yes the internet is cool but i wish we could be having this discussion in a bar (or pub) and with a lot of beer. and some decent, greasy food. ah that would be so much more entertaining.

A lot of poor Southern/Appalachian white culture is isolated from "standard" English speakers as well, and there is a long history of a different sort of entrenched underclass in those areas also. Do they get a break? No. They hear a language much different from "standard" English when they go home at night too. I think it's much the same thing, but applied differently to different groups.
Perhaps for the sake of consistency, we should also provide education in the native languages of legal immigrants, since they are citizens too?
Of course not, because that gets very messy, difficult and expensive.
Dialects are fine, but jeeziz.
I speak differently when meeting strangers, doing a job interview or writing a paper or a press release than I do when I'm talking to my friends.
We all do.

I know I'm totally horning in on a discussion that doesn't involve me, but I suppose I have a question about this claim (without having read the article either, so I'm going to do that in a bit).

I wouldn't necessarily take issue with whether or not Ebonics qualifies as a structured variety of speech. I realize there are rules for its usage, and that terminology and grammatical structure are not random and arbitrary within it. However, I question why there is a difficulty in learning standard English at all for someone whose oft-used dialect is Ebonics.

As !@#$%! points out (and I'm loosely translating), language has a historical and cultural base that, considering the numerous mitigating factors, can differ drastically from region to region and even subculture to subculture. However, Ebonics is a 'constructed' dialect, a language that's almost built from the ground up without precedent by its users, and evolving much more quickly and dynamically than any other language. It is constantly modified to correlate with the ever-changing sociological trends in society, adopting new words and discarding old ones as quickly and easily as high school slang.

Ebonics is one of the most highly adaptable, and easily adapted to, 'dialects' in existence! There is simply no logical reason why people who default to Ebonics should have any more difficulty than anyone else learning standardized English. If anything, they should be more capable.

hello bro, you just discovered bilingual education. works quite well! :D

--
ps a little reference material here

I have no problem with bilingual education.
Ebonics, however, is ENGLISH.

Also, in ESL classes that supplement bilingual education to new citizens to help them get along better in their new country, I'm pretty sure they teach "standard" English.

no, it's NOT!! that's the whole damn point

from a linguistics point of view it's not

it has different GRAMMAR

it's not just a few words

--

here's the article (i'm not saying wikipedia is god btw, but it's pretty illustrative):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebonics

All dialects differ.
I can understand people speaking in Ebonics.
I cannot understand people speaking Polish.
It's English. A particular dialect of English, true, but English it is.

Savage Clone brings up an excellent point.

I lived in Ireland for about a year awhile back, and when I first arrived, it nearly was a foreign language to me. The idioms were so numerous, I had to constantly ask for translations. Even those differed from county to county, even town to town.

Now, I find myself not just well versed in certain Irish dialects, but having incorporated quite a few of their speech habits unconsciously into my own way of speaking.

Not only is it relatively easy to familiarize yourself with a certain manner of speaking when you have the desire to, it's actually DIFFICULT to avoid doing so. You have to make a CONSCIOUS EFFORT not to adapt to a 'language' you are exposed to, simply because it is a natural human cognitive behavior to attempt to adopt a skill that contributes to survival/ease of living. A simple desire to communicate will create a proclivity to assimilate in a foreign setting.

I reiterate - the inability to learn standardized English is nonexistent. It is an unwillingness.

we need more beer :D
---

it's more of a creole than a dialect.

see, what i was trying to illustrate with my examples from spanish colonial times, is that the definitions of "language" and "dialect" are not so much scientifically based as they are political.

how come we don't say that english is a dialect of german?
politics
how come we don't say italian, spanish, french and romanian are dialects of latin?
politics! the rise of the nation-state...
how come we don't recognize north-african, syrian and saudi arab as different languages?
politics!!
this is a huge debate among linguists... the categories are not so clear-cut

sure you don't understand polish because it's a slavic language, but say if hitler had won ww2, germans could be making fun of you for your "funny german" (yes i exaggerate, but only to make a point). languages and dialects are differentiated more for political than linguistic reasons is my point... if not more at least 50-50...

I've edited my last post, it took me a while and you lot have gone and said some other things now which I'm going to have to respond to. I'm going to do a Marleypumpkin and insist that you go back to the end of page 2 and read my post.

Did you read my post?

Did you read my post yet?













Oh, I do make myself laugh sometimes.

If the whole point of teaching an Ebonics curriculum is to give credit to the intellectual capacity of capable students who don't "sound smart" because they write in their own dialect, doesn't it seem strange to assume that these same capable students could not easily learn to write in the standard that exists in the country of their birth?
I don't view this as the same situation that a new immigrant faces; a new immigrant could be the smartest person in the world and get poor grades because of a genuine language barrier. I simply do not belive there are very many people who live in America their whole lives and are so isolated from "standard" English that they just CANNOT pick it up. Especially in urban areas, which are the places that Ebonics flourishes and continues its incredibly rapid evolutionary process.

When English started, it was a dialect of German.
It's been a long time.

how come we don't say italian, spanish, french and romanian are dialects of latin?

Umm, we do. We lump them together in a group called "Romance languages," and they are far easier to learn once you know one of them than it is to learn, say, Mandarin.

when did it cease to be one? :)

hah hah a "marleypumpkin"

hold on...

!@#$%!, you're funny when you're obstinate (seriously).
Would it help If I admitted that perhaps in a thousand years, Ebonics could be sufficiently different to standard English that it could be regarded as its own language?
In a thousand years, English will hardly sound like English.

Haha Glice!

I might be deviating from the issue here, because the categorization of Ebonics is completely irrelevant to the point (however fucktarded it may be) that I'm trying to make.

I don't care if it's a language, a dialect, a patois, a goddamn pate.

I can understand it, and I rarely, if ever use it.

MORE IMPORTANTLY, THOSE WHO SPEAK EBONICS CAN UNDERSTAND ME.

I don't have much linguistic training either, but I'm going to be an asshole here and assert that that doesn't make a damn bit of difference. I don't care if, when you deconstruct it, ebonics comes from another planet. I don't care if it has a varied grammatical structure that qualifies it as a separate language. It is a modified, modifiable, dynamic offshoot of American English, and many parts of it have come into existence after the fact.

IT IS SLANG.

And, I must repeat, no one who habitually 'speaks' Ebonics can claim to have a language barrier with someone who speaks standardized English.

They understand it. They are exposed to it more frequently than Ebonics. It is, as Glice pointed out, racial politics that drives its usage.

To be frank, I think it's deplorable to use this as an excuse not to conform to an educational standard. It is lazy, contentious, and spiteful, and only serves to deepen the racial divide.

BULLSHIT, I tell you, BULLSHIT.

i'm not "obstinate" (but i hope im funny!), and i enjoy a discussion :D
i mean a decent one like we're having here-- not like arguing with khchris, with the insults & the personal attacks and the ego trips (yikes)
the question as i see is who has the truth? nobody.. but a little discussion helps to clarify things-- i enjoy that a lot
as a card-carrying geek one of my greatest sources of amusement is to discuss things with friends.... one of the reasons i was tempted by gradschool.

anyway I OWN THE TRUTH AND I WILL IMPART IT FROM MY ETHEREAL HEIGHTS
hah hah-- no way :D

no, but i'm looking at this not from the point of view of politics, but of linguistics instead, and the practical approaches to education-- because the educational system is absolutely fucked up.

one important note i'd like to make here-- i'm a native spanish speaker. i didn't learn english until i was like 14. not sure if this transpires in my prose. my pronounciation however is quite atrocious, hah hah, as phonetics gets frozen at an early age.

but my point is that i learned english AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE and **already having mastery of my own**. so it was easy! if you don't have mastery of ANY language, it makes any kind of learning much harder. that's the whole point of bilingual education programs-- hang on to a language and introduce the other bit by bit.

with african american vernacular english (i'm going to drop the term "ebonics" now), a similar approach to that of bilingual education has proven successful, and yet IT HASN'T BEED ADOPTED BECAUSE OF POLITICS. which proves to me that politicians make shitty scientists. just listen to bush on global warming and you'll see what i mean!

"Wot's da jackinory wit ya mate?"

Didn't take me night classes and linguist specialists to learn that that meant "Hey, what's going on?"

Not only that, I NEVER used idiomatic phrases like that (they just sounded too strange in an American accent), yet, even without the educational benefit of putting them into practice, I was still more than capable of translating them. I was exposed to them, and had the desire to understand, so the rest just happened naturally.

There are other, minute speech differences in this US/UK example - I found myself saying "as well" rather than "too," and structuring inquisitions differently. For example, while an American would more typically say

"You didn't go out Friday night?"

in Ireland/the UK they'd be more likely to say

"Did you not go out Friday night?"

Americans tend to use contractions much more than the Irish.

I personally think tiny nuances like that are much harder to adopt, as they're very slight variations on the way you 'fundamentally' construct your sentences, and therefore much more easily overlooked.

So if that can be done, there's no goddamn reason in the world why you can't change "Gimme my props yo" to "Lend me some credit" in a school paper.

well if you replace "jackinory" w/ "deal" you have an expression you already know. no change in grammar. just vocabulary & a bit of phonetics not too hard.

hah hah but in the school papers, my point, my whole point, was,
-assuming it's the same language tends to confuse things
-showing it's a different language clarifies not only the problem but also the objectives of the class (learn to speak like "whitey" so you can get a mortgage) :D

--
ps i hope everyone in this discussion is having a good time. i am. :)

OK, first off, I am glad this is a fun discussion and not a bitter argument, because we're all friends.
Secondly, !@#$%!, I had no idea you were not a native English speaker. Awesome. You're one of the best writers on this board!
I actually have no problem with people teaching in whatever dialect dominates the region the students and teachers live in, but a standardized form of "common English" needs to be learned as well. That way we can all understand each other.
Dialects proved problematic for certain jobs, like ambulance drivers communicating with dispatchers, etc. There is a particular standard of speech that is followed as radio protocol in jobs like that. I don't see how learning "standard english" for writing, for news broadcasts, etc is difficult or problematic.
Teaching in a language that gives people the most education they can absorb is important, but we all live in the same country and it's important to have a universal standard so we can communicate effectively between regions and subcultures.
If you grow up speaking an English dialect in an English speaking country, standard English is hardly a "challenge" to learn to use when you need to use it.
That's all I'm saying.

I would never have known English wasn't your first language if you hadn't pointed it out. You write it nearly impeccably.


I'll continue to assert that whether or not that approach is successful, that approach shouldn't be necessary in the first place.

How do those who 'speak' Ebonics (I'm not really sure how to phrase that) not have an existing mastery of a language? If they are able to communicate universally amongst a particular group of people, that constitutes a mastery. They are in no way at a linguistic disadvantage in comparison to anyone else.

yes yes yes i agree w/ you completely-- people NEED to speak english
but not because it's "proper"-- just because it's the language of power and if you don't want to be disenfranchised fool you have to play the game.
but it's a game-- a survival game-- a play, a mask you need to learn to wear...
it's just the method of teaching i disagree with-- assuming that people "should know it already" hasn't brought very good results. so, my point: teach it as a 2nd language & everything becomes clear as night :D

We all wear masks at times and we are all whores.
Life in the modern world.

there's an oral profficiency but no reading or writing or content learning in AAVE (AAVE= "ebonics"). that's what bilingual programs do. so if you're a ghetto kid you speak one language but have to write a different one. and you are never taught to write what you speak, and don't get a lot of practice at home with your written language. am i making sense?

If you already speak that way, how hard is it to write in your own vernacular?
Learning how to write in a universal standard is the challenge.

reading, writing, grammar, content knowledge, it's all deliverd in the OTHER language that's not your vernacular; at the same time you don't learn any science math or say geography (?) in your own vernacular. the problem with this is that it interferes w/ your whole cognitive development and schooling as your brain tries to straddle both language systems. if you are offered some curriculum in your own vernacular & then "proper english" gets introduced, it's much easier to adapt-- that's what the research shows.

Like I said before, people can go ahead and teach in the vernacular that dominates their region, but eventually there must be some kind of common standard so we can comminucate across regional and subcultural lines in the same country.
And I still maintain that AAVE is English. The "E" stands for English!

Very small children are also fully capable of absorbing two languages simultaneously.

AAVE also evolves so quickly that any structured "curriculum" in it will inevitably be somewhat behind the curve.

This is fun, too much actually. I'm neglecting obligations, I have to get my ass off this board.

I agree with Savage Clone in that in order for American society to function effectively and fluidly, standards need to be adopted. That's just the way it is, and that is a global universality. I might like to speak Spanish (which I do very poorly, if at all really) or pig Latin, but I recognize that in order to operate within any society, I have to conform to its adopted standard of communication in order to be at all functional.

!@#$%!, you may see such enforcement of standardization as a white political agenda. I on the other hand see the resistance to the standard as a reactionary black political agenda.

These language differences have NOTHING to do with race. It's simple practicality. The implementation of a communication standard isn't an attempt to rob anyone of his ethnic identity; I could claim that not being allowed to use Chicago slang in a thesis is discriminatory - why should I have to abandon my cultural roots to conform to a standard of academia? The standard exists to broaden the lines of communication amongst a diverse population. If anything, it is an attempt to narrow cultural gaps rather than widen them. The standard happens to be based upon Anglo English, because for one thing, it's got to be based on something, doesn't it? How the hell else could it exist? And it's based on Anglo English simply because, historically (at least after colonization), THAT IS THE PREVALENT LANGUAGE IN THIS COUNTRY. It would be positively MORONIC to base the standard on a minority language.

But we're all PC and pansy-assed and modern and sensitive these days, so if something popular or mainstream or 'standard' can be attributed to the white majority, well, it must be racist, musn't it?

"White" standard English isn't racist. It's simple logic, convenience, and effectiveness. Claiming that adopting such a standard is the manifestation of a white political agenda is the equivalent of me going to Poland and bitching about not being able to understand anyone.

Like it or not, that's just the way it is. Life's a bitch.

yo, mes amis, i gotta leave this fine establishment of known as the motor-hotel, with it's free internet, and get on the road. or i finna get on the road (??). thanks for the conversation and i hope i can afford a motel w/ internet for tonight :D

Sorry, but that still doesn't fly with me (I know I'm probably being obstinate now). We've come full circle back to Glice's question, which is how drastically Ebonics differs from standard English. Again, I don't care how you deconstruct it, the difference is far from drastic enough to pose a learning problem.

You are taught in standardized English from the moment you begin schooling which, for the most part, is around 4 or 5 years old. As Savage Clone pointed out, children whose first language is one other than English, but who are educated at a relatively young age in English, adopt English in a flash.

In fact, a friend of mine whose native language is Polish moved to the States when she was four. She speaks Polish in her home, her parents speak no English whatsoever, but, because she began schooling in America as a child, speaks English as fluently as if it were her native language. More significantly, she has a lot of difficulty writing properly in Polish, and speaking it "formally," despite it being her native language. She simply does not have occasion to do either of those things, and therefore never learned.

She is now in medical school after having graduated Cornell with honors.

Talk about differences in language!

I will boldly state that those who use Ebonics and claim they or their children cannot adapt to standardized English are, plain and simple,

JACKASSES

and it's an insult to try and pass that shit off as a race issue.

Have a safe drive, and remember to watch out for those nose-pickers.

Good, this is a good excuse for me to get the hell out of here as well.

God I'm such a geek, I love these debates.

Jackasses, eh?
Is that some kind of highbrow academic term?
I don't understand you.

You gotta be trippin' yo, I knows you ain't no foo'.

Ok, that was probably in poor taste. Sorry.

Yeah, ordinarily you are the gold standard for tact.
I'm shocked.

Fuckin' right I am. My elocution and delightful femininity should be a paradigm to all young women.

I Admire you fashionable running shoes

Drop them nikes of yo ass before i blast you Mother Fucker

chomsky explains of ebonics (or black vernacular english) that, in essence, "standard english" is taught and expected to be learned in schools because it's the dominant language of power. he then goes on to explain that if suddenly, people speaking BVE were reaching positions of power en masse, that BVE would carry with it a sense of prestige. chomsky also explains that in touring universities in the hinterlands of the US, he often comes upon locales where he can't understand anyone around him, and they're speaking english. he says that upon enquiry regarding local dialects, it's generally revealed that "standard english" must be taught to those individuals while they're enrolled in the university so that they can communicate effectively with recruiters from IBM and the like.

chomsky has a lot to say about ebonics. essentially, however, his discussions are purely conceptual in nature and revolve around power dynamics and social oppression. essentially, if you examine his arguments, he says that, "in an insular and perfect world where a member of community A will never venture beyond her community, her dialect should be celebrated and encouraged."

well, sure. that's great. but it does more to perpetuate a horribly unbalanced power dynamic against community A if their community is not absolutely insulated from those beyond it. in my opinion, it's helpful to have a mastery of the tools of the oppressor if you want to give weight to tools beyond their reach. does hip hop do this? is it a way to use the white power structure to deliver a little trojan bomb of BVE to white ears? maybe.

hurricane katrina brought international attention to ray nagin. his quotes were often peppered with BVEisms. sharpton used BVEisms on the campaign trail. the black panthers used BVEisms. black celebrities use BVEisms in press. oprah even uses them when she needs to whip her audience into a frenzy.

do any of you believe though, that the most powerful of the people mentioned above do not have a complete, functional mastery over the language of the oppressor? do any of you believe that they would have been just as well served--or better served--by having been encouraged to communicate **exclusively** in BVE throughout school?

that's my only concern with BVE. of course it's a practical means to colloquial verbal discussion. of course it has its own structure. of course people are often saturated in it. the rub is in the notion that not everyone is immersed in it. if you have a school of 3000 black kids in the bronx (which my mom taught at for 15 years) i can tell you from first hand experience that not every student there wants to be institutionally exposed to BVE. should their education then be made a process whereby they go home to do their homework for an english language writing class and rigorously adhere to the rules of grammar and structure conveyed to them in class, while another student sitting next to them ignores what they'd both had equal exposure to in class and hands in a paper disregarding every rule they had learned--and both receive an equal grade based on politically correct relativism or teacher apathy?

i'm well aware of BVE's ability to fit linguistics' mold of language. i've never claimed that it wasn't a language or a dialect. what i do claim, however, is that schools theoretically exist to teach a program. if two students are enrolled in the same school, exposed to the same program, each has an equal **opportunity** to come away with the same mastery of what is taught. it's both an educator's and a student's prerogative to subvert that opportunity thru either apathy, frustration, political correctness, fear or ennui. i seriously believe that if 10% of the students in a class can come away from that class with an ability to express that they've learned something from it, then ALL of the students had the same opportunity to gain at least what that 10% had learned. i think testing and grading are ridiculous, but as students are in those boxes for 8-10 hours a day, they might as well go home with something to show for their time.

that's my basic point. argue away as you wish.