A mother tongue spoken by millions of Americans still gets no respect
the-magazine.org
the-magazine.org
The common examples of the difficulties in determining language vs a dialect are: the "dialects" of Chinese; Macedonian vs Bulgarian; Swedish vs Norwegian vs Danish: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect.
I think most linguists would consider AAEV to be a dialect of English.
I heard that expressed as "A language is a dialect with an army and navy"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_an...
I found it quite true when you look at cases like Dutch vs. Afrikaans or Swedish vs Norwegian vs Danish. Declaring your dialect a "language" can be a tool of nationalism.
My mother-in-law apologizes for accidentally using "slang" terms in front of my children, mostly because she was taught at school that her language was 'incorrect' and it was suppressed in favour of the 'correct' dialect of the ruling class who lived in another country.
It started out as a Dutch dialect or creole, of course, and it is now a separate language.
But the process formation of a separate language was political as well as linguistic.
has army, is dialect: Schweizerdeutch, American English, Brazilian Portuguese
has army, is language: Norwegian (v. Danish)
no army, is language: Yiddish, Afrikaans
no army, is dialect: Frisian
Nonetheless, your point still stands as I'm sure there are valid examples of 'no army, is dialect'
As political power went until 1994, all heads of state and of the army (and as far as I remember, all holders of other top positions) were Afrikaners.
The way the word "accent" is used by most non-linguist English speakers, I'd say you're mostly right: People will say things like "she's got a Southern accent" – when she was born and raised in the South, speaking that same regional variant of the language that her parents spoke, ie. speaking that dialect.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_an...
a shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot
Yiddish is fascinating. (And entertaining when spoken by Mel Brooks as an Ind ... er, Native American).
> "Eine Sprache ist ein Dialekt mit einer Armee und einer Flotte"
I am not sure if somebody amalgamated all those languages to form Hindi in 1947. The original article 343 of the Indian constitution specified Hindi in Devnagri as the national language, mostly out of the insistence of people like Gopal Krishna Goghale who while agreeing that English is a better language for law-making (http://www.constitution.org/cons/india/p17348.html) argued that we should not declare it the national language because of the colonial past.
The Official Languages Act of 1963 and subsequent amendments to article 343 cleaned up this mess.
Edit: Clarified the correct article of the constitution. I originally said Article XVII, but it should have been Part XVII.
Two dialects protected by armies navies and nuclear bombs.
A few years ago, researchers discovered that schoolchildren in Baltimore had invented a new gender-neutral singular pronoun: http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/grammar-yo-pronoun.aspx
"Yo" seems to feel more natural than the usual Spivak options.
I was mildly amused at the "pause/unpause" word pair mentioned in the article, I had always assumed that the pair was "pause/resume"...
It's analogous to "mute/unmute" and "mute/resume[sound]" where the unmute is by pressing the "mute" button, ie releaseing the mute state, whilst the resumption of sound can be achieved by pressing a volume up or down button.
I can't. Schools are supposed to teach you the official language and all the skills you need to succeed in society. AAVE won't help you (or be useful) at work, or in academia, unless you are studying AAVE as your job.
I agree that it will be divisive in the long run, I think you are right that encouraging AAVE to continue and legitimizing it and calling it a language is the wrong way to go.
Was the cockney English slang of 1800's England a language? I think most would say no, it was simply the bad English of the uneducated. I think AAVE is simply modern America's cockney slang.
"Schools should recognize the legitimacy of AAVE as a language for their students, and teach those students to recognize when and how to switch between AAVE and American English as appropriate. But most schools don’t do that. They simply teach students that the way they speak is wrong. Don’t talk this way; talk our way.
Wheeler says we’re still not doing right by children who grow up with AAVE. “The consequences are that students are being terribly misassessed in our schools. Teachers think that black kids are making mistakes, when really they’re re-creating what they hear and learn at home,” Wheeler says. “They’re counting as mistakes things that are patterns and rule-based, so [the students are] being placed in lower reading groups.”"
The point of recognizing AAVE is not to teach it as a replacement language. It's to treat it similarly to Spanish for example. By recognizing where kids are coming from, the system will better be able to direct them to where they need to be.
Same works for Spanish speaking kids - if they don't speak / understand English, they would be placed in remedial classes, right?
Since the world (outside the neighborhood) speaks standard English, they are probably served well to learn that that's what they need to know to succeed. The approach advocated would produce the opposite effect - kids would think that what they hear at home is OK and that the world should accomodate them.
But that's just factually false. Both of these children speak a proper first language at home, and both need to be taught to respond to English questions in English without being taught that their first language is somehow wrong.
Unless, of course, the class is so young that they can reasonably be expected to learn from mere immersion, at which point the advice of this article is correct, that you should provide the "AAVE-native" students the awareness that there are two forms of English going on, at they have to be able to switch to the standard one and use it in the appropriate context. (Spanish-native students generally figure this out on their own.)
Only once they are fluent in ASE (and that should happen rapidly for young AAVE speakers, mind) will English classes geared toward native speakers be productive.
http://robertspage.com/diausa.gif
This whole thing seems rather silly to me. Maybe instead of worrying about checking our privilege, we can worry about making sure everyone from all backgrounds is able to communicate in a professional way and graduate high school with a basic grasp of proper english. (your vs you're, etc)
(Because even if you don't want to call it remedial english, that's where they'll end up in college. If you've lived in America for 18 years but want to take ESL in college, they're justifiably going to think you're insane.)
Don't take this the wrong way, but highlighting "your" vs. "you're" indicates you really don't understand what we're talking about here. That is a difference of orthography, of spelling, which is completely unintuitive and frankly stupid to speakers of dialects in which those words are pronounced exactly the same way. Any native speaker, however perfect you consider their English, must be taught spelling by rote. All English is "broken" in that regard. (Did you know there are languages where there is no such thing as a spelling bee, because there is exactly one possible way to spell any word?)
But we're not talking about that. We're talking about people who go home every day and speak a real language, one just as proper, correct, consistent, coherent as your own. Just different. Your insistence that your language is "proper" because it is the language used in formal speech by the rich and powerful is, yes, incredibly unaware of your privilege.
And your calling that "silly" is, o irony, quite ignorant. Did you read the article? Did you read these comments? Did you go on Wikipedia and look up AAVE? Southern American English? Appalachian English? These are not broken forms of English, these are forms of English you do not speak. This is all completely uncontroversial among people who study the use of language scientifically.
I like to swear a lot when I'm at home, but that doesn't mean it's proper language for when I'm in the workplace. Why can't my bosses stop oppressing me with their managerial privilege!? :( :(
But by all means, continue the condescending ad hominems, I actually find histrionic people hyperventilating into comment boxes really hilarious.
[0] If this is still on the table, I'd also like to add "ad hominem" to the list. To quote The Princess Bride, "You have six fingers on your right hand. Someone was looking for you."
I am only interested in what is the most effective way to learn SE (any variety that news anchors speak in Anglophone countries).
I want them to succeed outside the area where people speak ebonics. And I think the best way that would be achieved is if they learn proper English at school, full stop. The difference with Spanish is that spanish-speaking kids simply would not understand English. These kids do. It just seems an exercise in protecting their feelings.
P.S. This comes from someone who actually was in an ESL (English Second Language) class in high school. And we actually had native-born black kids there - circa early 90s.
Of course you're entitled to an opinion, but this is not the opinion of, among many notable others, the Oakland school board since 1996.
I entreat you to consider that they (and I) might have a good reason that extends beyond "feelings". Perhaps a good reason elaborated upon at length in the article linked at the top of this very page?
You do realize the point of that was to tap into bilingual education funding, right?
Yes - and they've been considered a joke because of it since 1996. The decision was "derided and criticized, most notably by Jesse Jackson and Kweisi Mfume who regarded it as an attempt to teach slang to children". So my opinion is shared by many prominent black leaders.
There is a very good essay on the topic by David Foster Wallace that someone linked to in the comments. I was pleasantly surprised that he makes exactly the same points as myself (albeit much more eloquently). Do check it out.
What are you reading in that? I'm legitimately, deeply baffled.
My impression of your viewpoint is that kids should be taught in AAVE and have a separate Standard English class to learn how 'white folks speak'.
That said - I have nothing against same kids using AAVE at home and with their friends if they prefer - as long as they realize that knowing SE is instrumental to their success in life.
I also have two niggling points to make: 1) Standard English is not a dialect. That's just a matter of definition. 2) I'd also say that 100% of formal English speech and writing is using it. As far as I can tell, anytime a dialect is used in a book (Huck Finn, William Faulkner) - it's done to demonstrate a character who speaks a particular way. Do you know works written in a dialect where it's not done to this purpose?
I just wish you'd reconsider this. It seems you acknowledge that if we could magically swap AAVE and ASE completely, such that news anchors talk about how Obama ain't got no sense and young black children go home crying because they were marked down for using "whom" as an object, nothing else would change; What you call proper English would be the despised language of the underclass and the well-to-do would look down on them every time they ignorantly used a single negative in a phrase that requires the full construction.
And if you do acknowledge this, can you see how the classification of English dialects into "proper" and "improper" groups, which could more rightly be labeled "potent" and "impotent", amounts to massive institutionalized racism (for ethnolects) and classism (for sociolects)?
Or to put it in more personal terms, could you see yourself recognizing that the privileged in our society will look down on the underprivileged for speaking their native language correctly while simultaneously making some effort to be less of one of those people yourself?
> My impression of your viewpoint is that kids should be taught in AAVE and have a separate Standard English class to learn how 'white folks speak'.
Is that your impression of how ESL is employed for young native Spanish speakers? It is not. Once or if a person is fluent enough in the second language that the classes designed for native speakers can be productive, they are included in those classes and graded accordingly (perhaps with auxiliary tutoring if necessary). What is your argument for forcing them into those classes before that point, or without that auxiliary tutoring?
> 1) Standard English is not a dialect. That's just a matter of definition.
Whose definition are you using? This is the first line from Wikipedia: "Standard English (often shortened to S.E. within linguistic circles) refers to whatever form of the English language is accepted as a national norm in an Anglophone country." That is, by definition, a dialect. (Or, generically, a group of dialects.) Accordingly:
> 2) I'd also say that 100% of formal English speech and writing is using it.
And yet British news is written in British English and Australian news in Australian English and so on. The differences between these Englishes are relatively minor, apparently so minor that you do not consider them distinct dialects -- and perhaps that's my fault for not using the more PC term "variety" -- but they assuredly are.
Or do you mean to say that, since "standard" refers to the dialect used in formal speech in a country, the language of formal speech is by definition "standard"? To that I would say, 1) Duh, and, 2) So?
-Edit: So for those arguing that AAVE is a dialect, then If I add a few rules to any other language does that mean I've just invented a new language. That is what AAVE is, it is just English with a few additional rules that some people of low socioeconomic mean have learned (reinforced through bad education). Hardly what I would call a new language. Maybe in 500 years if the people speaking it become isolated, right now is just bad English.
In spanish there are people with low socioeconomic means that will also talk a bit different. Even with their own rules for some things. You do not call that a new language to spare their feelings. You call them uneducated and rightly so or else when will they learn if they are not ever corrected? Being politically correct just to spare the feelings of some people is not doing anybody any good.
I know is insensitive but by trying to be too nice problems never get solved.
For example consider Japan. Nearly every region in Japan has its own dialect. Everyone learns, for lack of a better way to say it, "standard Japanese" which is the kind used by news broadcasters. But, to their friends and family in their hometown they speak their local dialect which is often not understandable by people outside their region.
They know when to speak standard Japanese (for example a job interview) and when it's okay to speak the dialect.
The article is suggesting that AAVE should be considered a dialect and treated the same way. That seems reasonable to me given it's the same in many other countries. It also means respect for the culture of AAVE instead of contempt which seems like a good thing to me. So many people speak it. Why is their culture any less valid than another?
If you graduate from high school speaking only AAVE, you are in big trouble. Students need to learn to speak standard English, whatever else they may or may not speak. Distracting from this huge priority with intellectual arguments about the validity of cultures does these kids a huge disservice.
Home Language... Hahahahahahahahah. Seriously, you guys need to lower the BS. It is no more a language then the Spanish Puerto Ricans speak (Some people claim Puerto Ricans speak a dialect of Spanish. Seriously, what the hell? I've had to argue with people that it is just a different accent and some of them are simply mispronouncing some words because of the accent which they quickly loose if they go international). I have a bridge to sell all of you.
The article is not suggesting teaching AAVE. The article is suggesting not deriding people who speak AAVE at home, teaching them the difference between AAVE and "standard English", why it's important to know the difference, and when it's appropriate to use one vs the other.
Give me examples of the "AAVE dialect" that are not just examples of bad English. In Latin America there are a lot of dialects which are called like that simply because a minority of people speak it. But in reality they are full spoken languages (i.e. not just a few rules on top of an existing living language like English) You saying that AAVE is a language is an insult to those dialects like Nahualt and Mayan.
No one is arguing that there is or isn't a class and racial component to who speakers of AAVE are. They are primarily black and poor. But that point is irrelevant. Kids raised where people speak AAVE will grow up speaking AAVE. Simply declaring it 'not a language' gets you nothing. It's not 'just slang', it's a system of speaking with its own set of rules, just like any other language.
Your point about how every variation makes a language is correct. The term is idiolect. Language (like 'English'), is an abstraction over idiolects. But getting people who want to argue about "correct English" to an understanding of idiolects is more work than I can put into a comment during a work day. I'll try and dig up a general description of the issue and link it here.
Edit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiolect#Idiolect_and_language is the best I could do on short notice.
That doesn't make it not a language. What you're saying is that we should base categorize forms of communication based on the social status of their speakers. I hope you can see why that might be problematic.
> By your logic you might as well recognize English slang as an actual language.
This doesn't make any sense. AAVE is not slang, which you'd know if you read the OP.
Nope: take, for example, the "axe" pronunciation of "ask." You can trace this usage in an unbroken line from AAVE to Southern American English to Modern English to Middle English to Old English. You see, it's not just synthesis that can create a dialect or language, but also retention.
By your argument, Modern English isn't much of a language either. Instead, it's just the result of hundreds of unskilled speakers through the trajectory from Old English to Middle English to Early Modern English not learning how to properly use cases and inserting foreign Latinate words because they couldn't speak OE properly.
The idea that diglossia (or triglossia) does not exist in the mouths of educated, and even privileged speakers of English (wherever they may live) is preposterous outside of a relatively small part of the American socioeconomic strata (and by American, I mean North American — much of Canada is weirdly homogeneous as well). Most native speakers of English speak two or more "Englishes", each with its own grammar and vocabulary. AAVE is not a "lesser" dialect; despite its speakers often being disadvantaged, the language itself is no less legitimate. However, like most of us, in order to move outside of their dialectical grouping, speakers of AAVE must also have command of the prevailing standard — just like Jeff Foxworthy's redneck brain surgeon.
And Leetspeak, txt-speak, and AAVE are not equivalent entities. Leetspeak is an alternative alphabet, txt-speak is a system of abbreviations and slang, and AAVE is at minimum a dialect.
Asking a linguist "are these the same language" is as useful as asking a biologist "are these the same species"; it all depends on what you want to use them for.
(Although I don't particularly see the relevance of that to whether or not leet has a substantially distinct grammar from English, of which I remain unconvinced.)
This is already the case in Standard English dictionaries: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/aint
>What about l33tsp34k and txtng spk, u wnt 2gt dctnrz 4 it 2?
Actually, given how often I see it, I wouldn't be surprised if "U" was the standard English spelling for the second-person pronoun (or at least an acceptable variant), by the end of this century. It wouldn't be the first time an English pronoun's spelling collapsed down to a single letter ("I" was originally "Ic").
I don't think the article or comment really supported teaching AAVE to the exclusion of American English, the article at least tries to point out that teachers often view AAVE as an indicator of low intelligence instead of a separate dialect and supports changing that stereotype.
Wasn't AAVE originally created by people consciously trying to imitate SAE as best they could after limited education? Don't all the differences represent mistakes now immortalized?
The French might think so...
(Wasn't Old English originally created by Anglo-Saxons consciously trying to imitate Norse and Latin as best they could after limited education?)
English is a nonsensical mess spoken by fools who couldn't keep their German, Latin, and Greek separate.
>>> Please explain why Standard American English is superior to AAVE.
I'm not sure what you mean by "superior" here. There's an English language with its grammar rules, and there are common mistakes or detachments from widespread usage patterns which people make in English. What would be the reason some of these should be institutionalized with four-letter acronyms and research programs and, I have no doubt, juicy grants?
>>>> Why do you think SAE is any more valid than AAVE?
Probably the same reason "the" is more valid than "ze". I'd personally prefer the latter, it's easier for me (actually, I'd prefer to get rid of it completely, face it, the whole concept is just a waste of space and time), but stupid English-speaking world insists on using "the". No idea why, maybe you know?
I'm not sure what you mean by "superior" here. There's an English language with its grammar rules, and there are common mistakes or detachments from widespread usage patterns which people make in English.
This is wrong. There is not 'an English language'. There is Standard American English, Scouse, Glaswegian, Received Pronunciation, Jamaican English, AAVE, and dozens of others, many of which you would find harder to comprehend than AAVE.
What would be the reason some of these should be institutionalized with four-letter acronyms and research programs and, I have no doubt, juicy grants?
As I keep explaining, this article does not advocate AAVE speakers should not be taught SAE, but that by recognising their native language they can be taught SAE better.
Of course there isn't. If you are asked "do you speak English?", you have no idea what they are talking about. If you come into a bookstore and see a shelf named "Books in English", you ask the seller to point out to you which books are in Glaswegian, when one in Jamaican English, which ones are in AAVE, which ones are in Scouse... No way there's something that everybody actually calls "English". Got it.
>>>> As I keep explaining, this article does not advocate AAVE speakers should not be taught SAE
I am at loss why you keep explaining something that nobody doubted anyway. Teaching standard English does not preclude juicy grants for studying AAVE and "recognizing it" and "teaching better". I'd be happy to know how exactly better would it be? The article is pretty scarce on the details except for one method that basically eliminates the word "wrong" from the teacher's vocabulary and instead instructs the student that "we do it this way". I am not sure why this would be any different, but for this alone there's no need to even have a concept of AAVE as it seems...
If he actually understood this, his righteous indignation would be gone and then where would he be?
Actually, when it comes to linguistics, it's the only thing that validates it. Can you possibly come up with better criteria?
Nothing can be right or wrong anymore. Everything is just your opinion. These people have literally written papers on how physics concepts like E=mc^2 are sexist.
I ain’t tell nobody nothing about no sushi. or I didn’t tell nobody nothing about no sushi. or I didn’t tell nobody about no sushi. or I didn’t tell nobody about sushi.
All are bad English, i have no doubt whatsoever, that all would be understood by a speaker of "AAVE". I am of the opinion there is no such thing as AAVE, but there is definitely such a thing as people speaking bad English, which is reinforced by peer pressure and cultural and historical factors. Also I feel like people (educators in Oakland?) just caved, and don't want to admit that they have failed to properly educate and include a huge swathe of people.
I'm inclined to agree. I live in north Oakland, in a pat of the city where a lot of the Black Panthers were based and got involved in community development on a practical level, such as installing traffic lights on dangerous intersections and suchlike. A few of these projects have little signs attached for historical reference. None of them are written in AAVE though.
I find slangs, dialects, creole, pidgin etc., quite interesting; I grew up in Ireland with a huge number of local words mixed in with conventional English, my in-laws have a fairly fluid mix of Vietnamese, Chinese and English going on at home, and I had some acting training growing up so I have a very good ear accents and idiom, and can get myself mistaken for a native speaker in several languages with only a very limited vocabulary. I'm all for recognizing what's interesting about AAVE.
On the other hand, if you're not teaching English effectively (and effective teaching has been a problem in Oakland, in multiple subjects), then you're putting the pupils at a huge disadvantage. And making exaggerated claims for AAVE is part of the problem; it clearly is not a fully developed language, and the in the original article the parallel drawn with French was simply incorrect (which was noted at the end of the article, but I wonder how many people made it that far?).
I also agree that language variations are interesting...but AAVE is clearly not its own language. The suggestions flying around here that it ought to be treated like a second language entirely are rather ridiculous.
You don't have to justify usage of the word "the" to a chinese person, they know that's what they have to strive for in learning professional english. It's strange how often I see people (basically) advocating that we racially discriminate in these matters. I don't see anyone advocating that langauge patterns commonly used by hillbillies/rednecks be considered a completely different language, but those people are not just poor and uneducated, but also white. It seems that compassion runs dry so quickly for people of the wrong race, whichever one has been deemed fashionable to mock in a particular culture/decade. I wish we could do away with it entirely, instead of just swapping discrimination against one for discrimination against another.
Says who? Your intuition?
> the parallel drawn with French was simply incorrect
If you'd actually read that part carefully, you'd notice that the specifics of the example were incorrect, but even the correction is still a valid double-negative in French.
> if you're not teaching English effectively
As has been repeated several times throughout this thread, the argument was never about changing the English teaching curriculum. It was about having the teachers learn AAVE so they understand their students.
Your four examples of valid AAVE prove absolutely nothing. Most statements in English can be formed correctly in many different ways without drastically changing meaning. Here are the English corollaries to your AAVE examples:
I didn't tell anybody anything about any sushi. I didn't tell anyone a thing about any sushi. I didn't tell anyone about any sushi. I didn't tell anybody about sushi.
You're wrong. Linguists have been studying AAVE for years. It has been determined how the grammar of AAVE differs from SAE.
All are bad English, i have no doubt whatsoever, that all would be understood by a speaker of "AAVE".
Leaving aside whether these sentences are AAVE, are you arguing that being able to say the same thing multiple ways means that AAVE is not a language? That seems like an absurd point to make.
Also I feel like people (educators in Oakland?) just caved, and don't want to admit that they have failed to properly educate and include a huge swathe of people.
Did you read the article? It explains that by acknowledging AAVE as the native language of students, educators are better able to teach SAE and explain to students in what context it should be used.
Frankly, at this point you need to educate yourself. It's quite common for people to have the initial reaction that AAVE is bad English. But to continue to deny it a status of a language, and to insult its speakers as uneducated borders on racist.
Yeah but I didn't say Linguists wouldn't be able concoct a grammar for AAVE, I said one AAVE speaker would not be able to point out the grammatical errors of another.
The sentence I gave was an example of AAEV from the article. The article used the sentence "I ain’t tell nobody nothing about no sushi".
I just gave a bunch of other examples I thought would pass for actual AAVE sentences, that would be "grammatically correct" intelligible to any AAEV speaker.
I'm of the opinion that it's merely wishful thinking to say that we can tell where simple bad English ends and AAEV begins.
Just because you suggest that I'm probably a racist because I remain skeptical about AAEV being an actual language, that doesn't make it a language. I think that the AAEV is simply result of PC politics. Nobody not even linguists are immune to politics. I haven't "insulted the speakers" in any way, I didn't say people who talk that way are stupid, I said that people talk that way because they are uneducated, or because of peer pressure, or historical/cultural factors.
"Did you read the article? It explains that by acknowledging AAVE as the native language of students, educators are better able to teach SAE and explain to students in what context it should be used."
Yes I read the article, that doesn't mean I agree with everything it said. If AAEV truly is a language then I'll come around eventually with the right explanation. If I never hear a persuasive enough explanation then I won't come around to that way of thinking (recognizing AAEV as a language). Suggesting that people are racist for not seeing how it is a legitimate language, only makes me more beleive that it's politics and not linguistics that gave it that classification.
I wish this were true, but it doesn't seem to be. Several posters have given you well-thought-out, factual explanations for your misunderstanding of AAVE, but you seem to sweep them all under the rug because you think that "one AAVE speaker would not be able to point out the grammatical errors of another" - an assertion not based in fact at all.
Let's say I told you I didn't believe the earth was round, but that I'm keeping an open mind. You would, of course, bring up scientific data and expert opinions. To which I reply, "Well it still seems flat to me. Look!" stomp stomp "See, pretty darn flat! This round-earth theory of yours seems like just a result of PC politics. But keep trying - if the earth really is round, I just need the right explanation to win me over." Am I really being open-minded?
Would you be able to point out the grammatical errors in standard english without having been taught standard english grammar all through school, while at the same time having it re-enforced through writing assignments, literature, etc? I don't know about you, but I very likely would not. The point is we don't have a built in mechanism to flag subtle grammar errors (although we can certainly tell if something "sounds" wrong, but this is likely through re-enforcement).
A linguist doesn't "concoct" a grammar (not an ethical one, at least). A grammar is described based on actual usage of the language. As evidenced by the section "AAVE grammatical Aspects" in the above Wikipedia article, there are clearly rules of grammar in AAVE. What evidence do you have that one speaker of AAVE wouldn't be able to point out grammatical errors?
There are actually quite a few rules. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_American_Vernacular_Eng...
Based on what?!?
Linguistics is an honest-to-god real science. A real, academic discipline, with papers, peer review, analysis of recordings, population surveys, simplified predictive models, etc, and it unanimously disagrees with you.
You seem to have very strong opinions in this thread, but have provided absolutely no evidence or basis for them.
This isn't a "feels like" or "believes" topic. This is a factual discussion, and you appear to be blathering your uninformed, lay speculation against the force of science. I feel like I'm arguing with a creationist here.
Here's an idea: Stop guessing about a language you don't speak, put your linguist hat on, and go out and find an actual attestation. I suspect you will be surprised.
Well, then you're wrong on a simple, factual level. It's like you not thinking the atomic number of oxygen is eight: It is, and it will be, regardless of what the ignorant think.
but they'd all be perfectly well understood by a speaker of "english" as well. so then "english" isn't a language. fascinating stuff.
Your knot write about you're ideas. You're comment says your opinionated about what people should right.
Your and you're are consistently misapplied by people everywhere, whether by consistently using one instead of the other, or just using "your" for everything.
Just because it's consistently applied doesn't make it correct English.
We use a standard form so you don't have to stop and puzzle out what the hell someone is trying to say.
Unless what you're writing is only going to be read by yourself, what you put down is supposed to communicate your ideas to others. That's why an ability to communicate in a standard manner is so important.
Clearly there are more socioeconomic and cultural reasons behind this, but it is puzzling why no effort has been made to make English the "official" language of the US.
I come from an area where many people, particularly grandparents of people my age, still spoke German in the home or sometimes exclusively. The WWII (and WWI maybe?) atmosphere killed it off to a large degree, but it still exists. There is a massive amount of variety in this country, though I still think English is essential as a common language.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-only_movement
It's generally seen to spring from anti-immigrant sentiment.
Well, what linguists think is that it's at minimum a dialect with consistent grammar and using features of many other forms of communciation that you'd probably consider "real" languages.
Just because it's not what you were taught doesn't mean it's "bad" English or slang.
What makes you think SAE is the only language you need to succeed in society? I live in Oakland, and I wish I learned AAVE in school. It would absolutely be useful to succeed in society. Ditto for Spanish.
I thought the posh Queen's English was a relatively recent invention (1818)? Your argument is kind of rediculous.
Anyways, is a Shanghainese uneducated because they speek Shanghainese at home rather than the standard Beijing-ish dialect?
What we do in schools now hardly works against segregation. We simply ignore that AAVE exists. The result is that we treat white students' English as "correct" and black students' English as "wrong", as if they are trying to speak Standard English and making careless errors rather than following the self-consistent rules of their own dialect. They're being told to follow rules that they never learned, but everyone seems to expect them to know.
The alternative is to acknowledge that these differences exist and do our best to help AAVE speakers learn Standard English as what it is to them: a non-native dialect that is the gateway to power in our society. And maybe, sometimes, when a black student says "he ain't got none" during a history class, the teacher might respond to the contents of the students words rather than their form.
The worry in the United States today is about the primary education of young people who grow up in cohesive communities of speakers of varieties of English that differ from broadcast standard General American English. The cases of African-American speakers and Hawaiian speakers of dialectal English are both mentioned in the article. To me, as someone who studied linguistics in my university studies, it seems a "no brainer" to meet elementary school pupils on common ground and to make sure their teachers understand the home language background of the pupils as the pupils are taught standard English in school. (Everyone appears to be united in the cause of making sure school pupils learn the standard national language, with the only serious dispute being about means.) There are, alas, social disadvantages in the United States from having nonstandard speech patterns
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5123171
even if those speech patterns are well accepted in some social subgroups here. Just as my grandparents were free to use German or Norwegian to communicate throughout their long lifetimes, let today's children speak however they like in their private lives, but let's meanwhile provide all learners the opportunity to learn the speech patterns that are most expedient to adopt here.
This is, of course, true not only in the US but in many other countries and often popularized in plays, movies, etc., Eliza Doolittle. In German, where people are quite possessive of their regional dialects, Bayerisch speakers are sometimes derided.
And it's not just nonstandard speech patterns, either. Unique names that flag people to a certain minority group may also bring social disadvantages. This is generally the case with the tradition of inventive/unique names among African-Americas (http://www.salon.com/2008/08/25/creative_black_names/ or see the paper at http://ideas.repec.org/a/tpr/qjecon/v119y2004i3p767-805.html).
Michael Jordan - Marcus, Jeffrey, Jasmine
Byonce - Blue Ivy Carter
Sean Combs - Justin, Christian, Chance, Jessie, D'Lila
Robert Johnson - Paige & Brett
I live in Maryland now and have visited Tangier Island and the English dialect spoken there is yet another interesting story.
Sadly, the Southern accent I had from growing up in Huntsville, AL, is now all but gone.
([0]It's not really - it's a line from HIMYM - but the video clip is a good depiction of it anyway, if you watch the whole thing).
To add to this, I have experienced similar. Years of working on farms/in food processing plants has left my informal speech riddled with expletives. I switch that on or off depending on the setting, but in situations that I am comfortable in that are not professional settings (for example, my mothers dinner table), it can slip through without me noticing.
The US has no official language, so it's a moot point. The article talks about how _teachers_ should recognize the language. Not teach the language, recognize it as a language, and not assume you're dumb just because you grew up speaking a different language (assumption like that have a definite negative effect on student performance).
As Italian is simply an adaption of Latin. So, was Dante writing bad Latin or good Florentine?
> I certainly wouldn't advocate that becoming a nationally recognized language.
Why not?
There is lots of great linguistic research regarding pidgin done at University of Hawaii, and the language itself provides a great historical context, as it reflects the combined cultures of Hawaii (Anglo, Japanese, Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, Portuguese, etc.) through vocabulary and intonation.
She says that these kids are speaking AAVE because that’s what they know; it’s not wrong — it’s their language. She thus advocates teaching students who speak AAVE at home the concept of code-switching. The general idea is simply the notion of switching between two different languages as needed.
No one is advocating that students aren't taught formal English, but that the language they speak is properly recognised. Doing this will actually improve students' ability to learn formal English.
According to the article's definition it doesn't sound like a crock at all. When a young person writes Spanish words and grammar in an English essay, sane people don't assume a degraded intelligence. We realize that this person is a native Spanish speaker. They are probably reasonably intelligent, but ignorant of certain normative rules of English and when and where a particular language/vocabulary is appropriate.
That all Ebonics is -- not unlimited acceptance of non-normative english in the wrong contexts, or teaching people to write with black slang (unless that's part of the point of essay). The whole point is to teach kids who speak a different dialect to code switch when writing, for example. These students are wrong to use certain verbal constructions in (formal) written english, but it's the language in a particular context that is wrong -- not the language itself.
Secondly, the whole interpretation of "double negatives" as being logically equivalent to (not(not TRUE)) is quite unfortunate. When languages use double negatives, it just means that that language expresses a negative using 2 helper words in separate parts of the sentence. It's a pattern for expressing a single negative, not a formula that doubles (or cancels) the negative.
Luckily, I can understand where programmers are coming from, that they're using their "native" languages, and that we can help them understand that those languages aren't appropriate in other contexts :-)
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictionary_of_Received_Ideas: "automatic thoughts and platitudes, self-contradictory and insipid"
No, this doesn't fit: Being opposed to homeopathy isn't an "automatic thought or platitude" and it certainly isn't "self-contradictory". It's an acknowledgement of basic science. Grouping it in with the kinds of thoughts "idées reçues" was intended to refer to makes the term entirely meaningless.
And, since we're talking about language, this is entirely on-topic. ;)
A good translation of "idées reçues" would be "a mild case of groupthink" (while recognizing that homoeopathy itself is a product of more serious groupthink). It's not a judgement about the content but an observation about the behavior I see on HN. I think it's totally possible to have automatic thoughts that are scientifically sound, but they can still be automatic (or "idées reçues") if they come more from unanalyzed peer statements and wanting to fit in than from self-driven analysis.
You're misunderstanding me: I'm not countering homeopathy, I'm countering your complete misunderstanding of the fancy French phrase you insist on throwing around.
I was under the impression that modern linguists generally agreed that good linguistics is descriptive, not prescriptive. Could you elaborate here?
A lot of this discussion is a complete embarrassment, I expected better from HN :(
It's interesting that double negation is standard in French, but not used in Germanic languages. In this case, it seems like the Germanic influences on English won.
[1] http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2006-11-08/features/06110...
What's interesting is that normal use of negation seems to have changed over time within many individual languages, repeatedly http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jespersen%27s_cycle which is perhaps part of the reason why the AAVE double negative has so many parallels in British regional dialects and the writings of Chaucer
I always thought double negatives were a waste of time and ink, but come to think of it this kind of redundancy seems optimized for quick parsing. There is more effort on the speaker for building coherent sentences, but it's easier to catch the speaker's intent even if some parts got lost or couldn't be understood.
Language is full of redundancy. Because it's a constantly evolving, very complex system of rules, it never reaches a state in which every grammatical sentence has an optimal balance between economy and expressiveness.
At the very least it's worth a read through to help you make your own decisions about the structure of this language. Although I don't necessarily believe the claim that most AAVE speakers use the same grammatical structure, I believe this is somewhat of a liberty taken by the author. I've heard many variations on AAVE grammar working at college tech support, and my ability to understand the grammar being used fluctuates from person to person. This isn't a single cohesive language; it's much more ad hoc than that in my personal experience, even in a small geographic region.
That doesn't mean much. Mainstream speakers of standard English also use a variety of grammatical structures. Some speakers of standard English will even argue till they're blue in the face that certain grammatical structures are wrong, wrong, wrong even after you show them examples from Dickens, Twain, Hemmingway et al.
Computer languages are not spoken languages. No one should accuse English of being "illogical" because it's redundant. It isn't as terse as mathematical notation because most people don't speak completely in mathematical notation. And it's all very logical, actually -- just not in the way you might expect. You might want to look into the effects of redundancy on transmission errors in communications before you pass judgement. :-)
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agreement_%28linguistics%29
Be interesting to do a corpus study on this.
"Interesting, now try it without the quadruple negative." -- Amy
Are you insisting Shakespeare didn't speak English?
> I never was nor never will be.
-- Richard III
> Students of English language and literature will also know that, had you lived in England up to the 17th century, you’d also have been doubling your negatives with gay abandon and not incurring the wrath of the grammar police.
The key part here is "up to the 17th century". If you had bothered to continue reading, you would have seen
> After the 17th century, certain writers attempted to make English spelling and grammar more systematic, and relate the rules of language to those of logic.
followed by
> Double negatives, when used to express a negative idea, aren’t acceptable in standard English
As noted elsewhere in these comments, the distinction between a language and a dialect is primarily a political one (and some linguists reject it entirely). However, there is a clear line between between Middle English and Modern English which does not exist between Elizabethan and American Standard, and that's why I say the original claim is false.
If what you want to say is, "Okay, Shakespeare used double negatives for emphasis, but he spoke a different dialect than I do, and in my dialect double negatives reverse meaning", that's a fine and fairly uncontroversial statement, in that it forces one to acknowledge that one speaks a dialect. If on the other hand you're trying to say, "Okay, but that was an old kind of English and English today is different," that's factually false.
If you want to claim that Shakespeare did not speak modern English, capitalized or non, you will need to specify exactly what you think you mean, because the statement as written is just not true.
> If what you want to say is, "Okay, Shakespeare used double negatives for emphasis, but he spoke a different dialect than I do, and in my dialect double negatives reverse meaning", that's a fine and fairly uncontroversial statement, in that it forces one to acknowledge that one speaks a dialect. If on the other hand you're trying to say, "Okay, but that was an old kind of English and English today is different," that's factually false.
(And, as stated in the article, this is not a new nor should be a controversial idea; it has been school board policy in Oakland for 17 years.)
In some languages there is a clear and understood role for dialect, in those countries it is understood that most people speak both a dialect and the formal language. You choose the most appropriate mode for the context. More importantly, there isn't a necessary judgement on hearing someone speaking dialect that they "must be ignorant".
I only learned about AAVE in the last few years and it was eye opening. I realized I do have a sort of instinctual prejudice against it, though. From the article:
Many of us unfairly judge others based on how they speak. Kenneth the page, on the late, great 30 Rock, spoke with a southern accent meant to exemplify his yokel-ness. Maybe you think that British accents sound dignified, or that the Minnesota accent on display in Fargo betrays its speakers’ intellectual inferiority.
I'd like to snap out of this, and I thought a good way would be to watch videos of articulate, smart, (preferably math/science-based discussion in AAVE). This post talks about Feynman[0]:
Feynman’s accent, one of America’s more stigmatized, becomes a strength rather than a weakness. It is a sad fact that we easily underestimate people because of their accents.
but since my first exposure to that accent was Feynman videos, I've naturally associated it with intellectualism. I'd like to have similar positive connotations with AAVE. Anyone have any video suggestions?
Perhaps this is the missing link for us sceptics - we associate it with poor uneducated individuals. Ie - by definition, if someone whose primary language was AAVE wants to sound articulate and smart they will resort to SE?
However, I'm sure he's an intelligent men, and I'm sure when speaking informally he'll fall back to AAVE. What I'd love to see is someone at, say, PhD Math or Physics level speaking in AAVE, preferably about that subject.
I'm studying a bit of Arabic, and I see parallels. In Arabic, there's the formal register, called Modern Standard Arabic. This is the dialect used in the Quran and printed in newspapers and such. However, people don't routinely speak in this register -- they speak in their local Gulf or Levantine or Egyptian dialects, which are pretty different from each other and from MSA. The pronunciation of letters is different, the vocabulary is different, hell, in Egyptian the question word goes at the end of the sentence whereas in other dialects it goes at the beginning.
They, too, think of their local dialects as "wrong" or "beneath" MSA, even though it's the native tongue of themselves and everyone around them, and they have to study for years to be comfortable with this somewhat artificial MSA dialect.
It's not quite as regimented in English, because the dialects are more similar, and because no one natively speaks the formal register, but the principles are the same.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ti1dHabjH3k [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJ3dk6KAvQM&t=4m31s
"A native-AAVE speaker will use SE when speaking to me, even if their preferred dialect at home is AAVE, so I don't get exposed to it."
I actually wonder if two black guys who can speak AAVE but want to discuss something intellectual (ie physics or literature) will resort to SE. My hunch is that they would.
But it still doesn't give you the full article
Friends who are also black have shared anecdotes about employers sounding put-off during phone interviews.
Until this bias is addressed, young people should be aware that speaking Ebonics can have negative professional consequences.
I wonder what the current feelings are about the benefits/drawbacks of establishing an official US English dialect and/or declaring US English as (one of the) official language(s) of the United State?
Thoughts?
Boontling: http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Boonville-s-quirky-dia...
(Cockney) Rhyming Slang: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhyming_slang
Not necessarily on topic from a political standpoint, but both good illustrations of how language forms and changes to suit the needs of those who use it.
Too bad. As a non native english speaker, I could intuitively understand what it means. While "AAVE" doesn't tell nobody nothing.
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Rebecca Wheeler, the professor at Christopher Newport University mentioned at the outset, is a descriptivist, like all linguists. She says that these kids are speaking AAVE because that’s what they know; it’s not wrong — it’s their language. She thus advocates teaching students who speak AAVE at home the concept of code-switching. The general idea is simply the notion of switching between two different languages as needed.
Either these people are trained to speak prescriptive English or they are barred from academic success. The argument of the article is that the treatment of the language causes this ongoing social issue, not that the social issue is preventing people from speaking American English.
Any honest person can see that those of us with more "respectable" US accents form the real criminal culture. We took the land from people we exterminated, took slaves of people whose dialects we still ridicule, and to this day imprison and war like no other humans in the universe.
I speak standard english, but am part of a minority group that has been tortured and killed for thousands of years. You don't speak for me. Or for my friends, who aren't all part of my minority group, but some of whom also speak standard english (and sometimes are or are not part of their own minority groups, while also some majority ones). I'd say you don't get to speak for them, either.
I have not taken any land nor exterminated or enslaved any persons. Stop stereotyping based on skin color. It's really racist. Racism against any person is not ok. I don't care who you think it will make you a better person if you hate.
"to this day imprison and war like no other humans in the universe."
All humans imprison and war, not just white people.
Africans and Asians can be just as cutthroat, if you have any knowledge of history whatsoever. Cruelty is not copyright Caucasian, as has become the political correct fad of the last few years. It's disgusting.
That decisionmaking power is less than in a real democracy (a top-down republic with some democratic forms), but more than a dictatorship. So there's some shared responsibility which does not exist in your examples of other groups.
It's like, I personally don't like rap, but I wouldn't begrudge others who do because they see something special in it that I simply don't see. I used to, until I realized it wasn't simply that people were being "stupid" by listening to rap, but instead that I was missing what they were seeing.
(Sorry to be a prat, but it was so deliciously topical.)
http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/08/24/dea.ebonics/index.html
So I disagree it wasn't "all me" and it wasn't bigoted.