A Language Joint

Reader Mary emailed a question I thought I'd answer here:

… Linguists have been teaching that AAE is a language separate from English, with a completely different grammatical structure.

... As a PhD in English and a mother of African American children, I wonder what your thoughts on this issue are.

I’m not a linguist, so I’m not going to quibble about the official definition of a separate language. But in my personal experience, I always say that if I understood it, it was English, because English is the only language in which I’m fluent. I’ve always just considered English to be a good deal broader than many people consider and to include multiple grammars. If these are considered separate languages by linguists then, yea! I am multi-lingual and didn’t know it.

Do you plan to expose Nat and Selina to AAE, or are they already exposed to this? Do your adult African American friends speak AAE around you or when talking among other African Americans?

Since I’m not sure what the boundaries are of some officially separate African American English, I can’t really say. I will say that various non-standard English dialects are spoken around my children on a regular basis, including African American patterns, working-class white patterns, southern white/Black (they overlap mostly) patterns, etc.

If your girls' birth families speak AAE and they remain in contact with them, how will you teach them to view this? Nat, being the language genius that she is/will be, may recognize their speech patterns as wrong and incorrect, a view commonly held by Standard English speakers.

How will you teach her about the different languages? Will you be open to Nat speaking AAE when she is in the AA community as long as she can code-switch when in a formal setting?

See, I don’t anticipate this ever being an issue. We don’t view varying ways to speak English as wrong, so it’s not likely she’d necessarily see it this way. Standard English will be her mother tongue, but she has lots of exposure to other types of language as well.

But when I was teaching English in a public school in DC, I used to deal with this quedtion every day. I wanted my students not just to know Standard English, but to know when and where to use it, without disrespecting their mother tongue versions of English. It’s not easy to teach Standard English without seeming to negatively judge other forms, but I did the very best I could.

Sometimes I used “the way I talk” as a stand-in for “standard” with my students. For example, one day I was having a discussion with a boy about whether or not it was safe for me to leave my bag in my room unattended. He insisted, “You can’t trust nobody, Miss Lady!”

I said, “you mean, you can’t trust anybody, Jose?”

“That’s right, Miss Lady, you can’t trust nobody!”

“But how would I say that, Jose?” I asked again.

“Oh!” he answered, getting it, “you can’t trust anybody!”

He knew the difference. I didn’t need to teach him the standard version. I just needed to help cultivate his awareness of when to switch forms (at school with an English teacher, for example).

When I did lessons for kids about common mistakes in beginning essay writing, I included things like mismatched number between pronouns and antecedents (eg: “someone might want their daughter to grow up to be president”). I would describe this as something you hear a lot in speech that is not the best way to write for school papers. I’d invite students to give different examples from their own lives of how different people say the same things. Then I would tell them that what most of their teachers want them to write in school, or lots of employers want to hear in a job interview is called “Standard English.” We’d talk about how people like me (Miss Lady!) talk, versus how their grandmother from the Dominican Republic talks versus how their uncle from Georgia talks, etc. etc.

I know it’s not possible to teach Standard English without raising the spectre of “correct” and “incorrect” but I never use those words when I teach it. I just talk about different ways to talk to different people in different contexts.

Another way I’d teach vocabulary for things like SATs would be to offer them three words, and ask them to give me back three words. I’d give them three “SAT” words to look up, define and use in a sentence, then I’d ask them to give me three words not found in the dictionary (or not found with their definition), but in common use among them and their peers or relatives, ask them to write their own definitions and give me a sample sentence. One example I got was “joint” used to mean “thing” or “event” (And this is how dumb I was at the time—I had a lightbulb moment of realizing what “A Spike Lee Joint” meant.)

If you study English long enough, you realize that it is constantly changing and has drastically changed from its early forms. Old and Middle English require translation skills, and can’t be read by a modern English speaker. (Believe me, I spent many miserable nights translating them during the nasty cold, dark, Hillary Term in Oxford.) Shakespeare, whose English was modern English, just like ours, wrote in a way that many people these days have trouble understanding. Spelling was not standardized until dictionaries became common in the nineteenth century and educated, upper-class men like Thomas Jefferson might well spell the same word in different ways in the same document and not be thought to have made a mistake. The same is true for rules of capitalization, punctuation and for quite a bit of grammar.

I grew up being told that “ain’t” was improper English and shouldn’t be used. That is completely untrue. “Ain’t” is a perfectly legitimate contraction for “is not” used by Elizabethan writers and speakers all the time (Shakespeare again, for example). That word, along with “yonder,” “ya’ll” and other words and expressions survived years of linguistic change in the isolated Appalachian region and later, when other places with more cultural capital had stopped using those expressions they became associated with poor, uneducated people. My southern family didn’t want their offspring speaking in that way. But it’s just good old Shakespeare’s English.

I have every hope that my daughters will be multilingual across languages as well as within English, across its forms. Whether those forms constitute separate languages is not for me to say, but I believe the more ways you can say or write something, the more ways you can think, so we will cultivate knowledge of languages and their appropriate contexts in every possible way in our family.

Comments

[Country Mouse]

Well said.

[elswhere]

I love this post. And I love how you taught your students. I wish I'd had the nerve and clarity to bring up different forms of English with my (mostly wealthy, mostly standard-English-speaking) students, so that they'd understand more about respecting the different forms of the language that they're sure to encounter. If I were going back to that school, I'd do it next year!

[maike]

there is always the difference between presriptivism and descriptivism in linguistics. the pendulum swings towards descriptivism these days, but when papers are graded, teachers fall into painful prescriptivism.
I don't want to get into a discussion about language rights etc, but I strongly believe that it is most important for speakers of any language to understand code switching. It is wonderful to speak a regional variety of some standard language, as it supports identity and group membership (if there is such a thing...I'm not a native speaker of English), but when applying for a job, a double negative in English might lessen chances to actually get the job. A double negative might get you a better deal on a car in different situation, though. It is generally advisable to know which variety is the standard and which isn't. But it is just as important to know which varieties can be used by speakers outside of the variety-group...I, as a non-native speaker of English, would never dare using AAE other than in my linguistics class room. It would be just wrong.
And that is the only possible occurence of the term wrong when it comes to linguistics. Linguistics looks at languages and determines differences. Not faults.

[Sheryl]

I applaud you for handling your response to those questions with such grace. I am a Black woman, born in the Carribean. I've lived in Michigan (mostly Detroit) for 34 of my 39 years. I guess, I can also be identified as an African-American. I speak what I believe to be standard/mainstream English in my home. As a child I was teased because of my Carribean accent, then later for speaking "proper." I think I would have blown a gasket if someone asked me if I was going to expose my child to AAE. What exactly is that?

I've heard the following phrases and words from African-Americans: "Who is you?", "I'm is...", "I seent...", etc. Some other examples are "peterfather" for pedophile, "oldtimers" for Alzheimers, skrawberry for strawberry, skreet for street, etc. Is this what's been recognized as AAE? Some don't conform to the rules of grammar and others are flat out mispronunciations of common words. Either way I can't feel anything but insulted when I hear that this is a recognized "language" and one that a parent should purposely expose an AA child to.

p.s. If I have made any grammar or spelling mistakes, I will gladly accept them as ERRORS and not seek to have them recognized as "Sheryl's English."

[maike]

sheryl, you're question is very valid.The thing is, AAVE is recognized as a language in a certain area of the US. Everywhere else it is a regional variation, or rather a sociolect (and with that it has indeed rules that have to be followed, otherwise it is not the correct version of AAE, so you are absolutely right, some things are flat out individual variations that are nonconform to a set of rules, or, in other words, wrong). If it was a language true to its name, then every American with dark skin would have to speak it. And no American with light skin would be able to speak it. Both variants are valid, though.
I think the question really should be about expsoure to variations. And I'm sure that Nat and Selina will experience all sorts of variations. (Children of college professors cannot escape variations...)

[regine]

I was glad to see Sheryl's post. As an Africa American woman born in Haiti, I also felt somewhat offended by these questions of AA English. What exactly is that supposed to be? I have seen and heard many non AAs speak slang and ebonics. I don't consider this as AA English and find it offensive that it is construed as such, regardless of any linguists.
And the notion that Shannon's children going to speak and sound so "waspish" that they may have trouble understanding other AAs and have to code switch? Please. . I'm surrounded by people of all races who speak standard English but have no problems decoding any variations of English or responding to them.

[shannon]

I like Maike's example about getting a job versus getting a good deal on a car. Most of the time I speak a highly educated, vocabulary-rich version of Standard English (so much so that my friends sometimes make fun of me), but I can "code-switch" in a snap when I'm talking to a diner waitress on a road trip through the South or something. I fall into backwoods Arkansas-ese so fast I don't even notice it!