Ebonics

[Mickmeister]

I don't understand why Ebonics has taken off so in the US? To me, it is nothing more than low class people that speak the language, yet I see it so often anymore. I see teenagers thinking it is OK to speak this horrible grammar, and this includes teenagers from affluent homes. This used to be confined to the inner cities, but it seems to have taken off. One of the terms that recently started is Tru dat, which we make fun of quite often at work. I don't see how speaking horrible grammar is acceptable?

[CutsieMarie89]

If you think Tru dat is a new term you must be quite removed from youth culture. There is a time and place for everything, sometimes I like to speak "Ebonics" when I'm with my family or or friends, but I know that it is not appropriate to use in other situations, because poor grammar is not acceptable in the working world. I go to a rather prestigious university and I know a lot of people who speak "Ebonics" when they are with their friends, it is only a problem if people don't know the difference between when it's acceptable to use and when it isn't.

[Betrayer0fHope]

It's the music. For once, people can actually blame rap music for doing something.

[MacGyver1968]

I have been doing an extensive analysis on the languages of sub-cultures in the US. (it keeps me busy on the bus :) ) From what I have seen, most people are a member of a least one sub-culture. Each of these sub-cultures have their own dress code, rules of behavior, and language. Most people speak a primary language most of the time, and speak their sub-culture language only when they are around other members of their sub-culture.

To use me as an example: My primary speaking language is Plain American English. I'm a member of 2 different sub-cultures, the "Old school Dude" sub-culture which speaks the sub-culture language of "Dude"..a language borrowed from another subculture group from the mid- 80's, "California Surfer/Skateboarder". I only address other members of the subculture by the term "Dude"...non-members are addressed as "sir" or something else.

I am also at least partially a member of the "Corporate" sub-culture. I don't subscribe to their dress code or rules of behavior, but I do speak their subculture language of "Boardroom Corporatese." On my job, I regularly have to correspond with full members of this sub-culture including members of the board, and upper management of my company. When speaking with them, I use terms like: "I am concepting..." instead of my normal "I am thinking of..."

IMHO, "Ebonics" was the original sub-culture language of the sub-culture "Inner-city African-Americans". I believe this sub-culture language was developed to differentiate themselves from another sub-culture "The Man"...a sub-culture of powerful white men. "The Man" was seen as the enemy, and speaking like him was amount to consorting with the enemy. Doing so was a breech of sub-culture rules, and you would be called "Uncle Tom" or "House N@gger".

This sub-culture language was adopted by another sub-culture group, "Hip Hop", (just as my subculture adopted the surfers language) the music of this sub-culture spread the language through-out all aspects of society. The only problem I have with this sub-culture is one of their rules of behavior, "Keeping it real", or in other words, the sub-culture language is to be spoken at all times. Speaking another subculture language like "Corporate" is frowned upon.

Speaking their sub-cultural language to non-members of the culture can be confusing for the non-member. Now, not all members of the sub-culture speak only "Ebonics"...some do use a primary language like Plain English when talking to non-members, and "Ebonics" to members. Our SF member "Camilius" is a perfect example..he can discuss 18 century philosophers in Plain English in one post, then if someone makes him angry, can use his sub-culture language to call someone a "bitch ass n@gga" :) I love it.

I think if the "Hip Hop" sub-culture allowed their members to speak a primary language, it would allow for better communication among all groups.

Just ole Mac's opinion. :)

(Fraggle, is it "subculture" or "sub-culture" ? thanks )

[Fraggle Rocker]

Fraggle, is it "subculture" or "sub-culture" ?In America it's written without the hyphen.

[Fraggle Rocker]

I don't understand why Ebonics has taken off so in the US? To me, it is nothing more than low class people that speak the language, yet I see it so often anymore. I see teenagers thinking it is OK to speak this horrible grammar, and this includes teenagers from affluent homes. This used to be confined to the inner cities, but it seems to have taken off. One of the terms that recently started is Tru dat, which we make fun of quite often at work. I don't see how speaking horrible grammar is acceptable?Read up on "pidgin" and "creole" languages, to give this discussion a scholarly boost. But I don't think it quite qualifies, since almost all of the people who speak it also speak standard English, depending on the circumstances. That would make it "jargon," "argot" or "cant." Rather like Shelta, which is spoken by the Irish Travelers when they don't want us to understand them.

As for "taking off," I think it's way past its peak. It's been years since anyone suggested treating it seriously in school.

It will be interesting to see what happens when a Hawaiian Ivy League graduate who speaks better English than the current moron replaces gangsta rappers as a role model. He can even pronounce "nuclear." :)

[OilIsMastery]

Ebonics is a left-wing euphamism for improper English spoken by a black person. It is different from Patois which is an actual dialect (Jamaica).

Ebonics is a racist term. Ebonics was actually invented by Southern whites.

Sowell. T., Black Rednecks and White Liberals (http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=4296), Capitalism Magazine, Jul 2005

[iceaura]

What's wrong with "dialect" ?

[Fraggle Rocker]

What's wrong with "dialect" ?The more general term is a variant of a language. A dialect is a specific type of variant, usually associated with a region or social class.

The key characteristics of a dialect are:Each speaker of the language speaks only one dialect, with obvious exceptions such as actors, linguists, spies and precocious children raised in more than one region or social class. A speaker of one dialect can understand the other dialects, perhaps after a little exposure--at least the neighboring dialects, if not the ones at opposite ends of a large language continuum such as Arabic.I think Ebonics does not satisfy either of these criteria.Most speakers also speak standard American English, perhaps with the accent of a region or social class, and can switch back and forth at will to suit a social situation. Ebonics contains slang and other terminology deliberately calculated to be difficult for outsiders to understand.Because of this, I think Ebonics comes closer to the definition of an argot or cant. It's not a perfect fit, but closer than it is to a dialect.

If it's hard for us to understand because it's the special jargon of rappers, then it's an argot, like the jargon of sailors or psychiatrists. If it's hard for us to understand because they don't want us to understand it, then it's a cant, like Shelta or Pig Latin.

[iceaura]

The key characteristics of a dialect are:

* Each speaker of the language speaks only one dialect, with obvious exceptions such as actors, linguists, spies and precocious children raised in more than one region or social class.
* A speaker of one dialect can understand the other dialects, perhaps after a little exposure--at least the neighboring dialects, if not the ones at opposite ends of a large language continuum such as Arabic. It seems to me that Ebonics fits that to a T, with the caveat that most speakers are bi-dialectical (!) - which seems no disqualification to me at all.

It's neither restricted to an in group or profession (such as rappers), nor employed merely to conceal, like pig Latin. It's the normal language of daily life for an entire social class of people, when there is nobody else around.

(Almost all speakers of it have been raised as children with exposure to at least one other major dialect, and almost all children are "precocious" at learning languages.)

[laladopi]

because its cool, and users of ebonics think that the more ebonics they know da cooola day git. ya harrr, i am terribly sorry, everywhere i go its the same nonsense.

[laladopi]

wuz crackn wit u cuz, i be at da beach texted da shawty at the crib!
oh I just HAD to indulge, I am not trying to offend you either mickmeister, nice avatar by the way.

[laladopi]

I am sadly part of the generation, where stupidity is the "like the coolest thing ever"
I hate shallow ego's of the youth usa!

[Medicine*Woman]

Ebonics is a left-wing euphamism for improper English spoken by a black person. It is different from Patois which is an actual dialect (Jamaica).

Ebonics is a racist term. Ebonics was actually invented by Southern whites.

Sowell. T., Black Rednecks and White Liberals (http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=4296), Capitalism Magazine, Jul 2005
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M*W: Short story about being a child in the Deep South. I was born in Hillbilly country but lived in SC from ages 5-9, my elementary school years. Whites spoke with a deep Southern dialect. "Mrs." was called "miss'ress" from the Black culture word for "mistress," and "Mr." we called "massah." It was "Tues-dee" not "Tues-day." We all spoke Ebonics then! The girls carried a "pocketbook" not a "purse." There are so many southern words I can't even remember now. My parents moved to Texas when I was 1. The kids in junior high laughed me out of the place, because I spoke so funny! As long as I've been in Texas, I never quite started speaking like one. My linguistic roots and dialect are still from the Deep South. Can't teach an old dog new tricks, I guess. My kids even make fun of me still!

[Fraggle Rocker]

It seems to me that Ebonics fits that to a T, with the caveat that most speakers are bi-dialectical (!) - which seems no disqualification to me at all.But it is. One of the most important criteria in the definition of a "dialect" is that it identifies a community (regional, social class, ethnicity, etc.) and that members of a community in general only speak one dialect.

Controversies do indeed occur over whether two idioms are dialects or something else, but they occur at precisely the opposite end of the spectrum from where we are. The question is always whether to call them two dialects of one language or two separate languages. Czech and Slovak; Provencal and any of the other Occitan idioms; Spanish and Catalan; Beijing Mandarin and Sichuan Mandarin; even Danish and Norwegian. It's about two idioms that are so different that many speakers of one can't understand the other at all without significant exposure and perhaps even some coaching. It's never about two idioms that are so easily intercomprehensible that speakers of one can casually speak the other like natives, and that's the situation with Ebonics and Standard American English.

Almost any North American, probably most Aussies and Englishmen, and even a good number of Scots, Afrikaners and Indians can understand Ebonics after watching MTV for about ten minutes.

Dialects are an impediment to understanding. The only impediments to understanding Ebonics for Americans outside the inner city are slang terms that refer to inner-city issues.

[CutsieMarie89]

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M*W: Short story about being a child in the Deep South. I was born in Hillbilly country but lived in SC from ages 5-9, my elementary school years. Whites spoke with a deep Southern dialect. "Mrs." was called "miss'ress" from the Black culture word for "mistress," and "Mr." we called "massah." It was "Tues-dee" not "Tues-day." We all spoke Ebonics then! The girls carried a "pocketbook" not a "purse." There are so many southern words I can't even remember now. My parents moved to Texas when I was 1. The kids in junior high laughed me out of the place, because I spoke so funny! As long as I've been in Texas, I never quite started speaking like one. My linguistic roots and dialect are still from the Deep South. Can't teach an old dog new tricks, I guess. My kids even make fun of me still!

My dad says Tues-dee. It drives me crazy so it's a southern accent? He also says sang-wich instead of sandwich, but I can't find out where he got that from.

[Absane]

Almost any North American, probably most Aussies and Englishmen, and even a good number of Scots, Afrikaners and Indians can understand Ebonics after watching MTV for about ten minutes.

Dialects are an impediment to understanding. The only impediments to understanding Ebonics for Americans outside the inner city are slang terms that refer to inner-city issues.

I can identify with these statements. When I moved from "the north" (or yankee country) to "the south" (Georgia), I had a hard time adjusting to the southeastern dialects (pin or pen?! pop or coke?! soda?! buggy? ya'll... they also talked with a weird accent). Over the years I figured it all out and even picked up some of the accent.

But when I entered high school, it took me a day to figure out Ebonics.

OHHH yEAAAA!!!! SHAWTY... FO SHIZZLE DAWG... CHIK OUT MAH GOLD GRILLZzzz.

My dad says Tues-dee. It drives me crazy so it's a southern accent? He also says sang-wich instead of sandwich, but I can't find out where he got that from.

The "Tues-dee" thing sounds very southern to me. Sangwich came from Dane Cook... unless he didn't get it from him, but from some people of Italian decent.

[CutsieMarie89]

I can identify with these statements. When I moved from "the north" (or yankee country) to "the south" (Georgia), I had a hard time adjusting to the southeastern dialects (pin or pen?! pop or coke?! soda?! buggy? ya'll... they also talked with a weird accent). Over the years I figured it all out and even picked up some of the accent.

But when I entered high school, it took me a day to figure out Ebonics.

OHHH yEAAAA!!!! SHAWTY... FO SHIZZLE DAWG... CHIK OUT MAH GOLD GRILLZzzz.



The "Tues-dee" thing sounds very southern to me. Sangwich came from Dane Cook... unless he didn't get it from him, but from some people of Italian decent.

Dane Cook? My dad always says sangwich, he thinks he is saying sandwich I heard Eddie Murphy say sangwich in Dream Girls, but I don't know if that's how he really talks or if he was just in character. You figured Ebonics out in only a day, I'm still working on some things and I live in the same neighborhood as these people, and speak it myself when I'm with family or I forget who I'm talking too it just slips out. oops.

[Medicine*Woman]

My dad says Tues-dee. It drives me crazy so it's a southern accent? He also says sang-wich instead of sandwich, but I can't find out where he got that from.
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M*W: You reminded me of another word, "sandwich." I remember as a child we called it "sammige." Was your dad from the South?

Children were taught to respect their parents by saying, "Yess'um" and "Nossuh."

When I went to SC from WV, I had a Black mammy. She taught me how to speak a Southern Black dialect. My parents worked for the govt., and when they noticed my Southern Black language, my mother quit work to stay with me and teach me how to speak proper English. Still, my parents had a White Southern, somewhat Hillbilly, accent.

[CutsieMarie89]

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M*W: You reminded me of another word, "sandwich." I remember as a child we called it "sammige." Was your dad from the South?

Children were taught to respect their parents by saying, "Yess'um" and "Nossuh."

When I went to SC from WV, I had a Black mammy. She taught me how to speak a Southern Black dialect. My parents worked for the govt., and when they noticed my Southern Black language, my mother quit work to stay with me and teach me how to speak proper English. Still, my parents had a White Southern, somewhat Hillbilly, accent.

Not really he was born in Texas and raised in New Mexico, so more like Southwest. He did speak several different languages maybe that's where it came from. I don't know why he talks funny no one else in his family talks like him. He is pretty fluent in so called Ebonics though and Spanglish. I suppose it all depends where you grow up.

[Medicine*Woman]

Not really he was born in Texas and raised in New Mexico, so more like Southwest. He did speak several different languages maybe that's where it came from. I don't know why he talks funny no one else in his family talks like him. He is pretty fluent in so called Ebonics though and Spanglish. I suppose it all depends where you grow up.
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M*W: Where you grew up or were taught to speak English is probably the reason we don't lose our accents. That's why my kids still make fun of me. They were raised predominantly in Houston, TX, so they don't have the twangs, nasal sounds or other more rural dialects. I notice as the older I get, my Hillbilly slips out some of the time. It's all good memories.

Have you heard the southern word for "tomatoes?" We used to call them "maters." "Potatoes" were "taters." In Appalachia, "window" was "winder", "pillow" was "pillar." And if you were looking for something, it was "over thar."

I just love languages!

[iceaura]

But it is. One of the most important criteria in the definition of a "dialect" is that it identifies a community (regional, social class, ethnicity, etc.) and that members of a community in general only speak one dialect. With each other.

Controversies do indeed occur over whether two idioms are dialects or something else, OK, "idiom" then. But not argot or cant, as described by you above.

Almost any North American, probably most Aussies and Englishmen, and even a good number of Scots, Afrikaners and Indians can understand Ebonics after watching MTV for about ten minutes.

Dialects are an impediment to understanding. The only impediments to understanding Ebonics for Americans outside the inner city are slang terms that refer to inner-city issues. If you say so. I once spent a week, more than thirty years ago now, communicating with two imported machine installers from South Side Chicago in various code English and sign language.

The flexibility of most ebonics speakers in NA lets the rest of us off easy, I suspect.

[Mickmeister]

Almost any North American, probably most Aussies and Englishmen, and even a good number of Scots, Afrikaners and Indians can understand Ebonics after watching MTV for about ten minutes.

That one of the reasons why I never watched MTV of VH1.

[CutsieMarie89]

That one of the reasons why I never watched MTV of VH1.

All they mostly play are stupid reality shows. But watching isn't enough to understand "ebonics" I think you have to experience it, before you get a true grasp of it.

[Fraggle Rocker]

But it is. One of the most important criteria in the definition of a "dialect" is that it identifies a community (regional, social class, ethnicity, etc.) and that members of a community in general only speak one dialect.With each other.No. With everyone. You miss the point. People only speak one dialect of their native language because that's all they need. Dialects, by definition, are intercomprehensible (at least nearby ones). It may take a little exposure to perfectly understand someone else's dialect, but nobody has to bother practicing speaking it. Sure, a few people do because it's an interesting pastime, but the majority of the population doesn't bother.

The idiom spoken in our inner cities, basically Southern American with a little phonetic drift and backwoods grammar, is African-American Dialect, or whatever the politically correct term will be once we have inaugurated our Hawaiian-Kenyan-Christian-Muslim-Caucasian-American president.

But Ebonics, the show-biz language of rappers and teenage wannabe-thugs, with its rude slang, exaggerated mispronunciations and total collapse of grammar, is not anybody's dialect and everyone who speaks it can also toggle right back into one or another standard American dialect. I agree that it doesn't quite satisfy the definition of a cant, but until we come up with a better term that's close enough.

With its 600-word vocabulary, it might qualify as a pidgin. :)

[CutsieMarie89]

I think I might be a bit confused. So what exactly is classified as "ebonics"? (or African- american speech or whatever you want to call it). Is it only the language that hip hop artist use? Does it only include the slang? Or is it just the grammar? Does the way my grandmother speaks count as "ebonics" or does it only refer to the way that rap artists and their fans speak?

[Medicine*Woman]

I think I might be a bit confused. So what exactly is classified as "ebonics"? (or African- american speech or whatever you want to call it). Is it only the language that hip hop artist use? Does it only include the slang? Or is it just the grammar? Does the way my grandmother speaks count as "ebonics" or does it only refer to the way that rap artists and their fans speak?
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M*W: I'm no expert on this, but ebonics is taught in this day and time in the Houston ISD as English! I've heard Black teachers use the words:

"akst" for "asked"
"arruh" for the letter "R"
"gots" for "got"
"he be" for "he is"

and more...

IMO hip hop and rap have a lingo of their own, but it's probably based on ebonics.

Rural southern white folks have their own lingo which may be close to ebonics but not totally.

Kids in Houston (not the whole State) come out of high school (if they make it that far) speaking ebonics. There are so many different areas in Houston that have their own dialects. The closer to the Gulf, white folks sound like Blacks. I'm still shocked and amazed by Black teachers with degrees in education and certification to teach speaking ebonics and passing it own to their students. OTOH, I appreciate the many flavors of language in this area.

[Fraggle Rocker]

All right, you've motivated me to do some research on Ebonics. What I've found is that the term is not in wide use, and this makes it difficult to find a consensus definition. It was coined in 1973 and appeared in the title of a book in 1975, but it rarely appeared in print until 1996. Then the school board of Oakland, California (a city with an African-American majority population and a tradition of avant-garde liberalism like its neighbors San Francisco and Berkeley) experimented with treating it as a separate language, to see whether teaching African-American children in their "native language" would improve their ability to learn. Every government policy has to have some jargon to make it seem erudite, so they standardized on calling this idiom "Ebonics."

The program quietly disappeared after a rapid failure and the name Ebonics has lapsed back into obscurity. However, you folks seem to be correct in saying that when it is dredged up and used, it is synonymous with African-American Vernacular English, or AAVE for short.

Interestingly, to equate Ebonics with AAVE does not entirely answer our question, since AAVE is called variously a sociolect and an ethnolect, in addition to a dialect, depending on which writer we're reading. A sociolect is the variety of a language spoken by a social class, such as the Cockney speech of working-class London. An ethnolect is spoken by an ethnic group, usually with a phonetic, syntactic and vocabulary substratum from their native language. Since until rather recently African-Americans were both a social class and an ethnic group, they qualified for both criteria. In two months we'll have a President who breaks both of those paradigms, so we'll have to see how our terminology adjusts.

In any case, apparently I don't represent the majority of the rather small group of people who even use the word "Ebonics" at all. To us musicians, it's the exaggerated cant of rap music. To the other two hundred people who might ever use the word in writing, it's the everyday speech of the shrinking number of African-Americans who have not assimilated to American Standard English.

One thing we can be sure of is that the forces of civilization will eventually level out the varieties of American English, and possibly of global English. The downfall of Jim Crow laws and the civil rights movement made the boundaries between African- and Euro-American residential neighborhoods less solid. New laws and customs put African- and Euro-Americans side by side in the schools and the workplace. Before long this integration spilled over into social life; even in a small city it's rare for a member of either community to go very long without routinely encountering members of the other community as peers.

All of these forces tend to level out dialects. In addition, electronic communication is an extremely powerful force. It has already made the Americans and the British able to understand each other's dialects fairly easily and adopt each other's slang. America's regional dialects are disappearing as they all listen to the same network newscasts and other programs, and as we all move around the country following our jobs. These days you're as likely to hear Indian English or Spanglish in Northern Virginia as the Southern English of the state's heritage.

So it is with AAVE and Standard American English. "Black" and "white" Americans now understand each other with little trouble, unless they're from the backwoods and don't get out very often. Dialect differences still exist, but they're weaker and not the impediment to understanding that they were 75 years ago, or even 25.

Which brings me back to what I call Ebonics: the show-biz language of rappers. They affect a style of speech so exaggerated that it's difficult for outsiders to understand. This is not contemporary AAVE, which is easier for the average Euro-American to understand than Indian English. It's a cant. Or, as I suggested earlier, since it has a ridiculously small vocabulary, it might be a pidgin. :)

[firdroirich]

As of last year, New Zealand's NZQA (Qualification Authority) allowed 'txt speak' in exams. Teachers must have cringed. Personally, I don't think it's good to have a subset of what is the international language become accepted in official structures, because the reason a protocol exists is to avoid confusion and misundertanding.

What's wrong with good grammar, spelling and pronounciation? It's the protocol of communication between nations. We can't suddenly add a subset and hope other people elsewhere adhere to the protocol. They might want to use slang within their own cultures and expect people half-away around the world to 'dig it'.

Is ebonics allowed in education in the US? For exams, homework, assignments etc?

[Fraggle Rocker]

Is ebonics allowed in education in the US? For exams, homework, assignments etc?AFAIK not anywhere, not any more, since the Oakland experiment fizzled. However the U.S. public education system is in ruins and teachers are happy these days if each student picks up one new idea each year. They're not likely to be too critical of a student who writes in AAVE, as long as he can write at all. The Melting Pot has been very active over the past few decades, so in speech they've got far more inscrutable accents to deal with than AAVE.

The average U.S. university graduate reads and writes at what my generation called the sixth-grade level, so lapses into AAVE in writing would be masked by the overall primitive and inept effort.

[iceaura]

In any case, apparently I don't represent the majority of the rather small group of people who even use the word "Ebonics" at all. To us musicians, it's the exaggerated cant of rap music. To the other two hundred people who might ever use the word in writing, I've heard the word fairly often, even on mass market media (a little while ago, during some kind of fad), and never once in a sense of limiting it to rap lyrics.

What's wrong with good grammar, spelling and pronounciation? Nothing except the inherent bias of calling them "good", which just picks fights to no purpose.

Call them "standard world English" or the like, and make sure that American schoolchildren, like the Chinese and French and Japanese schoolchildren, are schooled in them.

[Medicine*Woman]

As of last year, New Zealand's NZQA (Qualification Authority) allowed 'txt speak' in exams. Teachers must have cringed. Personally, I don't think it's good to have a subset of what is the international language become accepted in official structures, because the reason a protocol exists is to avoid confusion and misundertanding.

What's wrong with good grammar, spelling and pronounciation? It's the protocol of communication between nations. We can't suddenly add a subset and hope other people elsewhere adhere to the protocol. They might want to use slang within their own cultures and expect people half-away around the world to 'dig it'.

Is ebonics allowed in education in the US? For exams, homework, assignments etc?
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M*W: As I've mentioned above, in the Houston, TX public school district of predominantly Black teachers, ebonics is taught, because that is the language they speak. (How they got to be teachers is beyond me). Those Black students who (got accepted and) went to college have a more correct English dialect. I've heard teachers and students alike use Ebonics in this area. The closer to the Gulf of Mexico, the more slang their language becomes. The Hispanic population has also picked up the slang. There is a high drop out rate, however.

When I was in school, there wasn't an option of dialects. We had one and one only, and we better damn well knew how to speak properly or else. Further, we were taught manners, something I don't see much of today.

[Nasor]

But I don't think it quite qualifies, since almost all of the people who speak it also speak standard English, depending on the circumstances.
About five years ago I would have agreed with you, but I've been getting an increasing number of 19-year-old black students coming to my office hours who "be needn' t' axe me sump bout da homerk". Sometimes I have a pretty difficult time understanding what they're saying, although they never have trouble understanding me. I only grade them based on whether or not they can answer chemistry questions correctly so I suppose it doesn't really matter how they speak to me, but the thought of them speaking that way at a job interview makes me cringe. It's as if many of them are half-fluent in standard english, able to understand it but not speak it. Or perhaps they're simply unwilling to speak it...

[Medicine*Woman]

About five years ago I would have agreed with you, but I've been getting an increasing number of 19-year-old black students coming to my office hours who "be needn' t' axe me sump bout da homerk". Sometimes I have a pretty difficult time understanding what they're saying, although they never have trouble understanding me. I only grade them based on whether or not they can answer chemistry questions correctly so I suppose it doesn't really matter how they speak to me, but the thought of them speaking that way at a job interview makes me cringe. It's as if many of them are half-fluent in standard english, able to understand it but not speak it. Or perhaps they're simply unwilling to speak it...
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M*W: "Unwilling to speak it...
sounds more likely. It's a peer thing. It's their way of poking fun at our generation. If they have spent anytime paying attention in English class, they know the correct way to speak. What really grates on my nerves are those kids who go to black colleges and still speak Ebonics. Look at Obama, he's got a good command of the language with downright perfect intonation that is not even Chicagoese. When some of these Black kids go to a regular college, they tend to follow their peers. I've taught medical students, and you'd be surprised at the language some of them use (still unrefined). But, by the time they are graduated, they usually become more eloquent. English was not my subject to teach, but they seemed to appreciate me helping them with the language. It's still a shock to me when graduating seniors out of undergrad colleges still cannot read, write or speak English as it should be spoken. So, along with all the H&PEs I've had to grade, proper English was critiqued as well.

[Fraggle Rocker]

About five years ago I would have agreed with you, but I've been getting an increasing number of 19-year-old black students coming to my office hours who "be needn' t' axe me sump bout da homerk". Sometimes I have a pretty difficult time understanding what they're saying, although they never have trouble understanding me.I think we're still haggling over whether "Ebonics" is the exaggerated cant of thugs and rappers, or just a clever new name for African-American Vernacular English. Clearly it's defined as the latter, even if some of us musicians use the former meaning.

Your quote strikes me as AAVE, with the spelling crafted to accentuate its variance from Standard American English. We all say needin', ta', and 'bout in fast informal speech, we just don't spell the words that way when we write them out. I'm sure if you asked a Swede or a Russian or anyone whose native language has no W sound, he'd say that "homework" pronounced properly but quickly doesn't sound too much different from the way your students say it. Sump'm for "something" has been around for longer than I can remember, and it's hardly unique to AAVE. Eliding the M off the end of a consonant cluster that is thoroughly unnatural in any dialect of English, especially when it comes before a B and becomes the almost unmanageable cluster MPMB, is just phonetic simplification at work.

That leaves us with:

1. "Da" for "the." Conversion of the two TH phonemes is indeed a common trait of AAVE, since as far as we can tell from hypothetical reconstructions, the African language(s) that had the greatest impact on the pronunciation of the original slaves (like most human languages) did not have those phonemes. You often hear "bofe" for "both."

2. "Ax" for "ask." Another common trait of AAVE. The combination SK in final position is rare in English and until recently "ask" was the only common word that had it. So it's not remarkable that it would be reversed into a far more common ending in the dialect of people who were not formally educated. I suspect that with "disk" and "task" becoming everyday words, this will change. After all, it would be really confusing to say tax for task, and who's going to go around asking if anybody else in the office has been having trouble accessing their dicks today?

So the above two alternate pronunciations are nothing new, they have been hallmarks of AAVE since before Emancipation and by now we're all accustomed to unconsciously translating them into Standard English when we hear them.

3. The infinitive "be" for the present tense "am," "are," etc. Now that is new. We can identify this as a sign of further separation of AAVE from Standard American. Nonetheless it falls into a common pattern of taking an obvious existing trend and pushing it forward. "Be" is the one and only verb in English whose present tense (except in third person singular) differs from its infinitive! We have already performed the simplification of all of our other verbs. The Anglo-Saxon infinitive ending -an disappeared sometime between Beowulf and Chaucer! Since "be" is such an odd verb, with the infinitive having no relation to the indicative, dropping the infinitive inflection still left us with an odd verb. The speakers of AAVE are simply cleaning up our language for us, bringing "be" into conformance with the entire rest of our set of verbs, making English a tiny bit more logical and easier for foreigners to learn.:)"Unwilling to speak it... sounds more likely. It's a peer thing. It's their way of poking fun at our generation. If they have spent any time paying attention in English class, they know the correct way to speak. What really grates on my nerves are those kids who go to black colleges and still speak Ebonics. Look at Obama, he's got a good command of the language with downright perfect intonation that is not even Chicagoese.The Obama presidency will certainly have a profound impact on the motifs of African-American culture. Kids have a new role model who doesn't go out of his way to differentiate himself from the rest of us. He's the long-awaited incarnation of the Melting Pot. Euro-Americans are saying, "Hey don't forget his mom, he's one of us too." People are dancing in the streets of Kona and Lihue screaming, "We've got a Hawaiian President!" Christians are calling him a Muslim and Muslims are calling him a Christian. Perhaps the divide between light-skinned and dark-skinned Americans that has endured astoundingly for 140 years after the Civil War will finally be breached.

And African-Americans will start talking like Barack Obama instead of Jay-Z. Heck, even Jay-Z might start talking like Barack Obama. You know he can do it!