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African American Vernacular English is not Standard English with Mistakes

stanford.edu

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Re: African American Vernacular English is not Standard English with Mistakes

#41

Post by wrs »

xiaoma wrote: post #15

I think the important point is the utility of language, not its "correctness". Regardless of the political issues involved, speaking the "standard" language or the prestige language is an asset in most circumstances. Speaking Ebonics would make it harder for a doctor to win patient trust, harder for an interviewee to get a job, harder for a politician to win in most districts and even harder for a defendant to get a…

Probably true, but irrelevant to the article, which is about how more effectively to teach Standard English by recognizing that some students start from a different dialect.

Re: African American Vernacular English is not Standard English with Mistakes

#42

Post by jeromec »

wrs wrote: post #38
jeromec wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what you mean by same treatment, as I'm sure any English course instructors told him it was incorrect to pronounce the "i" with an "e" sound.

Now I'm guessing you haven't RTFA. The point of the exercise is to teach Standard English more effectively to people whose native language is AAVE, not to teach people AAVE.

My mom has a master's degree in Child Development, has been teaching for the past 15 years, and currently teaches a kindergarten class in Southern California consisting of inner-city kids of black, white, hispanic, Indian, and Asian descent. I know a fair amount about this topic, and her views are in line with mine.

EDIT: I wanted to be sure I had my mom's views correct, so I asked her. To clarify, she says if a child is speaking ebonics she will explain there are different styles of speaking, and it depends on your audience. Speaking in that way is okay at home, for example, but in an academic setting the "correct" way is to go by the book.

Re: African American Vernacular English is not Standard English with Mistakes

#43

Post by _pius »

pg wrote: post #11

The argument here is in effect that no vernacular variant of any language could possibly embody a mistake. Which is true for some definitions of mistake, and false for others. The problem with the definitions that make it true is that there's a slippery slope from dialects to idiolects. How many people have to speak a dialect for it to count as a dialect? You can't have any threshold, or you get weird consequences in…

The argument here is in effect that no vernacular variant of any language could possibly embody a mistake.

This is the very epitome of attacking a strawman. The article didn't come close to arguing that "no vernacular variant of any language could possibly embody a mistake."

As a matter of fact, the author specifically and painstakingly drew a distinction between what he considers simply mistake-based variants of languages (which do exist) and new language dialects with different, but well-specified grammars (of which he considers AAVE to be one).

Re: African American Vernacular English is not Standard English with Mistakes

#44

Post by kscaldef »

wheels wrote: post #10
lionhearted wrote: post #3

I'm kind of casually fascinated with language, so when I came across a few papers on AAVE, I dug in and read both viewpoints. It's a long debate, but the most interesting thing that this particular Standford piece didn't mention - this style of English evolved from poor, white Southern farmers in the U.S. You wonder how different the debate would be if it was about Southern/poorer English instead of Northern/wealthie…

One really odd observation that struck me when spending some time in southern Africa (South Africa, Zimbabwe and Botswana) a couple years back: "AAVE" has had a significant influence on the English of southern Africans and other elements of black American culture are prevalent as well: hip-hop, basketball and, even, somewhat comically, fried chicken. It really got my attention just after arriving when the brother of…

"bounce" is slang. There's nothing syntactically distinct in that sentence from Standard English, which is the discussion of the article.

Re: African American Vernacular English is not Standard English with Mistakes

#45

Post by mahmud »

wheels wrote: post #10
lionhearted wrote: post #3

I'm kind of casually fascinated with language, so when I came across a few papers on AAVE, I dug in and read both viewpoints. It's a long debate, but the most interesting thing that this particular Standford piece didn't mention - this style of English evolved from poor, white Southern farmers in the U.S. You wonder how different the debate would be if it was about Southern/poorer English instead of Northern/wealthie…

One really odd observation that struck me when spending some time in southern Africa (South Africa, Zimbabwe and Botswana) a couple years back: "AAVE" has had a significant influence on the English of southern Africans and other elements of black American culture are prevalent as well: hip-hop, basketball and, even, somewhat comically, fried chicken. It really got my attention just after arriving when the brother of…

African American culture is decimating African culture, IMO. I am from East Africa and these days it's rare to find any of our old art forms. As far back as the 70s, we had Reggae replace most of the indigenous pop music, and these days the reggae is giving way to hiphop.

Re: African American Vernacular English is not Standard English with Mistakes

#46

Post by wheels »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #20
wheels wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The gramatical differences between "high" forms of British and American English are comparatively small. Certainly the dialectal variations within each country are further departures than standard American English is from standard British English. In each the differences are more of preference and still usually considered correct in the other. A more apt example would be Swiss and high German, which are (aside from t…

I heard recently that Arnie offered to do the voice for the Terminator in the German dub of the film of the same name. They said no because his accent made the killer robot sound like a farmer or country bumpkin to German ears.

Honestly, his accent in German is hilarious. I dug up some old YouTube footage of him in German a while back and he sounds ... cute. Definitely not hard-core like he does in English. ;-)

Re: African American Vernacular English is not Standard English with Mistakes

#48

Post by sethg »

mattmaroon wrote: post #47

This seems to make the ludicrous argument that because the mistakes are consistent they are not mistakes.

If an African-American speaks African-American Vernacular English to his friend at the barbershop, it's probably not a mistake.

If an African-American speaks that dialect to a hiring manager in a job interview, it probably is.

(Obviously you can imagine exceptions in both cases.)

Re: African American Vernacular English is not Standard English with Mistakes

#49

Post by _pius »

mattmaroon wrote: post #47

This seems to make the ludicrous argument that because the mistakes are consistent they are not mistakes.

What is any dialect or derived language but a set of consistent mistakes with respect to the ancestor language?

A dialect that lacks prestige is no less a dialect for it — that was one of the points of the article.

Re: African American Vernacular English is not Standard English with Mistakes

#50

Post by [deleted] »

_pius wrote: post #49
mattmaroon wrote: post #47

This seems to make the ludicrous argument that because the mistakes are consistent they are not mistakes.

What is any dialect or derived language but a set of consistent mistakes with respect to the ancestor language? A dialect that lacks prestige is no less a dialect for it — that was one of the points of the article.

[deleted]
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