As a black male I speak both, but it depends upon the person that I'm speaking with. If I'm speaking with my professors or employers, obviously I use standard English. With friends, depending on the importance of the conversation I will most like speak a mixture between standard English and AAEV. The thing is, all people who speak AAEV understand standard English, it would be impossible not to. No child who grew up in a household that speaks AAEV will be confused by the statement "I do not have any time for that", even though in their home and in their neighborhood they hear it as "I ain't got no time for that." This issue is that when entering elementary school, students who grow up with AAEV simply use the dialect that they are used to. I will venture to say that there is no (Adult) person who speaks AAEV that doesn't know proper English. Some simply speak primarily in AAEV because everyone else in their inner-circle does. Others do so as an act of rebellion against the larger white society. Speaking standard English is seen as "Acting White" (assimilation), which is deeply frowned upon in certain circles.
When my Historical Linguistics professor mentioned that determination of dialect/language difference is mostly political I was amazed and argued with him for half an hour and still wasn't convinced after that. I thought there should be a way wherein a linguist can collect and then analyze corpora, then scientifically discover and label dialects, isoglosses, languages, etc. Later, I learned that although there are tools for doing this analysis, the resulting labeling is mostly based on political/ideological distinctions.
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 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.
As counterexample I would still call American English and Brazilian Portuguese dialects, even though they have armies and navies. I'm not sure if I would call Afrikaans a dialect.
I think the key point is that no-one is being marked incorrect at school or told they are stupid etc. for using American spellings instead of "correct" British English spellings (or other language features). Probably the war of independence between the countries marking an important boundary for when those things changed.
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.
Frisian is an official language recognized by the Dutch government and the EU, in fact it is one of the two official languages of the Netherlands. It is taught in schools and spoken at official policy meetings.
Nonetheless, your point still stands as I'm sure there are valid examples of 'no army, is dialect'
Good examples, but "Afrikaans has no army" is debatable and IMHO misleading. It doesn't share an army with Dutch. And in the formative period from the Boer wars (1880, 1899) to 1994 I would say that it did have an army in absolute terms.
When I studied linguistics, dialects were simply defined as regional variants of a language (and that includes the "central" dialect, which many would equate with the language itself), while an accent was what a non-native speaker would get (e.g. "English with German accent"). Whether some dialect rose to the political status of language, was a political question, and not really something for linguists to worry about until they took a course on sociology.
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.
Which was said first, ironically, in Yiddish (a language that gains its status as such through its connection with an ethnic group, not military presence).
This is pretty true in India, which is divided into states mostly by linguistic lines. I've heard "dialects" which sound distinct enough to be separate languages (Marwari versus Hindi) and "languages" that sound similar enough to be dialects (Urdu and Hindi).
"Hindi" is made up of Marwari, Mewati, Bhojpuri, Magahi, Maithili, Bundeli, awadhi, chhattisgarhi... all of them different language with their own history and literature. This was done in '47 mostly for political reasons, to stop Bangla from becoming the Indian national language.
In a way the Italian situation is similar [0].
[0] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/03/Italian_l...
I would like to point out that linguistically there is no language called Hindi. The modern Hindi is a Sankritized, modernized register of the Hindustani language - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindustani_language
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.
Hindi is written in Sanskrit letters and Urudu is written in Arabic script. The languages use same words. Hindi is the primary official language for India and Urudu is the primary national language for Pakistan.
Two dialects protected by armies navies and nuclear bombs.
I'd say there are "pause/unpause" and "pause/resume". The former details that resuming is by releasing the pause state, eg repeatedly pressing on a pause button. For "pause/resume" the resumption can be achieved by pressing play, for example, rather than by unpausing.
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 understand the argument for supporting AAVE in schools, but at the same time, I strongly feel that this kind of split is exactly what leads to less diversity and more segregation in the long run. In an ideal world, we'd all be neutral about which dialect we hear and speak whichever we're more used to ourselves. In the real world, it just gives people another data point by which to divide the rest of their world into "us" and "them".
>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.
"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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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].
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.)
>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").
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 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?
> 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?
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.
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.
>>>> 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...
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.
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.
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?).
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
"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?
>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?
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.
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 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
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 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
AAVE speakers exist, and their dialect is not going anywhere anytime soon. If decades of schoolteachers telling black children to speak "correctly" hasn't eradicated the differences, another decade isn't going to make the difference. Our only choice is how to treat it.
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.
Thanks for the submission. This is an interesting article about applied linguistics for primary education in the United States. Approximately around 1900, the United States reached its peak period of receiving immigrants who were not English-speaking when they arrived. Today, nearly all Americans speak one variety or another of English, even though only about one-fourth of the United States population consists of persons whose ancestors spoke English before arrival in the United States. English has been assimilated by almost all inhabitants of the United States precisely because it is the only language that unites all those inhabitants. (Three of my four grandparents, all of whom were born in the United States, spoke a language at home other than English. My two maternal grandparents received the entirety of their schooling in church-operated schools in the German language, one in Nebraska and one in Colorado. But they spoke English just fine as adults, and that was the language I communicated with them in both by direct conversation and by postal letters. My Norwegian-speaking paternal grandmother went to college, majoring in English, and relied on her knowledge of another Germanic language to help her progress in reading Beowulf in the original Old English. I still have her college edition of Beowulf at home.)
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
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.
"There are, alas, social disadvantages in the United States from having nonstandard speech patterns"
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.
"We find, however, no negative relationship between having a distinctively Black name and later life outcomes after controlling for a child's circumstances at birth."
But it's somewhat misleading. Do rich black people give their children distinctively Black names? I actually looked up names that richest AA gave their kids:
Michael Jordan - Marcus, Jeffrey, Jasmine
Byonce - Blue Ivy Carter
Sean Combs - Justin, Christian, Chance, Jessie, D'Lila
The article makes it very clear - AAVE is superficially the same as General American English so neither the teachers or the students realize that that the kids need to speak two different languages. Instead you have the teachers insisting that there's only one language and they're using it incorrectly. That's quite a bit different from the German and Norwegian your grandparents had to deal with.
I really like the distinction between two languages and a single language. A lot of the kids I've worked with were able to switch from the way they talk with friends, AAVE, to how they talked with teachers and staff similarly how a student might switch from using spanish and english. Pronunciation changes, words change, etc.
One side of my family has roots in the Great Smoky Mountains part of Appalachia. The English spoken there has its own rules and vocabulary. I have a book, "The Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English", that my sister gave me and it's fascinating. Speakers of this variation of English are often perceived as uneducated, not unlike AAVE speakers. Some features of Smoky Mountain English, like the double negative, are quite similar to AAVE.
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.
Speaking as an African-American male I can say I've spoken both for a long time. When I’m around friends and family I speak AAVE and when I’m around ‘judgmental others’ and for business purposes I speak American English.
Code switching is actually when you wander between two or more languages in the scope of a single conversation (which is downright weird to listen to if you speak only one; girl I knew would wander between Russian and English conversing with her mother and I would try like the devil to follow when she started in Russian and eventually realize that it wasn't some weird English words). Based on my own (small) experience with it in English and French it's sometimes easier to find the word you're looking for in the other language; this only happens to me when I'm trying to speak English in public after I've been speaking French for a while tho. The grammar gets ... complicated.
This was fascinating. Folks should leave their bigotries behind and read it, rather than seeing the word ebonics and using it as an excuse for racist comments.
I think that it isn't well regarded as a language because at root it is simply an adaption of another language (English). There's differing vernaculars anywhere you go, depending on the culture and the demographic. There's no use in regarding them each individually as "languages", they are termed correctly as just being vernaculars. When I started working at a factory when I was 18, I was suddenly bombarded with blue collar vernacular. By the time I was 21, double negatives, particular "ain't got no.." were fairly ingrained in my speech and I still talk like that in informal situations. I certainly wouldn't advocate that becoming a nationally recognized language. AAVE is perpetuated culturally but almost any AA you meet can speak formal English just fine, being necessary for success outside of their cultural enclave. Making it a separate language per se doesn't serve any real function and will really only cause another level of division on a national level.
> When I started working at a factory when I was 18, I was suddenly bombarded with blue collar vernacular. By the time I was 21, double negatives, particular "ain't got no.." were fairly ingrained in my speech and I still talk like that in informal situations.
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.
> I certainly wouldn't advocate that becoming a nationally recognized language.
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).
AAVE gets no respect because of the social status of those who speak it, not because it's "ungrammatical". Of the stratified [1] dialects of American English, it's a basilect; "standard" American English, spoken on TV and taught in schools, is the acrolect. Pro tip: if you want to get ahead, learn and speak the acrolect.
I've only lived in Hawaii for three years, but I've definitely gained an appreciation for HCE (Hawaiian Creole English) or pidgin as it's more commonly called.
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.
The public schools are these kids' last and only hope to learn the communications skills (aka standard English) they will need to make it to the middle class. Don't ruin it for them.
That's not what he's suggesting. Rather, he's suggesting that the schools separate teaching how to communicate amongst themselves v. how to communicate in a middle-class manner, and not label the former "wrong" and the latter "right," but rather the former "personal" and the latter "formal." That's not different from students of yore having to learn Latin to get along in college: it wasn't that they were speaking English (or French, or German, or whatever) poorly, but rather that Latin was required to get ahead in the world. Same thing here.
You should really read articles before commenting on them.
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.
I think ebonics if a load of crock, but as an aficionado of linguistics, I don't understand the resistance to double negatives in "proper" English. The "ain't got none" construct exists in many other languages. The double negative reinforces each other, instead of canceling each other out.
You have to define what you mean by "Ebonics". The term is awful... :-)
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.
Wow, I'm a bit disappointed in the HN community here. There are a lot of <i>idées reçues</i>[1] that seem to come up over and over again (anti-homeopathy being one, not that I'm pro-homeopathy, so don't get off-topic over it). But this whole anti-Ebonics is new to me (in this community), especially after the OP explained it in such understandable terms.
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 :-)
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. ;)
You proved my point: needing to counter homeopathy every single time it (or something vaguely similar, such as anti-vax--and yes, that is bait) is mentioned off-hand is automatic thought. I didn't bring up homeopathy with arguments for or against, I brought it up as an example of what happens to discussions, I discouraged people from discussing the merits of it, yet you still do.
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.
There's some research[1] that suggests that some dialects of Old English used double negation reliably, but that this got phased out in 'proper' Middle English.
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.
In this case, those attempting to standardize English grammar decided double negation should be used to achieve subtle shades of positive (as in Italian) rather than negative emphasis (as in Catalan) so double negatives are not conveying nothing (unlike in French or Castilian where the standard extra negative no comunica nada). Perhaps the divergence between the Romance languages is more immediately surprising...
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
Double negatives are recommended in proper french, but using only the first negation is actually grammatically correct(ex: je ne sais pas -> je ne sais) and keeping the second negation only is usual in casual speak (Je ne sais pas -> Je sais pas).
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.
I thinks person marking on verbs and use of articles is waste, who needs? Also, "have seen" is redundant because of "have", "have see" is better. Also, "is" redundant, many language does without. Without better.
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.
I found myself nodding at the explanations of the grammer given in the article. I've never deeply thought of AAVE as a language, more of a corruption (which is a natural part of how living languages grow and evolve), but the article gives some depth to the discussion.
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.
"I don't necessarily believe the claim that most AAVE speakers use the same grammatical structure"
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.
As a programmer, double negatives make me reel with horror. I cannot parse an English sentence with a double negative as being a single negative; it's utterly illogical. At best, they're an unnecessary hindrance.
This is the problem with being a "programmer" with no domain. This is sort of like the one true programming language debate ("blub") where people want to evaluate mathematical notation as to their qualitative worth completely devoid of any context.
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. :-)
A double negative is not double negation (in other languages), it's called agreement[1]. Just like you have to have agreement between numbers in English (It is / They are) you can also have languages that require/support agreement in terms of negative/positive. Yes, it's redundant information, but all human languages have a lot of extra information built into them at every level to make them easier to use.
My intuition is that double negation in English is usually accompanied by a shift in stress to emphasize that the negation should be interpreted in the "correct" way (i.e., as negating a previous negation) rather than as mere agreement. I think English actually allows multiple negation with no significant change in semantics in many dialects, possibly as the default interpretation.
Think of the AAVE negation, not as an operator, but as a tense. It's like in Standard English when you change a sentence from singular to plural, or from first-person to third-person: several words are required to change in lockstep or else the sentence isn't grammatical. Negation in AAVE works like that.
You obviously didn't make it to the end of the article, where it's explained that numerous Francophones wrote into dispute the author's interpretation and the author admitted his understanding of French was fundamentally flawed. As a French-speaker myself, encountering obvious bullshit at the beginning of the article made it difficult to uncritically accept his assertions for the remaining pages.
That note at the end also made it clear that the mistakes were corrected. Did you read the first part, get upset, then reload and read the note at the end?
Yes, the double-negative construct exists in other languages. It doesn't exist in English. You may as well be asking why people insist other people use English words instead of German words when talking to them.
He most certainly did not speak modern English, which is the English we're talking about.
> 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
Shakespeare most certainly did speak, and write, Modern English. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_English . If your claim is that he did not speak an identical dialect to you, well, neither do many English speakers who use double negatives for emphasis (or because they are grammatically required) every day.
This is ludicrous. The language spoken by Shakespeare was undoubtedly and clearly different from anything regularly spoken today, and nearly unintelligible to any English speaker without an interest in Shakespeare or older forms of English. If that is not a different language, then what objective basis do you have for saying that AAVE is a different language?
To be clear, Shakespeare did not speak American Standard English (or any dialect of English currently spoken). However, as I replied to your sibling, the English that he spoke is not more different from ASE than many other dialects of modern English, and is much closer than some. (Where it differed is primarily in orthography, as the last thing to be standardized in English was spelling, which makes the difference when reading text seem much greater.)
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.
I said "modern English", not "Modern English". The fact that Wikipedia defines a term "Modern English" to mean English spoken since ~1550 is quite irrelevant to this discussion.
Wikipedia, referencing the science of linguistics. And it ain't a scare capital, they call it Modern because it is. English spoken since the Great Vowel Shift does not differ from English spoken today any more than dialects of English spoken today differ from each other.
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.
The entire context of this discussion is a concrete example of how the language spoken by Shakespeare does in fact differ from the standard English spoken today. But instead of recognizing this fact, you are trying to turn this argument into one over the meaning of the term "modern english", which is completely pointless.
> 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.
The point of this entire thread is that what you are calling "standard English" is not a thing. It's not what Shakespeare spoke and it's not what we speak. There is American Standard, the dialect primarily spoken on the news in the US and elsewhere, but that is one of dozens. Many of those, including the Elizabethan spoken by Shakespeare and ethnolects spoken my many millions of people today, employ double negatives for emphasis. You are trying to draw an old/new distinction which does not reflect reality.
Why not white redneck english then? I've met numerous people in West Virginia, Alabama, Georgia, etc. that speak as different a form of english as ebonics represents. It's perfectly fine for the english language to spawn related children, but the purpose of language is understanding / communication, and it's ideal for the people of a country to be able to communicate in a standard language to maximize efficiency (in trade, social interaction, you name it). I'd argue it's ideal to navigate people that speak broken english (whether they're caucasian, african american, hispanic, asian, whatever) back toward speaking a more standardized version of it.
Why not Spanish? You can't get here from there. If a child speaks a coherent first language at home, you can't "navigate them back" to ASE, it will only confuse them (and further reinforce your preconception that they are speaking "broken" English). You need a teacher who speaks their first language fluently to instruct them on the standard language, and when it is appropriate to use.
(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.)
You didn't answer the question. Why not Standard Redneck English? Is it not a different language? Isn't its lack of status due to the lack of status of its speakers? Other than race, how is this different?
I think that English has a challenge because there is no defined "correct" English, there is no clear distinction between dialect, accent, and formal speech.
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?
Could you share with us "videos of articulate, smart, (preferably math/science-based discussion in AAVE)"?
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?
Well, that's just it. 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. Think of this reporter [0].
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.
"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.
When people ask how Bangladesh fought a war to separate from Pakistan just because they spoke different languages, I want to point them to some of the comments in this article to show how deeply language can be tied up with prejudice, classism, power, etc.
Ahh... this brings me back to my college days (I also majored in Linguistics).
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?
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.
Can you point out where in the article it advocates teaching students AAVE?
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.
I see a mention of it below, but none in the article, and I wanted to highlight that there is a term for this: Diglossia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diglossia
No, it does not get respect because that is how people from a lower socioeconomic level speak. And if you come from a higher socioeconomic level you might not want to speak like that so as not to be confused from the lower socioeconomic level because it can kill off many opportunities in the work place or love relationships. Unfair? maybe, but this is how the real world works.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
