[!@#$%!]

yes the internet is cool but i wish we could be having this discussion in a bar (or pub) and with a lot of beer. and some decent, greasy food. ah that would be so much more entertaining.

[Savage Clone]

A lot of poor Southern/Appalachian white culture is isolated from "standard" English speakers as well, and there is a long history of a different sort of entrenched underclass in those areas also. Do they get a break? No. They hear a language much different from "standard" English when they go home at night too. I think it's much the same thing, but applied differently to different groups.
Perhaps for the sake of consistency, we should also provide education in the native languages of legal immigrants, since they are citizens too?
Of course not, because that gets very messy, difficult and expensive.
Dialects are fine, but jeeziz.
I speak differently when meeting strangers, doing a job interview or writing a paper or a press release than I do when I'm talking to my friends.
We all do.

[truncated]

Proponents of Ebonics instruction in public education believe that their proposals have been distorted by political debate and misunderstood by the general public. The belief underlying it is that black students would perform better in school and more easily learn standard American English if textbooks and teachers acknowledged that AAVE was not a substandard version of standard American English but a legitimate speech variety with its own grammatical rules and pronunciation norms.

I know I'm totally horning in on a discussion that doesn't involve me, but I suppose I have a question about this claim (without having read the article either, so I'm going to do that in a bit).

I wouldn't necessarily take issue with whether or not Ebonics qualifies as a structured variety of speech. I realize there are rules for its usage, and that terminology and grammatical structure are not random and arbitrary within it. However, I question why there is a difficulty in learning standard English at all for someone whose oft-used dialect is Ebonics.

As !@#$%! points out (and I'm loosely translating), language has a historical and cultural base that, considering the numerous mitigating factors, can differ drastically from region to region and even subculture to subculture. However, Ebonics is a 'constructed' dialect, a language that's almost built from the ground up without precedent by its users, and evolving much more quickly and dynamically than any other language. It is constantly modified to correlate with the ever-changing sociological trends in society, adopting new words and discarding old ones as quickly and easily as high school slang.

Ebonics is one of the most highly adaptable, and easily adapted to, 'dialects' in existence! There is simply no logical reason why people who default to Ebonics should have any more difficulty than anyone else learning standardized English. If anything, they should be more capable.

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by Savage Clone

Perhaps for the sake of consistency, we should also provide education in the native languages of legal immigrants, since they are citizens too?

hello bro, you just discovered bilingual education. works quite well!

--
ps a little reference material here

[Savage Clone]

I have no problem with bilingual education.
Ebonics, however, is ENGLISH.

Also, in ESL classes that supplement bilingual education to new citizens to help them get along better in their new country, I'm pretty sure they teach "standard" English.

[!@#$%!]

no, it's NOT!! that's the whole damn point

from a linguistics point of view it's not

it has different GRAMMAR

it's not just a few words

--

here's the article (i'm not saying wikipedia is god btw, but it's pretty illustrative):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebonics

[Savage Clone]

All dialects differ.
I can understand people speaking in Ebonics.
I cannot understand people speaking Polish.
It's English. A particular dialect of English, true, but English it is.

[truncated]

Originally Posted by Savage Clone

It's a freaking colloquial dialect, for god's sake.
If I can learn (after a fairly limited amount of exposure) to understand Scottish people, Jamaican people, or people speaking in ebonic patois, I don't think it's too much to expect that someone coming from one of those other dialects would be able to pick up "standard" English either. Especially considering how much more immersive "standard English" is in general society, TV, etc.
IT IS THE SAME LANGUAGE. I don't think Southerners could get away with using Southern patois in a Master's thesis, and they would have little recourse to complain if they received poor marks for turning in a paper peppered with Southern colloquialisms and sentence structures.
I'm sorry, but I am going to have to go with truncated on this.

Savage Clone brings up an excellent point.

I lived in Ireland for about a year awhile back, and when I first arrived, it nearly was a foreign language to me. The idioms were so numerous, I had to constantly ask for translations. Even those differed from county to county, even town to town.

Now, I find myself not just well versed in certain Irish dialects, but having incorporated quite a few of their speech habits unconsciously into my own way of speaking.

Not only is it relatively easy to familiarize yourself with a certain manner of speaking when you have the desire to, it's actually DIFFICULT to avoid doing so. You have to make a CONSCIOUS EFFORT not to adapt to a 'language' you are exposed to, simply because it is a natural human cognitive behavior to attempt to adopt a skill that contributes to survival/ease of living. A simple desire to communicate will create a proclivity to assimilate in a foreign setting.

I reiterate - the inability to learn standardized English is nonexistent. It is an unwillingness.

[!@#$%!]

we need more beer
---

it's more of a creole than a dialect.

see, what i was trying to illustrate with my examples from spanish colonial times, is that the definitions of "language" and "dialect" are not so much scientifically based as they are political.

how come we don't say that english is a dialect of german?
politics
how come we don't say italian, spanish, french and romanian are dialects of latin?
politics! the rise of the nation-state...
how come we don't recognize north-african, syrian and saudi arab as different languages?
politics!!
this is a huge debate among linguists... the categories are not so clear-cut

sure you don't understand polish because it's a slavic language, but say if hitler had won ww2, germans could be making fun of you for your "funny german" (yes i exaggerate, but only to make a point). languages and dialects are differentiated more for political than linguistic reasons is my point... if not more at least 50-50...

[Glice]

I've edited my last post, it took me a while and you lot have gone and said some other things now which I'm going to have to respond to. I'm going to do a Marleypumpkin and insist that you go back to the end of page 2 and read my post.

[Glice]

Did you read my post?

[Glice]

Did you read my post yet?













Oh, I do make myself laugh sometimes.

[Savage Clone]

If the whole point of teaching an Ebonics curriculum is to give credit to the intellectual capacity of capable students who don't "sound smart" because they write in their own dialect, doesn't it seem strange to assume that these same capable students could not easily learn to write in the standard that exists in the country of their birth?
I don't view this as the same situation that a new immigrant faces; a new immigrant could be the smartest person in the world and get poor grades because of a genuine language barrier. I simply do not belive there are very many people who live in America their whole lives and are so isolated from "standard" English that they just CANNOT pick it up. Especially in urban areas, which are the places that Ebonics flourishes and continues its incredibly rapid evolutionary process.

[Savage Clone]

When English started, it was a dialect of German.
It's been a long time.

how come we don't say italian, spanish, french and romanian are dialects of latin?

Umm, we do. We lump them together in a group called "Romance languages," and they are far easier to learn once you know one of them than it is to learn, say, Mandarin.

[!@#$%!]

when did it cease to be one?

[!@#$%!]

hah hah a "marleypumpkin"

hold on...

[Savage Clone]

!@#$%!, you're funny when you're obstinate (seriously).
Would it help If I admitted that perhaps in a thousand years, Ebonics could be sufficiently different to standard English that it could be regarded as its own language?
In a thousand years, English will hardly sound like English.

[truncated]

Haha Glice!

I might be deviating from the issue here, because the categorization of Ebonics is completely irrelevant to the point (however fucktarded it may be) that I'm trying to make.

I don't care if it's a language, a dialect, a patois, a goddamn pate.

I can understand it, and I rarely, if ever use it.

MORE IMPORTANTLY, THOSE WHO SPEAK EBONICS CAN UNDERSTAND ME.

I don't have much linguistic training either, but I'm going to be an asshole here and assert that that doesn't make a damn bit of difference. I don't care if, when you deconstruct it, ebonics comes from another planet. I don't care if it has a varied grammatical structure that qualifies it as a separate language. It is a modified, modifiable, dynamic offshoot of American English, and many parts of it have come into existence after the fact.

IT IS SLANG.

And, I must repeat, no one who habitually 'speaks' Ebonics can claim to have a language barrier with someone who speaks standardized English.

They understand it. They are exposed to it more frequently than Ebonics. It is, as Glice pointed out, racial politics that drives its usage.

To be frank, I think it's deplorable to use this as an excuse not to conform to an educational standard. It is lazy, contentious, and spiteful, and only serves to deepen the racial divide.

BULLSHIT, I tell you, BULLSHIT.

[!@#$%!]

i'm not "obstinate" (but i hope im funny!), and i enjoy a discussion
i mean a decent one like we're having here-- not like arguing with khchris, with the insults & the personal attacks and the ego trips (yikes)
the question as i see is who has the truth? nobody.. but a little discussion helps to clarify things-- i enjoy that a lot
as a card-carrying geek one of my greatest sources of amusement is to discuss things with friends.... one of the reasons i was tempted by gradschool.

anyway I OWN THE TRUTH AND I WILL IMPART IT FROM MY ETHEREAL HEIGHTS
hah hah-- no way

no, but i'm looking at this not from the point of view of politics, but of linguistics instead, and the practical approaches to education-- because the educational system is absolutely fucked up.

one important note i'd like to make here-- i'm a native spanish speaker. i didn't learn english until i was like 14. not sure if this transpires in my prose. my pronounciation however is quite atrocious, hah hah, as phonetics gets frozen at an early age.

but my point is that i learned english AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE and **already having mastery of my own**. so it was easy! if you don't have mastery of ANY language, it makes any kind of learning much harder. that's the whole point of bilingual education programs-- hang on to a language and introduce the other bit by bit.

with african american vernacular english (i'm going to drop the term "ebonics" now), a similar approach to that of bilingual education has proven successful, and yet IT HASN'T BEED ADOPTED BECAUSE OF POLITICS. which proves to me that politicians make shitty scientists. just listen to bush on global warming and you'll see what i mean!

[truncated]

"Wot's da jackinory wit ya mate?"

Didn't take me night classes and linguist specialists to learn that that meant "Hey, what's going on?"

Not only that, I NEVER used idiomatic phrases like that (they just sounded too strange in an American accent), yet, even without the educational benefit of putting them into practice, I was still more than capable of translating them. I was exposed to them, and had the desire to understand, so the rest just happened naturally.

There are other, minute speech differences in this US/UK example - I found myself saying "as well" rather than "too," and structuring inquisitions differently. For example, while an American would more typically say

"You didn't go out Friday night?"

in Ireland/the UK they'd be more likely to say

"Did you not go out Friday night?"

Americans tend to use contractions much more than the Irish.

I personally think tiny nuances like that are much harder to adopt, as they're very slight variations on the way you 'fundamentally' construct your sentences, and therefore much more easily overlooked.

So if that can be done, there's no goddamn reason in the world why you can't change "Gimme my props yo" to "Lend me some credit" in a school paper.