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Opinions on "Ebonics" | ||
Tags: United States | Dialect | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5227 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes  Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 17 of 25 23 March 2012 at 3:41pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Ebonics as an English dialect doesn't interest me in the least beyond some superficial knowledge of its features as to ensure I'm not completely lost just in case I ever meet someone who can only speak it. From what I've seen so far it's rather transparent except for somewhat flowery vocab choices (which you are bound to find everywhere in any language anyway), and I fail to see great value in 'expressiveness' that allegedly shows just around certain topics like street life or drug dealing (OP dixit) -- I'm beyond the age when I could have considered that 'cool' (and didn't).
OTOH I conceive languages as a tool to communicate with the broadest possible set of people, so I'm somewhat worried when I hear about speakers of dialects pettily refusing to learn a standard form (I normally say 'proper form' just to scandalize and disturb the prissies out there) or their language. We may frown upon immigrants staying in a language bubble of their own and never learning the country language, but then sticking to a dialect is OK? Because 'standard' and dialects are more mutually intelligible than separate languages, this is a less extreme way of doing things, but a form of the same train of thought nonetheless -- and kind of shooting oneself in the foot if you ask me. I'm not one to think there are dialects intrinsically better than others except when they are picked to become or are somehow closer to the standard form of a language (f.ex. like Tuscan was chosen as the base of modern standard Italian), and then only because they ease intercommunication -- any standard form is always easier to build on a pre-existent dialect (ideally the one with the highest intelligibility to the others) and doing it in a more 'neutral' way is kind of self-defeating as well, meaning that probably no standard form of any language is completely dialect-neutral. These are somewhat sad but otherwise unavoidable facts of life. Incidentally, this is also exactly why any attempt at having 'international languages' invariably ends up in either of these three ways: a pre-existent one is used, one is conned that's similar to those of a demographic group large enough so it has a chance to stick and be used, or something is concocted that's too alien for everybody so it never reaches any kind of critical mass. That said, we may think it's bad that someone won't hire someone else because of his/her not speaking standard English or whatever and only his own dialect instead, but that's only logical, and it makes more sense the less widely spoken that dialect is. I think we should be honest about this. Who would you hire, all other things being equal? Someone who can communicate equally well with everyone around him (the purpose of standards) or someone who will stumble more or less dealing with others depending on how close their dialects are? The foreigner who speaks the language badly or the national? The monolingual or the polyglot? 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6440 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 18 of 25 23 March 2012 at 3:46pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
The verb system is quite expressive.
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| GeneMachine Triglot Newbie Germany Joined 4685 days ago 16 posts - 40 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC1, Latin Studies: French, Japanese | Message 19 of 25 23 March 2012 at 4:33pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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One might add that AAVE goes far beyond "street life" and "drug dealing". That is just bad stereotyping. The dialect precedes the inner-city ghettos by centuries and extends to social strata far from those.
I am not a big fan of language prescriptivism, in particular, when it associates itself with certain "preferred" sociotopes - it's far too easy to turn the notion of "the right language" into a tool of oppression. 8 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| PillowRock Groupie United States Joined 4735 days ago 87 posts - 151 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 20 of 25 23 March 2012 at 6:45pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
To me, those two statements that you're attributing to the same person represent two very different things. Teaching kids the dialect of their native language that will allow them the widest possible field of future opportunities is one thing. Telling them that the dialect spoken in their community is "incorrect" or "wrong" is something else entirely. 8 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| tritone Senior Member United States reflectionsinpo Joined 6121 days ago 246 posts - 385 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Portuguese, French | Message 21 of 25 24 March 2012 at 4:11am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
AAVE is as old as the hills. It's what slaves spoke, and it's a subset of Southern-American English. Elderly blacks from the rural deep south, speak the purest AAVE. 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| zenmonkey Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6553 days ago 803 posts - 1119 votes 1 sounds Speaks: EnglishC2*, Spanish*, French, German Studies: Italian, Modern Hebrew | Message 22 of 25 24 March 2012 at 8:57am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Sociolects are present in all the languages I've studied. They are part of the regional, economic, historical, ethnic constructs and as such a rich additional to languages. I find them interesting.
Having said that, I also expect people to step out of them and attempt to embrace the standard language when dealing outside of the sociolect group. It is a sign of cultural identity on one side but of limited social interchange and experience beyond the boundaries of a group, on the other hand. I'll cringe if I heard someone say "It be" or "Ste livre" (French - for Ce livre) be it in a job interview or by a company CEO. Sociolects, minority languages often give rise to language prejudice. It is up to the individual to deal with them with a self-determined level of flexibility - so, yes, schools should teach students how to speak what is considered, as a shortcut, Standard English so that individual can code-switch as they interact with others - if they so wish. Give the tools, not the moral values. Edited by zenmonkey on 24 March 2012 at 9:02am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5227 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 23 of 25 24 March 2012 at 1:55pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Exactly. I'll just add everyone would probably be better off if at least some people clung a bit less to such identities.
I certainly hope so.
I'd bet we probably have a dialect of English rooting in the slaves' time and recent attempts at recreating it by 'gangsta' types to reinforce some sense of identity and compensate that of marginalisation. Then again there might be just one Ebonics dialect as old as the USA, which isn't that much anyway. So what? No matter where a dialect or language comes from, it is what its speakers make of it, and becoming a mere ghetto mark is one possible outcome (not saying it is the current state of things -- I'm only vaguely aware of any relevant facts). Prejudices on top of that will certainly exacerbate things and provide even more biased views for those so inclined. But that's life.
Oppression? Yes, but I guess it's better to stay away of politics etc. However, even in the field of languages I think it's quite healthy to acknowledge we all have prejudices and we differ only in how we go about them (which, after all, is the relevant part). For example, it is simply impossible that a person likes all possible sociotopes the same, so everyone has necessarily more or less "preferred" and "less favourite" sociotopes. On the other hand, we are all prescriptivist to some degree. How so? If I present myself as a Spanish speaker and I say things like "if I was you", "ain't nobody going anywhere", "I like them apples", "I could care less", "been done work" or whatever, someone will likely show up and tell me I should say "if I were...", etc. But if I present myself as an English speaker and I say the same things, it's much less likely that someone will correct me. Why? Prejudice, simple as that, for it should be rather obvious that the correctness of what someone says can't depend on where [s]he comes from. However, since there's no language in which we don't insist in saying there's "right" and "wrong" (which is BTW necessary to have effective communication), there are mechanisms for doing so in every one of them. Long story short: since it is impossible that prescriptivist corpora can make their authority effective and they always lag behind real use, the only truly universal mechanism of decision is compliance with other speakers. So, "deen bone work" and the like are perfectly right as dialectal utterances, but they are equally certainly not as standard English -- unlike those that become part of any accepted standard (we could debate long about unaccepted/able ones), any purely dialectal constructions become less and less valid the wider the circle of use you consider. Not we're quarrelling about it here, but many people do in other places, and frankly I don't see the need to if one takes the time to think about it. Edited by mrwarper on 24 March 2012 at 1:56pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| wv girl Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5240 days ago 174 posts - 330 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish | Message 24 of 25 24 March 2012 at 6:24pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Whenever the Ebonics debate comes up in our schools, I think of Dr. Martin Luther King's famous speech, "I have
a dream." He didn't start it with "I be dreamin' ... that one day my little younguns be livin' ..." He addressed the American public in standard American English, although the cadence was particularly Southern, similar to the white Southern Baptist sermons I grew up with. Coming from West Virginia, a rather poor state that's been the butt of jokes ranging from former vice president Cheney to Jay Leno, I know something about ridicule and prejudice. Certain accents and speech patterns mark you as being undeniably from a certain area and (to some extent) class. We moved to the city when I was still young ... not that anywhere around here is a big city, but even in my own state, certain accents are looked down upon. When I started school, my mother began to eliminate "ain't" from my speech, saying we don't talk like that here. While she continued to use Appalachian dialect with our older relatives, in our life as city dwellers, she sounded like them. So did my sister and I. While Ebonics, like our Appalachian speech, is regarded as a variant of standard English, kids must know standard English for school. It really is preparation for life, for jobs you hope to get. Few teachers here would correct a student's talk to another student, but a written essay or presentation is a different thing. As Dr. King so eloquently exemplified ... know your audience. 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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