African-American Vernacular English
Black americans discourse in english occurred when they were enslaved by white americans, and raised in the south. For example, in many lyrical pieces rappers spelling words with “em” at the ending signifies the southern culture of black americans. Since, african americans lack resources in schools they only knew what person to person. This eventually was tickled down generations and generations. As time went on “black english” continues to change.
In discussing Black English, John McWhorter talks about the theories of the origin of the language. McWhorter talks about how people have made claims that Black English is related and comes from African languages. He also tells how their research on this subject is unreliable and “sketchy.” These people making these claims are outside of linguistics, meaning they practice things such as education and speech pathology. People like Dr. Smith, a teacher at a medical college, suggested that Black English is a mixture of African languages with English, where these African languages have altered English into a new language.
Baldwin stated that “Language is determined by the person that is speaking it.” The audience is anyone that doesn’t consider “Black English” a language, people that don’t use
1. What factors differentiate the history and experience of African Americans from those of Asian, Hispanic, and Native Americans? The factors that would separate African Americans from racial ethnic groups would be their involuntary immigration and initial enslavement. Other groups came in hopes of political freedom and economic opportunity. While African Americans history and experience were based upon economic exploitation, the denial of freedom, denied their language, history, culture, ancestral ties and homeland affiliation.
When the British colonized North America, there was a large demand for labor. This labor came in two forms, indentured servitude and slavery. Indentured servitude was very popular at first but slavery soon became a huge market. With the importation of hundreds of slaves from Africa, it became the easiest and cheapest way to supply labor to plantations. But these slaves were seen as property, not people.
“If Black English Isn’t a Language Then Tell Me What Is” In the essay “If Black Isn’t a Language Then Tell Me What Is” (The New York Times, 1979) written by James Baldwin, the author asserts that the African American community has altered the English language into a new language during the last five centuries to accommodate the black experience in American history despite the white’s attempt to submerge it. To begin the essay he makes his argument clear by referencing the alterations the French made to their native language to describe how people will eventually “...evolve a language in order to describe and thus control their circumstances…”; furthermore he continues to analyze how the caucasian people of America have only accepted the black language when it came out of a white mouth; he ends the essay by reinforcing his position, elaborating on the racism black’s have faced when they were denied the right to an education unless it was for the white benefit. His liberal purpose is to bring light to the subtle racism that African Americans experience even after the Civil Rights movement and to acknowledge the cultural influence they have in America. His writing appears very personal and intimate like he’s voluntarily opening up to his audience by letting them know of his own struggles as an African American, targeting mostly minorities and people who feel oppressed by white America.
Unlike Cosby, that believes that AAVE should cease to exist. Cosby prompts his audience to not accept the Vernacular that some black people speak because it will get them nowhere. Whiles, Smitherman defends that there is no intellectual deficiencies in the students that speak AAVE. Cosby says younger African Americans do not want to learn the Standard American English whereas Smitherman believes that they approach school enthusiastically and highly motivated to learn. It is not that they do not want to learn but instead because of the constant tearing down of their vernacular and being placed in Special Educational programs as a result extinguishes the desire of wanting to learn.
The Skin That We Speak The way a person speaks is a direct link to a person’s culture and the environment which he or she was raised in. A person’s language, skin color as well as economic status influences the way he or she is perceived by others. Lisa Delpit and eleven other educators provide different viewpoints on how language from students of different cultures, ethnicity, and even economic status can be misinterpreted due to slang and dialect or nonstandard English by the teachers as well as his or her own peers. The Skin That We Speak: Thoughts on Language and Culture in the Classroom by Lisa Delpit and Joanne Kilgour Dowdy, who collected essays from a diverse group of educators and scholars to reflect on the issue of language
It was once believed that the languages that the Africans spoke varied drastically from region to region but in reality they were “local variations of a deeper-lying structural similarity” (Herkovits 79). This similarity allowed communicating in the New World to be easier than if the languages were all completely linguistically independent, “whether Negro speech employs English or French or Spanish or Portuguese vocabulary, the identical constructions found over all the New World can only be regarded as a reflection of the underlying similarities in grammar and idiom, which, in turn, are common to the West African Sudanese tongues” (80). Language then became an important part of African American culture, whether it be a “secret” language used to help slaves escape, or to tell stories and folklore to children to encourage and motivate them, or express African proverbs from generation to generation. There has been many times when other races seem not to understand what African Americans are saying because of the slang terms we create that then become popular terms, most recently has been the phrases “on fleek” and “twerking”, to name a few examples. Being proficient in verbal arts was prized in Africa and now a value has been placed on verbal expression in today’s culture through riddles and through preaching and teaching (Williams
In America, it was all about race and discrimination. It started out the same just a need for free labor, but since it was mostly black slaves it led to the thought that black people were only good for slavery. This made people think the black people were inferior just because of
One of the reasons is that it is very expensive and troublesome to transport a huge number of slaves across the ocean. People were treated horribly, but in those days such actions were not crimes. Even if we consider them as crimes, they can not be regarded as
Judgment for using colloquialisms found mostly in the black community (African American Vernacular English, or AAVE, as it is called) is commonly paired with a white person’s latent racism — despite that white person perhaps thinking his or her
This research study article “Dialect Awareness and Lexical Comprehension of Mainstream American English in African American English-Speaking Children” written and conducted by Jan Edwards, Megan Gross, Jianshen Chen, Maryellen C. MacDonald, David Kaplan, Megan Brown, and Mark S. Seidenberg examines the sociocultural conditions of AAE. The writers hypothesize that children who speak AAE have trouble comprehending words that are not commonly present in the dialect. The purpose of the study is to promote dialectal awareness and dialectal comprehension. The article’s research team is from the University of Wisconsin Madison, which holds one off the nations top Speech Language Pathology programs.
African American Studies was a great experience. Has opened my eyes to my surrounding and the world around me. This course with Dr. Sheba Lo, was something out of me confront zone. I learned so many things from race to cultural to the importance aspect of African American. We are isolated to an environment that hide so much history that we all don’t think they are important to who we have become.
Do you know anything about other cultures besides your own? We live in a world with numerous countries and diversities. Each country has its own appeal and positives and often times we find ourselves comparing the resemblances and differences between these nations based on a variety of aspects like geography, culture, language, economy, government, weather and so on. Ethiopia is a country with a rich historic background which comes with a variety culture. The U.S is another country with an amusing culture.
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