not sure that's the primary purpose. It can also be a very strong way to reinforce / test the boundaries of a group. Do you talk like us or not? Are you one of us? There are a multitude of ways to convey understanding; the how is sometimes more important than the content.
Conveying meaning is necessarily more primary than forming group identity simply because "do you talk like us" depends on "us talking to each other" in the first place. It's hard to imagine an evolution where intra-group communication happened as a result of extra-group communication.
Right, but here we're talking about understanding in a broader group - specifically, between groups - since that was what dukoid's post was about.
There is a very big aspect that people overlook in this conversation. There is what is known as the "dialect of power" and in the US that is Standard American English. It's not necessarily "wrong" to speak AAVE but in doing so, you will disqualify yourself from opportunities that could otherwise be open to you based on your education and/or experience. If someone calls you to schedule a job interview and you don't so…
You shouldn't have to. I recently started a role where I work very closely with a guy from southern Kansas. He speaks with an accent that I would associate with hicks, farmers, non-intellectuals. And true to form, he was raised on a farm. But he's smart, hard working and great to work with. Every day that we work together, I'm learning things that I wouldn't have otherwise understood. No one criticizes him for speaki…
> He speaks with an accent that I would associate with hicks, farmers, non-intellectuals.
Having an accent isn't the same as speaking a dialect. For example, many Indians speak correct English, but their accent renders them near unintelligble.
As a Texan, I'm always going to have a Texas accent, unless I take pains to minimize it. But I can easily switch to standard English, y'all.
Norwegians spend the late 1800s and early 1900s quarreling amongst themselves what should be the standard for written Norwegian. Should they take the heavily Danish-influenced written language common in cities, or should they use something closer to the dialects spoken in the rural areas? Eventually, their parliament ruled that Norway shall have two official written languages and all government documents will be publ…
On a side note: for whatever reason I think I can read about 1 in 3 words in Norwegian (standard and book) with no prior training.
Makes me wonder if an ancestor ate some lutefisk or something.
The primary purpose of language is understanding. Forking a language to convey some sort of cultural distinction has the unfortunate side effect of making this more difficult.
There is a very big aspect that people overlook in this conversation. There is what is known as the "dialect of power" and in the US that is Standard American English. It's not necessarily "wrong" to speak AAVE but in doing so, you will disqualify yourself from opportunities that could otherwise be open to you based on your education and/or experience. If someone calls you to schedule a job interview and you don't so…
You shouldn't have to. I recently started a role where I work very closely with a guy from southern Kansas. He speaks with an accent that I would associate with hicks, farmers, non-intellectuals. And true to form, he was raised on a farm. But he's smart, hard working and great to work with. Every day that we work together, I'm learning things that I wouldn't have otherwise understood. No one criticizes him for speaki…
As someone with a similar background to your friend, you don't code switch for the people who already respect you, it's for those whose respect you want. I wouldn't speak in my low-class, rural dialect around prospective employers or customers or anyone else I might want to perceive me as competent. There may well be a racial component to how AAVE speakers are treated, but the class component is non-negligible.
EDIT: Judging by the downvotes, a lot of people disagree with my experience. I'd love to hear your experiences or rationale.
Sure, and many rules of AAVE are more consistent. For instance take the following words in standard English: * yourself * myself * ourselves * himself * itself One of these things is not like the other! All of these take the form of possive + "self," except "himself." And sure enough, in AAVE we have "hisself" instead. A more logical, consistent replacement.
I recall that immigrant populations that don't integrate into the main population for long periods of time have a tendency to learn simplified versions of the original language. If I recall correctly, Old English lost a lot of its ornament when the Norse settled in Britain. EDIT: I'm puzzled by the downvotes. Am I mistaken? If so, I'm happy to be corrected.
You are probably thinking of Pidgins and Creoles[0], two very well studied linguistic categories that come about when two or more groups with no shared language come together (Pidgin) and then their children learn the Pidgin as a first language (morphing it into a Creole). AAVE is grammatically and functionally distinct from either a Pidgin or a Creole.
"grammatically incorrect" is an arbitrary value judgment, no matter how much you might assert or concern-troll otherwise.
No, it's not. It's just erroneous here; AAVE has an internally consistent grammar just as any other language does. I know quite a few people who code-shift between AAVE and standard American English, just as I do between that and the (admittedly somewhat less different) dialect of my youth. The remainder of Overtonwindow's comment flows from that error and one other, which is to assume that AAVE is a "degraded" form…
Yes, clearly. I just meant "… in a vacuum" or "… with the implicit understanding there is some _true_ grammar". In one sense, yes, utterances/productions can be grammatically incorrect with regard to a particular grammar under discussion, but if those utterances/productions can be said to be a part of that grammar, eventually the grammar needs to change to accurately describe the state of the world.
(Ultimately I have to think some of this comes down to "misperformance" where the speaker _knows_ their production is invalid. If enough speakers "misperform" but begin to hold the idea that these speech acts are not actually invalid, is that what tips the scales in favor of changing a grammar?)
You shouldn't have to. I recently started a role where I work very closely with a guy from southern Kansas. He speaks with an accent that I would associate with hicks, farmers, non-intellectuals. And true to form, he was raised on a farm. But he's smart, hard working and great to work with. Every day that we work together, I'm learning things that I wouldn't have otherwise understood. No one criticizes him for speaki…
> He speaks with an accent that I would associate with hicks, farmers, non-intellectuals. Having an accent isn't the same as speaking a dialect. For example, many Indians speak correct English, but their accent renders them near unintelligble. As a Texan, I'm always going to have a Texas accent, unless I take pains to minimize it. But I can easily switch to standard English, y'all.
Sometimes, you have to do the needful to get ahead at work.
There is a very big aspect that people overlook in this conversation. There is what is known as the "dialect of power" and in the US that is Standard American English. It's not necessarily "wrong" to speak AAVE but in doing so, you will disqualify yourself from opportunities that could otherwise be open to you based on your education and/or experience. If someone calls you to schedule a job interview and you don't so…
I'll echo some of the other commentors here on accents. I grew up in the East Bay of SF and we have SAE, an Okie accent from our dustbowl migrant forefathers, and a valley-girl/surfer twang too. I speak SAE in mixed company, the Okie with older relatives, the 'surfer' accent with close friends and family of my generation, and SAE when nieces, nephews and other children are around during holidays. We would prefer the next generation either develop their own accents or forget ours. I would not dare use anything but SAE with co-workers, bosses, or customers around. As many transplants to the Bay are on HN, it may surprise you that the people that grew up around you, even in SF Bay, have accents they do not share with you around. What is more interesting is the lexigraphic and accented differences between places like SF, the south Bay, Napa, and even Sacramento. It's not easy, but within a few minutes, I think I can still place the speaker from one of those location, though with the younger generation I may just be BSing.
Social trends in America are never framed in terms of class. Instead, we have to reach for other dimensions, in this case race. We could say it’s plain racism that keeps AAVE down. But it’s such an easy theory to falsify: it predicts that white non-standard English would be accepted at job interviews and in press rooms. It isn’t. So it looks like race is one explainer, but not the whole story. It could be a combinati…
Occam's razor can be a useful tool, but to conflate class with race ignores that in many ways, there is no economic status that can make black people as accepted and welcome as white people. Race is an important factor that can have more impact than class.