{"id":271,"date":"2019-04-22T08:58:36","date_gmt":"2019-04-22T15:58:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/linguamonium.com\/?p=271"},"modified":"2021-04-25T05:31:55","modified_gmt":"2021-04-25T05:31:55","slug":"accents-and-dialects-part-iii-black-english","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/linguamonium.com\/?p=271","title":{"rendered":"Accents and dialects (part III): Black English"},"content":{"rendered":"

This last post on accents and dialects summarizes an editorial by linguist, academic, and popular writer John McWhorter. McWhorter\u2019s linguistics research focuses on sociohistorical language change and creoles, but he has published multiple articles and books about race relations as well. Here, he tackles a combination of those subjects with Black English (taking a particular and somewhat controversial stance towards a recent event involving the dialect).<\/p>\n

Article: “There’s Nothing Wrong with Black English”<\/a> (The Atlantic)<\/p>\n

A short poem published not long ago in The Nation<\/em> sparked outrage due to the fact that its homeless narrator speaks Black English, while the poet, Anders Carlson-Wee, is white. In response, The Nation <\/em>editors added a warning to the poem calling it \u201cdisparaging,\u201d and the poet apologized profusely.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe primary source of offense, in a poem only 14 lines long, is passages such as this, in a work designed to highlight and sympathize with the plight of homeless people: \u2018It\u2019s about who they believe they is. You hardly even there.\u2019 The protagonist is referring to the condescending attitudes of white passersby who give her change.\u201d<\/p>\n

America certainly has a long history of parodying black language (minstrel shows being a prominent example), and our past inevitably influences the unease people feel when artists use Black English today. But the dialect that Carlson-Wee employs is not caricatured; it\u2019s \u201ctrue and ordinary black speech\u201d.<\/p>\n

One reason for the anger provoked by the poem could lie in the too-common perception that Black English is a degraded form of the language \u2013 so if a white person uses it to portray a black person, it\u2019s obviously condescending and offensive. But Black English is simply a dialectal variety (just like \u201cstandard\u201d English is another dialectal variety).<\/p>\n

\u201cIf a sentence like\u00a0People be lookin\u2019 at him funny<\/em>\u00a0seems unsophisticated because the\u00a0be<\/em>\u00a0isn\u2019t conjugated, try wrapping your head around the fact that the\u00a0be<\/em>\u00a0also expresses, overtly, a nuance that the standard sentence would not\u2014that this looking in question happens on a habitual basis. You wouldn\u2019t say\u00a0People be lookin\u2019 at him funny<\/em>\u00a0if it were happening at the moment. Black English jangles with things that we are trained to hear as \u2018slang,\u2019 but which foreign learners would struggle to master, in the same way as they would with pluperfects and subjunctives.\u201d<\/p>\n

Around the world, people use one language variety in their private lives, and a different one in public \u2013 and don\u2019t consider their private variety to be \u201cbroken.\u201d This is the case with Arabic speakers \u2013 national\/more local dialects like Moroccan and Algerian Arabic are quite different from the Modern Standard Arabic on the news (and from each other), but speakers understand it\u2019s just context-dependent.<\/p>\n

Another problem is that white people may operate under the prejudicial misconception that black people can only <\/em>speak Black English, and that Standard English is beyond them. Educated whites today, though, often seem aware of the bidialectalism of black Americans \u2013 that individuals can speak one way or the other depending on context. Attesting to this, Carlson-Wee\u2019s narrator dips into and out of Black English in the poem.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, we should evaluate each work on a case-by-case basis, and shouldn\u2019t necessarily shun all nonblack artists from depicting the valid bidialectalism of black speakers, when those artists do it accurately and gracefully.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

[Note: The article touches on several other aspects which I left out of the summary, such as cultural appropriation \u2013 if interested in more, definitely give it a read.]<\/p>\n

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll wrap up with a few points that I hope these \u201caccents and dialects\u201d posts (and the full articles, if you\u2019ve read them) have conveyed:<\/p>\n