Jill Kitson: Welcome to Lingua Franca. This week: why Ebonics is no joke.
          Geoff Pullum on African-American Vernacular English.
 
 

          In December 1996, when the Oakland, California, School Board announced its
          plan to use Ebonics, or African-American vernacular English in schools, critics
          all over the world ridiculed the policy, dismissing the vernacular of black
          Americans as slang or Standard English with mistakes.

          Geoff Pullum, Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa
          Cruz, says the critics were wrong. African-American English is not slang and
          it's not Standard English with mistakes. Here he is to explain why.

          Geoff Pullum: It is unusual for a policy announcement at a city School Board
          meeting in California to trigger a worldwide media frenzy. But one School
          Board meeting in December, 1996, did exactly that. Within days of the
          announcement, School Board members could not leave their homes without
          being besieged by journalists. They were vilified, ridiculed, and attacked in
          newspapers and magazines around the entire world. Why?

          The Board had issued a statement to the effect that it was changing its
          educational policies with regard to one aspect of the local linguistic situation.
          They would pay more serious attention to the language spoken at home by
          most of the district's school students. Its status would be recognised,
          teachers would be trained to look at it objectively and appreciate its merits,
          and it would be used in the classroom as appropriate. The New York Times
          reported this much quite fairly. 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. The talk
          radio switchboards lit up, intemperate opinions flared. What was going on?

          The answer lies in the fact that the language being recognised by the School
          Board was not Spanish or Polish or Russian or any such relatively
          uncontroversial language. The city was Oakland, a poor city on the east side
          of the San Francisco Bay where half the population is African-American, and
          the language was the one that linguists usually call African-American
          Vernacular English.

          Now the trouble is that most speakers of Standard English think that
          African-American Vernacular English is just bad speaking, English marred by a
          lot of ignorant mistakes in grammar and pronunciation. Or worse than that, a
          repertoire of mostly abusive street slang used by an ignorant and dangerous
          urban underclass. An editorial in The New York Times a few days after the
          first news report said the Oakland School Board had 'declared that black slang
          is a distinct language.'

          We can get that myth out of the way right at the start. The Times should be
          ashamed of itself. The Oakland School Board never mentioned slang, and
          never intended to imply anything approving about it.

          Slang is a finite collection of vivid, colloquial words and phrases associated
          with a subculture and not yet incorporated as part of the mainstream
          language. But no subculture's slang could constitute a separate language.
          The mistake is like confusing a sprinkle of hot sauce with a dinner. Slang has
          no grammar of its own, it is a small array of words and phrases used under
          the aegis of some ordinary language and in accordance with its grammar. The
          majority of slang words and phrases are in the language already, and are
          merely assigned new slang meanings by some subpopulation.

          Oakland's announcement was pompous, badly written, and filled with
          provocative references to 'African Language Systems'. But it didn't mention
          slang, and its intent was clear enough: the Board wanted to acknowledge
          that African-American Vernacular English was distinct in certain respects from
          Standard English and proposed to be responsive to the educational
          implications of that fact.

          Buried among the jargon of the announcement was a mention of a name for
          African-American Vernacular English suggested by a black scholar in 1975 but
          never adopted by linguists: Ebonics. That misbegotten word, concocted from
          'ebony' (a colour term from the name of a dark coloured wood) and 'phonics'
          (the name of a method for teaching reading) was destined to attach to the
          Board members as if chiselled into a block of granite and hung round their
          necks. They would never hear the end of it.

          One problem with the name was that it lent itself irresistibly to stupid puns
          and jokes. The Economist picked it up and printed a brief story headed 'The
          Ebonics Virus', a tasteless reference to the then recent outbreak of the
          horrible Ebola fever in Zaire. The subliminal link there is clear enough: nasty
          things out of Africa!

          And people rapidly invented other 'onics' words to mock the idea of letting
          African-Americans have their own claim to a language. 'Will Jewish people
          propose that their way of speaking English should be designated Hebonics?
          Huh? Will old people say their problems are caused by the fact that they
          speak Geronics? Huh? Could stupid people complain that they were the
          victims of their native language, Moronics? Huh?'

          Cartoonists seemed to find these possibilities endlessly amusing, and the
          jokes kept coming for more than a year. But they didn't make me laugh.

          The topic was a joke because of what the majority of English speakers think
          about African-American Vernacular English, that apart from the special slang,
          it is just English with a lot of grammatical mistakes. They also think it's an
          impoverished version of English with a lot of grammatical mistakes. Alberto
          Manguel wrote in the August 1998 'Australian's Review of Books' that black
          English is 'nothing but a vastly impoverished version of Standard English.' He
          gives no evidence for that at all.

          I don't know how you measure poverty in a language. But on the bit about
          grammatical mistakes, people are simply wrong. There is a difference
          between making grammatical blunders in Standard English and speaking
          correctly in a different variety of the language, one that has a slightly
          different grammar. And that's the case here. African-American Vernacular
          English has a regular, systematic grammar of its own.

          People who don't know the language talk about how the word 'be' is used in
          the wrong places. They think black Americans say, 'He be laughin'.' When
          they should say 'He is laughing', and that's treated as one of the many
          amusing pieces of evidence that they don't speak English correctly. It's not
          true. The African-American Vernacular English usage they're referring to is in
          fact a device for expressing what's called 'habitual aspect'. 'He be laughin' is
          grammatical in African-American Vernacular English but it doesn't mean 'He is
          laughing', it means 'He habitually laughs.' If you want to say 'He is laughing'
          right now, in this language, you say 'He laughin'.'

          Now that raises another point about the item grammarians call the copular
          verb 'be'. People say that black Americans are so lazy and careless they leave
          out forms of this verb like 'is' and 'are' altogether. They say 'He rich' instead
          of 'He is rich'; and they say 'Dey ugly' for 'They are ugly', and so on. Well,
          those words do indeed get left out, but there is nothing careless about this;
          there is a grammatical rule here, and it's rather complex to state. Here is a
          brief version.

          In African-American Vernacular English you may omit forms of the copular
          verb 'be' provided all of the following conditions are met. (I will give you
          seven conditions. Take notes.)

          1. It musn't be accented. You never leave 'is' out of something like 'There
          already is one!'

          2. It mustn't end the sentence. You never say, 'I don't know what it is'
          without the 'is'.

          3. It mustn't begin the sentence. You never leave out the 'is' in a question
          like 'Is dat right?'

          4. It mustn't be an infinitive. You never leave out 'be' in something like 'You
          got to be strong' or an imperative like 'Be careful', or in one of those habitual
          aspect cases like 'He be laughin'.'

          5. It mustn't be in the past tense. You never leave out 'was' or 'were'.

          6. It mustn't be negated. You never leave out 'ain't' from something like 'He
          ain't no fool.'

          7. It mustn't be first person singular. You never leave out the 'am' of
          sentences like 'I'm yo' main man.'

          Only when all these conditions are met,(plus one or two others I left out for
          simplicity), can you omit a form of the verb 'be'. Now that's not a simple set
          of conditions. This is a language, with rules of its own, and they're not quite
          the same as the Standard English rules, despite the fact that the vocabulary
          is mostly the same and the whole system is close enough to be treated as a
          dialect of English by most linguists.

          There are a lot of other details of the grammar of African-American Vernacular
          English that are quite clear and systematic but do not match Standard
          English. For example, it has what linguists call Negative Concord, like
          Spanish, Italian, Russian, Polish and plenty of other languages. And it has
          something called Negative Inversion, which means auxiliaries often go before
          the subject when they're negated.

          In Standard Italian, the way to say 'Nobody telephoned', is 'Non ha telefonato
          nessuno', literally that's 'not has telephoned no one.' The 'non' at the
          beginning and the additional negativity of 'nessuno' 'no one' are both
          required. Italian demands that a sentence like this be negated in a particular
          way, the Negative Concord way, and it needs both 'non' and 'nessuno'.

          In African-American Vernacular English, the way you say the same thing is
          'Ain't nobody called.' The auxiliary 'ain't' is first, it's negative, and in a
          negative clause the way you say 'anybody' is 'nobody'. There's only one
          negation, but it's marked at two places, the 'aint' and the 'no'. Just as
          plurality is marked twice when you say 'The children were good' in Standard
          English; it's marked once on 'children' and once on the word 'were'.

          Facts of this sort about the grammar of African-American Vernacular English
          have been known to American linguists for decades. That's why we were
          dismayed at the ignorance betrayed by the media commentators' angry and
          offensive attacks on American-American Vernacular English and the Oakland
          School Board.

          They confused lexicon with syntax, accent with dialect, difference with
          deficiency, and grammar with morality. They made amply clear the deep
          hostility and contempt whites feel for the way underclass blacks speak.
          Right-wing commentator George Wills called it 'the patois of America's
          meanest streets', as if this dialect was so depraved it could only be spoken in
          slums. Another thing that came out was the deep shame felt by Americans of
          African descent for being associated with people who speak that way. Former
          Black Panther party official, Eldridge Cleaver, published an article in The Los
          Angeles Times in which he compared acknowledging African-American
          Vernacular English in the schools with condoning cannibalism. I swear this is
          true.

          The saddest thing is that in their scramble to find words to evince their fury
          and contempt at the native language of many poor black Americans,
          columnists both black and white ignored the genuine issues of educational
          policy that had motivated the Oakland School; Board. There is educational
          research showing that it does work better to introduce children to schooling
          through a dialect they understand. It works better for rural Norwegian kids
          being introduced to Standard Norwegian; it works better for black American
          schoolchildren. It has been carefully evaluated on both groups.

          This should be simple enough: it has beneficial effects on your ability to learn
          if your teacher speaks your dialect, doesn't blame you for speaking it, treats
          the way you speak with some modest amount of respect, and helps you in
          your transition toward the standard language, instead of mocking you. Those
          beneficial effects are lost if African-American Vernacular English is treated
          like a deformity, or a foul disease, or a sign of ignorance and intellectual
          sloth, or like Standard English with mistakes.

          So, I hope I've made it clear why I don't find the jokes that have gone around
          the world about 'Ebonics' to be the slightest bit funny.

          'Hey, are One Nation supporters going to claim they have a separate
          language too? Hansonics? Huh?'

          Give me a break!

          Jill Kitson: Geoff Pullum, Professor of Linguistics at the University of
          California, Santa Cruz.