African American Vernacular English is not Standard English with Mistakes
stanford.edu
stanford.edu
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/wealthier. There'd be different allies and opponents on both sides, different arguments, and so on.
It's not hard to imagine some of the people most fiercely mocking AAVE would be its biggest champions, and some of its supports would be its largest detractors. Presenting the argument as a black/white thing makes it very different than presenting it as a geographical thing, or a rich/poor thing, or a formally educated/not thing, or an industrial/agricultural thing.
It really got my attention just after arriving when the brother of the bride to be, whose wedding I was there for, said while getting in his car, "Let's bounce."
Were I a sociologist I think studying the flow of culture from black Americans to southern Africans and trying to separate out the distinctively African elements of black American culture vs. the distinctive black American elements of southern African culture would be fascinating.
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 hypothetical cases, like all the speakers of a dialect dying off except one. So if you decide that no vernacular can embody mistakes, you're bound to conclude that nothing any individual does can be a mistake, so long as they do it consistently.
But lots of disciplines involving living things have problems like this. You can't "define" species. A species is a historical happenstance, which can only be precisely defined in retrospect with minute information we usually never have access to. You can spend all day coming up with corner cases and boundary conditions where any such attempt breaks down. But that's like deciding if a particular boulder in Panama is a North American one or a South American one. Just because those terms break down in boundary cases and are not like mathematics doesn't mean those terms aren't useful.
Things pertaining to human beings and culture are even more prone to this.
In the case of African American vernacular, there are sizable populations with high degrees of consistency in their patterns of speech. Quite far away from boundary conditions.
Another thing I've noted, since dating an African American woman and attending family gatherings with her, is that the manners and rules of social conduct of rural African Americans are more complex than I am accustomed to. When I am with her family, I have to think about how I'm going to excuse myself and navigate leaving a room. Otherwise, I never think about this. I reflected on this, and realized that it reminded me of watching Masterpiece Theater as a child. I'm probably witnessing throwbacks to French and English culture from centuries ago, still rippling though rural Louisiana.
Homo Sapiens are complex -- period. Even many so-called "country bumpkins."
Is that increased complexity, or merely lack of familiarity? I imagine someone coming to a large gathering of your family would also feel like there were new subtle rules to learn, etc.
I know that I have to think more about myself when I'm stuck in an unfamiliar social setting than in one I've spent lots of time in.
You seem to think I'm naively making some argument that depends on the words breaking down at boundary conditions. Actually I'm not. I believe a language spoken by just two people (or even one) is just as real a language as one spoken by millions-- that the difference in the way they're treated is a matter of politics, not the intrinsic qualities of the language.
I was also trying to provide support to the notion that, "the difference in the way they're treated is a matter of politics." Often, I'm replying to 3rd parties or countering common misconceptions in my "replies," which is probably trying to say too much in one post as well as leaving too much implicit.
In other words, I am grinding an axe here, but it's not directed at you.
A language spoken by exactly two would be very difficult to study. There are problems analogous to studying a species with only the last two individuals from which to draw data. I think there is some mechanism here that links the softer fields inextricably with politics. There is less academic "territory" to occupy, and so there is a handicap to the political power of academics who study that particular data, while at the same time, there's also often increased power that stems from scarcity. (Dead sea scrolls.)
EDIT: All human endeavors are linked with politics. "Softer" fields tend to be more encumbered.
This is exactly how languages evolve over time, actually. A group of individuals makes changes ("mistakes"), and is consistent in the usage of the new ("mistaken") forms over a given period of time.
If you didn't accept that, you'd be forced to conclude that we're all just very bad speakers of our modern languages' predecessors.
In effect, we're hard-wired to process language, and so are constrained by the limits of that wiring. A mutation ("mistake") that violates these rules will not 'stick', because the resulting language would be unintelligible to humans.
Where my father grew up, the dominant language was not Spanish but Caló, which is generally (incorrectly, in my opinion) considered a degenerate form of Spanish. Later on he had to catch up a lot in order to be taken seriously in international business.
He also learned Brasilian Portuguese, which started out as a regathering of various dialects of Lisbon Portuguese. It is a defacto language, and may become be widely recognized as such, given the political weight behind it.
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).
What I'm saying is that all vernaculars have consistently observed (surely you don't literally mean well-specified) grammatical rules. Their speakers couldn't understand one another otherwise. So if your definition of mistake = inconsistency, then (by definition) you'll never find a vernacular that embodies mistakes.
If a child (or someone who grew up in the language environment) made the "mistake" then it's an example of language change in action... unless the child is so young that it's simply a language learning artifact such as "I goed to the store today, daddy" (which, incidentally, is logically consistent with other past-tense forms yet ungrammatical b/c of social norms)...
The author drew a distinction between making a grammatical mistakes, and a vernacular dialect. He didn't claim that there were some vernacular dialects that embodied mistakes and others that didn't. I can't imagine any linguist who would.
Fair enough. When you said "vernacular variants" (as opposed to dialects) it sounded as if you were including all vernacular variants including simple grammatical mistakes, sporadic use of slang, etc.
What I'm saying is that all vernaculars have consistently observed (surely you don't literally mean well-specified) grammatical rules.
I agree that all vernacular dialects have consistent rules. And you're right, I did mean consistently observed, not well-specified.
If you were raised in a household and exposed to proper English input, your native language is proper English. You have accomplished nothing other than learning the language you were exposed to. Similarly, if you are born into a household that speaks Spanish or AAVE or Dutch (and are fed and otherwise not abused too significantly), you will learn one of those languages and become a fluent speaker without any conscious effort.
AAVE is no more "improper" Standard English than Spanish is improper Standard English.
Of course, if you're taking a course in school on Standard English and you choose to turn in a paper written in AAVE (or Spanish), you are likely not to get an A.
If you think you disagree with me in some way, could you point out a sentence I wrote that you believe is false, and explain why it is?
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 (which, incidentally, change over time just as languages do). It is my opinion that someone named, say, Shanikwa had about as much control over her name as anyone else does over his/her native grammar, and those who judge someone on the basis of their name are just as much playing the social judgment card as those who judge a person's native grammar. Doing so is purely a social status play, and has no useful/pragmatic significance or objective superiority.
The fact is, language changes over time like any other fashion. If you don't like a particular grammar or a particular fashion that is a matter of taste. I can look at someone's outfit and say "ooh, fashion mistake", but is there really any reason why I would find doing so useful?
You can make the argument that using Standard English (and wearing a suit) are useful social conventions to adopt when going to a job interview, but I think the usefulness of either judgment ends there.
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 get from this thing that's close to standard English, the more likely you are to sound incompetent or incomprehensible.
If someone comes into a job interview -- or YC interview -- speaking AAVE, or some wildly non-standard form of English, they're probably signaling that they haven't figured out how to speak, if not "proper" English, then a form of English that will allow them to communicate with high-level technical workers. They're not likely to get the job or the funding or the lawsuit won or whatever it is that they're trying to accomplish. _That's_ the problem.
There isn't a central authority because there doesn't need to be: as Foucault might argue, there are merely different loci of power or force that tend to create webs of what is acceptable or not in a given situation.
"The fact is, language changes over time like any other fashion. If you don't like a particular grammar or a particular fashion that is a matter of taste."
Which is all very interesting until you're applying for a job or writing a research paper and you can't write something very close to standard English, at which point you're not going to be able to achieve what you want to.
"You can make the argument that using Standard English (and wearing a suit) are useful social conventions to adopt when going to a job interview, but I think the usefulness of either judgment ends there."
I don't. The fundamental issue is what you signal and how efficiently you communicate. Whether you wear a suit or not has little to do with how you communicate verbally or in writing; whether you can speak something akin to standard English matters enormously.
The problem comes then when we try to say "this is Standard English <refer to guide on 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.
A more apt example would be Swiss and high German, which are (aside from the fact that Swiss Germans are also fluent in high German) mutually incomprehensible. To a high German speaker, Swiss German sounds decidedly silly and has moderately different grammar. However since there's no conflation of social class with the Swiss German dialect, the comparison of Swiss and high German is much less politicized than AAVE and standard American English.
Austrian German, on the other hand, is virtually identical to standard high German grammatically – it just sounds funny and has a few regionalisms in its vocabulary: kind of like the difference between American and British English.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect#.22Dialect.22_or_.22lan...
I think usually the difference (as mentioned in the OT's paper) is more political than linguistic.
Luxembourgish is identical to the local German accent - but one is an official language while just over the border it's a dialect
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 favorable judgment. Any teacher who ignores this fact does a disservice to the students.
From the article: "Yet opinion writers proceeded to fall upon the topic like starving dogs attacking a bone. They ridiculed, they sneered, they frothed, they flamed, they raged, they lived off the story for weeks."
This kind of language just doesn't show up in secondary education guides. It's clearly about demonizing the opposition.
This is probably the best one line summary of the issue I've ever read.
I learned two things that are equally true and somewhat self-contradictory. 1) Language is a continuum, not a rigid thing. There is no right or wrong language. If you are communicating you're doing it right. 2) Most all societies have a "high" language and a "low" language. Sometimes there are multiple layers. People who want to move in better circles learn to conform and work fluently in the "high" language.
The continuum question was especially interesting. Is Old French just bad Latin? Or is it a different language? What about those languages that have one spoken form and two written forms? The same language with different names because of political considerations? Lots of neat history and trivia here. I really enjoyed the series.
AAVE isn't correct or incorrect any more than gravity is correct or incorrect. They both exist; it's our job to study them.
Putting AAVE into a box labeled "incorrect English" is just a way to avoid the hard work of understanding our world.
And yes, the "academic" understanding of AAVE includes the sociolinguistic aspects denoting class, race, education, etc.
Simple, because of perception. Whether you like it or not perception matters. If I perceive your car as worth your selling price, a deal happens - doesn't mean my perception over yours is any more "correct". Same happens with stock prices, or hiring decisions. In other words, the things that matter in the day-to-day life in which we currently function include dictionaries and grammar books.
I agree that perception matters. For instance, a bad perception could mean you buy a worthless car, or make a bad hiring decision. It doesn't mean, however, that the car was worth your money, or that the bad employee was worth hiring.
Same thing about AAVE. If it has been proved that this is a dialect of English, it is a dialect of English. No matter how delusional the majority of the population can be.
But it's the difference between recognizing AAVE as its own thing, sociolinguistic warts and all, and labeling it as "broken English."
Linguistics isn't just about grammar (in fact, in linguistics "grammatical" is basically synonymous with "understood by a native speaker"), it's also about the signals we send when we speak a certain way (semantics and sociolinguistics).
Labeling AAVE as "broken English" is just a way of dismissing it and giving ourselves an excuse for not understanding it.
For example, I know plenty of successful people who have poor grammar. But nobody goes around saying they speak "broken English," and if I pointed that out everyone would think I'm an asshole.
Why don't people react the same way when we say someone speaking AAVE has "broken English?" Why is it ok to point out how "poorly" they speak?
Anyhow, all I mean to say is that the proper study of AAVE includes the idea that speaking it signals certain things about the speaker, not just its syntax, morphology, etc.
I recommend reading the research of William Labov, who has ton of work in studying the various dialects of American English.
Telling that to kids can only have good effects. First, it is telling them that they're not retarded —and neither are their parents. Second, it makes a clear separation between AAVE an standard English. They are two separate dialects, so, students should learn both. Third, if speaking standard English is "correcting errors", it may be percieved as a loss of Identity, "acting white" or whatever. If it is "speaking another language", this can't really be seen as such. For instance, I don't lose my French identity by writing English.
If the entire world sees AAVE as incorrectly spoken English without investigating furter, the entire world is simply mistaken. Kids should learn to correct the entire world's mistakes, not to do them.
I disagree. I think the mistake you are making is the focus around what is or is not "error". It's not about that. My friend from Argentina constantly strives to improve his American English, rather than his AAVE, regardless of your insistence of the validity of AAVE. He now works in an office on the 17th floor where he hires people, and I knew him when he knew no English. Like it or not it does makes a difference.
Quite possibly, especially if he had the accent to match, considering the success of James Bond movies in America.
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.
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.
Rastafarian use of 'Me' for 'I' makes sense and is consistent.
Using 'bad' to mean 'good' probably isn't a good idea if you are an aircraft mechanic.
Without rules, there's no way to break them, and thus no meaning for "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.)
A dialect that lacks prestige is no less a dialect for it — that was one of the points of the article.
However to accept it as a legitimate dialect is another thing. If your child spoke that way you would constantly correct them, for their own good. It'd be much better for all involved to redefine "dialect" to not include something that devolved from another language via mistakes made by dumb rednecks who can't understand the concept of a double negative.
If we call that a dialect, then the very word "dialect" is broken.
Then, I suppose, the word dialect is broken. :)
There's a long history of vernacular dialects lacking prestige and casting aspersions on their speakers. Shakespeare, notably, wrote his plays in the vernacular to connect with his audiences. [1] Chaucer did the same with Canterbury Tales. [2] Of course we forget that now because we revere those authors as purveyors of great literature.
To call it a dialect may be technically correct, if you're merely arguing semantics. However to accept it as a legitimate dialect is another thing. If your child spoke that way you would constantly correct them, for their own good.
Matt, I'm a young, intelligent, black male in America: I would never let my kids grow up speaking AAVE exclusively. Trust me. But neither I nor the author are arguing the prestige of the dialect.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare%27s_influence#The_c...
Are the two mutually exclusive? Can one dialect not be simply another with mistakes?
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 basis they simply screw up the task of speaking Standard American English. This is a subtle but non-trivial difference: one point of view is about culture while the other is fundamentally about intelligence.
Because many people hold the latter view, I was taught by my parents to avoid speaking AAVE. For similar reasons, I was taught to avoid Pittsburghese[1] even though I grew up with it in school.
Are the two mutually exclusive? Can one dialect not be simply another with mistakes?
I think it comes down to my earlier question: What is any dialect or derived language but a set of consistent mistakes with respect to the ancestor language? More to the point, either all dialects have mistakes or none do. The only difference I can see is the prestige involved.
So I guess her argument that mistakes + tradition = dialect seems silly to me. Even if its true by the dictionary definition of "dialect" it's a harmful viewpoint to take.
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.
People don't speak AAVE because they're lazy or dumb. They speak AAVE because they grew up where everyone else speaks AAVE.
If the South had won the Civil War you might not think using double negatives, double modals, etc. were a sign of stupidity -- AAVE and Southern (white) English share many common syntactic and morphological features.