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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

#241

Post by Crake »

Cushman wrote: post #159
SilasX wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it still would be right to put both kids (the Spanish- and AAVE-speaking) in remedial English because both are at a low level with respect to American Standard English. The fact that they're good in another language doesn't somehow mean they're at the class's expected level in ASE. Unless, of course, the class is so young that they can reasonably be expected to learn from mere immersion, at which point the advice…

Not remedial English. ESL. There's a big difference. English class is where speakers of ASE learn the grammatical rules of their language in ASE. Doing that again, or more slowly, will not help someone who does not speak ASE at home. ESL is where a speaker of your native language teaches you ASE as a foreign language, because it is. Only once they are fluent in ASE (and that should happen rapidly for young AAVE speak…

Should we put other native speakers of english with an inability to write a sentence with correct grammar in with the ESL too then? Based on this map of American dialects, it seems like standard english is the lingua franca of many different offshoots of the english language.

http://robertspage.com/diausa.gif

This whole thing seems rather silly to me. Maybe instead of worrying about checking our privilege, we can worry about making sure everyone from all backgrounds is able to communicate in a professional way and graduate high school with a basic grasp of proper english. (your vs you're, etc)

(Because even if you don't want to call it remedial english, that's where they'll end up in college. If you've lived in America for 18 years but want to take ESL in college, they're justifiably going to think you're insane.)

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

#242

Post by Crake »

pekk wrote: post #190
Afton wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not downvoting you. But your position is untenable, and comes from a misunderstanding about what a language is. It's not that it's not politically correct, it's that it's factually incorrect. No one is arguing that there is or isn't a class and racial component to who speakers of AAVE are. They are primarily black and poor. But that point is irrelevant. Kids raised where people speak AAVE will grow up speaking AA…

Simply declaring that it is a language gets you nothing too. If every minor variation creates a whole new language, then almost no two people with a vocabulary of a few thousand words actually speak 'the same language'.

This.

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

#243

Post by Crake »

blocking_io wrote: post #49
Hairy_Sandwich wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I can understand the argument for supporting AAVE in schools I can't. Schools are supposed to teach you the official language and all the skills you need to succeed in society. AAVE won't help you (or be useful) at work, or in academia, unless you are studying AAVE as your job. I agree that it will be divisive in the long run, I think you are right that encouraging AAVE to continue and legitimizing it and calling it…

As the article points out, if it were 'bad English', the rules of AAVE would not be consistently applied. However, speakers know how to use the rules and they always apply them. Saying that 'calling it a language' is bad is truly ignorant. As far as linguists are concerned, it is a language. If you say otherwise, you are simply wrong. There is nothing inherently better about the English you speak compared to their En…

You can consistently apply bad rules. For example:

Your knot write about you're ideas. You're comment says your opinionated about what people should right.

Your and you're are consistently misapplied by people everywhere, whether by consistently using one instead of the other, or just using "your" for everything.

Just because it's consistently applied doesn't make it correct English.

We use a standard form so you don't have to stop and puzzle out what the hell someone is trying to say.

Unless what you're writing is only going to be read by yourself, what you put down is supposed to communicate your ideas to others. That's why an ability to communicate in a standard manner is so important.

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

#244

Post by Crake »

smsm42 wrote: post #76
blocking_io wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the article points out, if it were 'bad English', the rules of AAVE would not be consistently applied. However, speakers know how to use the rules and they always apply them. Saying that 'calling it a language' is bad is truly ignorant. As far as linguists are concerned, it is a language. If you say otherwise, you are simply wrong. There is nothing inherently better about the English you speak compared to their En…

I don't see how it follows. For example, for a native speaker of a language that has no definite/indefinite articles, it is common to omit those in English. Also, for speakers of languages without plural or complex tense system, it is common to systematically omit plurals or use only one or two tenses in English. Would it mean that English without articles, plurals and with only present tense would not be a "bad Engl…

This is what happens when you take postmodernism crazy think that comes out of the liberal arts departments and apply it to things in the real world.

Nothing can be right or wrong anymore. Everything is just your opinion. These people have literally written papers on how physics concepts like E=mc^2 are sexist.

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

#245

Post by Crake »

anigbrowl wrote: post #98
Hairy_Sandwich wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there are any rules to "AAVE" either, one speaker of this dialect? creole? language? or whatever we're calling it, would not be able to point out grammatical errors in the speech of another. I think the following would all be considered valid AAVE: I ain’t tell nobody nothing about no sushi. or I didn’t tell nobody nothing about no sushi. or I didn’t tell nobody about no sushi. or I didn’t tell nobody a…

Also I feel like people (educators in Oakland?) just caved, and don't want to admit that they have failed to properly educate and include a huge swathe of people. I'm inclined to agree. I live in north Oakland, in a pat of the city where a lot of the Black Panthers were based and got involved in community development on a practical level, such as installing traffic lights on dangerous intersections and suchlike. A fe…

Good to see you around here. (I gave up on metafilter.)

I also agree that language variations are interesting...but AAVE is clearly not its own language. The suggestions flying around here that it ought to be treated like a second language entirely are rather ridiculous.

You don't have to justify usage of the word "the" to a chinese person, they know that's what they have to strive for in learning professional english. It's strange how often I see people (basically) advocating that we racially discriminate in these matters. I don't see anyone advocating that langauge patterns commonly used by hillbillies/rednecks be considered a completely different language, but those people are not just poor and uneducated, but also white. It seems that compassion runs dry so quickly for people of the wrong race, whichever one has been deemed fashionable to mock in a particular culture/decade. I wish we could do away with it entirely, instead of just swapping discrimination against one for discrimination against another.

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

#246

Post by Crake »

calibraxis wrote: post #62
freehunter wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Such racist comments have a twisted relation to the truth: the US virtually criminalizes its Black population. It's public knowledge that no other country incarcerates its people as much. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rat... ) Any honest person can see that those of us with more "respectable" US accents form the real criminal culture. We took the land from people we exterminated, took sla…

"We took the land from people we exterminated, took slaves "

I speak standard english, but am part of a minority group that has been tortured and killed for thousands of years. You don't speak for me. Or for my friends, who aren't all part of my minority group, but some of whom also speak standard english (and sometimes are or are not part of their own minority groups, while also some majority ones). I'd say you don't get to speak for them, either.

I have not taken any land nor exterminated or enslaved any persons. Stop stereotyping based on skin color. It's really racist. Racism against any person is not ok. I don't care who you think it will make you a better person if you hate.

"to this day imprison and war like no other humans in the universe."

All humans imprison and war, not just white people.

Africans and Asians can be just as cutthroat, if you have any knowledge of history whatsoever. Cruelty is not copyright Caucasian, as has become the political correct fad of the last few years. It's disgusting.

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

#247

Post by Cushman »

Crake wrote: post #241
Cushman wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not remedial English. ESL. There's a big difference. English class is where speakers of ASE learn the grammatical rules of their language in ASE. Doing that again, or more slowly, will not help someone who does not speak ASE at home. ESL is where a speaker of your native language teaches you ASE as a foreign language, because it is. Only once they are fluent in ASE (and that should happen rapidly for young AAVE speak…

Should we put other native speakers of english with an inability to write a sentence with correct grammar in with the ESL too then? Based on this map of American dialects, it seems like standard english is the lingua franca of many different offshoots of the english language. http://robertspage.com/diausa.gif This whole thing seems rather silly to me. Maybe instead of worrying about checking our privilege, we can wor…

Yes. If you are trying to teach children "correct" grammar rules that they will go home and unlearn because their peers speak a different grammar, you are getting teaching very wrong and you should do it differently. As has been reiterated exhaustively in these comments, that does not mean you do not teach them SAE. It means you teach it so they actually learn it.

Don't take this the wrong way, but highlighting "your" vs. "you're" indicates you really don't understand what we're talking about here. That is a difference of orthography, of spelling, which is completely unintuitive and frankly stupid to speakers of dialects in which those words are pronounced exactly the same way. Any native speaker, however perfect you consider their English, must be taught spelling by rote. All English is "broken" in that regard. (Did you know there are languages where there is no such thing as a spelling bee, because there is exactly one possible way to spell any word?)

But we're not talking about that. We're talking about people who go home every day and speak a real language, one just as proper, correct, consistent, coherent as your own. Just different. Your insistence that your language is "proper" because it is the language used in formal speech by the rich and powerful is, yes, incredibly unaware of your privilege.

And your calling that "silly" is, o irony, quite ignorant. Did you read the article? Did you read these comments? Did you go on Wikipedia and look up AAVE? Southern American English? Appalachian English? These are not broken forms of English, these are forms of English you do not speak. This is all completely uncontroversial among people who study the use of language scientifically.

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

#248

Post by [deleted] »

tsotha wrote: post #218
Cushman wrote: post #163

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…

>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?

[deleted]

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

#249

Post by omonra »

losvedir wrote: post #230
omonra wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you share with us "videos of articulate, smart, (preferably math/science-based discussion in AAVE)"? Perhaps this is the missing link for us sceptics - we associate it with poor uneducated individuals. Ie - by definition, if someone whose primary language was AAVE wants to sound articulate and smart they will resort to SE?

Well, that's just it. A native-AAVE speaker will use SE when speaking to me, even if their preferred dialect at home is AAVE, so I don't get exposed to it. Think of this reporter [0]. However, I'm sure he's an intelligent men, and I'm sure when speaking informally he'll fall back to AAVE. What I'd love to see is someone at, say, PhD Math or Physics level speaking in AAVE, preferably about that subject. I'm studying a…

Thank you - I really liked the 1st video.

"A native-AAVE speaker will use SE when speaking to me, even if their preferred dialect at home is AAVE, so I don't get exposed to it."

I actually wonder if two black guys who can speak AAVE but want to discuss something intellectual (ie physics or literature) will resort to SE. My hunch is that they would.

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

#250

Post by Crake »

Cushman wrote: post #247
Crake wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should we put other native speakers of english with an inability to write a sentence with correct grammar in with the ESL too then? Based on this map of American dialects, it seems like standard english is the lingua franca of many different offshoots of the english language. http://robertspage.com/diausa.gif This whole thing seems rather silly to me. Maybe instead of worrying about checking our privilege, we can wor…

Yes. If you are trying to teach children "correct" grammar rules that they will go home and unlearn because their peers speak a different grammar, you are getting teaching very wrong and you should do it differently. As has been reiterated exhaustively in these comments, that does not mean you do not teach them SAE. It means you teach it so they actually learn it. Don't take this the wrong way, but highlighting "your…

Frankly, this post makes you look really ignorant of the actual experiences of disadvantaged people in America (of which I am one, by the way). Maybe you should check your assumption privilege.

I like to swear a lot when I'm at home, but that doesn't mean it's proper language for when I'm in the workplace. Why can't my bosses stop oppressing me with their managerial privilege!? :( :(

But by all means, continue the condescending ad hominems, I actually find histrionic people hyperventilating into comment boxes really hilarious.

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