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> 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 "redn

> 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.

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.