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A mother tongue spoken by millions of Americans still gets no respect

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211–220 of 262 posts

Re: A mother tongue spoken by millions of Americans still gets no respect

#211
post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: A mother tongue spoken by millions of Americans still gets no respect

#212
post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

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 suppose it wasn't clear; I don't see a difference, except that California is more progressive linguistically than Kentucky.

Re: A mother tongue spoken by millions of Americans still gets no respect

#213
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

"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.

So your answer to my entreaty is "no", then?

Re: A mother tongue spoken by millions of Americans still gets no respect

#214
post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Re: A mother tongue spoken by millions of Americans still gets no respect

#215
post #17

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…

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.

Re: A mother tongue spoken by millions of Americans still gets no respect

#216
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really disagree, but I'm not sure you could call English "official" in the US. De facto standard at most.

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.

There has been.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-only_movement

It's generally seen to spring from anti-immigrant sentiment.

Re: A mother tongue spoken by millions of Americans still gets no respect

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Fuck, if that is the definition of a dialect then every single accent of a language is a new dialect.

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.

Re: A mother tongue spoken by millions of Americans still gets no respect

#218
post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 outsi…

> 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 t…

>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.

You do realize the point of that was to tap into bilingual education funding, right?

Re: A mother tongue spoken by millions of Americans still gets no respect

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Americans self-identify with English just as much as Brazilians identify themselves with Portuguese. This issue arises when this is not the case.

I can think examples of any combination of "has army/not", "is language/dialect". Mutual intelligibility doesn't even matter either way. has army, is dialect: Schweizerdeutch, American English, Brazilian Portuguese has army, is language: Norwegian (v. Danish) no army, is language: Yiddish, Afrikaans no army, is dialect: Frisian

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.

Re: A mother tongue spoken by millions of Americans still gets no respect

#220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> determination of dialect/language difference is mostly political I heard that expressed as " A language is a dialect with an army and navy " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_an... 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'm not sure if I would call Afrikaans a dialect.

It started out as a Dutch dialect or creole, of course, and it is now a separate language.

But the process formation of a separate language was political as well as linguistic.

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