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African American Vernacular English is not Standard English with Mistakes
- tokenadult 17y agoYes, and General American standard English is not the Queen's English with mistakes either. This information should be well known to anyone who has taken even one linguistics course, but it does still come up as a misconception to be argued against, as the interesting submitted article does. Similarly, English as spoken in India is not a variety of British English with mistakes, nor is standard Australian English any better or worse than standard English in Britain or in the United States.
- wheels 17y agoThe gramatical differences between "high" forms of British and American English are comparatively small. Certainly the dialectal variations within each country are further departures than standard American English is from standard British English. In each the differences are more of preference and still usually considered correct in the other. A more apt example would be Swiss and high German, which are (aside from the fact that Swiss Germans are also fluent in high German) mutually incomprehensible. To a high German speaker, Swiss German sounds decidedly silly and has moderately different grammar. However since there's no conflation of social class with the Swiss German dialect, the comparison of Swiss and high German is much less politicized than AAVE and standard American English. Austrian German, on the other hand, is virtually identical to standard high German grammatically – it just sounds funny and has a few regionalisms in its vocabulary: kind of like the difference between American and British English.
- mkelly 17y agoLinguistically, there's no agreed-upon rule for what makes a "dialect"[1]. What I heard from Linguistics people is that they're all just separate languages, some with and some without a written form. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect#.22Dialect.22_or_.22language.22 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect#.22Dialect.22_or_.22lan...
- wheels 17y agoRight, I removed that line just before you posted for that reason. :-) I think usually the difference (as mentioned in the OT's paper) is more political than linguistic.
- fhars 17y agoMy usual half-serious stance on this is that a language is just a dialect with an army. But this does of course break down in the case of Icelandic, which is definitely a language, but has neither, but clearly captures tha fact that answers to these questions are to a large part political. When I was younger, there was a language called serbocroatian, spoken in one country and written with two different scripts...
- kjhgftgyui 17y agoA language is just a dialect with an army Luxembourgish is identical to the local German accent - but one is an official language while just over the border it's a dialect
- ilyak 17y agoIt's because both British and American Englishes (Is it correct to say "Englishes" heh?) are heavily written languages, so they tend to evolve much slowly and converge with their writing standard. AAVE isn't so it evolves faster. (btw, is it only me who hears something arrogant in "high German"?)
- ZeroGravitas 17y agoI heard recently that Arnie offered to do the voice for the Terminator in the German dub of the film of the same name. They said no because his accent made the killer robot sound like a farmer or country bumpkin to German ears.
- wheels 17y agoHonestly, his accent in German is hilarious. I dug up some old YouTube footage of him in German a while back and he sounds ... cute. Definitely not hard-core like he does in English. ;-)
- lionhearted 17y agoI'm kind of casually fascinated with language, so when I came across a few papers on AAVE, I dug in and read both viewpoints. It's a long debate, but the most interesting thing that this particular Standford piece didn't mention - this style of English evolved from poor, white Southern farmers in the U.S. You wonder how different the debate would be if it was about Southern/poorer English instead of Northern/wealthier. There'd be different allies and opponents on both sides, different arguments, and so on. It's not hard to imagine some of the people most fiercely mocking AAVE would be its biggest champions, and some of its supports would be its largest detractors. Presenting the argument as a black/white thing makes it very different than presenting it as a geographical thing, or a rich/poor thing, or a formally educated/not thing, or an industrial/agricultural thing.
- wheels 17y agoOne really odd observation that struck me when spending some time in southern Africa (South Africa, Zimbabwe and Botswana) a couple years back: "AAVE" has had a significant influence on the English of southern Africans and other elements of black American culture are prevalent as well: hip-hop, basketball and, even, somewhat comically, fried chicken. It really got my attention just after arriving when the brother of the bride to be, whose wedding I was there for, said while getting in his car, "Let's bounce." Were I a sociologist I think studying the flow of culture from black Americans to southern Africans and trying to separate out the distinctively African elements of black American culture vs. the distinctive black American elements of southern African culture would be fascinating.
- kscaldef 17y ago"bounce" is slang. There's nothing syntactically distinct in that sentence from Standard English, which is the discussion of the article.
- mahmud 17y agoAfrican American culture is decimating African culture, IMO. I am from East Africa and these days it's rare to find any of our old art forms. As far back as the 70s, we had Reggae replace most of the indigenous pop music, and these days the reggae is giving way to hiphop.
- losethos 17y agoYou speak in tongues? Gospel planets guarded tumultuous abridged Eternal decay exultation detail solaces reference wanting signify Enlightener pricked says qualified EDITIONS prayers deaf blessedness Living sake unanxious churches abated member drowsiness preferred shook Balaneion witting shake bawler having seduction
- ilyak 17y agoWelcome to the world of dialect continuum! Please enjoy your stay. Notable thing here is that AAVE has useful features absent from "just" English.
- pg 17y agoThe argument here is in effect that no vernacular variant of any language could possibly embody a mistake. Which is true for some definitions of mistake, and false for others. The problem with the definitions that make it true is that there's a slippery slope from dialects to idiolects. How many people have to speak a dialect for it to count as a dialect? You can't have any threshold, or you get weird consequences in hypothetical cases, like all the speakers of a dialect dying off except one. So if you decide that no vernacular can embody mistakes, you're bound to conclude that nothing any individual does can be a mistake, so long as they do it consistently.
- stcredzero 17y agoYou can't have any threshold, or you get weird consequences in hypothetical cases, like all the speakers of a dialect dying off except one. So if you decide that no vernacular can embody mistakes, you're bound to conclude that nothing any individual does can be a mistake, so long as they do it consistently. But lots of disciplines involving living things have problems like this. You can't "define" species. A species is a historical happenstance, which can only be precisely defined in retrospect with minute information we usually never have access to. You can spend all day coming up with corner cases and boundary conditions where any such attempt breaks down. But that's like deciding if a particular boulder in Panama is a North American one or a South American one. Just because those terms break down in boundary cases and are not like mathematics doesn't mean those terms aren't useful. Things pertaining to human beings and culture are even more prone to this. In the case of African American vernacular, there are sizable populations with high degrees of consistency in their patterns of speech. Quite far away from boundary conditions. Another thing I've noted, since dating an African American woman and attending family gatherings with her, is that the manners and rules of social conduct of rural African Americans are more complex than I am accustomed to. When I am with her family, I have to think about how I'm going to excuse myself and navigate leaving a room. Otherwise, I never think about this. I reflected on this, and realized that it reminded me of watching Masterpiece Theater as a child. I'm probably witnessing throwbacks to French and English culture from centuries ago, still rippling though rural Louisiana. Homo Sapiens are complex -- period. Even many so-called "country bumpkins."
- xiaoma 17y agoI think the important point is the utility of language, not its "correctness". Regardless of the political issues involved, speaking the "standard" language or the prestige language is an asset in most circumstances. Speaking Ebonics would make it harder for a doctor to win patient trust, harder for an interviewee to get a job, harder for a politician to win in most districts and even harder for a defendant to get a favorable judgment. Any teacher who ignores this fact does a disservice to the students.
- wrs 17y agoProbably true, but irrelevant to the article, which is about how more effectively to teach Standard English by recognizing that some students start from a different dialect.
- xiaoma 17y agoI don't think that's what the article was about at all. The article was essentially an attack on press coverage the author wasn't happy with. Its focus was more political than pedagogical. From the article: "Yet opinion writers proceeded to fall upon the topic like starving dogs attacking a bone. They ridiculed, they sneered, they frothed, they flamed, they raged, they lived off the story for weeks." This kind of language just doesn't show up in secondary education guides. It's clearly about demonizing the opposition.
- elblanco 17y ago>Regardless of the political issues involved, speaking the "standard" language or the prestige language is an asset in most circumstances. This is probably the best one line summary of the issue I've ever read.
- jeromec 17y agoRegardless of the school board debating the potential validity of AAVE, I think it's misguided to experiment with asserting such "correctness" to teach kids that will grow up in a world that doesn't regard it as such. Save such philosophy for later academics, where the author/speaker can make a conscious choice of use - similar to the stylistic, but "incorrect", use of 'But' or 'And' to begin a sentence.
- jfarmer 17y agoWhy should dictionaries and grammar books be any more authoritative than the way people actually speak? AAVE isn't correct or incorrect any more than gravity is correct or incorrect. They both exist; it's our job to study them. Putting AAVE into a box labeled "incorrect English" is just a way to avoid the hard work of understanding our world. And yes, the "academic" understanding of AAVE includes the sociolinguistic aspects denoting class, race, education, etc.
- jeromec 17y ago> Why should dictionaries and grammar books be any more authoritative than the way people actually speak? Simple, because of perception. Whether you like it or not perception matters. If I perceive your car as worth your selling price, a deal happens - doesn't mean my perception over yours is any more "correct". Same happens with stock prices, or hiring decisions. In other words, the things that matter in the day-to-day life in which we currently function include dictionaries and grammar books.
- loup-vaillant 17y agoAre you actually saying that our perception of the world is actually bending the world? I agree that perception matters. For instance, a bad perception could mean you buy a worthless car, or make a bad hiring decision. It doesn't mean, however, that the car was worth your money, or that the bad employee was worth hiring. Same thing about AAVE. If it has been proved that this is a dialect of English, it is a dialect of English. No matter how delusional the majority of the population can be.
- mattmaroon 17y agoThis seems to make the ludicrous argument that because the mistakes are consistent they are not mistakes.
- sethg 17y agoIf an African-American speaks African-American Vernacular English to his friend at the barbershop, it's probably not a mistake. If an African-American speaks that dialect to a hiring manager in a job interview, it probably is. (Obviously you can imagine exceptions in both cases.)
- _pius 17y agoWhat is any dialect or derived language but a set of consistent mistakes with respect to the ancestor language? A dialect that lacks prestige is no less a dialect for it — that was one of the points of the article.
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- mattmaroon 17y agoI was trying to point out that that is a bad way of framing it. To call it a dialect may be technically correct, if you're merely arguing semantics. However to accept it as a legitimate dialect is another thing. If your child spoke that way you would constantly correct them, for their own good. It'd be much better for all involved to redefine "dialect" to not include something that devolved from another language via mistakes made by dumb rednecks who can't understand the concept of a double negative. If we call that a dialect, then the very word "dialect" is broken.
- _pius 17y agoIf we call that a dialect, then the very word "dialect" is broken. Then, I suppose, the word dialect is broken. :) There's a long history of vernacular dialects lacking prestige and casting aspersions on their speakers. Shakespeare, notably, wrote his plays in the vernacular to connect with his audiences. [1] Chaucer did the same with Canterbury Tales. [2] Of course we forget that now because we revere those authors as purveyors of great literature. To call it a dialect may be technically correct, if you're merely arguing semantics. However to accept it as a legitimate dialect is another thing. If your child spoke that way you would constantly correct them, for their own good. Matt, I'm a young, intelligent, black male in America: I would never let my kids grow up speaking AAVE exclusively. Trust me. But neither I nor the author are arguing the prestige of the dialect. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare%27s_influence#The_changing_status_of_the_English_language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare%27s_influence#The_c... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernacular_literature http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernacular_literature
- DanielBMarkham 17y agoListened to a great series of lectures on the story of human language a while back: http://www.teach12.com/ttcx/CourseDescLong2.aspx?cid=1600 http://www.teach12.com/ttcx/CourseDescLong2.aspx?cid=1600 I learned two things that are equally true and somewhat self-contradictory. 1) Language is a continuum, not a rigid thing. There is no right or wrong language. If you are communicating you're doing it right. 2) Most all societies have a "high" language and a "low" language. Sometimes there are multiple layers. People who want to move in better circles learn to conform and work fluently in the "high" language. The continuum question was especially interesting. Is Old French just bad Latin? Or is it a different language? What about those languages that have one spoken form and two written forms? The same language with different names because of political considerations? Lots of neat history and trivia here. I really enjoyed the series.
- michaelcampbell 17y agoGenuine question here; does AAVE have an accepted grammar? I don't mean necessarily a written canon, but anything that's not "make it up as you go" ad-hoc style. (And yes, I realize all language has some evolutionary context to it.) Without rules, there's no way to break them, and thus no meaning for "mistake".
- kscaldef 17y agoYes, and that's the subject of TFA.