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African American Vernacular English Language Analysis

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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

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