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Comment by Hairy_Sandwich | Hacker News Reader

>I can understand the argument for supporting AAVE in schools

I can't. Schools are supposed to teach you the official language and all the skills you need to succeed in society. AAVE won't help you (or be useful) at work, or in academia, unless you are studying AAVE as your job.

I agree that it will be divisive in the long run, I think you are right that encouraging AAVE to continue and legitimizing it and calling it a language is the wrong way to go.

Was the cockney English slang of 1800's England a language? I think most would say no, it was simply the bad English of the uneducated. I think AAVE is simply modern America's cockney slang.

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I don't think you read the article.

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

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

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

Seriously, you are equating AAVE with Spanish. AAVE is how people of poorer means speak or with less education speak, even if it's not politically correct to say it. Spanish is an actual language hundreds of years old and spoken by multiple nations. By your logic you might as well recognize English slang as an actual language.

-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.

I'm not downvoting you. But your position is untenable, and comes from a misunderstanding about what a language is. It's not that it's not politically correct, it's that it's factually incorrect.

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.

Simply declaring that it is a language gets you nothing too. If every minor variation creates a whole new language, then almost no two people with a vocabulary of a few thousand words actually speak 'the same language'.

Sure, and if you want to go down the road of constructing metrics for language, you can. I should warn you that you will likely find it fruitless and arbitrary.

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.

This.

> AAVE is how people of poorer means speak or with less education speak

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.

Some cultures consider non standard dialects just that, "non standard". They don't deride people who speak them as poor or less educated.

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?

I think that "is the culture that speaks AAVE a valid culture?" is a vanishingly insignificant question compared to the critical real-life problem of providing black inner-city kids the education and communication skills necessary to make it in today's world.

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.

Agree with your first point.

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.

You're arguing against a strawman. The article states that no one is suggesting that students not learn Standard American English. The point it is making is that it is more useful in teaching SAE to recognize that some students arrive at school speaking a different dialect rather than with an incorrect understanding of SAE, and that acknowledging that explicitly is more productive than telling them never to speak their home language.

>>and that acknowledging that explicitly is more productive than telling them never to speak their home language.

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.

You sound far stupider than someone speaking Ebonics, and all else equal, I would certainly hire an intelligent and peceptive Ebonics speaker and than someone who displays muddled thinking in grammatical SE.

I know you are but what am I....?

I'm getting tire of this BS.

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.

I stopped reading at "I am tire", as you have shown yourself to be worthlessly illiterate.

What are you talking about? It is a new dialect. No, it wasn't a typo made at a rush, that is how I spell "tired" in my new dialect. Rather than ridiculing me you should tell me the difference between the dialect I speak at home and standard English which I imagine you speak.

Define "actual language."

You didn't read the article, and you're saying gibberish. Please stop.

In the U.S., Spanish is also how people of poorer means or less education speak. That doesn't make it not a language.

Not unless they're of Hispanic heritage, in general.

Responding to your edit: no, the rules of AAVE nearly all originate in non-standard dialects of British and Irish (Hirberno-) English. They aren't something that spontaneously arose from a deprived economic climate or a dysfunctional society. There are only a very tiny number of differences between AAVE and American Standard English that can be explained by an element of weak creolization (such as the dropping of to be in statements of identity and optional inversion in forming questions); the rest find exact parallels in dialects on the ground throughout Britain and Ireland. In fact, most Newfoundlanders would have little trouble with the grammar (though not necessarily the slang) of AAVE, since their native dialect derives from a very similar mixture of British and Irish dialects. While it can probably be fairly stated that the colour bar has been responsible for the isolation of the black vernacular grammar (and its failure to transition to something closer to American Standard English), it is not dissimilar to the native English dialects of the people who were once working alongside them as indentured servants rather than as slaves.

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.

> 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).

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.

So should there be AAVE-English academic dictionaries with entries like "ain't: are not", etc.? What about l33tsp34k and txtng spk, u wnt 2gt dctnrz 4 it 2?

The differences between American Standard English and AAVE are primarily grammatical, not lexicographical. So an AmE-AAVE dictionary wouldn't be very thick.

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.

Leetspeak can be classified as a dialect too, if you'd like, it has its own words (leet, pwnd, haxor, etc.) and you can find grammar differences if you look hard enough[1].

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leet#Grammar

That's pretty unconvincing. Despite the heading "Grammar", it mentions differences that are lexicographic or merely orthographic in nature. The only real grammatical process mentioned is "changing its grammatical usage to be deliberately incorrect" which has some obvious problems. "All your ___ are belong to ___" is an idiomatic expression in Internet Standard English, but that does not a grammar rule make.

You haven't articulated any real objective principle to distinguish when two ways of talking are the same language. The decision seems to be based on politics (in this case politics of race)

Naturally, there is no such objective principle for me to articulate. Everyone speaks according to the language center of their own brain. Some ways of speech are more different than others; some are so different that communication is hard without speaking slowly, and some still are so different that communication is impossible and you must resort to pointing (and even pointing is not universally meaningful). At some point along the line we call it a different language, but it's not representative of any sharp distinction that exists in reality.

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.)

>So should there be AAVE-English academic dictionaries with entries like "ain't: are not", etc.?

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").

U is logically parallel to I, and is accepted in (India) Indian English.

Unless these kids are going to be reading books written in ebonics, perhaps they don't belong in higher reading groups?

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.

To reiterate your parent: The point is not that they should not be taught ASE. The point is if a young child writes, "No tengo", you'll say, hey, we need to get a Spanish speaker in here to teach this kid some ESL. But if they write, "I ain't got none", you'll say, hey, we need to put this kid in remedial English because that's incorrect.

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.

But it still would be right to put both kids (the Spanish- and AAVE-speaking) in remedial English because both are at a low level with respect to American Standard English. The fact that they're good in another language doesn't somehow mean they're at the class's expected level in ASE.

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.)

Not remedial English. ESL. There's a big difference. English class is where speakers of ASE learn the grammatical rules of their language in ASE. Doing that again, or more slowly, will not help someone who does not speak ASE at home. ESL is where a speaker of your native language teaches you ASE as a foreign language, because it is.

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.

Should we put other native speakers of english with an inability to write a sentence with correct grammar in with the ESL too then? Based on this map of American dialects, it seems like standard english is the lingua franca of many different offshoots of the english language.

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.)

Yes. If you are trying to teach children "correct" grammar rules that they will go home and unlearn because their peers speak a different grammar, you are getting teaching very wrong and you should do it differently. As has been reiterated exhaustively in these comments, that does not mean you do not teach them SAE. It means you teach it so they actually learn it.

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.

Frankly, this post makes you look really ignorant of the actual experiences of disadvantaged people in America (of which I am one, by the way). Maybe you should check your assumption privilege.

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.

O...kay? I'm not sure how you're reading my rather lay summary of the state of modern linguistics as histrionics, but maybe that's just a dialectal thing. I was kind of hoping you would go ahead and check out the Wiki articles[0], but I guess I'm glad you're even bothering to read my comments.

[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."

Your argument seems to rest on the premise that teaching them in Standard English will imply that ebonics is wrong. And that is somehow bad. I, meanwhile, just don't care. The world will not care about their feelings - and the earlier they learn SE, the better.

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.

> And I think the best way that would be achieved is if they learn proper English at school, full stop.

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?

"but this is not the opinion of, among many notable others, the Oakland school board since 1996."

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.

So your answer to my entreaty is "no", then?

Yep :)

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.

I... am really confused. AFAICT there is only one DFW essay linked in these comments, and it seems to say basically what I, others here, and the linguistic consensus is saying: That there is a dialect of English used in the great majority of formal English speech and writing which is not spoken natively by many intelligent English speakers, and that the best way to deal with this is to acknowledge that their dialect is valid and appropriate when spoken with peers while also instructing them in the rules of SAE that will be necessary for them to interface effectively with formal society. There are differences in that DFW is talking about college-age writers who have to more or less be told to suck it up and learn it the hard way, while young schoolchildren can be taught much more effectively by early immersion, but the general thrust is much the same.

What are you reading in that? I'm legitimately, deeply baffled.

Exactly - I believe that school kids should also suck it up and learn to speak properly (I will not shy away from this nomenclature) early, rather than wait for college (and what about the majority who don't make it there?) where an English professor will give them this speech.

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?

> speak properly (I will not shy away from this nomenclature)

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?

>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.

You do realize the point of that was to tap into bilingual education funding, right?

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

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

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

I don't think there are any rules to "AAVE" either, one speaker of this dialect? creole? language? or whatever we're calling it, would not be able to point out grammatical errors in the speech of another. I think the following would all be considered valid AAVE:

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.

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.

"You're wrong. Linguists have been studying AAVE for years. "

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 said one AAVE speaker would not be able to point out the grammatical errors of another.

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).

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.

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?

"If AAEV truly is a language then I'll come around eventually with the right explanation."

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?

When you can't spell a word consistently that you use eight times in one post --the most important word in your post-- we don't give much weight to your guesses as to who can spot inconsistencies in usage.

There are actually quite a few rules. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_American_Vernacular_Eng...

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?).

Chaucer would faint if he were forced to read this barely intelligible creole you call "English".

> it clearly is not a fully developed language

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.

Good to see you around here. (I gave up on metafilter.)

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.

"All are bad English, i have no doubt whatsoever, that all would be understood by a speaker of "AAVE""

but they'd all be perfectly well understood by a speaker of "english" as well. so then "english" isn't a language. fascinating stuff.

> I don't think there are any rules to "AAVE" either

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.

> I think the following would all be considered valid AAVE:

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.

Or just read a book on the topic. Many of them are written in SE.

Sorry, but you're just wrong - not "I disagree with you" - but your facts are wrong. There are many rules, as other posters have said, and people who speak AAVE regularly would absolutely be able to pick out grammatical errors. If I said "I didn't tell him anything about anybody," it would be grammatically correct English. If I said "I ain't tell him nothing about nobody," it would be gramatically correct AAVE. If I said "I ain't tell him nothing about anybody," or "I ain't tell him anything about nobody," AAVE speakers would certainly recognize it as incorrect. Most AAVE speakers I know would probably make fun of you for mixing dialects.

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.

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.

I don't see how it follows. For example, for a native speaker of a language that has no definite/indefinite articles, it is common to omit those in English. Also, for speakers of languages without plural or complex tense system, it is common to systematically omit plurals or use only one or two tenses in English. Would it mean that English without articles, plurals and with only present tense would not be a "bad English" but would be a language on its own? ESL students would be delighted to know their English isn't bad, it's just their own view on the English language, equally valid, I'm sure, but somehow I do not see that happening just yet.

Are you really comparing how second language learners mangle a language to the first language of millions of Americans? As I said, English learners would not consistently apply rules. They make different mistakes. AAVE speakers reliably use the same grammar, and can understand each other unambiguously. Please explain why Standard American English is superior to AAVE. Why do you think SAE is any more valid than AAVE?

Your righteous indignation does not really contribute much. There are billions of people that speak bad English every day. That alone doesn't make their English good. Just saying "a lot of people do it" is not a validation of anything. Every person with native Russian language, at least until they lived in English-speaking country for many years, reliably skips articles and reliably misuses complex tenses, because there's no such thing in their language background. Yet they understand each other perfectly well, moreover - native speakers understand them perfectly well too (maybe they cringe a bit inside, but what could you do?) Does it mean we have Russian American English Vernacular here?

>>> 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?

Your comparison of second language speakers to native speakers of AAVE continues to be insulting and wrong.

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.

> this article does not advocate AAVE speakers should not be taught SAE

If he actually understood this, his righteous indignation would be gone and then where would he be?

>>>> This is wrong. There is not 'an English language'

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...

> Just saying "a lot of people do it" is not a validation of anything.

Actually, when it comes to linguistics, it's the only thing that validates it. Can you possibly come up with better criteria?

> Why do you think SAE is any more valid than AAVE?

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?

Why is the origin relevant? Middle English incorporated Norman vocabulary into Old English following the invasion and subjugation of England. Does that make French a more valid language than English?

> Does that make French a more valid language than English?

The French might think so...

Your description matches every language just as well.

English is a nonsensical mess spoken by fools who couldn't keep their German, Latin, and Greek separate.

Wasn't Modern English originally created by speakers of Old English consciously trying to imitate French as best they could after limited education?

(Wasn't Old English originally created by Anglo-Saxons consciously trying to imitate Norse and Latin as best they could after limited education?)

My uneducated 4-year-old nephew speaks American Standard English. It doesn't take any education whatsoever to imitate language.

This is what happens when you take postmodernism crazy think that comes out of the liberal arts departments and apply it to things in the real world.

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.

You can consistently apply bad rules. For example:

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.

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

You really can't and it's pretty frustrating when you consider my great grandparents were of German and Norwegian heritage and had to learn English in order to integrate when they came here.

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.

Shrug

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.

There has been.

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

It's generally seen to spring from anti-immigrant sentiment.

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

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

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

Cockney slang has rules too, it's at least as much a dialect as AAVE.

True! I was more objecting to the "I think" part and the "slang" part, but I should've been clearer about that.

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

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

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

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

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

There is no official language in the United States.

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