re Re: re Re: re Re: SLSL language

[jbor]

on 16/3/03 7:18 AM, calbert at hslboxmaster.com wrote:

>> "Mangled" and "aberrant" sez who?
> 
> Says a broadly accepted standard of usage.
> Language is, after all, a means of communication.

So your argument is that the users of African American English don't
understand one another? Or that it isn't a broadly accepted standard of
usage within their community? Please.

I don't think anyone here has advocated that Ebonics be taught in place of
"standard" American English, only that it be recognised and acknowledged as
a legitimate mode of cultural expression. I think the real sticking point
for some is the suppressed realisation that Ebonics is a subversion of
"standard" American English, rather than a marker of social and cultural
inferiority. To be able to manipulate and flout the "rules" of a language
(often in such a way to point up inconsistencies and illogical
preconceptions within those "rules", and to purposely and successfully
offend speakers of the dominant "argot") requires a pretty solid
understanding of the base language. Of course, for subsequent generations of
speakers that knowledge of the base language gradually disappears, because
the new code does function perfectly well on its own and the kids are
immersed in it on a daily basis. Thus the children aren't able to switch
back to the alternate code when it's appropriate to do so for the discourse
context, and this is where the problems arise in education, employment etc.

It's quite possible that the distance between the two codes will continue to
grow, perhaps to a point where they become mutually incomprehensible. In
fact, this is precisely how languages do develop.

> It is not to  
> deny the legitimacy or aesthetic qualities  of argots or dialects to
> argue that the "public" educational process is not responsible for
> nurturing it. Though education may be said to have any number of
> redeeming outcomes, surely LEARNING must be  privileged -
> otherwise the process is something else....and LEARNING  is not
> served by maintaining the "prejudices" of ignorance - not meant in
> any negative sense, but in the absolute one.....The sting of being
> corrected in class cannot possibly compare to that of being
> rendered handicapped in a job market.....

This is rubbish. Language is merely a medium of communication and
instruction. The same conceptual knowledge and skills can be conveyed and
learnt via Ebonics as via English. Or Spanish. Or Windigo. Or any language.
African-Americans (who can't switch to the dominant language code) are
disadvantaged in the job market in the same way that newly-arrived migrants
and refugees are. If Bojan or Lakshmi were surgeons or engineers back in
Bosnia or Sri Lanka the fact that they don't speak English doesn't make them
any less of a surgeon or engineer.

It's exactly the same for African-American children as it is for a second-
or third-generation American child who grows up in Little Italy and speaks
only Italian at home and in her or his wider community until he or she
starts school, and who continues to speak only Italian in those contexts.

> This debate  also overlooks one  of the very functions of argot,
> which is EXCLUSION.

Of course one of the motivations behind the use of Ebonics is exclusion.
It's a form of protest.

> Those who employ it are  specifically
> looking to confirm a bond which is NOT universal.

English isn't "universal". Get over yourself.

best