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.
A mother tongue spoken by millions of Americans still gets no respect
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Re: A mother tongue spoken by millions of Americans still gets no respect
#12Re: A mother tongue spoken by millions of Americans still gets no respect
#13Thanks for sharing. This was a good read and I think a lot more people could use to read it instead of just blindly commenting with rude remarks...
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.
Re: A mother tongue spoken by millions of Americans still gets no respect
#14I think in order for a language to gain any significant amount of respect it needs to be used in commerce and more than just illegal commerce.
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. O…
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".
Re: A mother tongue spoken by millions of Americans still gets no respect
#15When 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.
Re: A mother tongue spoken by millions of Americans still gets no respect
#16I 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.
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.
Re: A mother tongue spoken by millions of Americans still gets no respect
#17I 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".
Re: A mother tongue spoken by millions of Americans still gets no respect
#18I think in order for a language to gain any significant amount of respect it needs to be used in commerce and more than just illegal commerce.
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.
Re: A mother tongue spoken by millions of Americans still gets no respect
#19Speaking 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.
Re: A mother tongue spoken by millions of Americans still gets no respect
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. O…
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.