{"id":141900,"date":"2020-01-07T11:38:14","date_gmt":"2020-01-07T16:38:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=141900"},"modified":"2020-01-07T12:10:48","modified_gmt":"2020-01-07T17:10:48","slug":"the-limits-of-standard-english","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/01\/07\/the-limits-of-standard-english\/","title":{"rendered":"The Limits of Standard English"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

\u00a9 ~ Bitter ~ \/ Adobe Stock.<\/p><\/div>\n

Few large groups of English speakers have borne as great a burden of stigma as black people. In the time of slavery, that stigma was enshrined in law\u2014and even after emancipation, legal measures have been used to ensure that black people could not easily vote, could not access decent education and transportation, and so on. Since the civil rights era, many legal barriers to equality have been removed, but society has yet to catch up. As of the second decade of the twenty-first century, black people are almost five times as likely to be jailed as white people, despite making up only 13 percent of the population. It\u2019s not surprising, then, that the dialect many black people speak is stigmatized, too\u2014to such a great extent that it\u2019s often denied the status of dialect, becoming merely \u201cbad\u201d English. That assumption has become so ingrained, it\u2019s even taken up by some black people themselves.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is no such thing as \u2018talking white\u2019 \u2026 It\u2019s actually called \u2018speaking fluently,\u2019 speaking your language correctly. I don\u2019t know why we\u2019ve gotten to a place where as a culture\u2014as a race\u2014if you sound as though you have more than a fifth-grade education, it\u2019s a bad thing.\u201d This was the argument of a young black woman whose video on the subject went viral in 2014. In her view, speaking what linguists call African American Vernacular English (AAVE) is not speaking \u201cfluent\u201d English. It is bad English\u2014the kind of English that should be dispensed with by the time you\u2019re eleven years old. As the journalist Jamelle Bouie wrote about the video, \u201cthe \u2026 ideas that black Americans disparage \u2018proper English\u2019 and education and use a \u2018broken\u2019 version of the language have wide currency among many Americans, including blacks.\u201d<\/p>\n

The funny thing is, most English-speaking people, wherever they live, are to some extent familiar with AAVE. That\u2019s because of the powerful projection of black culture through movies and music, including the massive popularity of hip-hop. Despite being stigmatized in America itself, the dialect has cachet around the world, though arguably that\u2019s because it\u2019s seen as \u201cedgy\u201d\u2014romanticized as the argot of gangsters and drug dealers. So when Britons or Australians read phrases like \u201cI ain\u2019t lyin,\u201d \u201cI ain\u2019t never seen nothin\u2019 like it,\u201d \u201cHe be workin\u2019 hard,\u201d they can identify the speaker as likely being black; they can conjure up the accent and intonation in their minds\u2019 ear. <\/p>\n

And yet because this dialect is one that\u2019s very close to standard English, and is used by a group whose status is generally low, it gets branded as \u201csloppy speaking,\u201d \u201cslang,\u201d or \u201cghetto.\u201d The last label, although freighted with racial judgment, could at least make linguistic sense. We know that dialects emerge when there is geographical stasis. In areas of cities that are primarily black for a number of years, even decades, distinctive ways of speaking are likely to develop\u2014more so given that the isolation is in this case both physical and social.<\/p>\n

As Geoffrey K. Pullum makes clear in an article entitled \u201cAfrican American Vernacular English is not standard English with mistakes,\u201d AAVE is a dialect no less complex or expressive than more prestigious forms of the language. It is rule-bound and systematic. It also happens to be the means of communication of a marginalized, often economically disadvantaged group of people. In fact, AAVE possesses at least one fine grammatical distinction that standard English completely lacks. Pullum explains that there is a \u201cremote present perfect\u201d tense in AAVE, evident in expressions like \u201cshe been married,\u201d where \u201cbeen\u201d is emphasized. This doesn\u2019t just mean \u201cshe has been married,\u201d but \u201cshe is married and has been for some considerable time.\u201d In a similar way, the AAVE form \u201cbe\u201d + present participle\u2014\u201cbe walking,\u201d \u201cbe singing,\u201d et cetera\u2014is often mistaken for the equivalent of the English present continuous tense: \u201cis walking,\u201d \u201cis singing.\u201d In fact, it marks what is called \u201chabitual aspect\u201d\u2014meaning the action is performed as a rule, not necessarily right this minute. \u201cHe be singing\u201d therefore means not \u201che is singing,\u201d but \u201che sings [as a hobby, or professionally].\u201d<\/p>\n

Another distinctive feature of AAVE is the use of the double negative, as in: \u201cI ain\u2019t never seen nothin\u2019 like it.\u201d In standard English, this would be \u201cI haven\u2019t ever seen anything like it.\u201d What is the reason for a double-up like this? If you say \u201cI ain\u2019t never,\u201d don\u2019t the two phrases cancel each other out? Aren\u2019t you saying you have in fact seen it? That\u2019s one argument for why this is just \u201cbad,\u201d irrational, sloppy English\u2014but it\u2019s wrong. What we\u2019re seeing here is not logical negation but, as Pullum points out, a fairly common linguistic strategy called \u201cnegative concord\u201d\u2014negative agreement, in much the same way that, in French, nouns and the pronouns and adjectives used to describe them in a sentence must all agree in gender. Plenty of other languages have developed negative concord, for example Italian. \u201cThere is no one there\u201d would be non c\u2019e nessuno<\/em>\u2014literally \u201cnot is no one [there],\u201d grammatically closer to the AAVE \u201cain\u2019t nobody there.\u201d It wouldn\u2019t be plausible to accuse sixty million speakers of standard Italian of sloppiness or speaking in slang. So why would we do the same with AAVE?<\/p>\n

AAVE often leaves out what linguists call the \u201ccopula\u201d\u2014that grammatical form of the verb \u201cto be\u201d (in other words, not the form that means \u201cto exist,\u201d as in \u201cthere once were dinosaurs,\u201d or \u201cto be equal to\u201d\u2014as in \u201cGod is love\u201d). So a black speaker might say \u201cHow you doing?\u201d or \u201cYou late.\u201d But the standard forms of many languages do this\u2014for example Arabic, where \u201cYou are late\u201d is Anta muta\u2019akhir<\/em>\u2014literally, \u201cYou late.\u201d<\/p>\n

None of these facts dampened the controversy in 1996 when the school board of Oakland, California, passed a motion addressing AAVE, which it called \u201cEbonics.\u201d The board made clear it would recognize the dialect used at home by many of its pupils and would deploy it in the classroom, for example to \u201ctranslate\u201d standard English sentences so that students could understand them better. It is a mark of the stigmatization of AAVE that this move was met with fury, igniting a debate across the United States. A widespread assumption was that it was an example of \u201cpolitical correctness gone mad,\u201d where a clearly substandard form of the language was being elevated simply because it was used by black people. The desire to bend over backward to accommodate an ethnic group\u2019s sensitivities was trumping the need to deliver a high-quality education to the students of Oakland. The move was condemned as dumbing down, and of depriving black students the means by which to improve themselves. It was criticized by pundits both black and white. The civil rights leader Jesse Jackson said: \u201cWhile we are fighting in California trying to extend affirmative action and fighting to teach our children so they become more qualified for jobs, in Oakland some madness has erupted over making slang talk a second language. You don\u2019t have to go to school to learn to talk garbage.\u201d<\/p>\n

Given just how disparaged AAVE is, it\u2019s not surprising that it was viewed as \u201cgarbage.\u201d And it\u2019s certainly true, given the way such attitudes permeate the worlds of employment and higher education, that students who could not master standard English would be at a disadvantage. But would using AAVE in classrooms squeeze out standard English, or aid its speakers in getting to grips with the more prestigious variety? Here\u2019s what the Linguistic Society of America said in a 1997 resolution: \u201cThe systematic and expressive nature of the grammar and pronunciation patterns of the African American Vernacular has been established by numerous scientific studies over the past thirty years. Characterizations of Ebonics as \u2018slang,\u2019 \u2018mutant,\u2019 \u2018lazy,\u2019 \u2018defective,\u2019 \u2018ungrammatical,\u2019 or \u2018broken English\u2019 are incorrect and demeaning.\u201d Not only that: \u201cThere is evidence from Sweden, the US, and other countries that speakers of other varieties can be aided in their learning of the standard variety by pedagogical approaches which recognize the legitimacy of the other varieties of a language. From this perspective, the Oakland School Board\u2019s decision to recognize the vernacular of black students in teaching them Standard English is linguistically and pedagogically sound.\u201d<\/p>\n

In other words, using AAVE to help students acquire standard English actually speeds up that process. So why the fuss? Really, it just comes down to the closeness of AAVE to English\u2014which enables it to be regarded as merely a sloppy version of the latter\u2014combined with the extreme stigmatization of black people, such that symbols of their culture, including dialect, denote worthlessness. Among white people, anger at the normalization of AAVE might have been rooted in fears that it would, as a result, be in a better position to \u201ccontaminate\u201d standard English.<\/p>\n

Politics and language frequently collide in this way; how could they not? The way we speak becomes distinctive when we are separated from outside influences, either geographically, socially, or both. Over time, distinct dialects become powerfully symbolic of those networks. They can be badges of pride, or of shame. They can be elevated to the status of \u201clanguage,\u201d remain dialects, or get disparaged as slang. But these decisions are mostly sociopolitical, to do with stigma and status. The linguistic categorization starts with the idiolect\u2014the forms of speech used by a single person. A collection of mutually intelligible idiolects forms a dialect. Where two dialects are not mutually intelligible, they are often called \u201clanguages\u201d\u2014unless there is a political or cultural reason not to regard them as such\u2014as with Arabic, for example.<\/p>\n

Languages don\u2019t have hard borders. In places where populations have been stable for many centuries a dialect continuum can develop, as in southern Europe, where Italian blends into French and then to Spanish. So what is Italian? What is English, French or Spanish? Are they objects you can point to? Where do they begin and end?<\/p>\n

In truth, of course, the mistake lies in taking languages to be \u201cthings,\u201d analogous to objects. Once again, we find ourselves under the net. Because we can say \u201cI learned Spanish\u201d using the same syntax as \u201cI kicked a ball,\u201d we take the shorthand\u2014Spanish is a \u201cthing\u201d that can have something done to it\u2014to be reality.<\/p>\n

Languages do exist, but they are not necessarily the things we take them for. On the one hand, we each have an understanding of at least our mother tongue that allows us to produce sentences in it according to certain rules. I say \u201cI kicked the ball\u201d not \u201cthe ball kicked I.\u201d That knowledge of rules in our brains is one part of the reality of a language. The other part is its existence as an autonomous system, a means of communication whose form is negotiated between speakers. It is not fixed, but changes as it is used in millions of separate interactions.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

David Shariatmadari is a writer and editor at the <\/em>Guardian. He studied linguistics at Cambridge University and the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, where he now lives.<\/em><\/p>\n

Excerpted from <\/em>Don\u2019t Believe a Word: The Surprising Truth about Language<\/a>. Copyright \u00a9 2019 by David Shariatmadari. Used with permission of the publisher, W.\u2009W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To deem African American Vernacular English \u201cbad\u201d English isn\u2019t just racist\u2014from a linguistic standpoint, it\u2019s also entirely incorrect.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1891,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[684],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-141900","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-language"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Limits of Standard English by David Shariatmadari<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"To deem African American Vernacular English \u201cbad\u201d English isn\u2019t just racist\u2014from a linguistic standpoint, it\u2019s also entirely incorrect.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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