MrSmith said:
There's always someone quick to shout racism. But that isn't the issue here. Of course there are a million different forms of English. Within the UK there are countless accents, dialects and even languages (Welsh Gaelic, Scottish Gaelic). No-one in their right mind would deny the 'validity' of creoles either. But creoles arose from the need to communicate cross-culturally and cross-lingually. I was referring to pockets of youths in inner-city housing who speak a certain way to be identified with a certain ethnic group. The same people who tend to lose that way of speaking as they rise the socio-economic ladder.
No idea how old you are but unles you went to the US very young you may well have an accent. But I'm sure you speak grammatically correct English, and use conventional (correct) spelling. And you weren't even born there.
Ah, someone from England proposing to know about African American English. I don't know what blacks in your cities speak, but if its anything like Dizzee Rascal, its not ebonics- its street slang.
Accents/vocab and grammars are very different things. Language is gauged on the basis of grammar structures, not accents/vocab. There are only 3! (or 6) possible grammars in the world, given the 3 basic parts of sentence structure (subject object verb). The line that demarcates Ebonics from so-called Standard English lies in the particular grammar structure used.
The difference between street talk and Ebonics and Standard English is this:
Street Slang: I *^%@#$$ that riide yo.
Standard English: I've long since been done with that car.
Ebonics: I done been done with tha car.
See the difference?
You're right though- if I spoke with a Indian English accent, people would start asking me to fix their Dell
. As you so nicely put it, the people in charge of the corporate ladder all look a certain way, and they all speak a certain way, and in order to play ball on their turf, you've got to speak like them. Lucky for me, I've lived here almost my whole life.
And it is really a race thing. Ebonics, also known as African American English, is isolated to a community of speakers of a certain 'race', living in the rural south (of the US).
The real question is- why is it when white people speak English, its called a language, but when blacks speak it its called a "dialect" or a "slang"? I think the answer is something like this: In countries like Canada and India, large ethnic groups that speak languages differently are given recognition. In countries like France, the US, and Spain, large minorities are expected to conform to standard set by the majority. So when millions of blacks speak AAE/Ebonics, they are degraded, told they are simply bastardizing Standard English.
I'll leave it to someone who is Basque or Corsican or Québécois to explain why it is important that linguistic differences be affirmed, and not passed off as mistakes or worse- that speakers should just conform to the majority language so that they can get a job.
