I feel stupid asking these sorts of questions constantly but I really need someone to explain to me the objection Black people have to using correct grammar. Is it because it’s too many words to use and they feel that they can communicate more effectively by completely eliminating parts of speech…
While it’s evident in your language that you’ve already made up your mind, I love talking about ethnolinguistics, especially as it pertains to Black American English. This will be a long post, because there’s a lot of information.
Sometimes I can understand why people have an aversion to Black American English — it’s one of the many parts of our culture and history that we aren’t taught about and mainstream America teaches us to feel that way, it’s really easy to buy into that level of anti-Blackness especially with no education to combat it — but when people ask why and claim the question is genuine, while simultaneously shaming those who use the dialect already, my patience wears a little thin. So I’m not going to strive to be polite or pleasant here as you’ve already gone to great lengths to be disrespectful not only to the individuals who use the dialect, but the people who came before them that helped shape it.
The formation of the dialect:
Whether slaves or hired workers, when people who speak different languages have to come together to work, they develop what is called a pidgin. A pidgin has a lexifier language (the language of the dominant, which is in our case English) and is used for the sole purpose of work. You have to communicate with the boss and your coworkers to get it done, and you shape it around the boss’s language.
When a pidgin is spoken in the home, by the next generation, it becomes a creole. In the case of Black Americans, the creole is Gullah Geechee. You’ve remarked that the dialect as it is used today resembles the language of slaves. Actually, Gullah Geechee will come closest to that and is the oldest surviving form of a uniquely Black American dialect/language, though it is unfortunately dying out as the shaming of the history and culture becomes more widespread within Black America. The youth aren’t picking it up and preserving it, and they don’t want to.
(Within the first two minutes you hear Miss Caroline speak about the history of her language and she previews it in her speech, but you should continue and really hear the creole — it’s beautiful.)
A creole is a language. However, elements of that creole and the lexifier language its pidgin was built around often come together and form a dialect. Here, we have Black American English, more commonly known as AAVE, AAE, BAE, etc.
What people refuse to recognize is that the split that happened between mainstream American English — the one you’ve called “correct” — and BAE is part of Black history. Even as slaves, Black people were isolated, but during and after the Great Migration, we still were. “The Black Community,” was a very literal thing. We existed in spaces that didn’t require us to come into contact with white Americans. Ergo, our dialect developed differently. That’s what makes it ours. It came from us, almost independently. It still shocks me that people don’t get how beautiful that is, but consider mainstream American English (which I’ll call MAE from here on out) “correct,” when it developed apart from mainstream British English for exactly the same reasons and in the exact same way. Isolation. It’s a trip that there are significant grammatical differences between MAE and MBE, but no one advocates that MBE is “correct,” despite that English isn’t native to America. But that’s the hypocrisy of the way it’s taught to us.
Many people don’t want to hear or believe the rates of segregation in present day living situations, but it’s there. We’re still largely isolated, but we’ve been exposed to everything else. However — and it gets even more beautiful, here, especially with all the media leading that has people thinking all we do is kill each other — our dialect varies less regionally than MAE due, not only to that continued isolation, but also to closeness. For example, white people from the west or the north hear me say “y’all” and attribute it to me being Southern (and Southern American English played a big role in the development of BAE, for obvious reasons that are key points in Black History). However, I grew up thinking everyone said y’all because I grew up with Black music and Black relatives from all over the country. They use BAE, so that Southern element is still there. There are even Southern traits in Black culture outside of our dialect/language (because it all varies much less regionally for the same reasons) that have carried over to non-Southern regions. That’s all due to isolation and closeness. We stay connected no matter where we go. This shows to be similar in many other minority dialects as well (except Native languages, but I think they’re starting to make a comeback — the big issue is older people not wanting to teach the youth who do want to learn because they believe they won’t be successful for having the language and/or accent and they see it as protecting them).
BAE, within Black America (and white suburban boy wanna be down america ugh) has what is referred to in linguistics as covert prestige. MAE has overt prestige and is what it is because the people who pull the strings say so. Everything other than MAE, be it Southern, Boston, or what have you is subject to linguistic discrimination — obviously, it’s worse for dialects and languages and accents associated with minorities. Covert prestige just means that within the applicable group(s), the dialect or language is seen as preferable. This happens in Black America for some of the reasons you mentioned, as an act of defiance (like what happened with language in Jamaica), but also because it links us together. It’s ours. It came from us. We want to keep it. For us, it’s “cool,” for those reasons. That’s another reason why BAE and ALL dialects aren’t, despite heightened exposure, moving toward a uniform MAE dialect and are instead spreading further apart. Identity, which, at least for us, but I’m sure for a lot of groups, is very much based on history and culture.
Linguistic discrimination:
I could go on all day about people judging someone by how they talk and not what they’re saying. I could go through the multiple studies conducted by linguists that show how we judge people, but I won’t. I’ll touch on what you’ve said in your original post about education.
Black students are put into remedial or special needs categories in school at alarming rates, but a lot of that has to do with the way they speak. There is actually a video that brought tears to my eyes (because when I was 10, my dialect was the first thing that had to go and the first anti-Black lesson I got from a teacher) that I’m going to try and find later, but there’s an elementary school class that’s learning the different dialects of English without elevating any one as superior. It’s a completely different situation than what most Black kids would face in classrooms.
You’ve “answered” your own question by blaming education. That’s just not true, and I’ve gone through the history already, but it brings up a point that needs to be made.
People think that the dialect is a symbol of ignorance, or being uneducated. A lot of people blame that for why Black people are viewed as such now. I used to, too. Hell, I’m from Kentucky, and we were definitely not getting these lessons. However, I realized that it’s incredibly stupid to think that because we were already considered ignorant and uneducated. People on my campus were making fun of how “stupid and uneducated” the Black students are, but we’re college students.
My first or second day of my ethnolinguistics course, my professor asked us if, “Do you think that people are viewed as unintelligent because of the way they speak, or is the way they speak viewed as unintelligent because of who is speaking?” And given that we’ve been viewed as unintelligent for literal ages, I’ll have to go with the latter.
I’ll leave with this, because it’s something I want people to think about:
On the lines of “correct grammar” and BAE being a simplified version of MAE, which any linguist can tell you it isn’t, it’s interesting to note that there are linguists — experts in their field — who call it AAL, meaning African-American Language. The spelling, grammatical, phonetic rules of BAE indeed do rival that of a language.
There’s nothing simple about it.
The fact that a growing and dangerous number of Black people can’t read or comprehend what you wrote is exactly what’s wrong with your argument. There is NOTHING wrong with speaking correct English. It doesn’t make me white. It doesn’t mean I don’t have common sense. It doesn’t mean I’m some sort of elitist.
AGAIN, I dream a world where ALL Black people are educated, articulate, and intelligent. Associating those things with whiteness is your slave mentality.
A lot of research — I mean a LOT of research — has gone into what you’re talking about and everything you’ve said is founded in nothing and, actually, is contradicted by the evidence. Do your research. Don’t willfully be ignorant.
The idea that there is a “correct” way to speak is itself born from elitism. The reason that the higher up you go, speaking becomes more uniform with MAE is because people (all people) are typically forced to assimilate with those in power to be successful. Again, the research is abundant and it is not hidden.
Dialect is not directly correlated to education. It’s connected to social class, race and ethnicity, nationality, gender, and many things, but what education does to speech does not manifest itself in a dialect. I’ve given you the history, which you can easily look up to confirm for yourself, but you’ve chosen to ignore it. MANY educated Black Americans, including myself, predominantly use Black American English. There simply is no evidence to support your elitist, anti-Black claims and everything to the contrary.
How you don’t realize that shaming Black culture and what we’ve created for ourselves, then insisting we detach ourselves from that and our history that’s shaped not only our lives but our will because assimilation is “correct,” is anti-Black is beyond me. You can’t spin it any other way.
Your ignorance is further apparent in the ignored fact that most people who speak a dialect that is attributed to the culture of a minority group code switch for the sake of survival. You’re connecting our dialect and heritage with not knowing any better, but most of us do. We use MAE when we speak to police, to teachers, to people like you, because we know that we won’t be taken seriously, we’ll be perceived as stupid, or we’ll be seen as a threat. That is anti-Black. Instead of being real with you and speaking to you like I’d speak to anyone, I’ve chosen to use MAE because — while you already decided to reject the facts and remain ignorant — you wouldn’t have taken me seriously as someone who knows her shit had I spoken to you in my dialect.
And you don’t get that that is fucked up. One of the big reasons Black kids aren’t given a quality education and are deemed lost causes is because of this white supremacist mindset that all things Black are wrong. Not because there are actual mental hurdles to overcome. Yet, here you are, claiming to be down for the cause and doing the same thing — demanding that we assimilate when there is nothing wrong with how we talk. White elites decided it wasn’t acceptable because it was ours, and you bought it.
I bought it, too, though. Like I said, it started when I was ten. The difference between you and I, though, is that because I love my people and what we come together to create as a group, I stopped shaming Black culture and let myself appreciate it.
You using MAE doesn’t make you white. Like I said, most people who speak BAE code switch. Most of use it. We just realize that we shouldn’t have to because there is nothing wrong or inferior about what we’ve made. We’re moving as a people and refusing to assimilate just to survive and make it, because it isn’t fair and we’re fed up. Tired. While there are those of us who take covert prestige to an extreme level and claim that any Black American who does not use BAE at all is white, that doesn’t give you free reign to shit on our culture and heritage by doing the classic white supremacist thing and labeling it ignorant and uneducated. You are uneducated because everything you believe has long since been disproved by people who actually make a living studying this.
And, again, if you are proud, then I suggest you do you research.
Much respect
