ipl-logo

African American Vernacular English Language Analysis

819 Words4 Pages

Dear Mr. Cosby, I have heard your speech regarding African American Vernacular English, how it influences the youth and how the blame must be places on the parents for not teaching or encouraging their kids to learn “proper English” for the Brown v. Board of Education, and I don’t fully agree with the arguments you made that night. Firstly, I don’t think African American Vernacular English is the cause of the high dropout rates or the reason the African American kids are going to prison, or failing school. And with all due respect, I don’t think you are the person to complain about dropout rates, since you yourself have dropped out of high school after failing 10th grade. The point which was emphasized the most in your speech, was that the overall bad reputation that the African American teenagers have in school is due to the type of English they speak, however, I think that African American Vernacular English (AAVE) does not necessarily “cripple” someone, as proven by the works of American professor of linguistics William Labov. Labov’s research concluded that teenager speakers of AAVE can think logically and abstractly. William Labov, at one point in his …show more content…

And then there are the problems of the poor working people. The people who wake up early in the morning of every day and work tens of hours a week, and still, they can barely make above the poverty level. We should recognize the struggle of both the poor African American single mothers and poor African American fathers, and the lack of social support they have to struggle with. I imagine it must be unimaginably difficult to spend as much time with their children as the working-class African American parents would like to, considering they are demonized if they do not provide for their children’s basic

Show More
Related
406 Words | 2 Pages

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.

Read More
1121 Words | 5 Pages

I viewed Frontline a documentary series, which episode was entitled Poor Kids. The frontline personnel spent time with three children Kailey, Johnny, and Britany along with their families as they all struggle financially. We perceive a glimpse of what it is like to live below the poverty line in America through a child’s eyes. While observing the documentary, I became consciously aware that children who are considered poor or living below the poverty line were more mindful of the responsibilities of life. The children were worrisome of the lack of employment for their parents, bills, and in Britney’s case; how they would accommodate their way of living to support a new addition to the family.

Read More
426 Words | 2 Pages

Review of Vershawn Young Discussion After reading “Vershawn Ashanti Young: Should Writers Use They Own English?” against Rebecca Wheeler’s “Code-Switch to Teach Standard English (Young 111. Wheeler 108)”. Each paper expresses a different opinion regarding the teaching of English in the classrooms. Each author writes with different agendas, different tones, and different purposes. Each acts upon their beliefs as they perceive them, and as a result are poles apart.

Read More
338 Words | 2 Pages

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

Read More
436 Words | 2 Pages

Wolfram states that African American children tend to have a different dialect because they usually grow up in urban, blue-collar environments. This leads them to be influenced by how others talk in the

Read More
411 Words | 2 Pages

Loosely using words we do not have recognition of is a problem we can fix with more public awareness of where they came from through a conversation about race; a conversation that may seem daunting, but that has the ability to teach profound lessons of the way our society

Read More
310 Words | 2 Pages

It was the early twentieth 100 , and the world had already changed trehands dously compared to the world of their parents and grandparents. Slavery had ended in United States more than half a century earlier. While African American English still faced tremendous economic and social obstacle in both the northern and southern DoS , there were more chance than there had been. After the Civil War (and first slightly before, especially in the Union ), Department of Education for Negroid American English -- and total darkness and white char -- had become more common . Many were not able to attend or complete schooltime time , but a substantial few were able not only to attend and complete elementary or secondary winding school, but college .

Read More
650 Words | 3 Pages

African-American Vernacular is a language spoken in the African-American community on a daily basis. It is a part of history and it continues to grow and become way of life for most African-American to understand the meaning of certain things. It’s easy to lean about new things or explain complicated things with the use of African-American vernacular. African-American vernacular is a simple version of standard American English. I am not one hundred percent sure whether or not AAE should be treated as a separate language, I am more of 50/50.

Read More
983 Words | 4 Pages

“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.

Read More
775 Words | 4 Pages

Although this sort of language is not limited to the characteristics of AAE, it situates the African American childhood in their socially disadvantaged environment, where the inhibition level of using taboo vocabulary is at a minimum and the language is, in fact, that which is considered inappropriate in other social

Read More
1395 Words | 6 Pages

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

Read More
903 Words | 4 Pages

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

Read More
1082 Words | 5 Pages

There are many open wounds in the African-American community that have not healed what so ever. Disintegration of family structures in the African-American community has been a persistent problem for far too long. High out of wedlock birth rates, absent fathers, and the lack of a family support network for many young African-Americans have led to serious problems in America's urban areas. The persistence of serious social problems in inner-city areas has led to a tragic perpetuation of racial prejudice as well. African Americans still face a litany of problems in the 21st century today.

Read More
663 Words | 3 Pages

Vonnie McLoyd discusses in the book Child Development that black families are more likely to face poverty in America and the effects that poverty has on those children. McLoyd states that children that have faced poverty in their lives can have “impaired socioemotional functioning” (McLoyd 311). As a result from job loss creating parental stress, parents often become

Read More
479 Words | 2 Pages

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

Read More

More about African American Vernacular English Language Analysis

Related Topics

Open Document