71–78 of 78 posts
Genuine question here; does AAVE have an accepted grammar? I don't mean necessarily a written canon, but anything that's not "make it up as you go" ad-hoc style. (And yes, I realize all language has some evolutionary context to it.) Without rules, there's no way to break them, and thus no meaning for "mistake".
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I mentioned most of the ideas in your post in my own post. I don't consider them persuasive.
The ideas in my post are barely mentioned in the last paragraph of your post: that's why I wrote it. I think you underestimate the extent to which being able to speak and write in standard English is important. That's what pg implied in his original post, and he's right. Maybe standard English is a "fashion," as you put it, but that's not very useful: what's more useful is to note that being able to master this "fash…
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Her article is titled "African American Vernacular English is not Standard English with Mistakes". She seems to spend the whole article making the semantic argument that it is instead a dialect. I don't think this is a meaningless distinction. If you believe the author, speakers of AAVE are speaking a dialect of English that has lower prestige than Standard American English. If you don't, you think that on a daily ba…
Well, I wouldn't say the current speakers of AAVE are literally trying to speak English properly and making a mistake. I would say that the people who created it were. And I would say that the people who speak it now suffer for it just as if they were. Thus for all intents and purposes, it is English with mistakes, even if technically it is a dialect. So I guess her argument that mistakes + tradition = dialect seems…
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Her article is titled "African American Vernacular English is not Standard English with Mistakes". She seems to spend the whole article making the semantic argument that it is instead a dialect. I don't think this is a meaningless distinction. If you believe the author, speakers of AAVE are speaking a dialect of English that has lower prestige than Standard American English. If you don't, you think that on a daily ba…
Well, I wouldn't say the current speakers of AAVE are literally trying to speak English properly and making a mistake. I would say that the people who created it were. And I would say that the people who speak it now suffer for it just as if they were. Thus for all intents and purposes, it is English with mistakes, even if technically it is a dialect. So I guess her argument that mistakes + tradition = dialect seems…
I would say that the people who created it were.
It's a process that's evolved over a few centuries and has its roots in the slave trade. There are people who think AAVE owes a lot to the creoles that formed on Caribbean slave islands like Jamaica.
And I would say that the people who
speak it now suffer for it just as if they were.
A similar example is the relationship between people who speak French and people who speak Quebecois.
But be honest: do you really think Quebecois are dumb? Do you think the language is an illegitimate or devolved version of French? Is it just "French with mistakes?"
Quebecois' prestige in the French-speaking world has to do with the historical relationship between French Canadians and France, not the differences in the language.
As I said in another comment, if the South had won the Civil War, you might not object to things like double negatives, double modals, etc.
Thus for all intents and purposes, it is English with
mistakes, even if technically it is a dialect.
In an educational context the latter is absolutely destructive. If you're teaching an AAVE speaker SAE and think they're just "making mistakes," you won't get to the root of the issue, which is that their internal model of the language is very different from yours.
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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 chil…
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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 chil…
I need to reply to my own post above. I just had a long discussion with my mom, and at first found that we did not have the exact same views. However, she now agrees with me that when telling a child speaking ebonics at home is acceptable, even that is damaging, because it sends mixed signals, and should not be encouraged. There simply is no benefit to hanging on to usage of ebonics.
I feel we don't understand each other. I'll try to restate what I said in more details.
What if the kid speaks French? Most likely, he will speak French at home, and American English at school. Sometimes, he will employ the wrong word or make a grammatical mistake while trying to exploit similarities between the two languages. Any professor hearing this will call this an error.
But but but, at home we say… say the poor boy. If the professor know French, he may answer What you say is more like French. In English, we say this…. Note this is not an encouragement to abandon French. Merely an encouragement to learn proper English.
Now, replace French by AAVE (or Ebonics). What has changed? I agree that the two languages are highly similar. This may be confusing to the kid. There is two ways to handle this:
(1) Saying to the kid that his last sentence wasn't proper English. This is very close to saying that he doesn't speak correctly, period. Knowing the way we speak at home, the kid can easily extend that statement to his parents or neighbours, and try to correct them, proud of the knowledge he just learned at school. I think this is dangerous, because this may be perceived a direct attack on their identity. This can lead the kid's family or friends to pressure him into not learning proper English, for instance by dismissing it as "speaking white" or something.
(2) Saying to the kid that his last sentence was AAVE, not English. Making a sharp distinction between the two. Insisting that at school, you are to speak English, not Ebonics. So, when the kid get home, he won't try and correct his parents. He may point out the differences between English and AAVE, but won't speak of them as errors. This is hardly an attack on the identity of Ebonics speakers. Plus, it makes sense: "black speak" in the "black world" (home), "white speak" in the "white world" (school and work). As a consequence, there is less reason for his family or friends to insist that he doesn't speak proper English.
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Well, I think the burden of proof is on you to show why language mistakes matter at all . If I can understand what someone else said or wrote (or spelled!), then why do we need a central authority to determine what is correct vs incorrect? Isn't there a fairly significant incentive toward conformity for efficiency's sake? It's as if there were a call for some central authority to critique the names people are given (…
"Well, I think the burden of proof is on you to show why language mistakes matter at all." Most importantly, because they inhibit efficient communication among parties. The lesser problem is that they might signal low educational status and/or incompetence: I know there is no such thing as "standard English," but you can get pretty close to it through guides like Diana Hacker's _Rules for Writers_. The further you ge…
The problem comes then when we try to say "this is Standard English ". The books many people feel represent "proper" English are often full of nonsense propagate mindlessly by people who learned what they were told was "proper" English. If I had a nickel for every time somebody regurgitated a "rule" derived from "A Short Introduction to English Grammar" by Lowth, I'd be a very rich man indeed.
Ultimately, setting a standard form of a language ends up devolving into Lowth style shibboleths designed to create an in-group and an out-group usable as a basis for discrimination but not necessarily useful for communication.
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…
This is probably the best one line summary of the issue I've ever read.