The Ebonic Plague?
"I mean, really, it seem
like everybody and they momma done had something to say on the subject!" The
sentence comes from Geneva Smitherman, a professor of English, the director of
the African-American Language and Literacy Program at Michigan State
University, the author of the books Talkin and Testifyin (1977) and
Black Talk (1994), and one of the people quoted most frequently by
reporters and commentators seeking context for the national controversy over
"ebonics"--a form of Black English recently granted official recognition as a
separate language by the Oakland, Calif., school board.
As it
happens, though, Smitherman's words have nothing to do with the Oakland school
board's action. They were written two decades ago, when the vernacular used by
many blacks in America's inner cities and the rural South was receiving its
first round of national attention, partly as a result of influential works of
scholarship such as J.L. Dillard's Black English ( 1973). A few years
later, in a widely publicized ruling, a Michigan court ordered local school
districts to take account of Black English. The most remarkable element of this
story, in other words, is how unchanging it is. The central pedagogical
problems (low achievement by large numbers of black students, and how to reach
these students), the scholarly arguments (how should Black English be
characterized?), the flashes of racial feeling, the sober (and dyspeptic)
public commentary--one could transplant it all from one era to another, without
risk of anachronism.
To recap the events of the present era, then--briefly: On
Dec. 18, 1996, the Oakland Unified School District unanimously endorsed a
resolution whose ulterior intentions remain unclear, but which, at the very
least, declares that the "primary language" spoken by many of its 28,000 black
students is not English. It is a distinct language--not a dialect, not
nonstandard speech--called "ebonics" (a combination of "ebony," meaning
"black," and "phonics"). The resolution asserts that deficiencies in black
educational achievement cannot be remedied unless the prevalence of ebonics is
recognized and somehow dealt with. What might "somehow dealt with" involve?
Representatives for the Oakland schools have given answers that sometimes
conflict with the wording of the resolution itself on such issues as whether
ebonics would or should be a language used in formal instruction (as opposed to
something that teachers simply should be given financial incentives to be aware
of and conversant in); whether ebonics would itself be taught as a subject; and
whether claiming the status of a distinct language for ebonics was, in fact, a
ploy to shake loose federal bilingual-education dollars (an outcome immediately
ruled out by Richard W. Riley, the secretary of education).
Needless
to say, the confrontational language of the Oakland resolution, and the
ill-advised statement that ebonics is "genetically based," did nothing to
stifle criticism. (Click to read the full text of the resolution.) The
educational politics of this issue will no doubt play themselves out in the
usual messy American way--and, with luck, they will do so beyond the glare of
publicity (that being where experimental educational programs that involve the
inner-city vernacular but avoid the manifestos are already taking place).
Two points deserve mention.
First,
the word "ebonics," which dates back to the early 1970s and has been used even
in some public-school settings without controversy for years, may seem to be
putting on airs, but what many linguists prefer to call "Black English
Vernacular" or "African-American Vernacular English" is a major linguistic
stream that has been flowing within recognizable channels for centuries.
(Benjamin Franklin and, before him, Cotton Mather left simulations in their
writings of the speech of some American blacks that anticipate vernacular
renderings today.) There is, of course, no single "Black English"--there are
various black Englishes in Africa and the Caribbean, for instance--and Black
English Vernacular is not considered a separate language by most language
specialists or, for that matter, ordinary people. (As one commentator has
recently noted, the complaint about rap lyrics is not that they can't be
understood.) But the black American speech at issue in Oakland--however one
categorizes it as a language or a dialect--not only is pervasive but also
displays features that one finds nationwide, owing to its roots in the black
migration from a common region, the South. There are telltale characteristics,
widely if not universally present: the replacement of an initial "th" with a
"d" sound ("dis," "dem") and of a medial or final "th" by an "f" or other
consonant sound ("with" becomes "wif," "brother" becomes "bruvah"); a reduction
of consonant clusters in general (so that "first" becomes "firs" and "hand"
becomes "han"); the replacement of a final "r" sound with a vowel sound
("summah" for "summer" and "mo" for "more"); the prevalence of so-called
plosive consonants (making a word such as "bill" sound more like "beel"); the
placement of stress on a first, rather than a second, syllable ("DEE-troit");
the disappearance of the final "s" from third-person singular verbs ("what go
'round, come 'round"); the dropping of the copula ("I here," "the coffee cold")
and of certain tense inflections altogether. The ancestry of vernacular
elements such as these is diverse and includes antique forms of English and
slave-trade-era maritime lingua franca, but an African origin for many of them
has been persuasively argued for. West African languages, to give just one
example, also tend not to make use of a "th" sound.
Second, disagree as one might with the highhanded approach
taken by the Oakland Unified School District, the linguistic challenge
confronting urban schools defies armchair comprehension. Discussions around the
holiday dinner table in Greenwich or Grosse Pointe may characterize ebonics as
an issue mainly of laziness or sloppiness--something whose rectification should
be a matter merely of better habits or self-control, like standing up straight
or looking another person in the eye. The front-line literature from America's
classrooms belies that notion. Those interested in acquiring some (sanitized)
sense of how great is the task--even in the absence of any other social
problems--that faces a teacher wishing to impart mainstream speaking and
writing skills to black students who don't have them might consult the
soon-to-be-published English: An African-American Handbook--A Guide to the
Mastery of Speaking More and Better English , by Savannah Miller Young, a
black elementary-school principal in St. Louis. (The book will be available in
mid-January. Address queries to P.O. Box 11704, Clayton, MO 631005-3098.) After
several brief introductory chapters, the book settles into a detailed program
of lessons and drills. The therapeutic lesson plan I suggest for speakers of
standard American English: Imagine what would be involved in undertaking this
program yourself, in reverse.
William Labov, a professor of
linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of an early study,
The Social Stratification of English in New York (1966), has been
arguing for years that, whatever its original sources, the language of poor,
urban blacks is becoming ever more divergent from that of other Americans, as
de facto racial segregation and social isolation become the permanent lot of a
vast subgroup of African Americans. The widespread use of the so-called
invariant "be" to indicate continuous or habitual action ("he be late"),
for instance, is not a historical legacy but a development of the last 50
years.
"Ebonics" may not merit the
status of a distinct language now, his research seems to imply--but just give
it time.
