languages (Ebonics)

From: sjm <sethm_at_loomcom.com>
Date: Thu Mar 9 12:55:38 2000

> I think that trend to continue as long as social activists try to promote
> gibberish as language, as the ebonics debacle.

I hate to be pedantic, but "Ebonics" really is called Black English
Vernacular (BEV) by linguists, and has been a recognized form of
spoken english by linguists for at least 30 years. It was made most
famous in Linguistics circles by William Lebov's paper "Language
in the inner city: studies in the Black English Vernacular" in 1972.

BEV follows strict rules of grammar and word use, and has syntactic
roots in several major west African languages like Ewe, Iwo,
and Yoruba. It really is not gibberish at all, no matter how
"wrong" it sounds to a native Standard American English speaker
(me included). In some ways, it actually allows much finer grained
shades of meaning than SAE does. In some ways, less. That's how
different languages work. But the fact that it follows a definable
complex grammar can't be debated, it's been studied to death by
linguists everywhere.

How the Oakland School Board was using BEV for its own purposes is
an entirely different matter which I won't even begin to touch on.
That's politics, not language.

For a real thrill, try finding information on the dialect of English
spoken on Ocracoke Island in North Carolina. Although it's dying out
now, there still remain a few native inhabitants of the island who
can speak it. They were mainly descended from Scottish immigrants
who were more or less entirely cut off from the mainland when
shipping lanes changed in the 18th century, and left to develop
their own dialect and speech rules over the course of the next two
hundred years.

(Yes, I was a linguistics major. No, I haven't done anything useful
with it. That's why I'm a programmer now.)

-Seth
Received on Thu Mar 09 2000 - 12:55:38 GMT