Ebonics/aave

The discussion and opinions surrounding AAVE/Ebonics were very different. I wasn t aware that Ebonics was classed as its own language. The term Ebonics came about in the 1970 by a group of black linguists who didn t agree with the terminology surrounding the language they used at the time. To their dismay, the term didn t catch on with other linguists or the public until much later on in 1996 when the Californian School Board recognised it as the main language in that area. (Rickford, no date https://www.linguisticsociety.org/content/what-ebonics-african-american-english)

During discussions, a few questions popped into my head:

Are students who use Ebonics at an academic disadvantage to those who speak (standard) English in their normal lives?

What would happen during school exams would a student who speaks Ebonics take an exam using SE or Ebonics where s the line?

I m going to try and unpick these.

Firstly, there seems to be a mixed debate among academics about whether or not it s an advantage or a disadvantage to use Ebonics (Hymes 1972 cited in Lee 2017 https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2162context=lajm). What I find hard to fathom is, if it s classed as a language in its own right (with its own grammatical structures, lexical differences etc), like Spanish or French are languages, why is it being reprimanded for being different? It seems like Ebonics is still viewed as an uneducated version of English, and that it s somehow the heritage language of slavery (Rickford, no date https://www.linguisticsociety.org/content/what-ebonics-african-american-english)

Everyone has the right to have a first language, and that includes Ebonics, and schools need to acknowledge that Ebonics is equal to English. Students still have the capability to learn SE and know when it s appropriate to use SE e.g. job interviews. In the same sense, opinions about children with any other language as their first language e.g. Spanish, would be commended on having two languages running parallel (Spanish at home, English at school for example), so why is Ebonics treated differently? Those who are learning English at school whilst using a different one at home may still be seen as at a disadvantage to their monolingual peers, but in the long run, they re going to be more diverse in the real world and be able to communicate effectively with multiple groups of people.

Second question: it would be amazing if we could answer exams in whatever language/dialect we felt most comfortable in, but logistically that wouldn t work and we d be there forever trying to work out what everyone is trying to say. It is lot more practical to have exams in the main language that everyone is learning e.g. SE. Going back to that hypothetical Spanish child, it would be rather uncommon to allow a Spanish child to answer an exam in Spanish, when the exam was written in SE, so equally, those who use Ebonics would most likely be required to answer exams in SE. If the school was teaching a separate subject/language called Ebonics, (like you d teach a French or Spanish class) and sat an exam in that subject, then yes, it s fair to say that writing in Ebonics would be appropriate.

Teaching modality in schools is common everywhere. It s literally engrained in you from when you can pick up a pencil and you had to write a hypothetical letter to the National Trust asking if you and your classmates can have a school trip to one of the sites. The same would apply here: teaching students who are learning SE and when it s the right time/setting to use it formal settings like exams. The majority of America (where Ebonics is spoken) would use some form of English (with a few dialectal and accent differences), so teaching students when to use English and when to use Ebonics would probably make the most sense.

For arguments sake, let s say that you can answer an exam using Ebonics or SE. It would make practical sense to register the student s answers as being written in Ebonics OR SE, wouldn t it? If a child writing in SE answers something in Ebonics, would it be classed as an incorrect answer? I guess so, since it s not written in the correct language. If our Spanish student wrote half his exam in Spanish and half in SE, the Spanish bits would probably be marked wrong.

The whole discussion around Ebonics is very thought provoking especially since it feels so close to English that it could be mistook for a dialect, yet when you look in more detail, there s a lot more going on than we may initially think.