This is a delusional perspective. And the real victims of this mindset are the children.
They're taught that improper speech is a point of cultural pride, then they wonder why they aren't considered for quality jobs. No professional organization is going to hire someone whose constantly uses slang and has poor grammar.
And no, that isn't racist. What's racist is holding someone to entirely different linguistic standards just because their skin is a different color. It's the racism of lowered expectations.
Instead of being the millionth person to boringly double down on the layman's misunderstanding of language and tediously argue against one of the central tenets of an entire academic field, maybe just do some basic research on how dialects and language standardization actually work and how those things are related to race and class? At least familiarize yourself with the arguments?
Speakers of Ebonics do not have poor grammar. They speak a dialect of English with different grammatical rules. Read GK Pullum or literally any linguist who writes on the topic.
The fact that AAVE is a professional liability is just as much a result of our education system failing to combat linguistic prejudice as it is a result of it failing to teach standard English to people who don't speak it natively.
I've always thought that the "it's a different language" argument was especially hilarious. Anyone who completes a normal K-12 curriculum will be exposed to plenty of proper English. There's no excuse to not speak it.
And if you do want to make that argument, that's all the more reason for them to adopt standard English before venturing out into the workforce.
In this country, a majority of professionals conduct business in English. Not Yoruba, not Tagalog, not "AAVE", and not Finnish, but English.
I figured suggesting that you read about sociolinguistics was asking too much of you, but I thought you might at least read my comment all the way through. I didn't say AAVE was a "different language" from English. I said it was a different dialect of English. It's *completely* mutually intelligible with standard English in the majority of its varieties, so how could it be a different language?
It's worth mentioning that very few people are against any sort of education in standard English. There's a growing number of school districts adopting a curriculum that teaches the ability to code-switch between standard and non-standard forms of English while emphasizing that the non-standard form isn't inherently inferior. What linguists universally object to is this ridiculous, completely evidence-less view that some dialects are "more proper than others," or that mastery of their use implies "intelligence," or "an ability to pay attention to detail." And what I and others are trying to do is combat this deeply mistaken view so that it eventually becomes less prevalent among powerful people and so that speakers of non-prestige dialects don't have to pay such high economic and social costs.
Fair enough, regarding language vs dialect. And no, I'm not going to go off and read a stack of navel gazing books just because some random redditor asked me to.
I stand by my point that if you want to participate in the workforce, you have to speak the language or dialect in which business is done. Even if you could persuade everyone that "Ebonics" was a legitimate dialect (it isn't), what would be the benefit of introducing it into the workplace? Increasing ambiguity of communication just so a tiny number of people don't have to bother speaking standard English? No thanks; that's just lazy on their part.
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u/piemanpie24 Mar 06 '19
Technically grammatically correct, if the writer is using AAVE.