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African American Vernacular English Is Not Standard English with Mistakes (1999) [pdf]
- raverbashing 10y agoWell, to be honest it is. In the same way English is (especially spoken one), "mistakes" from the languages that preceded it.
- jordigh 10y agoSure, but the article is trying to reduce social stigma against linguistic varieties. I have a long-lost-now-found sister who grew up in French Switzerland and in black culture in NYC . She's basicaly bilingual in both standard English and in AAVE (as well as Spanish and Swiss French). It's really interesting to hear her switch from AAVE with her rapper friends and coworkers to standard English with everyone else. She will conjugate verbs differently, which is the most obvious change to me, as AAVE has a richer verb system than standard English: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_American_Vernacular_English#Tense_and_aspect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_American_Vernacular_En...
- dudul 10y agoCool link. It's interesting to see that it seems to be a dialect that is not based on geography, but based on race and income. On a side note, as a non native English speaker, the double negative always sounds really awful to me :) You can call it dialect all you want, it just doesn't make any sense.
- skywhopper 10y agoLots of languages use multiple negative words to reinforce the negative meaning. Whether it makes sense depends on whether you interpret words like "not" as Boolean operators that "toggle" a binary value or whether you see them as indicators of a negative state that reinforce each other to serve as indicators of intensity or certainty. Since "standard" Engliah doesn't use "double negatives" anyway I feel it's more of a clever overloading than a logical paradox.
- halomru 10y agoWith all other words relating to absence of negation English uses the "binary toggle" interpretation (which is only binary as long as the described concept is binary). For example "Nobody is never not doing it" is equivalent to "nobody is at least sometimes doing it" is equivalent to "everybody never does it". Two negations on different parts of the sentence also don't reinforce each other: "not everyone is not doing it" if equivalent to "some people are doing it". To me treating double negative as reinforcement of the negation is a weird, unintuitive corner case that doesn't fit in the broader framework of the English language.
- tptacek 10y agoYou're of course welcome to present your own analysis on how negation and double-negation fit into the broader framework of the English language. But be aware that these kinds of arguments bear striking similarities to the arguments we have about the singular "they", which someone on a message board will always seem to have ironclad logical arguments against, only to find their argument foiled by incontrovertible evidence of its acceptability in Standard English.
- unclenoriega 10y agoTreating multiple negation as reinforcement may be weird and unintuitive to you, but earlier English speakers would disagree. In fact, it is the "binary toggle" negation that is the impostor in English, having been grafted from Latin by 18th century grammarians. http://www.macmillandictionaryblog.com/aint-nothin-wrong-with-no-double-negatives http://www.macmillandictionaryblog.com/aint-nothin-wrong-wit...
- skywhopper 10y agoDouble negatives as reinforcement fit just fine in several English dialects. Whether they do so in _your_ dialect is something you can judge. But any argument that depends on language features being "intuitive" or avoiding "corner cases" doesn't take into account how human language actually works. Double negatives would hardly be the most unintuitive feature of English.
- tptacek 10y agoYou should re-read the essay, which spends considerable time on the double negative. Ironically, not speaking English might make a reader more comfortable with double-negatives, which are, for instance, a feature of mainstream Italian.
- mikeash 10y agoFrench too, and you'd be hard-pressed to find a language more stuffy or proscriptive. How many languages have a 400-year-old state-sponsored committee whose sole purpose is to guide the language? It's amazing how difficult it is for people to get past the trap of thinking that what's familiar is "correct."
- wnoise 10y agoI don't want to call these usages in any of AAVE, French or Italian (the ones I've seen usage of) double negatives. They're doubly marked, but it's just one negative.
- throwaway6436 10y ago> dialect that is not based on geography, but based on race and income. The PC is strong with this one. Couldn't you just say, dialect spoken by poor black people? Don't worry, using plain words won't make you a racist.
- michaelchisari 10y agoMost people who haven't been exposed to AAVE don't realize that it has rules, and grammar, just like Standard English. That's why when people who don't speak AAVE try and "fake it", it doesn't sound right at all. It's not just an accent with some slang words thrown in.
- PaulRobinson 10y agoTo refer to these variations as a "mistake" is the problem. The English I am using to write this comment would be incomprehensible to my great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents. The version we are using here is acceptable because it is the form that those in power have accepted. To assume a variation is incorrect because the elites have rejected usage of that version makes the argument extremely political. Perhaps we should just accept it is an evolving language and vernaculars, dialects and variations are perfectly fine. If it is useful to a community to teach one of those in their schools rather than RP/Queen's English/Standard English, to decry that and insist it is wrong is to make a political argument about the right to identity as a community.
- Bromskloss 10y ago> To refer to these variations as a "mistake" is the problem. But, surely, some variations are mistakes, whereas others might have come about as a deliberate and thought out breaking of an existing rule.
- TazeTSchnitzel 10y agoNative speakers do make mistakes, but a persistent “mistake” which is an ordinary feature of how many people speak, is perhaps not such a thing at all.
- Bromskloss 10y agoIt came about as a mistake, that's what I'm concentrating on.
- ebfbsf 10y agoBut since you've already acknowledged that this is equally true of all dialects (that they form as a result of "mistakes") then why are you concentrating on it especially in regard to AAVE? Hmm...
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- rmc 10y ago"mistake" is a loaded term, which includes a meaning of being wrong, and deserving of being erradicated; so much so that people don't use it for Standard English. But people who are using it for AAVE are intentionally trying to use the loaded meaning of "mistake"
- erehweb 10y agoWould you also accept "Standard English is AAVE with mistakes"?
- raverbashing 10y agoNo because AAVE came from Standard English
- dang 10y agoLet's not have middlebrow dismissals of entire branches of linguistics, please. I'm sure Pullum is more aware than you and I are of how language evolves via "mistakes".
- kaitai 10y agoBoth assertions there are false. There are lots of loan words (are those mistakes?), new words (like internet -- a mistake?), plain disagreements (I am strongly in favor of the Oxford comma yet apparently intelligent people disagree), and different grammatical structures surviving from historical sources. Remember, there are Appalachian dialects based on Elizabethan English [1]. Should we all switch to that, since it's more "authentically" English? I bet they don't have words for half the foods you could eat in San Francisco. Evolution is not always just by way of mistakes! [1] http://www.wvculture.org/history/journal_wvh/wvh30-2.html http://www.wvculture.org/history/journal_wvh/wvh30-2.html
- jmcm 10y agoObviously. -Linguist
- AimHere 10y agoIndeed. But sadly, its very much non-obvious to an overlarge proportion of the population. In fact, plenty of nonexperts think it's obviously not the case. I reckon this is because people speak language throughout their lives and therefore believe themselves to be experts, and by extension, any linguistic judgments they make (which almost always line up with some old fashioned racial/regional/class- or even gender-based bigotry) are facts. So it goes.
- ebfbsf 10y agoExcept AAVE gets this treatment much, much more heavily. It's racism plain and simple. Every time this topic comes up on HN the response is totally predictable.
- AimHere 10y agoSure. That's probably a comment on the level of racism against African Americans (and the distinctness of the dialect) compared to the other forms of bigotry out there.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago> I reckon this is because people speak language throughout their lives and therefore believe themselves to be experts, and by extension, any linguistic judgments they make (which almost always line up with some old fashioned racial/regional/class- or even gender-based bigotry) are facts. It's common about everything people tend to do regularly. It's like many are missing the distinction between being good at doing something and being good at the meta-level, being good at reasoning about that something. One helps with the others, but they're distinct skills. Sure, most people are experts in communicating using a language, but they're no more experts of the language itself than a person digging ditches their whole life is automatically a shovel expert or a civil engineer. (Similarly, the time when most programmers could be called "computer experts" are long gone.)
- PaulRobinson 10y agoThis is fascinating to me. In the UK the words we use to describe every day times is so diverse and unique to an area that to call one term "correct" and the other "incorrect" would lead to a huge argument. It's accepted that different areas with their differing backgrounds and cultures have different names. For example, what would you call a small piece of break baked in a broadly spherical shape? The University of Manchester decided to find out: http://projects.alc.manchester.ac.uk/ukdialectmaps/lexical-variation/bread/ http://projects.alc.manchester.ac.uk/ukdialectmaps/lexical-v... Your evening meal, what do you call that? That varies, too: http://projects.alc.manchester.ac.uk/ukdialectmaps/lexical-variation/evening-meal/ http://projects.alc.manchester.ac.uk/ukdialectmaps/lexical-v... What about grammatical "errors", such as "The dress what I bought"? They looked at that too: http://projects.alc.manchester.ac.uk/ukdialectmaps/syntactic-variation/the-dress-what-i-bought/ http://projects.alc.manchester.ac.uk/ukdialectmaps/syntactic... I encourage people to explore the menus on that site. It's fascinating, genuinely. English is a dynamic language, particularly in its first birthplace, structured as it is after multiple invasions from Latin speakers, Germanic/Anglo-Saxon speakers, Vikings, the French, and more recently African, Caribbean, Sri Lankan and Indian/Asian migration from the former empire and commonwealth. It is why we can turn anything into an adverb and immediately make it rude/suspect ("I am so going to have a good penguining tonight"), or delightfully ambiguous on the one hand, but the intent obvious on the other ("This track is so brick, mate, you should listen to it"). English is not French. There is no official version of it. We talk about "proper" English as being "The [King/Queen]'s English", perhaps, but only to identify it as being distinct from the English used by many others. People aspire to use it as royalty does for obvious reasons, but it is churlish to dismiss variations. The fact that this issue happened in Oakland, that it was an issue relating to African American children in particular, that it is divorced from the reality of English and its traditions, all of this makes me suspicious the underlying cause was a form of implicit/subconscious racism. It may even have been explicit. That said, I've noticed America in particular has held onto a form of English and developed it in a way that is quite divorced from the UK. It's thought that the modern New York accent and vernacular is not wholly dissimilar to 18th-century English South West, for reasons perhaps obvious to those who understand a little of the history of New York and its earliest settlers. Likewise, Canadian accents have more than a hint of Scottish in many parts: 1950s Canadian films to me sound almost 100% Scottish. What is the point I'm making? It's a language for all of us. Yes there is a standard English. But those who seek to deny its development within sub-cultures and regional variations are not just denying its tradition and history, but avoiding a possibly very beautiful future.
- Throwaway23412 10y agoI think the problem is the flimsy line between dialect and language. I remember getting into an argument years ago about this, that dialects can be so thick that you might as well as be listening to someone speaking another language. A friend argued that it's still the same language, so you can understand what others are saying even with a different dialect. Please. The average person can't understand all of Scouse, AAVE, Southern American, Geordie, cockney, Hiberno‐English, etc. I still find myself rewinding dialogue in shows like Peaky Blinders. The only reason people have a problem with AAVE is some sort of racial pretentiousness. Even the use of the phrase "Standard English" in this article is pretentious. Standard to whom? Brits certainly have a different perspective of what "Standard English" is from Americans.
- TazeTSchnitzel 10y agoIn practice, the language “standard” is simply whatever dialect is used by the elites.
- Broken_Hippo 10y agoDialects Can indeed do this. My aunt is british: Her mother's dialect was so thick I could hardly understand her as a child. Fast forward to adult life, and I moved to Norway. Spoken dialects here can have just a few hundred people, though writing is more standardized. To confound it all, there are two official forms of Norwegian. Norwegians are expected to understand not only both forms of the language, but most dialects... along with Swedish and Danish (Swedish sounds similar, danish is written similarly). Yet... There are instances where two Norwegians simply cannot understand each other. They are more likely to switch to english or try very very hard to stick to plain language. I have less luck with the dialects - I can understand some with a few alterations. On the other hand, I now understand different dialects of English much better.
- marcoperaza 10y agoThis is thinly veiled nihilism. Yes, language is a human construct and no dialect is "better" in any universal objective sense. But as a society, we have expectations for how our common language is spoken. We have positive and negative associations with different dialects. The negative associations are equally valid parts of the language evolution process as the positive ones. I don't think schools should start teaching street talk. Civilization is about bringing order to chaos and having a standard accepted language is part of that. The common dialect, called Written English, used around the world is a major strength for our civilization. Teaching AAVE in schools is not going to help the students in black communities, it's just going to further alienate them from the rest of society. Accepting papers written in AAVE isn't going to prepare people for reality: no one cares about social justice for a dialect, they care about effective communication.
- jordigh 10y ago> I don't think schools should start teaching street talk. Why not? It would help understanding how many people talk. This kind of snobbery can be seen in Canada. Many English-speaking Canadians have to take some years of French schooling. However, due to whatever the opposite of "cultural Marxism" (edit: okay, the opposite of "nihlism", per your own edit) is, English Canadians are mostly taught the prestige dialect of France, which is not nearly as useful to Canadians as learning how Quebeckers actually talk would be. Sure, the prestige French dialect isn't completely useless either, but without this linguistic snobbery we could be doing a lot better to understand each other.
- Spearchucker 10y agoWhat makes your choice of a standard accepted language a valid choice? How are alternatives wrong? Surely "Witten English" was the wrong choice while the preceding choice was common? Also, nihilism is impossible. A belief in nothing is still a belief.
- tptacek 10y agoNo. Neither this essay nor the Oakland school system announcement that prompted it ever suggested "teaching AAVE in school". As the essay points out: that would be stupid, since students arrive at school already knowing AAVE. The bulk of the essay is an exploration of what AAVE actually is. Some of what emerges debunks the notion --- casually tossed off in your comment --- that the rules of AAVE are somehow lower-class; many of them are shared by other dialects of English, and even more are present in the primary dialects of other languages. Even more persuasive is the essay's central implied point: contrary to your description of AAVE as "street talk", AAVE is an intricately and rigidly defined dialect of English. You can't speak or write it simply by mangling Standard English. Well-educated writers who have samples of AAVE to work from fail comprehensively at replicating it, as the essay demonstrates in its hilarious payoff. To the extent the essay concerns itself with AAVE education, it's to point out that AAVE-aware education produces superior results in outcomes for Standard English education, in the same sense that teaching French people to speak Standard English is easier when you allow the speakers to acknowledge the French language.
- paulpauper 10y agoAmerican Jews, East Indians, and East Asians excel at academics because they temporarily set aside their cultural differences and learn the correct English grammar and usage. Yeah, there is some ambiguity (such as who vs. whom) but it's nowhere near the same as AAVE. Is that really asking too much
- braythwayt 10y agoOn a site dedicated to the proposition that "things don't have to be so," yes it is too much to presume as a given. We no longer wear suits and ties just because everyone wears suits and ties. We especially don't presume that someone not wearing a suit and tie is making a mistake or ignorant. We don't presume that they are incapable of writing a program because they are not wearing a suit and tie. We don't presume that because someone is writing a program in JavaScript instead of FORTRAN that they are incapable of writing good software. We don't presume that because the one language is a "toy" and the other is a "serious engineering tool," that there is something wrong with the person using the toy when they could have and should have used the serious tool. As a self-identified hacker, I would say that yes, there are great advantages to being able to choose to speak the legacy enterprise language when you wish, as an individual. But I would also say that it is a grave mistake to put up barriers against those who don't.
- Bromskloss 10y ago> We no longer wear suits and ties just because everyone wears suits and ties. I have trouble parsing this sentence. Do we or do we not wear suits and ties?
- TeMPOraL 10y agoYeah. We wear suits and ties not because everyone else does that too. We wear suits and ties because we want to impress investors. ;).
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- noonespecial 10y agoThe mistake seems to be carrying this bit of culture in an iron box in the mind into another culture and then insisting (even if subconsciously) that they are "doing it wrong". From "educating the ignorant natives" to "keepin' it real" we all seem to make this mistake when transiting other cultures at one time or another.
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- clentaminator 10y agoThe essay "Authority and American Usage" [1] is an essay concerning prescriptivism vs. descriptivism and the relations between grammar and class/power which (somewhat) masquerades as a review of Bryan Garner's A Dictionary of Modern American Usage [2]. This topic naturally includes discussion about the use of Standard Written English (SWE) at university/college level. In one chapter the author talks about how he teaches a remedial English class to instruct students in Standard Written English (SWE), and always begins by stating that while there is nothing incorrect about their own dialects, the fact is (and whether they are happy about it or not) SWE is the only way to communicate on a level playing field, and if they were even to consider trying to change this fact they'd have to argue their points through SWE in the first place in order to be taken seriously. [1] http://wilson.med.harvard.edu/nb204/AuthorityAndAmericanUsage.pdf http://wilson.med.harvard.edu/nb204/AuthorityAndAmericanUsag... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garner%27s_Modern_English_Usage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garner%27s_Modern_English_Usag...
- tptacek 10y agoThanks for posting this. I'd read it before, but re-reading it after reading Pullum's essay gave me an interesting new perspective on what DFW and Garner are talking about. Of course, the essay doesn't disagree (or agree) with DFW's prescription for SWE; it mostly just concerns itself with what AAVE actually is.
- devishard 10y ago> Of course, the essay doesn't disagree (or agree) with DFW's prescription for SWE; it mostly just concerns itself with what AAVE actually is. I think that the fundamental idea that AAVE and SWE are distinct things with their own prescriptions is pretty strong agreement.
- scott_s 10y agoI'm only about 20% through it, but this essay is brilliant. I may now read Infinite Jest so I can get more of David Foster Wallace's writing.
- norikki 10y agoBlack Americans are constantly being held back by leftists like on this school board denying them a real education. Being an 'AAVE' speaker severely limits your economic opportunity. Black Americans need to fully integrate, and academics need to stop justifying the existence of a culture that attacks anyone who makes something of themselves as an 'Uncle Tom'. The linguistics here are fascinating, but telling young black Americans that they can talk like hoodlums and expect to get ahead in life is cruel. Think of these children's futures. The way they talk is not an endangered species that needs to be preserved in the wild, it is a hindrance to real people trying to improve their lives; which should be the only purpose of public schools, not anthropology.
- scarface74 10y agoNot that I disagree with you, but is this so much different than the Right wanting to teach their children about a 6000 year old earth and "Creatiom Science"?
- icegreentea 10y agoFull integration does not require that you -only- be able to speak standardish english. I think the key of studying and destigmatizing AAVE is to allow the very type of integration that you want. By raising AAVE to the standard of a "real" language/dialect, instead of just calling it "broken english" (thus casting the speaker as broken in someway), you now open the door to the speaker being bilingual - something that is both clearly attainable, and perhaps in many ways possibly beneficial. Calling is broken generates defensive attitudes that will likely impede any actual process of integration.
- nicolas_t 10y agoThis. That's the most important point. There's been studies that shows that using the children's native dialect to teach reading results in faster progress. Making it clear that Standard English is a different language makes integration much easier. This is similar to kids learning Mandarin in China, they are taught that Mandarin is a different language than their dialect not that they speak broken Chinese, so they learn Mandarin and are eventually able to use it in business/formal situations.
- LyndsySimon 10y agoAs someone who grew up in the rural South, most of the distinguishing characteristics of AAVE listed on Wiki are present in my speech when I'm speaking to people who live where I grew up (Arkansas). It's mostly unconscious. If I'm in Memphis, TN and someone on the street asks for me change, I'd probably respond "I ain't got none." If I were in Richmond, VA and someone asks me for change, I'd probably respond "I don't have any." I learned "proper" English quickly because the dialect spoken in my home wasn't far removed from it, and a result I had a much easier time with grammar than my peers. I also have far less trouble communicating with a broader audience online.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 10y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code-switching https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code-switching
- nickpsecurity 10y agoSame here. I was born in Memphis, TN then spent lots of time in Northern Mississippi, rural Tennessee, and Memphis. Mostly black schools for more than half my education. Had to speak like them a bit to blend in and attract attention but not too much to avoid offending them. Same with country or proper English types although they weren't offended so long as I was consistent. I appreciate GFX's link as I didn't know there was a term and field of study for it. A coworker saw it not long ago. We were talking about a party or something I was at. He's white guy that loves movies, D&D, and so on. We walk past two, black coworkers cutting up. I keep talking with stories about the party. He stops to ask me, "Did you just start talking really black because you walked past a black person?" Black schools teach people to recover quickly and dismiss when hit with something like that. I recall basically doing just that then focusing the guy back to the party while talking whiter haha. Later, I thought about it. I knew I consciously did that sort of thing when I was around different people. I know my language is even a blend. Still, looking back, I did in fact change how I was wording things, increased gestures, and went for more energetic presentation the second my peripherals spotted blacks who I normally acted that way toward. Just switched in mid conversation without me even realizing it. I'm thinking some confused looks in conversations with rednecks could've had something to do with that. I'm a little more self-conscious of it now. Try to stick with one style or the blend I use that works well enough in diverse crowds. Except Standard English speakers and academics. I can't speak 30 seconds around them before an interruption unless they're unusually understanding or non-judgmental.
- deviate_X 10y agoHaha! and a Shakespearean play is better understood by French in France than the English in England because its is there properly translated into language they can understand.
- DanBC 10y agoShakespeare is full of stuff that doesn't make much sense unless you have the historic context. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/cZHd4yrC7DV2sdyndn372K/transcript-shakespeares-restless-world-programme-8 http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/cZHd4yrC7DV2sdyndn3... > [...] all little indicators of social difference quickly become incomprehensible. If, for instance, a theatre director today put a middle-aged man on stage wearing low-slung jeans, everybody in the audience would know it was both inappropriate and funny. In 50 years time they probably won't understand it at all and the object I'm looking at now carries just such a social meaning, self-evident to an Elizabethan, hard for us to read today. It's an English woollen cap of the 16th century, a sort of flat chocolatey brown beret, and it was found about 150 years ago at Moorfields in London. It was probably worn by a young man. [...] > Our hat unlocks a whole language of social difference and a whole structure of social control, both expressed through clothes and sometimes enforced by law. A Parliamentary statute of 1571 stipulated that every male over the age of six had to wear a woollen cap like this one on Sundays and holidays. The law was a shrewd device for supporting the English wool industry, but it was also designed to reinforce social divisions by making them visible.
- TillE 10y agoYes, the language itself you should be able to get used to after a while, but the historical context needs to actually be studied. No Fear Shakespeare is really great, though. Not comprehensive, but the best free resource for quickly understanding Shakespeare. Once you understand the meaning, you'll appreciate the poetry of the original language. http://nfs.sparknotes.com/ http://nfs.sparknotes.com/
- force_reboot 10y agoAs a native English speaker, born in England, I always enjoyed Shakespeare in the original language because I could understand many the nuances and plays on words, and because I could see the continuity between the language of Shakespeare and the language we speak today. This is probably not possible for everyone (I speak a few languages fluently, an this broader experience probably helps) and of course I need to read the footnotes, but the language of Shakespeare is not a foreign language to me. Of course if it was spoken out loud in the original pronunciation I would probably understand very little of it.
- pluma 10y agoI think the easiest way to talk about this without the racial connotations is to compare it to another language that is often simply considered "non-standard English": Scots. The Scots language is distinct from Scottish English and has actually a larger minority of speakers than AAVE (30% in Scotland according to Wikipedia). However it's insane to think that this means speaking Scots is sufficient if you want a good job. I don't think anyone attempting to get by in life and pursue a career in business or politics or academia would be taken serious if they only spoke Scots. Actually Scots probably has the advantage of nostalgia. AAVE on the other hand is (ultimately) an artefact of American slave ownership -- that's something we would much rather undo than remember. I think there's an argument to be made for the preservation of obscure languages (and a pidgin that is being threatened to be displaced by a dominant language it is partially based on certainly qualifies) but ultimately I agree exactly with what you are saying: reassuring AAVE speakers that it is okay to only speak a minority language when living in a country that is entirely based on a different language is cruel to the speakers. For comparison (according to Wikipedia's numbers): Irish Gaelic is spoken by 18.3% of people on the Irish island (i.e. both Republic and Northern); Welsh is spoken by 19% of people in Wales. Again according to Wikipedia's numbers, 12.8% of Americans speak Spanish at home, while 17.4% of Americans identify as Hispanic or Latino. If we assume AAVE is as widespread among black Americans as Spanish is among Hispanic and Latino Americans (because there are no official numbers) that would mean only 9.3% of Americans speak AAVE. Even assuming every black American is an AAVE speaker (and that seems extremely bold as even linguists admit that "AAVE" is more of a spectrum than a clearly defined language) that would still be only 12.6% of Americans who speak AAVE. In other words: even by the most generous estimate 87.4% of Americans don't speak AAVE -- and likely don't comprehend the more idiosyncratic variants of AAVE. So, even if AAVE is a "real" language, it's not widely useful outside of the small circles of AAVE speakers. It's just not realistic to expect 87.4% of the population to accommodate the "native language" of the remaining percentage if they already both speak General American English (or some approximation thereof).
- GordonS 10y ago> 30% in Scotland according to Wikipedia Actually, you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who doesn't use Scots to some degree. I realise the 30% figure came from census data, but most people here use Scots without recognising it themselves as a distinct 'Scots' language. It's a tricky thing to word in a census to get real numbers. > However it's insane to think that this means speaking Scots is sufficient if you want a good job Absolutely true. Myself and everyone I know use Scots in daily life, both at work and at home. But most recognise that (rightly or wrongly) it's not socially acceptable to use it in formal situations, such as during a job interview, talking to clients etc.
- stuxnet79 10y agoIs your sister in the music industry? Because you mentioned her "rapper" friends, and I just want to make it clear to everyone in this thread that not all AAs in NYC are "rappers".
- jordigh 10y agoYes, she is in the music industry. I didn't mean to say rappers and AAVE were synonymous.
- stuxnet79 10y agoOk, thanks for clarifying. I don't understand why I am being downvoted.
- unclenoriega 10y agoI think you're being downvoted because you seem to assume that, but for your intervention, the people reading this thread would assume that all blacks in NYC are rappers. The downvoters probably assume that you did not make this post in good faith but instead posted in a fit of passive-aggression, or for some other motive that does not contribute to the conversation.
- dang 10y agoWe detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12030277 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12030277 and marked it off-topic.
- tptacek 10y agoThis is a fantastic essay, and you're cheating yourself out of a great read if you dismiss it as a political argument. Geoffrey Pullum is a research professor specializing in the description of English and a contributor to the always-excellent Language Log. He is, as a friend of mine described him, an "Internet Linguistics Super Hero". This is the nerdiest and most interesting piece on African-American dialect you will ever read. Every Standard-English-speaking elite with an opinion on AAVE is wrong about it! And when they're wrong about it, they're wrong in funny ways! The payoff towards the end with William Raspberry trying to mimic AAVE is worth all the build-up --- not that it needs to be, since I couldn't stop reading that build-up either. The central thesis of the essay is this: elites dismiss AAVE as simplified or "street-talk" English. But it isn't: its rules are rigorous and intricate. You can't simply simplify Standard English and arrive at AAVE. You have to learn it, like any other dialect. Some of AAVE's rules are shared with other dialects, like Cockney. Some of its more idiosyncratic rules, like double-negatives, are mainstream features of other high-status languages. Whatever your political affiliation is, it's hard to read this piece and come away thinking anything other than AAVE should should take its place among all the other well-accepted English dialects. Having read the whole thread here, I'll take a second to point out what the essay is not about: * It's not about "teaching AAVE at school". The only case it makes for AAVE's role in education is to suggest that AAVE-aware instruction will improve outcomes for learning Standard English. * It's not about whether we should take special efforts to preserve AAVE, which makes about as much sense as contriving a long argument about whether we should preserve Cockney or Quebecois. * It's not about whether AAVE speakers should speak only AAVE. In fact, the essay heavily implies the opposite. Had it not been written before the mainstreaming of the term "code-switching", I imagine code-switching would factor heavily in the essay.
- coldtea 10y ago>The central thesis of the essay is this: elites dismiss AAVE as simplified or "street-talk" English. But it isn't: its rules are rigorous and intricate. You can't simply simplify Standard English and arrive at AAVE. You have to learn it, like any other dialect. Maybe, but the fact that you have to learn it, or that it has "rigorous rules" does't mean it's not a simpler variety of English. It's both a variety of English, and simpler.
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- zackelan 10y agoFor anyone interested in this topic, I'd recommend the Lexicon Valley podcast [0] in general, and two episodes in particular. What Does It Mean to Sound Black? [1] featured Columbia professor John McWhorter as a guest, and discussed the "black accent" in terms of phonemes as well as AAVE. Rules Are Made to Be Spoken [2] with John McWhorter now guest-hosting, covers "variationist sociolinguistics", the study of how linguistic cues are interpreted as a signifier of class and socioeconomic status. 0: http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley.html http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley.html 1: http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2016/05/blaccent_is_there_such_a_thing_as_sounding_black.html http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2016/0... 2: http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2016/06/sali_tagliamonte_on_the_unruly_nature_of_the_english_language.html http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2016/0...
- hodgesrm 10y agoNot to take anything away from this article, but the proposition that AAVE is a dialect is self-evident to anyone with a background in a language with strong dialects. German and UK English come lightly to mind. The politics of the debate were interesting and should not be ignored. For many people around Oakland the question of whether Ebonics is a dialect was a canard. At least for me the real issue was that the Oakland schools were doing an awful job providing basic education to their students. The Ebonics debate was a distraction from fixing real problems. Oakland schools ended up being taken over by the state a few years later [1]. [1] http://www.eastbaytimes.com/ci_12753927 http://www.eastbaytimes.com/ci_12753927