essay : critical thinking

This essay investigates racism in language. More specifically, the essay attempts to explore the discrimination that AAE or African American English encounter. The key aspects discussed in this essay are related to two social factors which are race and ethnicity. According to ( Hill, 2008:6-7) who argued that white American have a mistaken view of race suggesting that each group of people must be assigned to a specific race. Also, there is a quote by Guneratne who once said ‘’Ethnic groups are thus not fixed phenomena but are consistently being created and re- created a new; objective realties such as differences of language, territory, religion and custom are transformed into the basis of subjective consciousness or self-awareness’’ (Guneratne, 2002: 11). The essay attempts to explore AAE which is African American English and view the discrimination that this dialect of English have encounter.

AAE or AAVE refers to African American vernacular English, it is a dialect of English which is mostly spoken by African Americans. It is believed that AAE is influenced by the African culture. Thus, AAE can be symbol of African identity. However, AAE shares a large portion of grammar, phonology and morphology with (SAE) standard American English. Yet, AAE differs from SAE in many aspects. As for the history of AAE, it is believed that it was born in the slavery era while the working slaves were forced to speak English with their masters. Subsequently, African American at that time created this new dialect as a counter language, resistance and to change their reality. It is worth mentioning that not all African American speaks AAE. In addition, there are many different dialects of AAE which depend on geographical factors and the age or gender of speakers.

Since AAE began to spread it faced discrimination. In other word, people viewed AAE as sloppy version of English with a large number of grammatical mistakes. However, (Labov, 1972) claimed that all dialects are equally logical and grammatical. Hence, we can conclude that AAE must be treated like every other dialect of English. Another criticism that AAE received is that it is a dialect that is not capable to produce logical and intelligent ideas especially when compared to AE. However, this claim was rejected by linguists and psychologists by saying that AAE is capable of producing what other dialects can produce and that the only different is due to cultural diversity. In the late 90’s a controversy case occurred in Oakland, California in which a school board members concluded that AAE is a genetically based dialect and thus not a dialect of English. The board of education decision created a debated questions such as weather AAE is a dialect of English or it is a separate language? Should AAE used in the teaching process in order to facilitate the understanding of AAE speakers? . Another example which shows the discrimination that AAE speakers are facing comes from Baugh story; in 2003 Baugh made over 100 phone calls to lease an apartment, during his calls he used code-switching between AAE and SAE. The results of this experiment showed that AAE number received less than half the number of calls compared with the SAE voice. Additionally, one of the discrimination views toward AAVE is noted by Geoffrey Pullman who says that the vast majority of Americans view AAVE as not different from English with adding some slang vocabularies and a lot of grammatical mistakes. However, (Pullman, 1999: 41) argues that AAVE is a linguistic system with its own phonological, syntactic and morphological features. In other words, AAE is a rule governed just like any other dialects of the world. Until recently, many people criticize some grammatical features of AAE such as the use of habitual ‘’be’’ and double negation. First, as for habitual be is not wrong but it gives ‘’be’’ other function which describe the being situation. Also, the use of habitual ‘’b’’ in AAE can give an additional semantic options. Second, the deletion of consonants is rule based and not randomly chosen. According to (Pullman, 1999: 50-51) it depends on the voicing feature of the last two consonants. Thus, AAE behaves just like every other dialects of the world as it has specific rules that must be followed. In other words, AAE is a rule governed language. Another example is from the pronunciation of some words e.g. aks instead of ask. Therefore, a large number of people criticize that pronunciation (aks) and claim it gives a negative meaning. However, (Lippi-Green, 1997: 180) suggests that this pronunciation is not different from others examples that don’t match their spelling such as spelled or the fact that no one aspirate the /h/ sound in words like what. Interestingly, there was a controversy claim by Ernie Smith who argues that if African American people continued to use AAE; then we didn’t get out of the slave era and African American, by continuing to speak this dialect, are transferring the thinking, mentality and language of slavery from generation to generation. However, this claim by Smith was heavily rejected by African American linguists and writers.

To sum up, speech community is a group of people who share linguistic norms and ideologies. Moreover, members of a speech community use the same variety of language and share rules for speaking and interacting with others. Another essential point can be noted from (Labov, 1972) who suggested that the preference of people’s choice of a dialect depend on social, economic and political factors not linguistic factors because all dialects are equally logical and grammatical. And yet, dialects such as AAE has been discriminated for a long time. Thus, In order to have justice in communities all dialects must be treated equally and people shouldn’t make judgments based on someone’s dialect. Also, job opportunities and education should be the same for everyone in any community. It is shocking that some opinions about AAE and call it as ghetto language, street language and gang language. While this is the case with AAE, other dialects of English are also discriminated e.g. Chicano English as in mock Spanish situation and calling Hispanic people as lazy and dirty and less intelligent. The bottom line is that these racist ideas need to be changed immediately in order to have a better community with equal chances for everybody weather it was job opportunities, education or even the simplest things such as renting an apartment.

References

Ahearn, L. M. (2011). Living language: An introduction to linguistic anthropology (Vol. 7). John Wiley & Sons.

Baugh, J. (2003). Linguistic profiling. Black linguistics: Language, society, and politics in Africa and the Americas, 1(1), 155-168.

Guneratne, A. (2002). Many tongues, one people: The making of Tharu identity in Nepal. Cornell University Press.

Hill, J. H. (2009). The everyday language of white racism. John Wiley & Sons.

Labov, W. (1972). The logic of non-standard English. In Labov, W. Language in the inner city: Studies in the Black English Vernacular. Philadelphia University of Pennsylvania Press. Pp. 201-240

Labov, W. (1972). Sociolinguistic patterns (No. 4). University of Pennsylvania Press.

Lippi-Green, R. (1997). English with an accent: Language, ideology, and discrimination in the United States. Psychology Press.

Pullum, G. (1999). African American Vernacular English is not standard English with mistakes. The workings of language: From prescriptions to perspectives, 59- 66.