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Black American Ebonics Essay

929 Words4 Pages

Language is vital to the identity of human beings. It is perhaps the most important single characteristic that distinguishes human beings from other animal species. The ability of men and women to communicate with one another in intelligent, symbolic, often abstract speech could be argued as the most important factor in our place as a dominating species on planet earth. Distinctive sounds, called phonemes, are arbitrary and have no meaning. But humans can string these sounds in an infinite number of ways to create meaning via words and sentences. Humans use language to to talk about real or imaginary situations, or objects far moved from their immediate surroundings. Other animals, in contrast, communicate in reaction to stimulus in their immediate …show more content…

Fosters discusses several successful instructional ap­proaches for promoting facility with standard Ameri­can English while honoring the rich language tradi­tion of Ebonies as well as touching upon the political controversies that surround the topic. Although the term ebonics (ebony=black and phonics=sound) was not given until 1971, the origin of ebonics goes back back several hundred years earlier. Black American Ebonics is the result of black slaves and their descendants who had to learn how to speak the English language. The english language of their white slave masters. Since a high population of slavery was concentrated in the southern United States, this is where the first english leaned by african slaves geographically began. Even in our own modern times, the way Americans who live down south pronounce their words are considered incorrect by both American grammar scholars as well as the rest of the American population. Formal education was made illegal for slaves so the broken english they learned was then passed on to future african generations which gives insight into the origin of the language of ebonics. What was started as a pidgin language; meaning when two speakers of different languages with no common language try to facilitate communication, ebonics became a creole language after it was retaught to the next african slave

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