of the sort of African American vernacular you're addressing is discouraged is because there is no inherently african/black language

What? Of course there is no "inherently african/black language". Africa itself is a giant continent home to the most linguistic (and ethnic, and genetic) diversity on the planet, so that would be a tough claim to back up.

And no, out of the laundry list of reasons AAVE is stigmatized, that "there is no inherently african/black language" is not one of them.

The rest of your reply, despite best efforts, I literally don't even understand what any of it means. I don't mean to be uncharitable but it's kind of ironic given the topic being English Language...

To the degree you're trying to say something about AAVE being bad grammar, or being perceived to be bad grammar, that's not even half of it. Even those who speak perfectly grammatical Standard American English, but with an African American accent only, are still stigmatized. So it's not enough for speakers to speak grammatical Standard American English, they have to completely change they way they speak in order not to be stigmatized, which is sad and wrong.

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