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Comment by smallegan | Hacker News Reader

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

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

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

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

That's true, but it's not fair to say that this is the language of criminals. There's two different issues at play. Speakers with a southern accent aren't all uneducated good ole boys, even though the stigma says just that. Speakers of Russian are not all in the Mafia. It's disingenuous to say that the language is only used by criminals, and labeling it as such only reinforces that.

Such racist comments have a twisted relation to the truth: the US virtually criminalizes its Black population. It's public knowledge that no other country incarcerates its people as much. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rat...)

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.

Note this is the same fallacious thinking and biased observation that believes gay == flamboyant/effeminate, southern US == stupid, suit == powerful, etc.

Perhaps I misunderstand your point, but members of those groups don't have a real say in what the others do. They don't coordinate in a coherent policy. In contrast, my US culture does have a formal political system, where I do have a say in its decisionmaking. So we share some responsibility for its violence.

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.

"We took the land from people we exterminated, took slaves "

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.

AAVE is indeed spoken by people of low economic status, but is certainly not limited to them. I have met many, many African-Americans of high economic status who also do so, but informally and generally only with other African-Americans. I think the stigma is more closely associated with their culture than economic status.

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

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

Despite the strident tone, I never said otherwise. My defense of the language is based on the people I've encountered who speak it.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A correct observation, one supported by evidence, is that using the dialect correlates with being poor. Making the jump from that to "illegal commerce" was all you, and that was bigoted, especially since AAVE is strongly associated with African-Americans.

Other than the DEA or someone studying the dialect who hires based on your ability to speak AAVE?

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.

Well that wasn't a bigoted comment at all.

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

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