************* 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!
With each other. OK, "idiom" then. But not argot or cant, as described by you above. 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.
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.
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. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
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?
************* 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.
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. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Is ebonics allowed in SAT exams? 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?
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.
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. 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.
************* 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.
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...
************* 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.
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.Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! 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!
