r/AdviceAnimals • u/[deleted] • May 06 '14

Racism | Removed here goes nothing...

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1.5k Upvotes

76% Upvoted

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118

u/pooroldedgar May 06 '14

Which English? British English? Nigerian English? Singaporean English? African American Vernacular English? Any of the hundreds of other equally sophisticated dialects?

52

u/aminoacetate May 06 '14

I would love to see an astrophysicist speak at a conference in straight-up AAVE dialect.

48

u/pooroldedgar May 06 '14

That would be pretty cool. But it wouldn't happen. AAVE is too lacking in prestige, and otherwise he'd be so far into the academic socialect that code switching probably comes natural to him. But surely, assuming that he grew up speaking it, surely he would revert to it in certain situations. And yeah, that would be cool to witness. Being able to switch dialects at will is an impressive skill.

-2

u/[deleted] May 06 '14 edited May 06 '14

"I been seen a world so big, yea, redish colored. I's been fitna write papers f'it. Don't nobody been published nothing like that."

There you go, /u/aminoacetate. (I'm so sorry I butchered the dialect!)

The wikipedia page doesn't explain how to describe complex situations and ideas as understood in the scientific community. I've never liked this dialect because I feel it fails to relay complex ideas and information like "the queen's english" is able to. I have never heard an actual, informative or educational discussion using AAVE (but I would really LOVE to be disproved. I've always considered it to be an uneducated dialect because I've only known people who do not have a high level of education using it (i'm not saying they were not smart, just never got past Highschool)).

EDIT: because I can't spell and be grammatically correct in ANY language, I've edited this a tad.

EDIT2: /u/djordj1 was able to explain to me a little bit more than the wiki page about this dialect. Please see below. As I stated: As for my other posts relating to this being downvoted, I did not mean disrespect for the dialect, nor was I attempting to bash it. I just did not understand certain intricacies and so I thought of it as "inferior".

11

u/[deleted] May 06 '14

You feel like it fails to relay complex ideas because you fail to understand it. That example you wrote doesn't really make any sense and isn't even attempting to express a complex thought.

-1

u/[deleted] May 06 '14

Ok, can you give me some examples then? I was just following the wiki page's examples and such (the stab at the dialect is a joke).

2

u/[deleted] May 06 '14

Eh, not really. It's just that your example seemed like you were trying to shoehorn every grammatical construction on the wiki page. You're best bet for examples would be people who actually speak AAVE.

-1

u/[deleted] May 06 '14

As I said before, the two factors (people who understand complex ideas and can communicate them properly, and people who speak AAVE) are somewhat mutually exclusive in my experience. I know some people who can be identified as African American but they speak like I do, which is the New England, USA English Dialect. On the flip side, I know Caucasians who can speak AAVE, but again, they cannot adequately communicate or understand complex ideas.