sociolinguistics – Loki is the Philosopher King

stabbedinthenameofscience:

prismatic-bell:

im-just-a-penguin:

prismatic-bell:

gahdamnpunk:

THIS

Can confirm. My favorite book on linguistics has an entire section on AAVE that talks about this.

So some people are better at bad English than others? Also, in what kind of classes is this knowledge useful?

It’s useful for the kind of classes where people aren’t busy being assholes about how other people speak, @im-just-a-penguin.

But don’t take my word for it!

Here’s a website dedicated to explaining dialects that goes over the rules.

Here’s a professional linguist who specializes in AAVE, and just one of his many papers explaining that AAVE is a proper dialect.

Hot shit! Here’s an article from STANFORD UNIVERSITY that’s literally titled “AAVE is not Standard English with mistakes”!!!

Here’s a blurb from PBS, introducing the topic of whether AAVE is a creole or a dialect. You’ll notice neither one of those options means ‘just poor English’.

Here’s English Language and Linguistics Online, which is a nice technical linguistics website, further deconstructing how AAVE works.

Here’s a paper on the habitual “be” from New York University.

Here’s a link to some information from Portland University. I wish to draw your attention specifically to the phrase: “linguists now agree that AAVE is not ‘broken’ English, or slang”.

Here’s a super-technical paper on phonology in AAVE, which gets down into things like why AAVE speakers may say “axed” instead of “asked.”

Hm. Looks like there are a lot of people who study this stuff for a living who disagree with your assessment that it’s “bad English.” I guess you better get reading … . asshole.

http://writing.umn.edu/lrs/assets/pdf/speakerpubs/Smitherman.pdf

If y’all want to read more on this, also look up professor Smitherman from MSU.

Fun story: I worked as a research assistant for John Rickford, a sociolinguistics professor (and native Guyanese Creole speaker) at Stanford, 10 years ago on his project investigating the Creole Hypothesis of the origins of AAVE. He favors (or did at the time) the theory that it’s a “decreolized” creole. A creole (as it explains under the PBS link) is a language that develops after a generation of children have a pidgin – a mixed language formed in a situation of contact between speakers of different languages – as their primary linguistic input. The creoles we know about, mostly formed in colonial situations where enslaved or low-paid laborers with a variety of native languages were brought in to work on European-owned plantations, have a lexifier language – the European language spoken by the people in power, which provides most of the vocabulary, or lexicon, of the creole – and substrate languages, the languages originally spoken by the laborers, which provide various grammatical structures, function words, and phonological rules. A creole “decreolizes” when it becomes more similar to the lexifier language due to continuing contact with native speakers of the lexifier. AAVE is much more similar to Southern American English than most creoles (Jamaican, Barbadian, Haitian, etc.) are to their lexifiers, which is why it’s still a matter of controversy whether it was ever a creole or was just a dialect that spun off due to the relative social insularity of the community of speakers.

So, what was I doing on this project? Rickford’s team of research minions, which included me, three other college students, and a PhD student supervisor (all women, interestingly), were responsible for going through transcripts and listening to tapes of interviews with speakers of AAVE and a few English-based Caribbean creoles (Jamaican, Barbadian, Guyanese) and cataloguing their use of various grammatical features: plural marking on nouns (present/absent), question inversion (“Who is she?” vs. “Who she is?”), relative clause construction, and probably some other stuff I don’t remember now. The idea was to find out whether AAVE patterned more like the creoles or more like some British dialects, such as Northern Irish English, from which AAVE might have gotten some of its “nonstandard” features. No conclusions were reached after three months, obviously; our job was to collect and systematize data in such a way that it could be quantitatively analyzed. Which is very cool in theory but incredibly boring in practice. I never wanted to see another Excel spreadsheet in my life.

lordhellebore:

athenadark:

dollsahoy:

luvtheheaven:

samanticshift:

samanticshift:

“i don’t judge people based on race, creed, color, or gender. i judge people based on spelling, grammar, punctuation, and sentence structure.”

i hate to burst your pretentious little bubble, but linguistic prejudice is inextricably tied to racism, sexism, classism, xenophobia, and ableism.

ETA: don’t send me angry messages about this…at all, preferably, but at least check the tag for this post before firing off an irate screed.

no one seems to be following the directive above, so here’s the version of this post i would like all you indignant folk to read.

no, i am not saying that people of color, women, poor people, disabled people, etc, “can’t learn proper english.” what i’m saying is that how we define “proper english” is itself rooted in bigotry. aave is not bad english, it’s a marginalized dialect which is just as useful, complex, and efficient as the english you’re taught in school. “like” as a filler word, valley girl speech, and uptalk don’t indicate vapidity, they’re common verbal patterns that serve a purpose. etc.

because the point of language is to communicate, and there are many ways to go about that. different communities have different needs; different people have different habits. so if you think of certain usages as fundamentally “wrong” or “bad,” if you think there’s a “pure” form of english to which everyone should aspire, then i challenge you to justify that view. i challenge you to explain why “like” makes people sound “stupid,” while “um” doesn’t raise the same alarms. explain the problem with the habitual be. don’t appeal to popular opinion, don’t insist that it just sounds wrong. give a detailed explanation.

point being that the concept of “proper english” is culturally constructed, and carries cultural biases with it. those usages you consider wrong? they aren’t. they’re just different, and common to certain marginalized groups.

not to mention that many people who speak marginalized dialects are adept at code-switching, i.e. flipping between non-standard dialects and “standard english,” which makes them more literate than most of the people complaining about this post.

not to mention that most of the people complaining about this post do not speak/write english nearly as “perfectly” as they’d like to believe and would therefore benefit by taking my side.

not to mention that the claim i’m making in the OP is flat-out not that interesting. this is sociolinguistics 101. this is the first chapter of your intro to linguistics textbook. the only reason it sounds so outlandish is that we’ve been inundated with the idea that how people speak and write is a reflection of their worth. and that’s a joyless, elitist idea you need to abandon if you care about social justice or, frankly, the beauty of language.

and yes, this issue matters. if we perceive people as lesser on the basis of language, we treat them as lesser. and yes, it can have real ramifications–in employment (tossing resumes with “black-sounding names”), in the legal system (prejudice against rachel jeantel’s language in the trayvon martin trial), in education (marginalizing students due to prejudice against dialectical differences, language-related disabilities, etc), and…well, a lot.

no, this doesn’t mean that there’s never a reason to follow the conventions of “standard english.” different genres, situations, etc, have different conventions and that’s fine. what it does mean, however, is that this standard english you claim to love so much has limited usefulness, and that, while it may be better in certain situations, it is not inherently better overall. it also means that non-standard dialects can communicate complex ideas just as effectively as the english you were taught in school. and it means that, while it’s fine to have personal preferences regarding language (i have plenty myself), 1) it’s worth interrogating the source of your preferences, and 2) it’s never okay to judge people on the basis of their language use.

so spare me your self-righteous tirades, thanks.

Oh my gosh YES, this post got so much better.

this is sociolinguistics 101. this is the first chapter of your intro to linguistics textbook.

and

and yes, this issue matters. if we perceive people as lesser on the
basis of language, we treat them as lesser. and yes, it can have real
ramifications

(Also, most of what people loudly defend as “proper English” is nothing more than an adherence to one particular style guide over another–it was what they were taught, therefore it is the only way. Heh, nope. Learn some more. Linguistic descriptivism for all.)

most of what is taught isn’t even based on English but the rules for teaching latin

yes, you can split the infinitive because in English it’s two words, but in latin it’s one

so it is based on a structure designed by a very small educated elite to remind others of their place, and that place was as subhuman, the educated gentlemen who made these rules generally considered anyone who lacked in some way – no matter what it was – as subhuman and that they should be kept down by any means necessary and so created a labyrinth of traps to reveal them- including language

Lingustic prescriptivism is outdated and can be used far too easily as a tool for perpetuating classism, racism, and misogyny.