Similarities Between Ebonics And Multilinguistics

In the current political climate of the United States, immigration is an extremely hot topic. Every single person – qualified or not - thinks they have something of worth to add to the heated debate, leading to some increasingly polarized views across the nation. From the day of its founding, America has been a country based on an idealized diverse and multicultural society where every single person is free to be exactly who they want to be. If the government legislated English as the national language, the multicultural and multilingual society the States worked so hard for will be driven multiple steps backward in the process. The culture one grows up in forms the basis of their personality from the moment they are born. Speaking a language

There are at least 24 different dialects of English spoken in America alone according to the Washington Post. Despite the common language many people still find a way to create barriers between regions. In the situation of Ebonics and dialects relating to it, many people that do not speak or understand the dialect refer to it as “lazy English”, but it is in fact “no more lazy English than Italian is lazy Latin” according to linguist John Rickford (Rickford 726). Ebonics is a full-fledged dialect of the mother language English acknowledged by linguists across the world. Even though many linguists agree that Ebonics is a definite dialect many uneducated people still find it a basis of discrimination. The fact that many still believe speakers of Ebonics are not speaking “true” English is a good enough reason to not legislate English. If English were to be legislated, what form would it take? Would there be one winning dialect the entire country would be made to follow, or would each regional dialect still be spoken – just not any dialect deemed “lesser English”? The existence of these dialects are proof that the undertaking of legislating English would be an extremely daunting task to

The mere act of communication gives us the tools to “forever discover, learn, and expand” one’s brain and entire being in a world where communicating with others is so vital (Troutt 718). While there will always be errors and lapses in speech, like when “’tall’ becomes ‘small’” when buying a coffee at the popular coffee shop Starbucks, the act of creating a national language will only create a further barrier between the diversity found in a country like the United States (Magliozzi 2). The carefully cultivated culture that is so massively different everywhere one turns is something that American citizens should be proud of, and something that those in charge should want to keep. Forcing every one of those so very different people to speak a language they don’t necessarily want to speak would cause a massive decline in the great country the signers of the Declaration of Independence set out to