To James Baldwin, writing in 1979, it was this passion, this skill . . . this incredible music. Toni Morrison, two years later, was impressed by its five present tenses and felt that the worst of all possible things that could happen would be to lose that language. What these novelists were talking about was Ebonics, the informal speech of many African Americans, which rocketed to public attention a year ago this month after the Oakland School Board approved a resolution recognizing it as the primary language of African American students.
The reaction of most people across the country--in the media, at holiday gatherings, and on electronic bulletin boards--was overwhelmingly negative. In the flash flood of e-mail on America Online, Ebonics was described as lazy English, bastardized English, poor grammar, and fractured slang. Oakland’s decision to recognize Ebonics and use it to facilitate mastery of Standard English also elicited superlatives of negativity: ridiculous, ludicrous, very, very stupid, a terrible mistake.
However, linguists--who study the sounds, words, and grammars of languages and dialects--though less rhapsodic about Ebonics than the novelists, were much more positive than the general public. Last January, at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, my colleagues and I unanimously approved a resolution describing Ebonics as systematic and rule-governed like all natural speech varieties. Moreover, we agreed that the Oakland resolution was linguistically and pedagogically sound.
Why do we linguists see the issue so differently from most other people? A founding principle of our science is that we describe how people talk; we don’t judge how language should or should not be used. A second principle is that all languages, if they have enough speakers, have dialects--regional or social varieties that develop when people are separated by geographic or social barriers. And a third principle, vital for understanding linguists’ reactions to the Ebonics controversy, is that all languages and dialects are systematic and rule-governed. Every human language and dialect that we have studied to date--and we have studied thousands--obeys distinct rules of grammar and pronunciation.
What this means, first of all, is that Ebonics is not slang. Slang refers just to a small set of new and usually short-lived words in the vocabulary of a dialect or language. Although Ebonics certainly has slang words--such as chillin (relaxing) or homey (close friend), to pick two that have found wide dissemination by the media--its linguistic identity is described by distinctive patterns of pronunciation and grammar.
