3 ms·

The negative stigma is not about the language, it's about the ethno-social group as a whole. I think New England is a red herring. There's a similar negative s

by pluma 10y ago

The negative stigma is not about the language, it's about the ethno-social group as a whole. I think New England is a red herring. There's a similar negative stigma to the Southern Drawl -- and that's really as white as it gets. "White trash" or "redneck" is an actual existing stereotype. Both AAVE and Southern American English have negative connotations. The only difference is that AAVE also marks the speaker with an ethnicity that also has negative connotations (going by studies into biases, even black Americans have negative associations with black people). Fix the negative connotations of that ethnicity and people think of AAVE speakers no less than of uneducated white people. The reason that AAVE even in isolation "sounds uneducated" is that it is not only related to Southern American English (which already "sounds uneducated" on its own) but also that it simplifies some grammar and phonemes from English. No matter what complexity it brings to the table by itself, those changes make it look simpler in comparison and speaking simplified language makes a speaker appear less sophisticated. AAVE by itself sounds unsophisticated to GA or RP speakers. That simply cannot be helped. It's inherent to the language itself. The only thing you can hope for (short of replacing GA with something that makes AAVE sound less jarring -- or having AAVE somehow become the language of the sociopolitical elite) is that the association moves from "hoodlums" to "inbred rednecks". Note: I'm not saying AAVE "is" objectively less sophisticated. I'm saying it objectively sounds less sophisticated to a speaker of GA or RP. Even if you had never met a black person before and never heard AAVE before, as a GA speaker you would think AAVE sounds less sophisticated than GA because of the objective reasons I laid out. If you can think of a scenario where AAVE becomes a language everybody wants to speak in order to show off how sophisticated they are (like French in medieval England) or where GA is replaced by a language that is different enough to simply make AAVE sound completely foreign (like if the official language of the US was Chinese or Spanish), I don't see any plausible way to fight its negative connotations (unlike those of blackness in general).

Chathamization 10y ago
> I think New England is a red herring. There's a similar negative stigma to the Southern Drawl -- and that's really as white as it gets. "White trash" or "redneck" is an actual existing stereotype. Not sure how you can see this as a red herring. It's a pretty good example of how variations that aren't General American aren't held to the same standard. Some are considered a sign of poor education, while others are merely considered regionalisms. This reflects an underlying bias. The fact that rural Southern dialects carry a stigma that New England dialects don't only provides more evidence of this. You can say that it seems less sophisticated to you, but I doubt that this is merely an objective statement entirely disconnected from the culture that treats these dialects as less sophisticated. Linguists don't seem to consider them less sophisticated (kind of the point of the article, which was written by a linguist).
- pluma 10y ago
  > Linguists don't seem to consider them less sophisticated I never said AAVE is less sophisticated. I even went out of my way to make it clear that I'm not saying AAVE is less sophisticated. AAVE contains grammar that is based on simplified English grammar. Simplified grammar sounds less sophisticated to a speaker of the original grammar. This makes AAVE sound less sophisticated to English speakers. Quod erat demonstrandum. I'm not even a native speaker of English and this is obvious to me. Heck, this is immediately obvious if you try to learn English (or any language) as a second language: if you don't speak the language well people will treat you as less intelligent because you are not able to communicate at the same level of sophistication (simply because you lack the words and the grammatical details). This isn't awesome. This certainly isn't how you'd want it to be if you could just define how things are. But this is how things are and it's certainly not unique to English. The same is true for German, Chinese, Japanese and I'm fairly certain I've heard similar anecdotes from people studying indigenous languages. Please don't simply ignore my entire argument because you think I'm trying to go full Hegel and claim black people are less intelligent. You couldn't be further from reading me.
  - Chathamization 10y ago
    > if you don't speak the language well people will treat you as less intelligent because you are not able to communicate at the same level of sophistication Again, this is showing inherent biases. An AAVE or Southern dialect speaker speaking GA as well as a speaker of a New England dialect will be treated quite differently. The former is much more likely to be thrown in the "not speaking the language well" category; the latter is much more likely to be dismissed as merely a regional variation. > AAVE contains grammar that is based on simplified English grammar. But that's not true, as the paper mentions. Again, shouldn't we be deferring to the linguistics here? > Please don't simply ignore my entire argument because you think I'm trying to go full Hegel and claim black people are less intelligent. I honestly have no idea how you got this from my comments.
    - pluma 10y ago
      > An AAVE or Southern dialect speaker speaking GA as well as a speaker of a New England dialect [..] I'm assuming you mean speaking perfectly fluent GA but throwing in a few loanwords. Indeed then the speaker isn't using simplified grammar, but they're still signalling that they're a speaker of the language they're importing loanwords from and this leaks into how people assess them -- just like using French loan words is often used (often unsuccessfully) to signal being "cultured". I initially already said that people who speak AAVE also happen to fall into a socioethnic group who have negative connotations outside of their language. This is perfect evidence for that: speaking AAVE signals you are part of that group, so all biases against that group are applied to you. In that case AAVE itself isn't even relevant and might as well be Mandarin or French (as long as it uniquely signals association with the group). Heck, you even see white kids try to emulate some form of AAVE to associate themselves with what they perceive as "black culture" (often based on their exact stereotypes). > But that's not true, as the paper mentions. It's actually not what the paper argues. Pullum argues against the misconception that AAVE is "English with mistakes" and gives examples how these idiosyncracies GA/RP speakers perceive as "mistakes" actually follow consistent rules. Note how I said it is "based on" simplified English grammar. Dropping consonants and auxiliaries is superficially a simplification even if it follows rules. The production rules may be actually more complex because these rules come on top of whatever rules there were to begin with, but the produced result is simplified. The outcome is, to a GA but non-AAVE speaker's ears simplified (if only because they don't understand the additional production rules). > I honestly have no idea how you got this from my comments. You picked a single sentence from my comment and presented it out of context -- a context in which I clarified the exact meaning of that sentence and rejected what you were arguing I was saying. I thought it was safe to assume you did this in bad faith. I may have thought wrong, in which case I apologize. -- To reiterate: the reasons AAVE has negative connotations are twofold: 1. America really has problems with black people. As an outsider the entire situation seems absurd but there are a lot of historical nuances that have ultimately resulted in a standstill where white people pretend they're not racist and black people pretend everybody hates them. This is probably not easy to solve but is the real problem that needs solving (preferably by reducing the racism, not simply using less blatantly insulting language to discriminate black people). 2. AAVE to a GA/RP non-AAVE speaker sounds like a dumbed down version of GA/RP (because they parse it as GA/RP and it's close enough to work in "error compatibility mode"). There is no way to fix this but it's less of a problem if non-AAVE speakers don't already think the "kind of people" who happen to speak AAVE are stupid/criminal/undesirable (see #1). Trying to fix #1 by fixing #2 or trying to fix #2 in isolation is futile and is simply not going to happen.
tptacek 10y ago
No. As the essay superbly demonstrates in its conclusion, AAVE "sounds uneducated" because well-educated speakers of Standard English have cognitive biases that confuse them into believing that AAVE is merely garbled or "street-talk" Standard English. In fact, the rules for AAVE are intricate enough that well-educated Standard English speakers fail comprehensively to mimic it in writing even given an enormous wealth of samples from which to draw on. You can't simply "simplify" Standard English and arrive at AAVE. If you try, you'll end up in the same hilarious place William Raspberry ended up in the Washington Post. There's no question that Standard English speakers consider their dialect superior to AAVE, just as UK Standard English speakers consider theirs superior to Cockney, and Parisian speakers consider their dialect superior to, well, every other place French is spoken. What's worth noting is that the belief in the intrinsic superiority of one dialect over another is usually not well-founded. It's this constant conflation between usage and morality that David Foster Wallace concerns himself in his review of Garner's dictionary. Your comments here are prime example of that confusion at work. You should consider reading DFW's piece --- but do it after re-reading this one. I read the AAVE essay today for the first time, and then re-read DFW's, and had a very different take on DFW as a result.
- pluma 10y ago
  > cognitive biases Those cognitive biases are called "understanding GA/RP" and "not understanding AAVE". As I have said elsewhere, this is no different from a German attempting to parse Dutch, except a Dutch speaker can actually point to a country that has Dutch as official language. This is not a fault of AAVE. This doesn't make Dutch "realer" than AAVE. This is just how humans work. It's apparently relatively universal and not new, so it's naive to imagine we can "fix humans" to eliminate that bias. The real problem is that Americans have negative associations with black people. That is fixable because it is largely an artefact of the US's incredibly unfortunate history. Once that is fixed the bias against AAVE is no less worth delving on than the bias against Southern American English in general. The phenomenon you're trying to call out is called a "sociolect". These days almost every "non-standard" dialect acts as a kind of sociolect because the "standard" dialect is expected to be followed in all kinds of formal or even informal settings from political speeches to the workplace. I'm not arguing anything is superior. I don't understand why you keep responding to every single one of my comments by arguing I'm making some kind of claim about superiority. You can't simplify Standard English and arrive at AAVE, yes. That's what I am saying. But you can simplify Standard English, put it alongside actual AAVE and a non-AAVE speaker will likely find the two indistinguishable and think they're both "just simplified English". I'm talking about appearances in the context of another language here. Of course no language is "superior". I'm making a pragmatic argument about why people act the way they do, not about some nonsensical cultural shouting match.

by pluma 10y ago

Chathamization 10y ago

> I think New England is a red herring. There's a similar negative stigma to the Southern Drawl -- and that's really as white as it gets. "White trash" or "redneck" is an actual existing stereotype. Not sure how you can see this as a red herring. It's a pretty good example of how variations that aren't General American aren't held to the same standard. Some are considered a sign of poor education, while others are merely considered regionalisms. This reflects an underlying bias. The fact that rural Southern dialects carry a stigma that New England dialects don't only provides more evidence of this. You can say that it seems less sophisticated to you, but I doubt that this is merely an objective statement entirely disconnected from the culture that treats these dialects as less sophisticated. Linguists don't seem to consider them less sophisticated (kind of the point of the article, which was written by a linguist).

pluma 10y ago
> Linguists don't seem to consider them less sophisticated I never said AAVE is less sophisticated. I even went out of my way to make it clear that I'm not saying AAVE is less sophisticated. AAVE contains grammar that is based on simplified English grammar. Simplified grammar sounds less sophisticated to a speaker of the original grammar. This makes AAVE sound less sophisticated to English speakers. Quod erat demonstrandum. I'm not even a native speaker of English and this is obvious to me. Heck, this is immediately obvious if you try to learn English (or any language) as a second language: if you don't speak the language well people will treat you as less intelligent because you are not able to communicate at the same level of sophistication (simply because you lack the words and the grammatical details). This isn't awesome. This certainly isn't how you'd want it to be if you could just define how things are. But this is how things are and it's certainly not unique to English. The same is true for German, Chinese, Japanese and I'm fairly certain I've heard similar anecdotes from people studying indigenous languages. Please don't simply ignore my entire argument because you think I'm trying to go full Hegel and claim black people are less intelligent. You couldn't be further from reading me.
- Chathamization 10y ago
  > if you don't speak the language well people will treat you as less intelligent because you are not able to communicate at the same level of sophistication Again, this is showing inherent biases. An AAVE or Southern dialect speaker speaking GA as well as a speaker of a New England dialect will be treated quite differently. The former is much more likely to be thrown in the "not speaking the language well" category; the latter is much more likely to be dismissed as merely a regional variation. > AAVE contains grammar that is based on simplified English grammar. But that's not true, as the paper mentions. Again, shouldn't we be deferring to the linguistics here? > Please don't simply ignore my entire argument because you think I'm trying to go full Hegel and claim black people are less intelligent. I honestly have no idea how you got this from my comments.
  - pluma 10y ago
    > An AAVE or Southern dialect speaker speaking GA as well as a speaker of a New England dialect [..] I'm assuming you mean speaking perfectly fluent GA but throwing in a few loanwords. Indeed then the speaker isn't using simplified grammar, but they're still signalling that they're a speaker of the language they're importing loanwords from and this leaks into how people assess them -- just like using French loan words is often used (often unsuccessfully) to signal being "cultured". I initially already said that people who speak AAVE also happen to fall into a socioethnic group who have negative connotations outside of their language. This is perfect evidence for that: speaking AAVE signals you are part of that group, so all biases against that group are applied to you. In that case AAVE itself isn't even relevant and might as well be Mandarin or French (as long as it uniquely signals association with the group). Heck, you even see white kids try to emulate some form of AAVE to associate themselves with what they perceive as "black culture" (often based on their exact stereotypes). > But that's not true, as the paper mentions. It's actually not what the paper argues. Pullum argues against the misconception that AAVE is "English with mistakes" and gives examples how these idiosyncracies GA/RP speakers perceive as "mistakes" actually follow consistent rules. Note how I said it is "based on" simplified English grammar. Dropping consonants and auxiliaries is superficially a simplification even if it follows rules. The production rules may be actually more complex because these rules come on top of whatever rules there were to begin with, but the produced result is simplified. The outcome is, to a GA but non-AAVE speaker's ears simplified (if only because they don't understand the additional production rules). > I honestly have no idea how you got this from my comments. You picked a single sentence from my comment and presented it out of context -- a context in which I clarified the exact meaning of that sentence and rejected what you were arguing I was saying. I thought it was safe to assume you did this in bad faith. I may have thought wrong, in which case I apologize. -- To reiterate: the reasons AAVE has negative connotations are twofold: 1. America really has problems with black people. As an outsider the entire situation seems absurd but there are a lot of historical nuances that have ultimately resulted in a standstill where white people pretend they're not racist and black people pretend everybody hates them. This is probably not easy to solve but is the real problem that needs solving (preferably by reducing the racism, not simply using less blatantly insulting language to discriminate black people). 2. AAVE to a GA/RP non-AAVE speaker sounds like a dumbed down version of GA/RP (because they parse it as GA/RP and it's close enough to work in "error compatibility mode"). There is no way to fix this but it's less of a problem if non-AAVE speakers don't already think the "kind of people" who happen to speak AAVE are stupid/criminal/undesirable (see #1). Trying to fix #1 by fixing #2 or trying to fix #2 in isolation is futile and is simply not going to happen.

tptacek 10y ago

No. As the essay superbly demonstrates in its conclusion, AAVE "sounds uneducated" because well-educated speakers of Standard English have cognitive biases that confuse them into believing that AAVE is merely garbled or "street-talk" Standard English. In fact, the rules for AAVE are intricate enough that well-educated Standard English speakers fail comprehensively to mimic it in writing even given an enormous wealth of samples from which to draw on. You can't simply "simplify" Standard English and arrive at AAVE. If you try, you'll end up in the same hilarious place William Raspberry ended up in the Washington Post. There's no question that Standard English speakers consider their dialect superior to AAVE, just as UK Standard English speakers consider theirs superior to Cockney, and Parisian speakers consider their dialect superior to, well, every other place French is spoken. What's worth noting is that the belief in the intrinsic superiority of one dialect over another is usually not well-founded. It's this constant conflation between usage and morality that David Foster Wallace concerns himself in his review of Garner's dictionary. Your comments here are prime example of that confusion at work. You should consider reading DFW's piece --- but do it after re-reading this one. I read the AAVE essay today for the first time, and then re-read DFW's, and had a very different take on DFW as a result.

pluma 10y ago
> cognitive biases Those cognitive biases are called "understanding GA/RP" and "not understanding AAVE". As I have said elsewhere, this is no different from a German attempting to parse Dutch, except a Dutch speaker can actually point to a country that has Dutch as official language. This is not a fault of AAVE. This doesn't make Dutch "realer" than AAVE. This is just how humans work. It's apparently relatively universal and not new, so it's naive to imagine we can "fix humans" to eliminate that bias. The real problem is that Americans have negative associations with black people. That is fixable because it is largely an artefact of the US's incredibly unfortunate history. Once that is fixed the bias against AAVE is no less worth delving on than the bias against Southern American English in general. The phenomenon you're trying to call out is called a "sociolect". These days almost every "non-standard" dialect acts as a kind of sociolect because the "standard" dialect is expected to be followed in all kinds of formal or even informal settings from political speeches to the workplace. I'm not arguing anything is superior. I don't understand why you keep responding to every single one of my comments by arguing I'm making some kind of claim about superiority. You can't simplify Standard English and arrive at AAVE, yes. That's what I am saying. But you can simplify Standard English, put it alongside actual AAVE and a non-AAVE speaker will likely find the two indistinguishable and think they're both "just simplified English". I'm talking about appearances in the context of another language here. Of course no language is "superior". I'm making a pragmatic argument about why people act the way they do, not about some nonsensical cultural shouting match.