Ebonics....Hmmmmmmm....interesting.

[mikemike84]

there is nothing wrong with ebonics. i wish it became a standard language as it purely american based and its evolution is unique to america & is not british. people make me laugh i heard people say it has no rules or is just rong english. i mean people do realize u can speak ebonic wrong. blacks also code switch or use ebonic without slang & many more whites adopt ebonic slang without taking the grammar. that y a white can say an ebonic word and not be speaking ebonics. portugese, spanish & italian r mutal intelligible yet no one consider them the same language. if u learn one u can realy understand the rest real quick like within a month. so english and ebonics r not mutual but whites & black contact have made it seem so but only white american especially those in contact with black can understan ebonics. ive been over the world & when i speak i have to only de slag by also use different grammar to b understood i have to do this w/ some whites & some blacks but no to the same degree as they have bin more exposed to it. the problem is ebonics is mostly english based with regard to vocabulary and some of its feature have become mainstream especially the use of habitual "be". i see white with no connection to blacks using it. ebonic is a camoflagued creole. this makes it hard for mmany blacks to write english papers trust me at times i couldnt distinguish my talk ebonic from english. so i usually always got marked for grammar on my papers. grammar is where it differs the most & really isnt english based although it more so than say jamaican patwa which clearly sound more similar 2 west african english. where as ebonic ebonic sound southern english with a different grammar.

[K-SawDude]

I hadn't caught this thread until now, but for the record . . .

Linguists do not think Ebonics is just slang. It is a dialect of American English that has a variety of regular and distinct phonological and syntactic rules. Like slang, it certainly has its own lexicon (vocabulary). But unlike slang, it does follow regular and predictable linguistic patterns like all dialects do. For this reason, linguists these days often avoid the word "Ebonics" (which sounds like it's just about phonic characteristics) and instead say "African American English" (AAE) or "Black English."

Other facts:

While AAE was initially spoken primarily by African Americans, there are increasing numbers of speakers who are white, Asian, Hispanic, etc. who learn it as their first and primary language. By the same token, there are African Americans who don't speak AAE. Nobody is "frontin'" or being fake towards their ethnicity in terms of such language use. People build a grammar based on whatever language input they are exposed to as they grow up. And once they're past puberty, they can't just magically start talking a different way and sound like a native speaker of a new language/dialect without some difficulty.

Now, I understand people have a variety of social reactions and evaluations of AAE, especially when we talk about education. But the above facts are, well, facts of language that any linguist would want people to know before they make social judgments about others' language use.

(I'm happy to give examples and additional comments if folks are interested, but I didn't want this post to get too long.)

[ulver]

Lest ye forget...


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBZdjc4RfQA

And now the Key to Dallas...


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_Ra0...layer_embedded

He's remorseful alright... That he ever got caught...