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by Steven Fox Even if their handling of the matter was less than deft, the members of the Oakland school board deserve gratitude for bringing sharply into public view the question of just what linguistic skills our young people will need for their adult lives, Mr. Fox avers. The members of the school board in Oakland, California, probably had no idea that their actions regarding Ebonics would receive national attention. Nor did they expect that the nation's reaction would be so strong and so negative. They were, after all, just trying to find a way to solve a problem that has plagued their school system for a long time. Yet, as a result of their policy pronouncement, they have been hit with a barrage of criticism ranging from ridicule to hostility. It may appear that nothing good can come from raising this issue, but I disagree. The entire nation has engaged in a conversation about the importance of language proficiency in a way that it has never done before, and there is general agreement that without language proficiency a person cannot expect to succeed in the adult world. The Oakland school board deserves credit for raising the consciousness of America about a persistent and bedeviling problem. Unfortunately, the loudest noise often comes from people who don't know much about the subject. Some call Ebonics what has generally been called Black English or Black English Vernacular - a language, some call it slang, some call it a dialect. Some say it is just bad English, some say it is sloppy, some say it is illegitimate, some say it is wrong. At one point the Oakland board unwisely used the word genetic to describe the origin of Ebonies (the board has since retracted that statement, claiming that it did not mean the word in its biological sense but in its linguistic sense). Others have said explicitly that Ebonies is a descendant of the language that was forced upon slaves, who were prevented from learning to speak as their white masters did. One thing is clear: many people are confused. Perhaps I can help clear up some of the confusion. Ebonics is a dialect of American English. It is not a separate language, and it is not in itself slang, though it, like all languages and their dialects, employs slang to some degree. A language is a pattern of words and of rules governing the use of those words, spoken or written, that is mutually understandable by a group of people and not understandable by persons outside that group. Some languages are spoken by hundreds of millions of people. English, for example, has some 400,000,000 primary speakers - those who use it as their first language - and who knows how many secondary and tertiary speakers. According to linguist Paul Newman, Hausa - a language in the AfroAsiatic phylum of the Chadic family (which itself contains about 135 distinct languages) - claims around 25,000,000 speakers. But Hausa is no less and no more a language than English. And Sanskrit, the ancestor of many languages spoken widely on the Indian subcontinent, is the mother tongue of only a few thousand speakers. We do not judge one language or another to be superior because it is spoken by a greater number of people. While all of us in America might agree that we share the English language, we also recognize that we hear among ourselves many different dialects. Our friends from Boston and Dallas do not sound alike, and that is because they speak different dialects. A dialect is a subgroup within a language, one dialect differing from another in three particular ways: vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammar. Speakers of two different dialects of the same language should be able to understand one another, while speakers of two different languages most often cannot.(1) For example, a man speaking the dialect we generally call Standard American English (SAE) might say that "my friends and I went to a movie," while his Australian acquaintance would say that "my mates and I took in a cinema." In addition to carrying different meanings, the word mates is pronounced differently by the American and the Australian, the Australian pronouncing the vowel less like long A and closer to long I. Such differences in vocabulary, pronunciation, and usage will not prevent communication between the two English speakers. But when their German friend says, "Ich bin mit meiner Freunden ins Kino gegangen," neither one knows what he means. Regional dialects in America employ slight differences in grammar as well. "That's as far as I can go," according to speakers of SAE, but speakers of the dialect heard in the Appalachians might say, "That's all the further I can go." Such differences are not altogether a matter of education, either. I know a couple from Texas, both with doctorates and professorships in English literature, one of whom said, when analyzing a bridge hand after it had been played, "I might should have led the spade." Concern over dialect is not exclusively an American problem. In fact, I would say from my own experience that we care much less about it than do people in other countries who speak other languages. Parisians are notoriously snobbish about their pronunciation and consider theirs superior to that of native French speakers from Nice, Toulouse, and - a Dieu ne plaise - Montreal. Germans learn Hochdeutsch in their schools and speak Plattdeutsch in their villages. When I spent some time abroad during college, living with a Belgian family in Antwerp, the major city of the region known as Flanders, the local dialect was Flemish, but the national language was Dutch. We American students were taught Dutch, but if we asked local people what language they spoke, they would answer vlaams, Flemish. Though the spirit of nationalism was very strong, it was clear that their dialect had its place, and education was not that place. I recall the mama of the family I stayed with, on hearing her daughter Marie-Rose speaking with some of her school friends, saying to her "geen dialekt in onze huis" no dialect in our house. The English also recognize a status dialect, the dialect of the British Broadcasting Company - what we call the Queen's English and what they call the "Received Pronunciation" or the RP. Those who have not "received" it cannot expect to advance in public life beyond their own local areas. Regional television announcers speak in their local dialects, but no one on the national telly does. Margaret Thatcher, who was prime minister during the time I taught in Lincolnshire, grew up in Grantham, the town where many of my pupils lived. Though Mrs. Thatcher was admired by many for her political acumen, she was criticized on a personal level by those from Lincolnshire, who saw that she had adopted the classier dialect of Kent and forsaken the local pronunciation (which, by the way, shares with Ebonics the characteristic of substituting "f" or "v" for "th," so that one of my pupils told me he could "wiggow [wiggle] 'is toof wiv 'is foomb"). The Kentish dialect is the RP, without which Thatcher could never have risen from local politics to the national and international prominence she enjoyed. The dialect of her Lincolnshire background was an impediment. In a way that no English person would see as hypocritical, her neighbors both required her to elevate her language and chastised her for distancing herself from her humble beginnings. What is now being called Ebonics is a dialect of American English, and, as such, it differs from SAE, which is also a dialect, in matters of vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammar. Speakers of SAE cannot truly say that they find Ebonics unintelligible; neither can speakers of Ebonics claim that they cannot understand SAE. Some grammatical features of Ebonics contradict the rules we learn in the standard dialect, so that the expression "He don't got none" causes some purists to say that Ebonics is wrong, but in the Ebonics dialect the double negative is used for emphasis, and the third person singular form of the verb drops the "-s" ending. The fact that many listeners unfamiliar with Ebonics have not sorted out its regularities does not mean that it has none. The media have stressed that Ebonics is a highly rule-based dialect, and speakers of Ebonics do not carelessly drop the verb "to be" or word endings or any of the features we associate with SAE. Since Ebonics hit the front pages, I have spoken with several people about the phenomenon. Actually, I first investigated the matter when I moved to Cleveland and began teaching 28 years ago. My conversations have led me to several understandings. Many people consider the speaking of Ebonics to be a sign of ignorance and bad linguistic habits. They think students should be prohibited from using the dialect. Most African Americans that I have spoken to, both adults and students, have expressed some anger about the subject. Reactions have ranged from discomfort and frustration to acute embarrassment. I have heard no one defend the position that some people take - implied if not stated by media coverage of Oakland's actions - that students who use Ebonics cannot learn SAE. Most of the African Americans with whom I have spoken, in fact, have expressed irritation with any suggestion that they should not be expected to learn the same language habits that all other educated American children learn, A colleague told me that it was insulting to suggest that these American-born children should be given an excuse for not learning what immigrant children learn when they come to America. SAE is recognized as the language of general communication in America, and practically everyone expecting to succeed in the world of work needs facility in that dialect of English. Many doors are closed to people whose speech patterns differ too widely from the standard. Of course, in different areas of the U.S. one hears regional dialects, and those dialects - generally recognizable through pronunciation and then vocabulary, less often grammar - are accepted without stigma. No one would seriously criticize a Bostonian for saying "pahk the cah in Hahvahd Yahd" or a Texan for saying "Y'all come back soon, heah." Mark Twain said that an educated Southerner has no use for the letter "r" except at the beginnings of words. When pronunciation and vocabulary are the primary distinguishing features of a dialect, its speakers are considered intelligent, their dialects charming. But add differences in grammar to that mix, especially if the differences defy some of the most basic rules of SAE (unlike the example of my Texan professor friends), and the speakers are in for some criticism. The person who says "He might talk good, but he don't make no sense" will certainly make a poor impression. It is important to note that many linguistic characteristics of Ebonics appear in other dialects as well; surely double negatives and dropped final consonants define any number of regional American dialects. The slang words and expressions that give vitality to all dialects appear in Ebonics, too. Indeed, Ebonics probably has neither more nor less slang than any other particular dialect of American English. Ebonics is different in that it is a nationwide system and is associated with a group of people already identifiable because of race and economic status. Unfortunately, that is the real problem behind the controversy. While the Received Pronunciation in England calls up thoughts of royalty, elegance, and privilege, Ebonics stirs images of the problems of urban life - poverty, crime, unemployment, substandard housing, inferior education. Accurate or not, those factors are what most Americans think characterize life in the inner city. No one wants to perpetuate the cycle of urban poverty, a cycle that ensnares a larger proportion of African Americans than of others. And to the degree that the language of urban African Americans is associated with that cycle, people of all races express the belief that, if the young people can escape the language, they might also escape the poverty and the other problems that seem to go with it. One person with whom I spoke called SAE the "money language." Another made it clear that those who do not speak SAE cannot expect a white-collar job, which she believes we all want for our children. Some indicated that they had grown up in homes where the Ebonics dialect was spoken but had striven to master SAE. They presented themselves as testimony that it can be done. Students who have spoken to me have expressed still more impatience, even approaching outrage, at what they see as attempts to "legitimize" what they consider to be a stigmatizing behavior. One girl wrote in an essay that she experiences rejection and ridicule from schoolmates when she speaks what she considers "proper" English. They accuse her of "acting white" and of trying to deny her African heritage, charges that upset her greatly. Such social pressures recall the people of Grantham and their reaction to Margaret Thatcher. Another of my students told me that some of his friends have asked him whether they might be able to get jobs in the store where he works, but he is leery of recommending them because he knows that their manner of speech will alienate some of the clientele. He also wonders whether his friends' language habits will reflect poorly on him by association. Still another student told me very simply that learning language is like learning anything else: anyone who wants to learn what is correct can do so. Psychologists know that basic language patterns are formed very early, with the basic language structures firmly in place by age 5. We learn language, perhaps the most complex of all our systems of knowledge, by imitation rather than by prescription. That is, we make sentences and follow the patterns of language long before we can explicitly state the rules of grammar or syntax, if we are ever able to do so. Childhood errors are replaced, usually without instruction, with standard forms because the child hears the language used by adults. Children in environments where SAE is the language spoken will develop the patterns of that dialect themselves and will do so very early in their lives. Even when a child has reached school age, the earlier new language patterns are introduced, the better. Simply by modeling SAE, elementary teachers will have more opportunity to influence students than will secondary teachers. High school teachers have to call to their students' attention the distinctions between SAE and any other dialect, and those students who desire to establish standard patterns will have to make an effort to do so. This process is easier for some students than for others, but it can be done. When I began my teaching career at East High School in Cleveland, I had had no exposure to what we then called Black English. I came from suburban New York and a high school that, while racially integrated, enrolled black students who didn't speak much differently from their white peers. We knew that, as New Yorkers, we had what the rest of the country considered an accent, but that was regional, not racial. I had a very hard time in the first few weeks of my first teaching assignment, but I have to say that my students were very accommodating. Realizing that I was expected to help them learn SAE, I devised an exercise based on the sentences I heard them speak. They were to read the sample sentences and "correct" them - that is, "translate" them into SAE. The results were surprising. When I gave them "She don't care what happens to her," trying to get them to add the "-es" to the third person singular form of the verb, my students wrote, "She do care what happens to her." These students probably did not learn much from my efforts to teach them SAE. What does work is not so easily done. Parents who want their children to develop fluency in SAE must provide language models for their infants and preschoolers. This is especially difficult if the parents are not themselves speakers of the standard dialect, but it is not impossible. As the colleague I mentioned above said, children of immigrants learn SAE and speak it without an accent, even if their parents remain unintelligible in their efforts to speak English. As children begin to pick up influences from outside the home, parents must reinforce what they want their children to know. The child who comes home from playing with a neighbor and says, "That boy, he don't play fair!" needs to hear a parent say, "Oh, so that boy doesn't play fair?" Young children still see their parents as their most reliable models. By the time they reject their parents and willingly turn to peers, their language patterns will have been set. Recorded language on cassette tape is readily available from libraries. Children can hear many different voices speaking SAE long before they are susceptible to dialect influences from outside sources. When they do meet those influences, deviance from the standard can be addressed in the way. that my Flemish mama dealt with Marie-Rose: geen dialekt in onze huis! And while no parents can hope to prevent their teenagers from using the slang of their generation, they can be assured that their children have the patterns of standard language to return to when they are needed. Children also need to know that, if they use a language different from that of the crowd, they may experience rejection, and they have to be strong enough to endure that. As shown by my student who willingly braves the ridicule of some of her classmates and by Mrs. Thatcher who rose to the prime ministry, a measure of self-confidence and an awareness of the importance of linguistic competence can help young people through the sometimes cruel experience of peer pressure. If they are encouraged from early childhood, they will stand by their choices. Martin Luther King wrote and spoke SAE with consummate skill, but he was also adept at using the dialect of his congregation to great effect. It is doubtful that he could have succeeded so well within both the black community and the larger American community, not to mention on the world stage, if he had been fluent in only one or the other. Skill in any language or dialect has value. Nothing I have said should make any reader think that the dialect we now call Ebonics is inferior to other dialects or should be eradicated. However, it is important for us to realize just what linguistic skills our young people will need for their adult lives and to help them achieve those skills. The members of the Oakland school board, even if their handling of the matter was less than deft, deserve neither ridicule nor hostility for their actions. For bringing the matter so sharply into the public view, they deserve the gratitude of anyone who cares about the education of our nation's children. 1. The picture is not absolutely clear, and some exceptions come readily to mind. Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish are commonly held to be distinct languages, yet speakers of one can understand speakers of the others with little effort. We call them languages, rather than dialects, partly because of the political histories of those peoples and their nations. Still, millions of speakers of one "dialect" in China cannot understand the millions who speak a different dialect. Yet all are said to speak Chinese. Thus the distinction between dialect and language is imperfect at best. STEVEN FOX teaches English at Shaker Heights High School, Shaker Heights, Ohio. He originally published this piece in the newsletter of the Shaker Heights Teacher Association.
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