First, I want to thank those of you who took part in our recent Ebonics discussion. Yes, I sat there bloviating and saying that most of you were wrong. I even got a little huffy about it, which I shouldn't have. But all of you who participated were well-spoken and thoughtful and refused to descend to the juvenile. You have no idea how proud I am to be able to host such discussions, and I thank all of you for that. I've put the thread in our Best Discussions archive as a result.
Having said all that, I'd like to plug a book, and bloviate some more:
The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker. My buddy Jerry turned me on to it a few years ago and it's still one of my favorites. I can't recommend it highly enough. Some of the examples I used in the recent discussion came directly from Pinker. He's a linguistics professor at MIT and one of those maverick thinkers who challenge absolutely everyone's preconceptions. Left, right, center, no matter, you won't look at the English language, or language in general, quite the same way again after reading Pinker. This I can guarantee.
I remember I once had a lengthy conversation with a Portugese fellow about language. I sort of speak Spanish--I have been hearing it and speaking drabs of it since I was 3 or 4 years old. I don't speak it, really, but I understand a good deal when I hear it, and my Spanish teachers have often remarked at how good my accent is when I do speak it.
Okay, so what's that got to do with anything? Well, Portugese is universally recognized as a separate language from Spanish. Yet people who speak Portugese will generally acknowledge that if you hand them a Spanish-language newspaper, they can usually read it, and if they speak and listen slowly and carefully, they can usually communicate fairly effectively with Spanish speakers. The odd bit being, the Spanish speakers have a harder time with Portugese than Portugese speakers have with Spanish.
My lovely wife speaks Polish moderately well, but understands it perfectly. She also has a basic proficiency in Russian. Interestingly enough, a couple of years ago we rented a movie which was recorded entirely in Lithuanian, and subtitled in English. Rose almost got a headache watching this film. Why? Because she understood about half of what the Lithuanians were saying without watching the subtitles, and could tell at times that the subtitles weren't quite right. Yet half the time she didn't understand the Lithuanian, so had to read the subtitles anyway. The whole experience was rather uncomfortable for her, even though it was a good movie.
Why is that? Well, Lithuanian is very closely related to both Polish and Russian, you see, but it's not the same as either.
If you want to see something a little closer to home as an English speaker, have a look at this Dutch newspaper page and notice just how much you can pick out of what's being said. Dutch is somewhere between German and English, and you can really see it when you look at it in print.
Closer to home? Try this Tok Pisin news page from New Guinea. Notice how, if you concentrate, you can pretty much figure out what most of the stories are about. (Example: "Fiji suga indastri abirisem heve" seems to be about problems the Fiji sugar industry is having.)
Besides, how can you not love a language in which "gras bilong fes" (grass belong face) means "beard" and "fela bilong Mrs. Queen" (fella belong Mrs. Queen) is the proper designation for Prince Phillip?
Language is an interesting subject, especially when you start asking yourself what separates accent from slang from dialect from language. That's what linguists do for a living, as it happens.
* Update * Jane Finch has some further information on the controversy that you should read.
Great stuff once again Dean! I don't know enough about linguistics to make an intelligent comment, but I think it's fascinating....especially since I grew up speaking a separate dialect at home, but had to use standard English at school. Keeping a distinct line between the two actually made it easier to learn standard English, for me at least.
I really enjoy the diversity of your site. My wife is Russian. Since she grew up in far east Russia, she is lost when it comes to understanding other Slavic languages. We watched a great film from Yugoslavia entitled "No Man's Land" (which I highly recommend) and she was lost. On the other hand, a student of mine, who grew up in Uzbekistan, had very little trouble understanding the Serbo-Croatian spoken in the movie. (since I only speak English and Korean proficiently, I had to read the subtitles.)
I guess I compare her inability to understand Serbian to my mother's inability to understand the BBC program "Keeping Up Appearances" (which I might add is hilarious) due to their accents.
Of course, to the Brits, we are the one's with accents.
Just a thought,
Tim
Max Weinreich (and others) has been credited with the comment that, "A language is a dialect with an army and a navy." In practice, what this means is that definitions of language are always political.
Your example of Portuguese and Spanish is apt. According to Brazilian co-workers, speakers of Portuguese have little problem understanding Spanish. If you consider the history, this isn't too surprising, but I would claim that Portuguese is considered a language because the inhabitants of that part of the Iberian peninsula were on the winning side of the right wars. In fact, Spain has another such a political problem right now in Catalonia, where the natives (IIRC) are agitating for more political independence, and the Catalan language/dialect is a hot topic.
Another example is Macedonia. On a military history discussion list recently, I was involved in a heated exchange about whether Macedonia was Greek. The discussion was, at least originally, about the Macedon of Philip and Alexander, but Greek members of the list took it as an extraordinarily threatening topic. They seemed to see the discussion as implying that the current province of Makedon in northern Greece deserved independence.
Norwegian and Danish are quite mutually intelligible, and both are very close to German in spelling and grammar, though less so in pronunciation. (Much closer than Norwegian and Swedish, mentioned in Jane Finch's referenced article.) Again, the major difference is historical and involves several wars.
So, to return to your original contention, Ebonics has no army and no navy, and is no more a language than then dialect of a Yorkshire farmer. That farmer uses a very regular grammar and vocabulary that can be difficult for a non-speaker to understand. He, also, would not take it well if you were to tell him that his speech patterns are wrong (whether in or out of school). Please do not take this to imply that I disagree with you about how to better teach students that use this dialect, or that the dialect is somehow lazy or illegitimate.
Ebonics is, however, a barrier to success in modern US society.
Thanks for the recommendation; I'll be sure to pick it up.
One of the most intriguing examples to me is the case of Northern Ireland, where two sides in conflict have the same linguistic and ethnic roots. As a result, they've developed a system of "telling" that relies on linguistic clues to identify group membership. For example, for "h", Protestants say "aitch", Catholics "haitch". School names, surnames, place names...all are clues.
Another intriguing linguistic example is that of Cajun/Acadian. Despite a couple of hundred years, New Brunswick Acadians and Louisiana Cajuns still sound more alike than Acadians and Quebecois do. And as for French in general, after three weeks in France, I had a hard time understanding the Air Canada flight attendants' French.
Kurds, Armenians, Basques and Australian Aborigines all come to mind as people without nations but with their own languages.
There is debate within the scientific community as to what exactly differentiates a dialect from a language. However, the simple fact is that linguists recognize "ebonics" or "black vernacular English" as a language, one that has been studied and written about for over 30 years. Moreover, that recognition is so widespread as to be considered uncontroversial.
It is therefore a political position you're taking, not a scientific one.
Your Yorkshire example is interesting, and I frankly do not know what a linguist would say about it. But I do know that there is something in Britain called Public School English, and something known as "OxBridge English"--I'm not sure if they're the same--which can be and often is learned by those who grew up with a different dialect. Its use differentiates its speakers, and is considered helpful in many careers. Listen to the BBC World Service some time--most of their newscasters speak in this dialect, although you can be sure that they didn't all grow up speaking that way.
It is not true that speaking Ebonics is a barrier to success in the United States. A good number of successful black people speak it--however, they are usually successful because they are also fluent in Standard English, and use that professionally. Oprah Winfrey is a well-known example, but there are hundreds of thousands if not millions of black people who've learned to be fluent in both ways of speaking. Those who are fluent in both tend to do well.
The problem is that without proper teaching, most black kids who grow up with little exposure to standard English outside of television don't develop this dual proficiency. They could be taught to, however--if we were smart enough to try.
I understand the concern that recognizing the existence of black vernacular might lead to demands for bilingual education or legal documents printed in both dialects and so on. But that's an existing issue we already deal with all over the country with all sorts of other languages.
In the meantime, study after study shows that the most effective way to develop fluency among children who grow up up speaking a strong vernacular is to teach them to recognize the differences between their language and the mainstream language. Teach them to differentiate the two by a compare and contrast method, and they understand the mainstream tongue better. They are more literate as a result, and do better in all subject areas.
We also know, from many studies, that failure to acknowledge the existence of the native dialect actually diminishes performance in the mainstream tongue. Because the kids are confused. They're taught one thing by their teachers, and everyone else they know speaks completely differently. They often never learn how to differentiate their ways of speaking as a result.
As I've mentioned, such programs have been used successfully to improve conversing, reading, and writing skills in French by Quebec children. It's been used in Carribean island nations to help the children there learn better standard English. It's been used in many European nations the same way.
The simple fact is that we have other dialects here in the U.S. Black vernacular is one. Cajun creole is another. "Spanglish" looks well on its way to developing into a third.
As such, I ask my question yet again: if the method I describe has been proven around the world to work best for teaching fluency in the mainstream language, what is the objection? That teaching more kids to speak better standard English will lead to more separatism? Does that really make sense?
Kurds, Armenians, Basques and Australian Aborigines all come to mind as people without nations but with their own languages.
Er, Dean - Armenia exists. The country of Armenia borders Turkey, Iran, Georgia and Azerbaijan.
First off, these days there is an Armenia, BTW. Not all of Armenian descent live there, of course, nor is everyone there ethnically Armenian, but still it exists.
Dean, rather than "if not millions," I'd say definitely millions of blacks can and do speak both AAVE and standard prestige dialect English. Plenty slip into dialect usage for effect, when making certain emphatic points, telling stories, or just to convey a certain warmth and closeness through occasional phrases. The same is true of informal speech in general, of course, along with slang.
The line between language and dialect is very tough to draw, certainly a continuum, and certainly governed by political considerations. The Japanese dialects use sometimes even completely different grammatical structures and can even be incomprehensible to speakers of other dialects, much more so than AAVE. The differences are mostly in informal speech, but do creep into formal speech as well. The written language is mostly standard, though.
Chinese "dialects" are completely incomprehensible to other speakers, though written completely identically. Politically, the PRC insists that they are dialects, not languages.
I'd also feel a lot better if the various linguistics societies didn't try to conflate the studies of related dialects/languages like AAVE and English, which show a definite advantage using the compare and contrast method, and teaching kids who are fluent in unrelated languages where compare and contrast doesn't work. The LSA is very much pro bilingual education even in those cases where the studies argue against it, having adopted positions in favor of it.
On Armenia: Whoops.
On "bilingual education": I absolutely agree that countless "bilingual education" programs are very destructive. For kids who speak very different languages, the best system is immersion in the new language. We cripple Spanish-speaking kids when we put them in Spanish-language classes, and need to end that practice. It's abominable.
Yes, you can grow up in parts of Tucson as a native Spanish speaker and never have to use much English at all. I've seen plenty of kids here who went to bilingual schools and had very poor English, and who's parents spoke only Spanish at home.
What job prospects are these kids going to have? Beyond working the counter at someplace in the barrio.
Tru-dat tru-dat.
Tim
Here's something I've found to be interesting in all my travels in Europe, Russia, and the Far East: the most imitated, copied, and admired demographic in the world is the American black male. Hip-hop, athletics, fashion, and urban slang....Japanese, Koreans, and Russians copy him, want to be like him, want to walk, talk and dress like him....when I go to Russia, everyone asks me about black people.
The four most recognized people from American culture are: Ali, Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, and Mike Tyson...let's not forget the Williams sisters...
While probably only Tyson speaks primarily in ebonics, I find it difficult to believe that the others don't use it in everyday speech and cannot discount it as part of their socio-educational process.
Tim
Well I'd question whether or not Tiger Woods speaks Ebonics regularly. He doesn't self-identify as black, as he's of mixed Asian, black and something else I'm forgetting parentage.
I only understand true Ebonics due to, well, read the whole thread "Rape" below if you want to know, it's got the gory, heretofore unrevealed details of my incarceration 11 years ago.
But I didn't touch upon the very interesting racial details of that experience in that thread.
Let's just say, don't show fear in the joint, and beat boxing is a survival skill :-)