
African American Vernacular English Is Not Standard English with Mistakes (1999) [pdf] - c3534l
https://web.stanford.edu/%7Ezwicky/aave-is-not-se-with-mistakes.pdf
======
LordKano
There is a very big aspect that people overlook in this conversation.

There is what is known as the "dialect of power" and in the US that is
Standard American English.

It's not necessarily "wrong" to speak AAVE but in doing so, you will
disqualify yourself from opportunities that could otherwise be open to you
based on your education and/or experience.

If someone calls you to schedule a job interview and you don't sound the way
you're expected to sound when you speak, they'll mentally cross you off of the
short list before you ever cross the threshold of their place of business.

As an African American man, I'll admit that when I'm exclusively in the
presence of other black people, I'll code switch and speak in a way that I
never would at work or in mixed company.

I have a very Anglicized name and I speak Standard American English. As a
result of that, people who haven't previously met me in person are sometimes
surprised to learn that I'm not a white guy.

Being inclusive is a worthy goal but I think that education should stress the
importance of speaking Standard American English because it's necessary to do
so if one wants to be successful in this society.

~~~
mabbo
You shouldn't have to.

I recently started a role where I work very closely with a guy from southern
Kansas. He speaks with an accent that I would associate with hicks, farmers,
non-intellectuals. And true to form, he was raised on a farm. But he's smart,
hard working and great to work with. Every day that we work together, I'm
learning things that I wouldn't have otherwise understood.

No one criticizes him for speaking with his dialect of English. He doesn't
have to code switch. He speaks the way he speaks, he's understood and
respected. That's what's different about AAVE. It's not just that it's not the
dialect of power, it's a dialect people seem to go out of their way to not
respect.

~~~
looklittlejohn
I'd disagree with you that speaking with a southern twang doesn't disqualify a
person. I came out of deep East Texas and I have a bit of a drawl in my voice
that comes out when I'm tired or stressed but for the most part, I
intentionally speak as closely to SAE as possible. Because people do
disqualify me and I think you may have judged your friend too. You say you
associate his accent with people considered non-intellectuals? That's exactly
what LordKano is saying he tries to avoid by speaking SAE in the business
realm. Because he believes someone may make the judgement call that he is
unintelligent because of the way he speaks, just like you associate speaking
like a redneck to unintellicence.

I don't think this is about dialects being associated with any sort of people
group. I think it's about having a standard way of speaking in a professional
environment. And deviating from that may cause some people to have a negative
bias against you.

~~~
mabbo
> he believes someone may make the judgement call that he is unintelligent
> because of the way he speaks, just like you associate speaking like a
> redneck to unintelligence

That's a really great point. The very fact that I _do_ mentally associate my
friends accent that way is part of the problem. It's a problem that I hope I
am getting better at overcoming.

I'd rather by a hypocrite and say it's wrong than agree to the idea that it's
okay to need to modify the way you speak to avoid being disqualified by
society.

------
sampo
Norwegians spend the late 1800s and early 1900s quarreling amongst themselves
what should be the standard for written Norwegian. Should they take the
heavily Danish-influenced written language common in cities, or should they
use something closer to the dialects spoken in the rural areas?

Eventually, their parliament ruled that Norway shall have two official written
languages and all government documents will be published in both.

For example here are their parliament websites in both Nynorsk ("New
Norwegian") and Bokmål ("Book tongue")

[https://www.stortinget.no/nn/](https://www.stortinget.no/nn/)

[https://www.stortinget.no/no/](https://www.stortinget.no/no/)

Estimates vary, but maybe about 12% of Norwegians use Nynorsk as their primary
language, and 88% are Bokmål users.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_language_conflict](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_language_conflict)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nynorsk](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nynorsk)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokm%C3%A5l](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokm%C3%A5l)

~~~
8fGTBjZxBcHq
These are writing systems, not languages. As I understand it all Norwegian
speakers _speak_ the same language, they just represent that language
differently when writing it down.

Interesting but not that similar.

~~~
sampo
> As I understand it all Norwegian speakers _speak_ the same language

I am not Norwegian so I might not get this entirely correct. The British have
"BBC English" or "Oxford English" and the Americans have "Hollywood English",
but Norway doesn't have such a unifying standard for the spoken language.
People speak their own dialects, and the different dialects can vary quite a
lot.

 _There is no standard dialect for the Norwegian language as a whole, and all
dialects are by now mutually intelligible. Hence, widely different dialects
are used frequently and alongside each other, in almost every aspect of
society. Criticism of a dialect may be considered criticism of someone 's
personal identity and place of upbringing, and is considered impolite. Not
using one's proper dialect would be bordering on awkward in many situations,
as it may signal a wish to take on an identity or a background which one does
not have._

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_dialects](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_dialects)

------
athenot
This is a very revealing quote:

> No dialects in southern Britain (or America, which was settled from there)
> have a _g_ after a velar nasal at the end of any word anymore. So it is true
> that in the speech of Queen Elizabeth II, the _g_ sound that used to end
> _sing_ has been lost. But no one calls the queen sloppy or mistaken in her
> speech. Why? Because there is a double standard here. When Standard Southern
> British English introduces a simplifying change in the rules of punctuation
> (like "do not pronounce the _g_ sound after a velar nasal except in the
> middle of a word"), it is respected as the standard way to speak, but when
> AAVE introduces such a change (like "do not pronounce a stop at the end of a
> word after another consonant with the same voicing"), it is unfairly
> regarded as sloppiness.

I found this article as a whole to expand my appreciation for this dialect;
there is a lot more logic to it than I had assumed. In particular, the
negative concord (which had often bothered me) turns out to be the same as
what I already use in French.

------
scoot
Am I understanding correctly that this paper is making the argument that
because AAVE follows an identifiable set of grammatical rules, it is a dialect
rather than an aberration?

I don't have any opinion on that, I just wanted to make sure I understood the
basic premise.

~~~
Pharylon
Sure, and many rules of AAVE are more consistent.

For instance take the following words in standard English:

    
    
        * yourself
        * myself
        * ourselves
        * himself
        * itself
    
    

One of these things is not like the other! All of these take the form of
possive + "self," except "himself." And sure enough, in AAVE we have "hisself"
instead. A more logical, consistent replacement.

~~~
vorg
You omitted 2 of the reflexive pronouns. Only the 1st and 2nd person forms use
the possessive:

    
    
      * myself, ourselves, yourself.
    

_All_ of the 3rd person forms use the personal pronoun:

    
    
      * themselves, himself, herself, itself
    

Does AAVE also use "theirselves" ?

~~~
somecontext
This article
[http://acrwebsite.org/volumes/7610/volumes/v21/NA-21](http://acrwebsite.org/volumes/7610/volumes/v21/NA-21)
claims that AAVE uses "theirselves".

A quick search on Twitter suggests that "theirselves" is indeed used by people
who use "hisself", but perhaps half an order of magnitude _less_ than
"themselves".

------
jpttsn
Social trends in America are never framed in terms of class. Instead, we have
to reach for other dimensions, in this case race.

We could say it’s plain racism that keeps AAVE down. But it’s such an easy
theory to falsify: it predicts that white non-standard English would be
accepted at job interviews and in press rooms.

It isn’t. So it looks like race is one explainer, but not the whole story. It
could be a combination of things, except Ockham sneers at those, especially
when the elephant in the room—class—gets us so much further than race.

~~~
justizin
Occam's razor can be a useful tool, but to conflate class with race ignores
that in many ways, there is no economic status that can make black people as
accepted and welcome as white people. Race is an important factor that can
have more impact than class.

------
jchw
It's pretty hard to initially digest, but when you think about it, right and
wrong with language is almost entirely just convention. The difference between
what we consider 'bad' English and dialects of English is dubious at best.

~~~
GavinMcG
Can you make a further argument for that? You're basically dismissing the
article, but you're not offering anything to justify that.

~~~
alanbernstein
By what logic could any convention of spoken language be objectively correct?

~~~
stephenhuey
I did not major in linguistics but I had some very engaging linguistics
professors at Rice. Linguists consider themselves to be descriptive and
typical language teachers in grade school to be prescriptive. In other words,
linguists take pride in describing what native speakers actually do in
practice rather than what they are instructed to do. So if they catch a native
speaker doing something the "wrong" way they'll classify it as an error only
if native speakers will agree that the example in question was a mistake
because it doesn't make sense in the dialect. If native speakers agree that
whatever the speaker did actually does make sense to them, e.g. they're fine
with the usage of "ain't" or split infinitives or whatever in everyday speech,
then linguists will consider that to be a genuine example of the dialect. But
linguists are quick to point out that what is correct changes all the time
because words and phrases used by native speakers naturally erode and morph
and new ones are adopted, and trying to nail down what is correct is futile.

~~~
jchw
Basically I look at it this way: in reality, the coordination of 'correct'
language is a practical consideration, and it is an error to consider it a
matter of prestige, as if it's decidedly unintelligent to deviate from the
established norms.

------
boxy310
Just finished the Audible version of The Great Courses' audiobook on
linguistics, and they spent a chapter on this subject. A lot of the same
elements in this paper are pointed out in the lecture, which may indicate the
arguments in this paper were part of the foundational elements of that
particular lecture.

One of the things I found fascinating was that several of these grammatical
elements are similar to peripheral English accents of Ireland, Cornwall, or
York. The lecture noted that many of the indentured servants from Britain
would be quartered alongside slaves, and that the strongest language
reinforcement comes from people you live and work alongside.

~~~
travmatt
If you found that interesting, you’d probably also like “Black Rednecks and
White Liberals” by Thomas Sowell.

A major theme is how major elements of ‘ghetto’ culture actually derive from
the North-Britons and Scot’s these people lived near.

------
pdkl95
Xidnaf has a good video introducing AAVE from a linguistics perspective.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkzVOXKXfQk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkzVOXKXfQk)

------
mabbo
Languages change, evolve, and split into new languages. This has gone on
forever- why would it stop now?

~~~
jbob2000
It causes segregation based on race; Black people speak this language, white
people speak this one. We're trying to bring these groups together, diving
their language won't help at all.

~~~
LyndsySimon
I'm from rural Arkansas, and from my perspective, the dialect that is spoken
there shares more in common with AAVE than standard English.

The difference that I see is that I was expected to learn and speak standard
English in a professional environment while _the perception among my peers_
seems to be that those who natively speak AAVE expect their dialect to be
accepted in all settings.

Note that I was careful to say that this is my perception of the expectations
of others. My experience shows that native AAVE speakers adapt their language
in professional circumstances in exactly the same way I adapt my own.

~~~
rhizome
I don't understand the "expect" part, but are you trying to describe code-
switching?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code-
switching](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code-switching)

------
sctb
Discussion from last year:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12030097](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12030097)

------
dukoid
The primary purpose of language is understanding. Forking a language to convey
some sort of cultural distinction has the unfortunate side effect of making
this more difficult.

~~~
mark212
not sure that's the primary purpose. It can also be a very strong way to
reinforce / test the boundaries of a group. Do you talk like us or not? Are
you one of us? There are a multitude of ways to convey understanding; the
_how_ is sometimes more important than the content.

~~~
weberc2
Conveying meaning is necessarily more primary than forming group identity
simply because "do you talk like us" depends on "us talking to each other" in
the first place. It's hard to imagine an evolution where intra-group
communication happened as a result of extra-group communication.

~~~
icebraining
Right, but here we're talking about understanding in a broader group -
specifically, between groups - since that was what dukoid's post was about.

~~~
weberc2
Dukoid said the primary purpose of language is not communication (conveying
meaning), but intergroup identification. I don't see how this could be
possible.

------
beat
It is "wrong" because it is not the vernacular of the dominant culture. Just
like baggy pants are 'wrong" just because they're not the clothing style of
the dominant culture.

Differences arise as a result of segregation, and are then used to justify
continuing that segregation. Perhaps "deliberate" is the wrong word here, but
certainly expected.

------
soporific123
Alt-account for privacy. I'm one of the Ebonics kids (Titans where you at?!).

I'd like to add in some context. This all happened during the dot com boom in
the late 90s, and things weren't unlike they are now -- massive economic
expansion, uneven distribution of benefits, rapidly rising cost of living.
Teachers were getting priced out and demanded a raise. The district couldn't
afford it, so they asked the fed for ESL funds.

Long story short: funds were denied, teachers went on strike, many of the
better ones left the district at the end of the year, and the quality of
education received by myself and my peers suffered for it.

Do keep in mind that this is all from the recollections and understanding of
my teenage self.

[http://www.nytimes.com/1996/03/20/us/agreement-reached-in-
oa...](http://www.nytimes.com/1996/03/20/us/agreement-reached-in-oakland-
school-strike.html)

------
microcolonel
I find it easy to pick up dialects, but most people I know (especially people
who've learned English as a second language) have trouble understanding
various Southern, various Northern New England, various UK, various New
Zealander, various South African, and various Australian accents.

As a matter of efficiency, I figure everyone in North America should master
Standard American English (hard r, cot-caught split, pin-pen split) in both
speaking and listening, regardless of their home dialect.

~~~
wnoise
IME the cot-caught merge is widespread enough that "split" can't be considered
a requirement for standard. (Wikipedia says 40% merge, 60% don't.)

------
hprotagonist
This is eerily reminscent of "Authority and American Usage", a 2001 essay by
david foster wallace. The samizdat copy is here:
[http://wilson.med.harvard.edu/nb204/AuthorityAndAmericanUsag...](http://wilson.med.harvard.edu/nb204/AuthorityAndAmericanUsage.pdf)

Quoting from a section discussing Standard Written English vs. Standard Black
English (footnotes omitted):

 _I 'm not trying to suggest here that an effective SWE pedagogy would require
teachers to wear sunglasses and call students Dude. What I am suggesting is
that the rhetorical situation of a US English class---a class composed wholly
of young people whose Group identity is rooted in defiance of Adult
Establishment values, plus also composed partly of minorities whose primary
dialects are different from SWE---requires the teacher to come up with overt,
honest, and compelling arguments for why SWE is a dialect worth learning.

These arguments are hard to make. Hard not intellectually but emotionally,
politically. Because they are baldly elitist.[^60] The real truth, of course,
is that SWE is the dialect of the American elite. That it was invented,
codified, and promulgated by Privileged WASP Males and is perpetuated as
"Standard" by same. That it is the shibboleth of the Establishment, and that
it is an instrument of political power and class division and racial
discrimination and all manner of social inequity. These are shall we say
rather delicate subjects to bring up in an English class, especially in the
service of a pro-SWE argument, and extra-especially if you yourself are both a
Privileged WASP Male and the teacher and thus pretty much a walking symbol of
the Adult Establishment. This reviewer's opinion, though, is that both
students and SWE are way better served if the teacher makes his premises
explicit and his argument overt---plus it obviously helps his rhetorical
credibility if the teacher presents himself as an advocate of SWE's utility
rather than as some sort of prophet of its innate superiority.

Because the argument for SWE is both most delicate and (I believe) most
important with respect to students of color, here is a condensed version of
the spiel I've given in private conferences[^61] with certain black students
who were (a) bright and inquisitive as hell and (b) deficient in what US
higher education considers written English facility:

"I don't know whether anybody's told you this or not, but when you're in a
college English class you're basically studying a foreign dialect. This
dialect is called Standard Written English. [Brief overview of major US
dialects a la page 98.] From talking with you and reading your first couple
essays, I've concluded that your own primary dialect is [one of three variants
of SBE common to our region]. Now, let me spell something out in my official
teacher-voice: the SBE you're fluent in is different from SWE in all kinds of
important ways. Some of these differences are grammatical- for example, double
negatives are OK in Standard Black English but not in SWE, and SBE and SWE
conjugate certain verbs in totally different ways. Other differences have more
to do with style---for instance, Standard Written English tends to use a lot
more subordinate clauses in the early parts of sentences, and it sets off most
of these early subordinates with commas, and under SWE rules, writing that
doesn't do this tends to look "choppy." There are tons of differences like
that. How much of this stuff do you already know? [STANDARD RESPONSE = some
variation on "I know from the grades and comments on my papers that the
English profs here don't think I'm a good writer."] Well, I've got good news
and bad news. There are some otherwise smart English profs who aren't very
aware that there are real dialects of English other than SWE, so when they're
marking up your papers they'll put, like, "Incorrect conjugation" or "Comma
needed" instead of "SWE conjugates this verb differently" or "SWE calls for a
comma here."That's the good news---it's not that you're a bad writer, it's
that you haven't learned the special rules of the dialect they want you to
write in. Maybe that's not such good news, that they've been grading you down
for mistakes in a foreign language you didn't even know was a foreign
language. That they won't let you write in SBE. Maybe it seems unfair. If it
does, you're probably not going to like this other news: I'm not going to let
you write in SBE either. In my class, you have to learn and write in SWE. If
you want to study your own primary dialect and its rules and history and how
it's different from SWE, fine---there are some great books by scholars of
Black English, and I'll help you find some and talk about them with you if you
want. But that will be outside class. In class---in my English class---you
will have to master and write in Standard Written English, which we might just
as well call "Standard White English" because it was developed by white people
and is used by white people, especially educated, powerful white people.
[RESPONSES at this point vary too widely to standardize.] I'm respecting you
enough here to give you what I believe is the straight truth. In this country,
SWE is perceived as the dialect of education and intelligence and power and
prestige, and anybody of any race, ethnicity, religion, or gender who wants to
succeed in American culture has got to be able to use SWE. This is just How It
Is. You can be glad about it or sad about it or deeply pissed off. You can
believe it's racist and unfair and decide right here and now to spend every
waking minute of your adult life arguing against it, and maybe you should, but
I'll tell you something---if you ever want those arguments to get listened to
and taken seriously, you're going to have to communicate them in SWE, because
SWE is the dialect our nation uses to talk to itself. African-Americans who've
become successful and important in US culture know this; that's why King's and
X's and Jackson's speeches are in SWE, and why Morrison's and Angelou's and
Baldwin's and Wideman's and Gates's and West's books are full of totally ass-
kicking SWE, and why black judges and politicians and journalists and doctors
and teachers communicate professionally in SWE. Some of these people grew up
in homes and communities where SWE was the native dialect, and these black
people had it much easier in school, but the ones who didn't grow up with SWE
realized at some point that they had to learn it and become able to write
fluently in it, and so they did. And [STUDENT'S NAME], you're going to learn
to use it, too, because I am going to make you."

I should note here that a couple of the students I've said this stuff to were
offended---one lodged an Official Complaint---and that I have had more than
one colleague profess to find my spiel "racially insensitive." Perhaps you do,
too. This reviewer's own humble opinion is that some of the cultural and
political realities of American life are themselves racially insensitive and
elitist and offensive and unfair, and that pussyfooting around these realities
with euphemistic doublespeak is not only hypocritical but toxic to the project
of ever really changing them._

------
NearAP
Reminds me of this -

[https://twitter.com/ads_mdavn/status/890101529914560516](https://twitter.com/ads_mdavn/status/890101529914560516)

------
Overtonwindow
[deleted]

~~~
jasonmp85
"grammatically incorrect" is an arbitrary value judgment, no matter how much
you might assert or concern-troll otherwise.

~~~
throwanem
No, it's not. It's just erroneous here; AAVE has an internally consistent
grammar just as any other language does. I know quite a few people who code-
shift between AAVE and standard American English, just as I do between that
and the (admittedly somewhat less different) dialect of my youth.

The remainder of Overtonwindow's comment flows from that error and one other,
which is to assume that AAVE is a "degraded" form of standard American
English. It is not; it has old and many-branched roots of its own, only some
of which lie within American English.

But who knows? Perhaps Overtonwindow is a more accomplished historical
linguist than those on whose statements I here rely.

~~~
jasonmp85
Yes, clearly. I just meant "… in a vacuum" or "… with the implicit
understanding there is some _true_ grammar". In one sense, yes,
utterances/productions can be grammatically incorrect with regard to a
particular grammar under discussion, but if those utterances/productions can
be said to be a part of that grammar, eventually the grammar needs to change
to accurately describe the state of the world.

(Ultimately I have to think some of this comes down to "misperformance" where
the speaker _knows_ their production is invalid. If enough speakers
"misperform" but begin to hold the idea that these speech acts are not
actually invalid, is that what tips the scales in favor of changing a
grammar?)

