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Are you arguing that the feds shouldn’t have people on tap who know what the slang means?

“my’ and ‘ride’ as a long ah (mah, rahd).”

so…everyone in texas speaks ebonics? o.O

crissa…seriously? are you even seeing the point as it flies over your head? i think if they think slang is a completely different language, they may be beyond help.

Crissa, I ain’t heard nobody speak like that in a Lonnnnnnng time! 

Seriously - I’ve heard parodies of black english and movie send ups, but it has been at least 20 years since I have heard a real, live black person use a “black english” dialect for reals.

It certainly isn’t common in the younger generation that would be generally more commonly reached by the DEA, and it damn well wouldn’t be such a concern given that only about 5% of the population ever spoke English that way to begin with!

@Crissa

It is a little like searching for employees who are fluent in 1337 or who can speak “Southern.” 

Yes, it is important to keep up with slang, but by its very nature slang changes all the fucking time or is eventually recognized as a legitimate part of its originating language.  You cannot be “fluent” in slang.

URGENT!  Your government needs experts in Pig Latin.  If this is you, please submit your application to the Department of Homeland Security!

I remember a linguistics professor telling us about a job ad at a psychiatric hospital, apparently they needed someone who could speak klingon.

Maybe it is a cunning “shiny object”, this time put out by the Obama admin instead of the Repugs?  It’ll change the subject away from GROUND ZERO!

OK…I can see it being slang.  I can see it being a dialect.  It’s certainly neither a creole nor pidgin.

Languages usually are—or were—backed up by armies.

English is always adding in more words—it’s why it’s such a vibrant, living language.

Fluent in Ebonics?  Seriously?

I’m surprised to see this reaction here. I’m not a linguist but I believe African American Vernacular English - sometimes referred to as Ebonics - is a legitimate thing, more than just slang. There’s a nuance here that’s being ignored in the rush to ridicule, and it bothers me.

And perhaps they would like a couple kids who are fluent in LOL-Cat as well? I haz friend who kan haz job plz? Needz monies. She’s also pretty alright w txt spk 2 k govt? :p

Wow. Obviously, the DEA is receiving communications THEY CANNOT UNDERSTAND and they need people on hand to decipher what they mean. So what else would you have them do, exactly? Ebonics is clearly a loaded word, so what is the PC way to advertise the skills they are looking for?

This being the world of government contracting, they probably don’t have any other way of specifying what they need. If they call it a dialect, they’ll get people who just speak normal english. If they call it slang, they’re open to suits from all the contractors who want to supply people who speak some other slang. And sure, it’s ever-changing and they should have this expertise in house long since, but at least they’re giving it the old college try.

And if you’re trying to figure out any kind of conversation among people in a specialized subculture you desperately need that specialized knowledge. (As a young reporter I once got a regular transcriber to do a tape of a conversation among high-level geeks. The results were very funny to anyone who didn’t actually need to know what had been said.)

Pam, African-American dialects are some of the most studied in the past 50 years of American sociolinguistics.  You would do well to have an overview of that literature before running your mouth off like this.  I don’t like setting my foot down like this, but this post is bullshit.

Slang and pronunciation common to “the black community” (whatever that is) is not a language; [...]

There’s no definite boundary between dialect and language, because there’s no way to draw a principled distinction between those.  There are unquestionably language varieties that are spoken predominantly among African-Americans.

I think you and Jonathan Capehart are being thrown off by not being familiar with the use of “language” as a mass noun.  When linguists talk about “African-American language,” we don’t mean “the one discrete, distinct language that African-Americans speak and nobody else does”—it means the range of identifiable speech varieties that are spoken predominantly among African-Americans.  I.e., it’s the difference between the sentences “John studies Martian language” and “John studies the Martian language”—the first just means that John studies language as used among the Martians, without any particular commitment as to how many discrete languages they speak or where the boundaries between them should be drawn (which, I should remind you, can’t be drawn in the first place!).

[...] in fact if we’re going to even entertain the subject of “Black English”—it doesn’t deserve it, but let’s “go there”—how can you determine what it is? Slang and pronunciation are highly regional, cultural, and constantly changing just like fashion. How the F can you recruit for that?

Because there are a lot of elements that are pretty constant.  I’m not familiar with the phonological ones (“pronunciation”), but I can definitely name off the top of my head morphosyntactic phenomena that are peculiar to African-American Vernacular English, even though I never specialized in that topic: negative inversion (“Ain’t nobody seen Mary”); complete reduction of auxiliaries in contexts where Standard English only licenses contraction (“He runnin’” where Standard English allows “He’s running”); tense/aspect marking systems that are not found in Standard English or or non-African American vernaculars (“I been seen him”; “She done work”; “We be singing”).

How can you recruit for language expertise, in the face of variation?  Well, you recruit people who are knowledgeable about the range of language variation and the social and geographical variables that condition it.  That is, well, the whole damn central topic of a whole damn subdiscipline of linguistics, called sociolinguistics.

Seconding sancudim and antiope, as well as the more practical-minded commenters such as Caren*, Paul, and Akinoluna. The Ebonics Movement in Oakland was silly (see Robin Lakoff’s work on how it distorted sociolinguistic facts and made up some facts of its own), and there’s something funny about the DEA adopting the idea (or at least the terminology). But if Pam and others haven’t heard any discussion of AAVE in twenty years, it’s ‘cause the discourse has grown more conservative and anti-intellectual.  What, in the wake of Labov’s and Smitherman’s work, we used to call Black English (or Negro Dialect if we were in Nevada) is now stigmatized as “slang” thanks to conservatives, black and white (for an understanding of the former, see Ta-Nehisi’s celebrated Atlantic article on Dr. Cosby).  Undoubtedly, as Ms Kate says, more young black Americans are capable of a more “standard” English nowadays:  that’s one reason the “teach kids in Ebonics” movement has floundered. Doesn’t mean they can’t be bicultural and talk AAVE when they wunna.

*Who I think is alluding to Max Weinreich’s “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.”

Pam, on this one you’re just wrong.  AAVE (Black English) is not simply some slang.  It has well-defined and well understood features and a 50 year history of analysis in the linguistics literature.  It’s one of the few really uplifting stories we have in linguistics.  In the 60s, the dominant theory about the way Black people in America speak was that their language was simply defective—that growing up black meant being exposed to a very degraded communication scheme and that many black people were mentally incapable of properly communicating.  In the early 60s, William Labov decided to study this phenomenon by doing something that seems never to have occurred to linguists at the time: He went to Harlem and actually talked to people.  And he found that the mastery of standard English had no relationship whatsoever to either mental abilities or the ability to communicate effectively.  It was, simply, a different variety of English with a different set of rules and vocabulary.

This is one of a very small number of things that practically every linguist working in American language can agree about.  Ironically, what linguists think about language has very little impact on the public.  Ebonics is perhaps a bit of a silly name—I tend to stick to calling it “Black English” rather than AAVE because then people know what I’m talking about.  But it exists, has rules and standards like any other language, and is sufficiently different from standard English that we would call it a different language if it was spoken in another country.

The difference between a dialect and a language is not something that is determined in linguistics.  We have a saying—originally from a Max Weinrich article written in Yiddish in the 40s—that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.  If Ebonics isn’t taught in schools, that’s because of problems of empowerment and politics.  And there is nothing silly about the idea that many Black children have a hard time mastering standard English because it’s not their native language.  There is a fairly solid literature on treating English teaching for inner city Black children that same way English is taught to native Spanish-speaking children.

And, I’ve been around enough to know that as a middle-class white guy who grew up in ‘burbs, the more opaque basolectal variants of Black English are difficult for me to understand.  So yeah, you can recruit for it the same way you recruit people who speak Somali or French: look for Americans who grew up speaking that way but went on to colleges in standard English.

Comment #16: Josh on 08/24 at 10:50 PM

The Ebonics Movement in Oakland was silly (see Robin Lakoff’s work on how it distorted sociolinguistic facts and made up some facts of its own), and there’s something funny about the DEA adopting the idea (or at least the terminology).

This ties into something that I was thinking on the way back home.  One of the big problems here is that commentators keep responding to strawman versions of the pro-“Ebonics” arguments of well-meaning folk who very often fail to understand the linguistics work on African-American language in pretty fundamental manners.

Example #1: the Oakland Ebonics press release’s statement that “Ebonics” was “genetically related” to African languages.  The first problem is that unless you’re a philologist or linguist, you’re not going to know beforehand that “genetically related” in this context has nothing to do with DNA; it’s the technical term in linguistics for “these two languages descend from a common ancestor.”  It could hardly be a worse choice of term for a press release for the general public.

The second problem with the statement is that once you understand what it really means, well, it’s at a very, very generous best, a stretch.  The origin of AAVE is controversial, with the two main theories being (a) creole origin or other influence and (b) development exclusively from English dialects.*  Yet what you find all the time when a well-meaning layperson tries to sound authoritative about AAVE is that they’ll list one of these theories as “the truth.”

This is also relevant to Caren’s comment @10: I don’t think anybody claims that AAVE is a creole or pidgin, but there are linguists who claim it has some sort of influence from an African-American creole or pidgin that is no longer spoken.  This theory is often incorrectly cited as a supposedly accepted fact that AAVE is a pidgin or creole.

* I want to make clear that I don’t actually know these theories clearly enough to state them accurately.  I know that there’s at least two camps on the question, and that they split up roughly like that.

Comment #18: smartens on 08/24 at 11:09 PM

Ebonics is perhaps a bit of a silly name—I tend to stick to calling it “Black English” rather than AAVE because then people know what I’m talking about.  But it exists, has rules and standards like any other language, and is sufficiently different from standard English that we would call it a different language if it was spoken in another country.

This is strictly in the realm of the counterfactual, but I don’t think it would be consistently called a different language.

We have a hard time enough already getting people to recognize creole languages as something other than badly spoken versions of their lexifier languages.  To give an example in non-technicalese, it’s hard to get Cape Verdeans to agree that Cape Verdean is not badly spoken Portuguese, even when (a) the grammar is dramatically different, (b) the Portuguese can’t understand Cape Verdean, (c) older, uneducated Cape Verdeans typically can’t understand Portuguese very well (younger ones hear it on the TV all the time).

AAVE is far, far more similar to Standard English than Cape Verdean is to Portuguese, and there would probably be political interest in identifying AAVE as a dialect of English, in order to cast the hypothetical AAVE-speaking country as an Anglophone nation.  I don’t know the sociolinguistic situation of Jamaica well at all, but I’ll venture the guess that if there’s anywhere that a situation like this happens, it would be there.

Sacundim, I’m fairly familiar with the decrolization hypothesis for AAVE and sympathize with the anti-decrolization side that would tend to minimize the significance of African languages and the Caribbean creoles in the formation of Black Engish in the US.  But, I will grant that Shana Poplack is the only person bringing a lot of evidence to the table and that her evidence is not compelling to everyone.  The point that is important is that the _origins_ of Black English are irrelevant to any discussion of language and education policy.  What people are responding to is usually a strawman of their own making, the same one used against affirmative action or noticing that the justice system works differently for dark-skinned folk than for white ones: Fear that *they* are getting something *we’re* not.

@sancudium (and Josh, but less so, since you placed it in quotation marks)

What do you mean by “Standard” English?  There are actually two acceptable “Standard” Englishes that have a lot in common, but also many differences.  Formal and Informal is not some fancy dictionary way of saying “Right” and “Wrong, but Common,” both are completely correct but in different circumstances. 

Standard English also varies according to where you are located in the United States, at least in spoken forms (informal).  Some of those variations follow some of the rules of Ebonics.

If you want to give the DEA the benefit of the doubt on this, that’s fine I guess, but many of Ebonics’ distinctive features are not “spoken solely in the United States.”  Part of the argument for Ebonics being a language rests on that fact.

If you were going after 4chan and Anonymous as terrorists, what sort of language skills would you need?

Sacundim, I’m not sure AAVE is more different from standard English than bokmal Norwegian is from standard Danish, or between Delhi Hindi and standard Urdu, and I’m absolutely certain there’s more difference between AAVE and standard American English than there is between Turkish and Azeri, or between Serbian and Croatian.  A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.

Talk about right-wing forward fuel. Something tells me I’m going to read about this again in a multiple-colored Comic Sans email from my obnoxious family. HAR HAR HAR *insert joke linking this to Obama because he’s black here*

That’s all and good from a linguistic standpoint…but it’s immaterial from a practical standpoint.  “Ain’t nobody seen Mary” is perfectly comprehensible for anyone except a pedant who starts going on about double negatives.  Or idiots going an about “ain’t”.  Similarly, “He runnin’” is entirely understandable.  You don’t need a translator for that, or to be a specialist to understand.

(Incidentally, negative inversions were common where I was growing up in Canada where there was barely a black person to be found.  “I didn’t do nuthin’” and other such things has a long history in English common speaking.)

I watch “The First 48” every now and then and other shows showing real interrogations and police interviews, exactly the people that this whole thing is about, and I have no problem understanding what the person is saying, so long as they are speaking English.  The slang might have to be explained, but people pick that up so quickly that thinking you need to look for someone with pre-existing expertise is whack.

As the preceding sentence just demonstrated.  I would lay good odds that the majority of people in the US who have never heard “whack” used in that way would quickly figure out from context roughly what it means.

Comment #22: Atheist, A Feminist on 08/24 at 11:30 PM

Standard English also varies according to where you are located in the United States, at least in spoken forms (informal).  Some of those variations follow some of the rules of Ebonics.

Now we have a problem here in that by using the term “Ebonics,” you’re not being at all clear about which varieties of English you’re referring to.  Note that I was not contrasting Standard English with “Ebonics,” but with African-American Vernacular English, where the word “vernacular” is doing some work: it’s distinguishing varieties of African-American speech regarded as standard from those that are not so.  I once met somebody whose dissertation project was on Standard African American English—an understudied topic that, if memory serves me right (and it’s been at least 8 years), comprised uses of English that simultaneously managed to make themselves standard and recognizably black.

I have to take a rain check on defining what exactly constitutes “Standard” English, though.  I am assuming that we label varieties as “vernacular” on the basis of not being standard.

Comment #21: smartens on 08/24 at 11:29 PM

The point that is important is that the _origins_ of Black English are irrelevant to any discussion of language and education policy.

I agree with that.  But what I was bringing up is that there are a number of very high profile cases of people who argue for an increased role of Black English in language and education policy who repeatedly refer to vaguely cited theories of its origin, presumably based on a folk theory that this legitimizes it.  The Oakland “genetic relation to African languages” bit is the most famous example.  These practices, together with the fact that nobody ever really listens to linguists, lead to very confused public discussions of these topics.  (yes, we linguists have a big chip on our shoulders…)

Comment #24: smartens on 08/24 at 11:32 PM

Sacundim, I’m not sure AAVE is more different from standard English than bokmal Norwegian is from standard Danish, or between Delhi Hindi and standard Urdu, and I’m absolutely certain there’s more difference between AAVE and standard American English than there is between Turkish and Azeri, or between Serbian and Croatian.  A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.

Yes, but the English language is not tied to a specific national identity in the way those languages are (or, to expand the list, Catalan vs. Valencian).  Nobody goes around saying that the USA, Australia and New Zealand aren’t real nations because they don’t each have their own language distinct from that of England.  People do go around saying how good it is that all of these nations share a common language.

Basically, I read you as positing a counterfactual scenario where a native AAVE-speaking country declares AAVE to be a language distinct from English as a way of legitimizing their claim to a distinct nationality.  I’m positing an alternative scenario where they claim a distinct nationality on other grounds, and see themselves as another member of the community of English-speaking nations.  Both are counterfactual scenarios—though I again do wonder if how the real nation of Jamaica fits into this picture.

AAVE is a dialect of American English with some varying terminology and grammar. It is distinct from Standard American English, but it’s probably not even as far afield as Scots as far as linguistic relationships go. I kind of wonder what they’re dealing with that they have to specifically go looking for people who’ve studied it, since I wasn’t aware of any particular comprehension problems.

Sacundim, it’s certainly true that politics is more relevant to official language policy than vague notions of linguistic difference.  The kind of French spoken on the street in Canada is not immediately comprehensible to European native French speakers, and the kind of Dutch spoken in Flanders is so variant from any standard Dutch than Flemings subtitle their own TV shows.  In both cases, the people in those countries insist that what they speak is simply a variant of the standard language and the standard is explicitly taught in schools.  There are political reasons why they do this.  The reason the Croats insist that their language is not the same as Serbian, and why Macedonians insist their language is not Bulgarian, is just as much a matter of politics.  So, in some contrafactual Republic of New Africa, yeah, I can see good political reasons to decide the official language is English and teach the standard in schools just like the way Dutch is taught in Flanders and standard French in Canada; and I can see political reasons to decide the official language is “Kimerika”, slap a bunch of Arabic and Swahili words into the “official” language, write it phonetically and declare it not to be English, pretty much the same way Hindi and Urdu have done to distinguish each other.

However, no one is advocating adopting an official standard for Black English and teaching it at Berlitz.  The original “Ebonics controversy” was about whether second language bilingual education techniques were a more effective way to teach standard English to black children.  I’m sympathetic to that point of view, but there’s a legitimate case to be made against it.  The second is the DEA asking for people who can understand wiretaps where Black English is spoken, and placing hiring advertisements that treat it just like any other language the DEA might need skills in.  This strikes me as basically legitimate because I know from experience that people who are not exposed to that variant of English have serious difficulty understanding it.  Better to just ask to hire professional people with demonstrable fluency in Ebonics than to say you’re looking for “well-spoken black folk who know street jive.” 

From a linguistics point of view “native fluency in Ebonics” and “knows street jive” may amount to the same thing, but the first is interpreted as a professional request for applicants with specialized knowledge and the second sounds lame, racist and recalls the scene in “Airplane” with the “bilingual” signs.

smartens @29: I’m starting to be unable to tell whether we’re having an argument or just saying different things, because I’m increasingly inclined to answer you with just “yes” or “I don’t have an opinion on that particular point” (e.g., whether black children should be taught English using L2 techniques).

@sacundim

I used Ebonics merely because it is what is used in the original post and because I was responding to two posters who each used different words.  When I said “Some of those variations,” I was referring to variations of “Standard English” that are spoken outside of the African-American community.  My point was that, AAVE or Black English or, per the OP, Ebonics has much in common with various dialects and vernaculars from around the United States.  When spoken, many of these are considered “Standard” English.  The rules you you claimed AAVE violated are rules of Standard Written English, not of the various spoken varieties.

Nobody goes around saying that the USA, Australia and New Zealand aren’t real nations because they don’t each have their own language distinct from that of England.

[Raises an eyebrow]

They speak Maori in England?

This has been another episode of:  When Commentators ATTACK!!

On the tangent, any of you linguists read China Mieville’s City And the City?  Reading the commentry here makes me want to read reviews by a linguist or two.

6# (Is there anyone else here who cannot select to copy paste without the entire page scrolling up and getting selected?)

While slang is used by speakers of AAVE, it’s doesn’t entirely consist of slang. My parents speak AAVE. My nephew uses more slang while doing so than they do. They don’t use the slang they used when they were young, anymore for the most part (there’s satirical usage, and slang terms are sometimes reborn), but have retained the speech patterns. Yeah, it’s real… I speak it when I’m with my family in fits and starts, interspersed with standard English, the way people raised in bilingual homes do. However, while it isn’t a language - it’s a dialect - and an inability to understand it is so far from my lived experience that it seems preposterous to me, portions of it could be indiscernible to people from a markedly different background. That being said, there’s a distinct argot involved with the drug trade that will not be known to all speakers of AAVE, but will be more commonly understood among younger speakers because the argot and modern slang are commonly used in tandem and have a disproportionate influence on one another due to the popularity of the hip-hop subculture among black youth and the ubiquity of the drug trade as subject matter in the genre.

It’s been a long time since my linguistics classes, but if I recall correctly, one of the interesting things about AAVE is that it includes some verb forms that are more efficient than SAE. For instance:

“He work” = “He has a job.”

“He working” = “He is at work right now.”

So I disagree with the previous poster that any speaker of SAE would immediately understand everything in AAVE. Sure, an English speaker whose native dialect isn’t AAVE will understand the vast majority of AAVE, but one won’t necessarily pick up on all the subtleties.

@Phoenician in a time of Romans:

And dozens of Native American languages too.

jus’ learnin’ to speak

Sistah, we speak pidgin. You tell me, how is pidgin one real dialect, when ebonics is not? I know da kine ebonic history, but still. If people speak da bugga and you not understand, how can you say it’s no fo’ real?

@34 Selena777

I never meant to imply that AAVE was all or even mostly slang.  I was responding to comment #2 as nicely as I could: I tried to make better comparisons and then answered the actual question she asked.

@35 Amphigorey

So I disagree with the previous poster that any speaker of SAE would immediately understand everything in AAVE. Sure, an English speaker whose native dialect isn’t AAVE will understand the vast majority of AAVE, but one won’t necessarily pick up on all the subtleties.

I don’t mean to be snarky, but isn’t this true of all English dialects?  I think if the DEA expects people from Vermont to understand those from California and Kentucky, then the expectation should be that most English speakers will be able to figure it out well enough.

The original “Ebonics controversy” was about whether second language bilingual education techniques were a more effective way to teach standard English to black children.

I thought the original controversy was how to get more federal funding for your poor ass school (having went to a poor ass school)?

Comment #31: Atheist, A Feminist on 08/25 at 01:08 AM

I used Ebonics merely because it is what is used in the original post and because I was responding to two posters who each used different words.  When I said “Some of those variations,” I was referring to variations of “Standard English” that are spoken outside of the African-American community.  My point was that, AAVE or Black English or, per the OP, Ebonics has much in common with various dialects and vernaculars from around the United States.  When spoken, many of these are considered “Standard” English.

But I never claimed otherwise.  Recap: Pam questioned whether it was possible to identify a set of language variants that constitute “Black English”; I responded by naming a handful of the grammatical features that single out AAVE among the dialects of English.

The rules you you claimed AAVE violated are rules of Standard Written English, not of the various spoken varieties.

I did not claim that AAVE “violates” any rules of Standard “Written” English.  You’re reporting what I said in a way that’s not just inaccurate; the things that you’re attributing to me are in fact antithetical to the training that anybody who’s studied linguistics has received. 

First, linguists see all language as rule-governed behavior; the concept of a non-standard dialect being a “violation” of a rule of the standard language is antithetical to how linguists think about language.  Second, one of the basic principles of linguistics is that the fundamental mediums of language are speech and sign, and that writing is not one.  The analysis of a language is conducted on the basis of its spoken or signed form.  (In the case of dead languages, sure, we have to infer the spoken form from a written record—what’s important is how Latin or Old Chinese were spoken, not which squiggles were used to record them.)

All I did was name three instances in which the grammatical rules of AAVE are different from those of Standard English.  That’s not a claim that AAVE “violates” rules of SE grammar, and the writing system for English is not relevant to the claim. 

Linguistics is a very hard subject.  When you come across a few pieces of the puzzle, it’s very easy to misunderstand them when you’re missing some of the others.

@sancudium

Maybe the problem is that you are coming at this at a linguist (which, correct me if I am wrong, studies languages as they are observed) and I come at this as someone who studies English.

All I did was name three instances in which the grammatical rules of AAVE are different from those of Standard English.

This is not true.  It is only true if you meant Standard English to mean Standard Written English.  Colloquial and informal speech and writing has different rules.  The examples you mentioned are not unique to AAVE.  They are found in other American (and other, I believe) English dialects.  Once usage hits a certain critical mass, that becomes “good grammar” for spoken English.

Coming from the side of the prescription, the people who make, update, and study the codified rules that dictate (to a certain extent) whether or not people are using English “correctly,” the rules are only different from the rules of Standard Written English.

In terms of spoken English, the prescribed rules are largely regional and surprisingly lenient.

Those regional differences are, of course, important to study and classify, etc.  But that isn’t what the DEA is doing.  The DEA is looking for people who are “fluent in English and the languages - with dialects, accents, colloquiums, and idioms - originating in the countries listed.”  Then they list languages and countries. Example: Arabic - Algeria, Bahrain, Chad, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Palestine, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey, U.A.E., Yemen

Now, if they expect Arabic to stand in for all the dialects and for Modern Standard Arabic, then why is it at all appropriate to differentiate AAVE from English?

Sacundim, I think we disagree about the plausibility of different contrafactual scenarios which, to be fair, is a really lame thing to argue about.

“linguists see all language as rule-governed behavior”

Actually… my PhD thesis claims this is not the case.  But that is waaaay off topic.  Like most linguists, sacundim agree on all the relevant facts about non-standard dialects.  To speak a non-standard language is not to speak a defective language, and there is nothing defective about the vernacular dialects of African Americans.  Considering that 90% of linguists believe that 90% of linguists are fundamentally wrong about everything (and the other 10% are crackpots), and that we are, as a community, incredibly polemical and argumentative, the degree to which linguists of all stripes agree about the nature of AAVE is quite stunning.

@smartens

To speak a non-standard language is not to speak a defective language, and there is nothing defective about the vernacular dialects of African Americans.

That is a much better way of saying what I was trying to get at.  The Standard English is the consensus, which really only exists for written language because a bunch of old white guys spent forever writing down rules, which others (mostly other old white guys) mostly followed.  Spoken English is, for the most part, non-Standard because it isn’t written, thus isn’t expected to follow the exact same rules (we can’t all talk like Jane Austen characters), and in many cases is considered too formal if it does.

Atheist, one of the reasons why linguists like me (in contrast to some other linguists) are critical of the idea that a language is defined by rules is because the “standard” English, just like its vernaculars, is not really compliant with any well-defined set of rules.  In the days when I taught English, I tried to explain to students that the thing they needed to master, for better or for worse, was the type of English that signals membership among the educated elite.  When I felt cynical that was a synonym for “the kind of English rich white men speak.”  Standard English is defined sociologically, not prescriptively.  Linguists don’t concern themselves terribly much with what constitutes standard language, but lexicographers and educators do, and that sociological definition is the explicit definition for lexicographers at least since the publication of the COBUILD and an implicit norm for educators since the big curriculum reforms of the 70s and 80s.

@banisteriopsis #40

“I thought the original controversy was how to get more federal funding for your poor ass school (having went to a poor ass school)?”

You say “tom-AYE-to”, I say “tom-AH-to”.  Yes, there are federal grants for bilingual education for schools with large numbers of English second language students.  Which Oakland school board members took these claims seriously and which ones just saw it as a way to get much needed funds to their schools is beyond knowing.  It’s pretty easy to believe in things when they might pay off.

@smartens

Absolutely. 

Standard English is defined sociologically, not prescriptively.

Considering that for written English, little has changed in 200 years, but for spoken English an awful lot has (even for the educated elite), I think it is defined both sociologically and prescriptively.  Part of making any change to either, though, is acknowledging that vernacular forms of English are legitimate English (at least spoken, I have less hope for the prescriptively-defined written word).

If the posting were for a job at a university, then I don’t think any of us would be having this argument (other than perhaps critiquing the term).  Universities are part of both observing and prescribing.  Instead, though, this is from the US Government.  They have no place determining Standard English (since English isn’t our national language, thankfully) and so should treat English just like they treated Arabic.  Listing “Ebonics” as a distinct language from the English they expect all employees to speak is edging closer to a codification of a national language (not to mention rather Othering in context).

@KeithM: I’m guessing you don’t know anything about AAVE. What is the difference between what an AAVE speaker means by the statements: “The coffee [at some place] cold” and “The coffee [at some place] be cold?” (Obviously, you can look this up, but non-AAVE English speakers will not know this offhand unless they’ve studied the language, most likely).

Also, AAVE has nothing to do with slang. It was spoken well before any of the modern slang used by black Americans was invented. I think a bunch of people heard ebonics and thought the DEA wanted people to translate “These drugs be mad whack, yo” for old white guys. In fairness, the DEA should probably have said AAVE.

I leave for a while and figured when I returned that the discussion would be about AAVE, rather than the fact that the DEA HR department is f’d up. What they are asking for are people who are familiar in street talk related to drug dealing and running, or other criminal activity. That has its own set of linguistic elements that may or may not include AAVE, and not all are black. Even if they are searching for agents who are fluent in Spanish, that does NOT make them qualified to translate criminal slang, for instance.

The whole approach is wrong, and the use of Ebonics is particularly egregious. That the DEA list includes it probably reflects why we are losing the “war on drugs”. Our government doesn’t get it to begin with.

A month or two ago, there were stories in The Philadelphia Inquirer, stories which relied a lot on information from the Philadelphia Police Department, about a black male youth problem called “catch and wreck,” where black teens would single out someone and beat the crap out of him, for no apparent reason at all.  The Police Commissioner is black, the previous commissioner was black, the mayor is black, the previous mayor was black, and a lot of police officers in Philly are black, but this story went on for days before someone pointed out that it wasn’t “catch and wreck” but “catchin’ rep,” as in making a reputation.

My guess is that the problem was less racial than it was generational: the older black authorities didn’t understand what black teens were saying.

@48, Atheist:

English *spelling* hasn’t changed much in a few hundred years.  The rest has changed quite a lot.  Verb tenses are visibly different, and the phonology has been radically reshaped in most dialects.

@50, Pam:

Are you sure you are not assuming the worst reasons when considerably more charitable interpretations are available?  The blogger at WaPo certainly is, but, as this thread points out at some length, he’s talking out of his butt when it comes to language.  That the DEA is, as you put it, f’d up is probably true, but how do you expect them to advertise a desire to hire qualified law enforcement officers who *do* know drug slang, or have access to the resources to learn it?  Especially when qualified people must, practically without exception, be black people with a post-secondary education. The sociolinguistics of America make it nearly impossible for most white people to learn that kind of language, while a post-secondary education is a minimum requirement for most law enforcement work.  It is doubly hard when black people with college degree are extraordinarily hostile towards the linguistic particularities of black communities, far more so than most white people with comparable educations.

No one seems to find it odd that they are looking for people who speak Spanish, because you can’t even begin to learn whatever street slang and regional dialects Spanish-speaking drug criminals use unless you know Spanish to begin with.  Same with Chinese and Vietnamese.  Why should this situation been seen in any different light?

Atheist @ 42: Reading the rest of the list, it also looks like some dialects are listed separately (though I don’t have the knowledge to recognize any except the ones explicitly marked “dialect” or “variant”—wait, and Flemish Dutch, I think).

This whole thing made a lot more sense to me when I re-read the original post and saw that (1) this was one detail in a spec that the DEA had for hiring an entire organization, not an individual job posting that says “you must be fluent in Ebonics”, and (2) they wanted people to transcribe phone taps.

I don’t know, Pam’s comment that they’re using “speaks Ebonics” as a stand-in for “speaks drug slang”, which is a really offensive idea, is plausible too, in which case never mind. But then it would seem strange that the Atlanta office needs 15 times as many Spanish speakers as experts on American drug slang. Or am I misunderstanding?

Sorry I’m so late to this thread, but when I saw the title of the post, I thought that this was a joke. Sometimes I just want to weep for this country.

@smartens:  don’t you mean, “you say [tʰə‘me.ɾo], I say [tʰə‘mɑː.tʰəʊ]”?

@UmaroVI: what *is* the difference between “the coffee ... cold” and “the coffee ... be cold”?

My $0.02 - it’s a legit thing to ask for somebody who knows AAVE + modern street slang, but it’s a dumb thing to call it “ebonics”.  As UmaroVI has shown, AAVE grammar can be opaque to SAE speakers (and despite regional variation in SAE, there is much more difference between AAVE and SAE than any two flavors of SAE or even SAE and “standard” BrE).  Having someone who understands things like AAVE’s tense/aspect marking system is critical if you want to know who is doing what when.  But I suspect the slang might even be the bigger issue in this case, in which case all the AAVE expertise in the world isn’t going to help a 60-year-old linguist who happened to grow up “in the hood” understand the parlance of teenage street thugs of any color.

In the days when I taught English, I tried to explain to students that the thing they needed to master, for better or for worse, was the type of English that signals membership among the educated elite.  When I felt cynical that was a synonym for “the kind of English rich white men speak.” Standard English is defined sociologically, not prescriptively.

This. As another school-teaching friend put it, “cash english”. As in “if you want the dominant culture to pay you money to do stuff, or be willing to take your money and give you stuff you want, you have to learn to talk this way.”

Another thing that privileges the privileged.

I’m sort of surprised at all the argument.  Has n one here heard of Cockney rhyming slang or Verlan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verlan)?  Different sociocultural groups often use idiomatic dialects, particularly to confuse authorities or non-locals/outgroup members.

PiatoR:
Please don’t get them started.  Few people bother to remember that there are 2 languages (at least) native to Australia and New Zealand.

Pam, I may be missing something, but to me your eminently sensible comment #50 bears very little connection to what you wrote in the original post.  The original seems to disparage the very idea that AAVE exists: “if we’re going to even entertain the subject of “Black English”—it doesn’t deserve it, but let’s “go there”—how can you determine what it is? “

As I see it, knowledge of AAVE or any other dialect or language might well be necessary to accurately transcribe wiretaps, but as you point out, still be absolutely insufficient due to the use of slang and argot.

Comment #57: Sivi on 08/25 at 11:54 AM

I’m sort of surprised at all the argument.  Has n one here heard of Cockney rhyming slang or Verlan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verlan)?  Different sociocultural groups often use idiomatic dialects, particularly to confuse authorities or non-locals/outgroup members.

Those are argots, not dialects properly speaking.  They’re vocabularies, or at best, conscious rules for word coinage.

“linguists see all language as rule-governed behavior”  Actually… my PhD thesis claims this is not the case.

Sure, but they don’t teach that in Ling 101, and we need to keep the audience here in mind.  I’ve certainly been exposed to theories that sound much like that (e.g., usage-based models of language, Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations), yet at this point I’m far too removed from the discipline to have much of an intelligent conversation about that.  But as one of my profs used to say, intro courses “lie,” because you often need to understand some inaccurate stories about a topic before you can move on to the more accurate ones—so the concept of “rule-governed behavior” can do some positive work even if it’s problematic in other ways.  (Still, even if you dispense with “rules,” you need some notion of grammatical regularity.)

Comment #46: smartens on 08/25 at 05:25 AM

Standard English is defined sociologically, not prescriptively.

And that’s also my reply to Atheist, together with the fact that people speak Standard English all the time.  I hear and speak it every day in my office, and it’s what the talking heads on the TV almost invariably speak.

I have learned a lot from this thread.  I mainly have only heard of “Ebonics” as something racist white people use to make fun of liberals and black people. 

I would also very much like to know the distinction between “the coffee cold” and “the coffee be cold.”

Paul wrote:

As another school-teaching friend put it, “cash english”. As in “if you want the dominant culture to pay you money to do stuff, or be willing to take your money and give you stuff you want, you have to learn to talk this way.”

Oh, no, not at all.  Sure, you have to speak properly enough to persuade the person you want to hire you to hire you, but we’re perfectly willing to sell you stuff and take your money, regardless of your accent/ language/ dialect.

Pam says:

The whole approach is wrong, and the use of Ebonics is particularly egregious. That the DEA list includes it probably reflects why we are losing the “war on drugs”. Our government doesn’t get it to begin with.

Uh, you care to explain why it’s wrong, egregious, and what the government doesn’t get? You seem to not have a working grasp of Linguistics, and assume that anything you find funny is wrongy wrong, wrong wrong.

African-American English is considered a dialect, as it does have some more complex usage than Standard American English (which is also a dialect). As stated elsewhere on this thread, it is curious that the DEA feels there are translation issues they need to address with the African-American community (seriously, “whatever that is”?), and makes one wonder what the shortcomings are.

I understand that you are just a blogger, and not the voice of God, however, it’s posts like this one that really make me wonder what motivates you, Jesse and Amanda.

@Sacundim #60

Thanks for the correction.  I’m a neurolinguist, and my knowledge of technical linguistics is shaky at best.

Y’all just confused about the REAL meaning of this: Ebonics is a code word for “all unemployed former ACORN staffers without unemployment insurance apply now”.

gotta “think” like a wingnut, ya know! </snark>

I Heart Puppies, Pam is not Jesse or Amanda.

If you can’t get that sorted, then you have some fundamental comprehension problems that preclude any sound inferences about any individual’s motivations.

I’m guessing you don’t know anything about AAVE. What is the difference between what an AAVE speaker means by the statements: “The coffee [at some place] cold” and “The coffee [at some place] be cold?”

Without looking it up?  The “be (whatever)” tends to indicate something that’s ongoing as opposed to something that’s instantaneous.  “The coffee cold” would indicate that the coffee at this moment is cold, “the coffee be cold” would imply that coffee is and has been (or perhaps always is) cold.

And I know that because you see the same thing in other English variations, specifically the one in Ireland.  “What you be working at?” is an example.

Does the State Department require people specifically speak Hiberno-English before they get assigned to the embassy in Dublin, or are they expected to just get along?

And, to follow that up, even if I was to look it up, (and I just did and hey, waddya know, it is the same as in Irish-English), explaining the “habitual be” takes approximately 5 seconds and guess what?

I would point out again that this sort of thing is entirely common in variations of English.  Did you know, for instance, that Canadians just don’t stick an “eh?” at the end of every sentence, and that there are nuances in it’s use?  Do you care?  No, because it doesn’t tend to make a difference when you’re speaking English to an anglophone Canadian.

Oh, dear. All I can think is that all the dog/dawg confusion from season 3 of The Wire is real…if you haven’t seen it, the police believed erroneously that somebody confessed to a murder based on what happened to his pit bull.
I got pretty good at following cornerboy chat on that show after 5 seasons, but then again, how much of that is Balmer-specific, and even then…east and West have a rivalry…how much is Simon getting his urban poet on?
I wish I could apply on one level, though…it would be nice to dispense with the standard cover letter in favor of “You were supposed to let me play.  This America, man.”

Like when Bodie said that (His brother) James “*been *dead, ” on The Wire, I kind of took it that Bodie was really young when James took that bullet.

@52 smartens

English *spelling* hasn’t changed much in a few hundred years.  The rest has changed quite a lot.  Verb tenses are visibly different, and the phonology has been radically reshaped in most dialects.

A few hundred years is not the same as 200, FWIW.  English spelling has changed an awful lot in a few hundred years, verb tenses have changed somewhat as well (although there has been more change to verb cases), but grammatical structure has been pretty consistent.  Once you talk about phonology, you are no longer talking about a unified Standard English which is defined as the (shared, less regionalized) written form. 

@sancundium

And that’s also my reply to Atheist, together with the fact that people speak Standard English all the time.

If you actually hear Standard English (the most formal and widespread “accepted” usages), then they are misusing it unless you meant speak it all the time in their formal presentations, speeches, etc.  That type of Standard English (essentially dialect-free?) is defined as the written form and its associated rules.  It is “incorrect” (or inappropriate or too formal) to use in day-to-day speech.  It is, to a certain extent, why non-native speakers sound “off” to native speakers.  Written English and Spoken English are different.

one of the basic principles of linguistics is that the fundamental mediums of language are speech and sign, and that writing is not one.

Your focus is on spoken language (and I am sure you are far better informed about it than I am), and I’ll agree with you that to a certain extent, writing is an entirely different thing, but the written form is about all those fluent in the English language actually agree on with little variation.  The spoken form can adhere closely to the written form, but only to a certain extent.  Overly formal spoken English does not signal “cash English.”

Coffee be cold
Since you made me keep that broken-ass coffee maker instead of throwing it out last year, the coffee be cold.
Yes, no?
(I always feel a little shy about writing sentences like that…like I’m trying to act like Tarantino during his “down” period. I’m not down…I read Pelecanos a lot, but I still grew up in the suburbs…there’s no “Straight Outa Glendale” hip-hop opus.

Ms Kate - wow, thanks for letting me on the secret that one person does not post as 3 seperate entities.

However, this is a site that 3 seperate bloggers do kind of fall into the same trap, and that is to mock something they don’t understand, and automatically assume the worst motivations.

All 3 writers do that. Group think. But I suppose you’d have to wrassle with that for a few days before you can contemplate any of my more complex inferences.

Take a valium. Life can be fun.

I just…wow. All the linguists on here do you not realize how incredibly racist this sounds(and is)? Pam is pointing out the fact that black people speak ENGLISH and you are having a debate about “nuh uh cuz it doesn’t sound the way I speak english”.

ALL drug dealers use slang, which is actually what anyone needed to transcribe these tapes would have to be fluent in, not some crazy “black language”. The only difference is in the changes in geographical slang, which admittedly are constantly changing.

This completely ignores the fact that there are TONS of white dealers, who use the same slang, but I don’t see anything listed by the DEA asking for interpreters there. I’m a “halfsie’ who grew up in the minority community & don’t have problems understanding what ppl are talking about b/c of this super awesome thing called CONTEXT. It’s usually easy to pick up on if you actually, you know, LISTEN.
for the fuck of shit…

Laurie @61: I’m sure I’m not going to get the following 100% right, but it should be in the ballpark.

The coffee be cold is habitual aspect; you could render it in standard English as “the coffee is normally cold.”

But there is more to it than that, because it’s what’s called a grammatical distinction (a distinction made by grammar rules), as opposed to a lexical one (a distinction made by content words).  In Standard English, a sentence that expresses a habitual state uses the same function words (auxiliary verbs, verb endings, etc.) as one that expresses a current state.  These two possibilities are only distinguished optionally by using an adverb, which is a content word:

1. The coffee is cold.  (Unspecified)
2. The coffee is currently cold.  (Current state)
3. The coffee is normally cold.  (Habitual state)

In AAVE, if I recall correctly, there’s no equivalent to (1).  The grammar forces you to construct either a current state sentence (The coffee cold) or a habitual state sentence (The coffee be cold), which differ on the presence or absence of the function word be.

An English-vs.-French comparison might further illustrate this.  In English, if you see Joe running right now and you want to communicate that to somebody else, you don’t normally say David runs (except if you’re a sports narrator or something); you say David is running.  You’re grammatically forced to use progressive aspect.  David runs is, normally, a sentence that refers to a habitual action.  (Though again, there is an exceptional narrative style, typical of sports narrators, that differs from the general case precisely on this point.)

Standard French doesn’t have that.  David court is either “David runs” or “David is running.”  If you really want to say that David is running right now, you have to use content words to further specify the sentence:

4. David court juste maintenant.  (“David is running right now.”)
5. David est en train de courir.  (“David is in the process of running.”)
6. Voilà David qui court.  (“Look at David, who’s running.”)

That’s Standard French, though.  Fun fact: Cajun French has obligatory distinction of progressive vs. habitual action, like English does:

7. David court.  (“David runs.”)
8. David après courir.  (“David is running.”)

Saying (8) to a non-Cajun speaker will almost certainly draw a blank stare.  (Though the Académie<i> dictionary records a similar construction from a few hundred years ago.)

Or further analogy for folks who have studied Spanish (or Portuguese): <i>ser vs. estar, the nightmare of Spanish learners.  The language has two verbs that correspond to English be, and the grammar forces you to pick one or the other depending on the content of the sentence.  And if you thought ser vs. estar was nightmarish enough already, some dialects of Cape Verdean Creole top that off by also having two verbs for have: “I have a daughter” (N ten un fidju femia) and “I have fifty dollars” (N teni sinkuenta dolar<i>) require different verbs.

So yeah, the verbal tense and aspect of AAVE is strikingly different from Standard English, comparably so to the differences between English and French tense and aspect.  OTOH, the degree of difference is probably also comparable to that between different dialects of Spanish, a fact that doesn’t really bother anybody very much.  (<i>He corrido un kilómetro is “I (just recently) ran one kilometer” in most of Spain, but “I have (at some point in the past) run one kilometer” in most of Latin America.)

thatsnotironic writes @ #74:

I just…wow. All the linguists on here do you not realize how incredibly racist this sounds(and is)? Pam is pointing out the fact that black people speak ENGLISH and you are having a debate about “nuh uh cuz it doesn’t sound the way I speak english”.

Uh, actually, Mr. Ironic, 1) isn’t racist, 2) doesn’t sound racist, 3) no one said blacks don’t speak English, and 4) nobody said something as stupid as you strawmanned.

I have a great book for you to read. “Word on the Street”, by John McWhorter. Mr. McWhorter is a linguist. He lays out the history of African-American English, compares patterns and inner-logic to other dialects of English, and his essay is mostly about why it wasn’t really necessary to teach as if “Ebonics” was a foreign language.

There are patterns of usage in African-American English that are different from standard American English. I know it’s fun to pretend that if somebody speaks of “the black community”, and says something you don’t necessarily agree with, or in your case, have no knowledge to even judge, that the generalizations are “racist”.

Several other people have already explained the coffee thing better than I could, in particular sacundim.

And yes, it’s easy if you know to look for it, which a SE speaker might not.

All that said, I do agree that the DEA really should have said something like “speakers of AAVE (sometimes referred to as Ebonics*) who are also fluent with drug slang to do XYZ” rather than “Ebonics speakers to do XYZ.” I don’t think pretending that there’s no point in having a few people who speak a particular dialect around is an inherently bad idea, or even a particularly surprising one.

*and yes, this is worth including, because not everyone knows enough linguistics to know what AAVE means.

The whole approach is wrong, and the use of Ebonics is particularly egregious. That the DEA list includes it probably reflects why we are losing the “war on drugs”. Our government doesn’t get it to begin with.

Sorry Pam, but I suspect that the whole concept of a war on drugs is the reason we’re losing said war. This is, if anything, a minor part of the overarching issue, which is that the war on drugs is, like the war on terror, an undefined clusterfuck which results in disenfranchising a large percentage of the population, mostly people of color and from the economic underclass.

People keep saying things along the lines of, “it should be easy for DEA employees to figure out what’s being said in the transmissions, because AAVE/Ebonics/drug-slang is English too.”  And yes, they can probably get the gist or even most of what’s being said.  But when you’re doing that sort of work, “some” or “most” isn’t good enough. You need to understand every detail, every little nuance. And if your job is reacting to what’s being said, you probably don’t have time to be deciphering the transmissions. You need someone else to do that, that’s why we have and need language translators. They do the translating, somebody else does the work that results once the translation is available. Yeah, it might seem silly to need that when it’s English being spoken, but like others have said, not everyone has the background to understand the details and subtle nuances of AAVE/Ebonics/drug-slang in whatever transmissions the DEA obviously needs help with.

“Then that would make me and other African Americans you know bilingual.”  Yes, it would. It’s called code switching - many African Americans are effectively bilingual and don’t even realize it. So are some white Americans (typically Southerners).  Most Scots, Italians, Spanish and German are bilingual in the same way - they can speak the standard language at work, at school, with strangers, in formal settings but often speak a dialect (often quite different from standard) at home and within the community.  The difference is if an Italian police agency was looking for people who spoke Neapolitan dialect in order to penetrate a drug gang from Naples, it would be considered normal. And it’s not racist to notice that the local dialect of Glasgow is arguably not at all the same language we speak here in the US or in London.  It’s just the racial baggage in the US that gets everyone confused.  Yes, it is racist to assume all black people can speak “Ebonics” or other black dialects simply because of their skin color, it is not racist to point out that many African Americans speak dialects that people from outside that community can’t easily understand. It is not even surprising.  I have also met white people who have grown up in inner city communities who speak the local “African-american” dialect fluently and as their native tongue.

All 3 writers do that. Group think. But I suppose you’d have to wrassle with that for a few days before you can contemplate any of my more complex inferences.

Take a valium. Life can be fun.

Actually, my nickname is Dr. House, and not just for the large bottles of vicodin and ibuprofen on my desk.

That said, I love how you cast aspersions like poorly aimed fish netting at a dam.  I also admire your advanced capacity to tell black people, women, and queerfolk how and when they should be offended by clueless stupidity - as if they weren’t properly qualified to evaluate the racism they experience.  I guess they just ain’t smart enough darkies and bitches to know when their superiors, like you, just know it ain’t racism or sexism, eh?

BTW, I think the use of the term “ebonics” is both offensive and clueless.  Offensive because of the cultural baggage involved.  Clueless because the slang used by younger urban populations has massively changed under the influence of an influx of immigrant populations, hispanic mixing, and urban culture, and it varies geographically.  There is no one single “ebonics/black english/etc.” any more.

Thanks sacundim!  That is fascinating.  Now I want switch my field to linguistics.

What they are asking for are people who are familiar in street talk related to drug dealing and running, or other criminal activity.

Thank God. I had wondered why Pam was acting siditty all of a sudden. Yes, ebonics is not simply whatever comes out of a black person’s mouth.

I think I saw the Ebonics horse shudder, which gives me the license to explain my view: teachers need to realize that kids in their classes are not speaking ungrammatical English, but speaking grammatical AAVE. Because black English is almost completely populated with English words, it’s hard to realize it’s not just poorly spoken English. (Compare Yiddish, which has enough non-German words to make it evident it’s not just poorly spoken German.) In many ways teaching kids a new grammar to use with their old words is harder than teaching a 100% new language.

My problem, when I first worked with a predominantly black workforce, was understanding people’s intonation. Some times I would have to play back sentences in my head, as I have to do with French, to pick the words out of the sentence.

@sacundim: it’s interesting that you describe the simple present construction (“he runs”) as being entirely confined to “sportscaster-speak”.  It’s also the construction used in narrative roleplaying (e.g. “I cast magic missile”).

I’d argue that English has four main aspects: progressive, perfect, perfect progressive, and *narrative*.  Simple past, present, and future are all narrative aspect - they describe a specific action that happened, happens right now, or will happen in the future.  The reason the narrative present is so rare is because only in very special cases are we ever narrating events that are literally happening *right now*.

It’s mostly just a coincidence (or an accident of history) that the narrative present and the habitual are formed the same way.  They’re two completely different things.

I just wanted to note the reason I Heart Puppies and Ms Kate got into it above (well, besides the snark) was because Ms. Kate read this: “you, Jesse and Amanda” as an appositive, meaning something to the effective “stop it, you two!” addressing only Jesse & Amanda (the second person plural).  I Heart Puppies actually meant a list of three items: you [Pam], Jesse, and Amanda.  “Optional” oxford comma my a$$.

@#81 - Perhaps you should call yourself Ms Hate.

Perhaps I’m way different from you, Ms Hate, but I’m not telling gays, women, or blacks anything. A person posted something on a public blog, and I’m responding to it. I’m not really reacting to whatever groups you’re assigning people to. Perhaps you could learn something from that.

I asked for clarification to a senseless post whose author just wants to be right, with no reasoning or logic.

You prattle on:

There is no one single “ebonics/black english/etc.” any more.

Uh, yes there is. Linguistically. And there are regional flavors of African American English. Perhaps you should read this string before making a beeline to my posts so you could spew hate. You could really learn something interesting. But a verbal gang-spanking is so much more fun, isn’t it?

It’s also funny how there’s about 4-5 people who seem to be actual linguists, and who seem to have a pretty good handle of what they’re talking about in terms of African-American English, and others barrel in, accuse anyone not in total agreement with Pam of being total racists, and ranting that the aforementioned linguists are wrongwrongwrongwrong. Just because.

vyreque, I was referring to a list of 3 items, and I don’t think it was vague at all. I understand that the sentence, as punctuated, can be taken as you: Jesse and Amanda, list of 2, but the preceding sentences address Pam’s post, so I thought “you” was still operative. Are you saying that the 3rd comma before “and” is still integral? I guess that would eliminate all guessing at 2 or 3.

Beyond that, I don’t think Kate misunderstood my meaning, I think she was just in the mood for scolding someone, and I was in the way.

Huh. I would argue that being aware of the linguistic reality of AAVE is a powerful tool to fight racism in language and language enforcement (I figured out after a couple of linguistics classes that it wasn’t the field for me, but it was really valuable to learn - I’m vehemently anti-prescriptivist as a consequence). The reality is that many black American children do face discrimination in education because they are believed to be (and told that they are) speaking incorrectly. This definitely does damage, and awareness of the reality of language can help educators deal with the multiple English languages/dialects/whatever that they WILL encounter in a diverse classroom in an appropriate, anti-racist way.

I also think there might be room to quibble about the term “African-American Vernacular English,” both because it is not only black Americans that speak it and because of the way it racializes language spoken by black people. I totally agree that that’s not what we want to accomplish, here.

The plural of anecdote is not data, but my experience as a very, very white man raised in a white Massachusetts bedroom community: I can certainly communicate effectively with someone who speaks to me in AAVE, or whatever we should call it, but I do NOT understand every nuance of it in the way I understand every nuance of someone who speaks to me in - what should I call it? How about “middle-class white-person vernacular”? (No, I’m not being flippant, here; I’m also sensitive to the issue of calling the language I speak “standard.”). That’s not a problem in my life.

And finally, I was confused and surprised by Pam’s original post, but her comment has totally removed my confusion. Sometimes things don’t always come across to me; I appreciate the follow-up, which I actually find very persuasive, and I think I Heart Puppies’ pearl-clutching about Jesse, Pam and Amanda’s “motivations” is pathetic and disingenuous. Their motivations? At least in part (and this is just a frickin’ guess), they are to fight sexism, racism, and the bajillions of other -isms I’m leaving out in the name of promoting equality in beliefs, words and actions. If, in the course of working toward that goal, there is the occasional miscommunication or misunderstanding or even (heaven forfend!) factual mistake, I can live with it. WTF else are they going for? The millions of bucks ready for the taking in the blogging universe?

Whoops, forgot to finish my second-to-last paragraph: That’s not a problem in my life, because the reality of my work is that I spend a lot of time communicating with white people. But being able to communicate with complete precision under all circumstances is valuable.

The other reason it’s not really a problem is the functional bilingualism mentioned by someone earlier. I’m guessing a lot more people who speak AAVE (or whatever) amongst their family and close friends are comfortable speaking the way I do than vice versa. Which is, of course, yet another element of my privilege as a middle-class white person.

I also think there might be room to quibble about the term “African-American Vernacular English,” both because it is not only black Americans that speak it and because of the way it racializes language spoken by black people. I totally agree that that’s not what we want to accomplish, here.

I think that’s the single biggest problem.  I’ve heard people who look like they walked out of a White Power Ranger’s wet dream of Aryan perfection who speak (at least part of the time) like that.  Using “Ebonics” immediately conjures up the image that they’ll only have to deal with people of a certain appearence, when the truth is the drug deal they might be monitoring might involve a Mexican-born supplier (who grew up in LA) meeting with his two white gangsta-wannabe homeboys.

“Think we’ll need some interpretation, Bob?”

“Oh not at all, John.  No African-Americans involved.  Wait, what are they saying?  Dammit, they’re speaking some kind of strange language!”

“I could ask George to come and…”

“No, I told you, there are no African-Americans in the meeting, so what good is getting someone who knows Ebonics?  Curses, foiled again by those clever drug-dealers and their strange tongues!”

If they’d phrased it more as looking for people already familiar with street vernacular, slang, and so on, I don’t think people would have raised a big deal.

I think grolby Hates Puppies.

I’m still curious about what would motivate the DEA to do this other than an actual need. In other words, I’m assuming the DEA is listening to conversations it can not understand and has determined that people who speak AAVE/Ebonics would be helpful in translating those conversations. Pretty straightforward, I think, and I don’t see the problem.

If you believe this is racist, what is your explanation for how the need for Ebonics speakers was developed? (I ask because it seems to me this is where the disagreement lies, but maybe I’m missing something.)

I’m sorry, Antiope, I’m going to go out on a limb, here, and guess that those calling this discussion, or the reference to language patterns of the greater African-American community racist are trying to score some kind of imaginary points.

Obviously, a third of Pandagon posters weren’t sticken with some sort of disease that made them suddenly racist, they’re smart people who know Linguistics, the Ebonics issue, and can speak (write?) intelligently on the subject.

Cops want to solve crimes. I’m guessing there’s some nuance in statements that’s being lost in some key areas that make these cops want to differentiate between somebody standing on the corner right then, as they speak, or someone standing on the corner habitually, as indicated by the helping verb “be”.

Keith@#91 - But the term “street vernacular” doesn’t exactly refer to African American English, which becomes more pronounced when one goes into the South, and more pronounced, yet, when one ventures into the rural South, where isolation keeps the dialect more pristine. African American English is also close to rural Southern English, which is derived from a few non-standard Scotch and English dialects in the late 1600s.

Both/and, Puppies and Antiope. It is reasonable to suggest both that the DEA is motivated by genuine need (as someone mentioned and I alluded to, there is the difference between getting the gist and understanding the nuances) and that there are elements of how they’ve advertised that need that are problematic. I don’t think that this is a particularly difficult concept to grasp, but Puppies appears to be having trouble with the idea. This suggestion that people are trying to score “points” is insulting, but more than that, it’s just moronic. What kind of points are you suggesting that people are trying to score? What do they gain by scoring these points? Can they be redeemed for plushies or lollipops? Suggest something concrete or shut the hell up.

And shit; yeah, cops want to solve crimes. And in the course of solving crimes, it’s not as though cops in general or the DEA have any history of adopting racist policies or methods. Of course the justice system pursues the prosecution of crimes through the purest of motivations and without any systemic bias whatsoever, and it is therefore totally unreasonable to suggest that there might be some racism in the process. And anyone who does suggest such a thing is doing so, not because they give a shit, but because of questionable, unsavory but conveniently unspecified “motivations.”

I agree with the linguists on the existence of AAVE. I agree with everyone who isn’t in love with the term. I even agree that the DEA is likely to have a reasonable need for people familiar with AAVE; I part company with Puppies on the rest of his/her nonsense on the pure intentions of the DEA and vague-but-sinister motivations of anyone with objections to raise about the want ad they put out.

Gee, grolby. It seems we’re mostly on the same page, then. Yes, it’s a clumsy solicitation for an “interpreter” to the nuances of a dialect.

Is the actual discussion of African-American English, or the acknowledgement that a dialect exists based on the speech patterns of multi-generation African-Americans in itself, racist? That’s my issue, and it’s not so hard to discern. To recognize and discuss a dialect is not a racist endeavor.

Why, grolby, do you think there are people here so quick to jump on and accuse those of us discussing this dialect of being racist? Pam seems to say that the mere acknowledgement of a dialect spoken by a group of people, the black community (I believe she commented, “whatever that is”) is wrong. For some reason.

You do understand the concept of “earning points”, right? Like, maybe people would like to impress their peers with their ability to spot and stomp out any vestige of racism, even people they don’t like asking a question. This might be beyond you, so I apologize if it is.

I have not commented on the intentions of the DEA, mr. grolby, so I’m not sure what you’re disagreeing with.

I see no problem with questioning why an African-American person would deny that “the black community” even exists, and why people would try to even shut down discussion of a dialect under the pretense of “stopping racism”. I’m not so sure the intentions of the writers of this blog are so pure and altruistic that they can never be questioned.

Comment #85: Dave Fried on 08/25 at 10:38 PM

@sacundim: it’s interesting that you describe the simple present construction (“he runs”) as being entirely confined to “sportscaster-speak”.  It’s also the construction used in narrative roleplaying (e.g. “I cast magic missile”).

I did not intend to imply any exclusive confinement to that context.  It’s just the one that sticks to my mind the most.

However, I don’t think your example is narrative; it’s performative (as in I pronounce you husband and wife).  I don’t doubt that roleplaying also has the “sportcaster’s present,” though.

I’d argue that English has four main aspects: progressive, perfect, perfect progressive, and *narrative*.

Well, frankly, I don’t argue that stuff—I look it up.

It’s mostly just a coincidence (or an accident of history) that the narrative present and the habitual are formed the same way.  They’re two completely different things.

It’s completely normal for syntactic and morphological forms to be multifunctional.  E.g., while the main use of Subject-Auxiliary Inversion in English is to form questions (Can you open the door?), it is also used for some forms of negated declaratives (Never again will I open the door for him), and negative inversion in AAVE (Can’t nobody say how tall he is).

Note that last example; it’s simultaneously (a) a strikingly distinctive feature specific to AAVE, yet also (b) an extra subcase of a more general pattern that also exists in Standard English.  Also, the is is obligatory (you can say He tall but not Look how tall he); note that this is perfectly parallel to a context where Standard English disallows contraction (you can say She’s tall) but not Look how tall she’s).

@sacundim: so it’s not okay to have my pet theories? :p I’m really only arguing that one of the four commonly-accepted aspects used in English could be interpreted a bit differently.  Believe me, even though I don’t have a degree in linguistics, I’ve looked a *lot* of this stuff up, many times, as it relates to many different languages.

Perhaps “narrative” is the wrong word; I know it’s used in some other languages (Persian? I don’t recall…) to refer to something like a perfective.

Also, while I think “performative” is a useful descriptor for many of the uses of simple present, it could also be seen as just the first-person sub-case of a larger narrative aspect, or alternately as first-person imperative mood, depending on how you look at it.

Or, I could be talking out my butt; maybe the simple present is just that, we eschew it because language is fairly arbitrary, and I’m trying to find a pattern where there really is none.

Comment #95: I Heart Puppies on 08/26 at 12:18 PM

Keith@#91 - But the term “street vernacular” doesn’t exactly refer to African American English, which becomes more pronounced when one goes into the South, and more pronounced, yet, when one ventures into the rural South, where isolation keeps the dialect more pristine. African American English is also close to rural Southern English, which is derived from a few non-standard Scotch and English dialects in the late 1600s.

Oh boy.  Two points here.

First, on the claim that African-American English comes from non-standard Scotch and English dialects, see my comment @19.  There is no consensus on its origin—and as smartens points out elsewhere in the thread, it’s not really that relevant.

Second, I object to the term “street vernacular” in different and (I think) stronger grounds than you do, because it sounds to me as a way of stigmatizing the dialect by associating it with “street culture,” which is understood to be with crime, drugs, violence and sexism.  I’d much rather call it “home vernacular”—the language that many (most?) African Americans learn and speak at home.  That’s at least more neutral, if not positive.

(Though yeah, “street” can be used as a term of covert prestige to give it “cred” among people who are so inclined.  That wouldn’t normally be middle-aged middle class society.)

Comment #99: Dave Fried on 08/26 at 03:12 PM

@sacundim: so it’s not okay to have my pet theories?

More or less , but I certainly took care not to exempt myself from the prohibition.  Another way of putting it is that, after having seen countless analyses of the tense/aspect systems of dozens if not hundreds of languages, I normally require (a) more convincing than what you’ve attempted, (b) to actually work through the details of an argument and cross-reference it with what other people have said, which I haven’t and I don’t really anticipate doing soon for this case, because, well, I have other stuff to do .

Though I’m lazy, and I’d probably just go with whatever Huddleston and Pullum say—and I don’t even own a copy of it, so I can’t tell y’all what that is.

@sacundim: Huddleston and Pullum apparently feel that the main aspectual distinction in English is imperfective vs. perfective, and would probably argue (if I were to read more than a few small excerpts of the book, which I also don’t own) that given that, we don’t use a perfective present because it usually doesn’t make sense in that context.

Puppies, you’re not paying attention. You’re too wrapped-up in scolding the authors and commenters at this blog for giving a shit to note that your questions have already been answered. As for the scolding itself, it’s offensive because it’s the same old song about how calling out racism is worse than racism itself. If someone makes an error in fact when they do so, well, I’m fucking over it because racism is a bigger deal than a mistaken accusation of racism. Because the consequences of actual racism are severe, and the consequences of Pam Spalding and the commenters disagreeing with you on whether “Ebonics” is racist is, uh, nil. Yes, I know that it hurts your butt, but that’s a price I’m willing to pay.

On a related note, I don’t particularly care for the insinuation that the “non-linguists” in this discussion have nothing of value to add by their criticism. I should add that I never identified myself as a linguist, because doing so on the basis of a fucking 201 and an advanced syntax course that I took five and six years ago would be outrageously pretentious. But anyway, once the actual linguistics experts in this thread stepped in, a fairly productive discussion got going, and it made me think about some issues in the way we talk about language and race that I hadn’t considered before. That result, even though I disagree that AAVE does not exist, is valuable to me. Which is why your whining about motivations annoyed me.

My assumption here is that most of the people here who disagree with me are anti-racism. That is, yeah there’s snark and aggravation and gnashing of teeth, but we’re basically on the same side. Contrast with your juvenile (and irrational) accusation that those who disagree with you are doing so because they want to impress their friends, not because they give a shit or something.

Wow, grolby, you mean that you’re saving children, or something, by calling names on the internet?

Profound.

If only Dr. MLK had the internet to get in flame wars on. He could have really accomplished something.

grolby says -

If someone makes an error in fact when they do so, well, I’m fucking over it because racism is a bigger deal than a mistaken accusation of racism.

So let me get this straight. To you, playing “the 7 degrees of racist seperation” is a parlor game. If some poor fuck gets caught in the maelstrom, or if some actual scientific research is ridiculed just so you can pretend to “give a fuck”, as you put it, so be it.

Thank you for so eloquently proving my point. A post like this, of Pam’s, has nothing to do with fighting racism. Yes, there might be some odd motivations behind the DEA’s quest, but I fail to see how mocking actual accepted science helps anyone.

p.s. I never said that the accusation is worse than racism. My point is that it’s accepted that there is a dialect of African American English. It isn’t racist to discuss that. To screech that the mere discussion is racist is lunacy. To get on the same side of an obvious child trying on philosophies for size is immature.

@grolby

Don’t bother fighting with I Heart Puppies.  He’s a troll who hasn’t been around here much this summer, but who used to reply to Amanda with shit like this:

Seriously, I don’t hang around here and read your blogposts religiously because I subsequently want to post how much women suck because they’re stupid.

I am just going to repeat for him the great advice he got from Ferox back in the day:

Dear I Heart Puppies,

You’re being dismissive and condescending, and that’s why people are treating you poorly.

Asshole.