English as a language is constantly changing and evolving. New words are being created every day, and with the help of the internet, are being spread at a rate unmatched with any time in history. This is due in part to all the different dialects in the United States and in the world. One of the most popular and influential English dialects in America is known as African American Vernacular English or AAVE. Other names for AAVE include Ebonics, Black English, African American English, and Black English Vernacular. It is not only composed of African Americans, and almost all AAVE speakers come from low-income households. Students from impoverished families have enough trouble getting through school, but speaking primarily AAVE poses another …show more content…
To what extent does linguistic profiling perpetuate discrimination against speakers of AAVE?
AAVE in School
AAVE is spoken by people of all ages, and when children as young as 5 come to school speaking AAVE as their primary dialect, many teachers do not know how to teach them. For all of AAVE’s history it has been looked down upon as a flawed version of standard English and many speakers are assumed to have less academic potential than their peers. In words of Walt Wolfram PhD (1993), a sociolinguistics professor,“operating on erroneous assumptions about language differences, it is easy for educators and students to fall prey to the perpetuation of unjustified stereotypes about language as it relates to class, race, and region”(p.6). This type of discrimination is called linguistic profiling and can stem racism or classism that may be much more discreet than outright hatred, but can hurt people all the same. The negative connotations that coincide with AAVE come about not only from the disparities it has with standard English, but because of the ideas already present within the listener about the
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Many speakers of AAVE are able to also speak in standard english in situations that call for it, but many are not as fluent in it or do not know how to use it at all. Job interviews are one of the most common formal situations and most people going would want to present themselves in the best way that they can. This for most includes dressing well, acting composed, and speaking in the most refined way they can, but job interviews are also one of the most common stressful situations to be in. Stress may cause the people that do not commonly use Standard English to have more trouble with it then they would otherwise and reverting to AAVE can cause intelligent people with acceptable credentials to get denied jobs in favor of more fluent standard english speakers. This is only one situation and there are many other reasons a person might speak in AAVE at a job interview but the larger issue is that the people that do speak AAVE even minimally are judged harshly by employers on something that does directly affect job performance in most cases. As cited by Eric Kushins PhD (2014) to Jeffrey Grogger’s findings that “Studies of workplace income disparities found that blacks whose speech was distinctly identified by raters as black earned 12 % less than comparably skilled blacks who were not identified as black (Grogger 2011)”
Lisa Delpit’s book, “The Skin We Speak”, talked about language and culture, and how it relates to the classroom. How we speak gives people hits as to where we are from and what culture we are a part of. Unfortunately there are also negative stereotypes that come with certain language variations. There is an “unfounded belief that the language of low income groups in rural or urban industrial areas is somehow structurally “impoverished” or “simpler” than Standard English” (Delpit 71). The United States is made of people from various cultures and speak many different variations of languages. As teachers we must be aware of some of the prejudices we may have about language and culture.
While some features of AAVE are apparently unique to this variety, in its structure it also shows many similarities with other varieties including a number of standard and nonstandard English varieties spoken in the US and the Caribbean. Speakers and writers of this dialect use some distinctive aspects of the phonological, lexical, and grammatical traits associated with this dialect. Many sociolinguists would reserve the term AAVE for varieties which are marked by the occurrence of certain distinctive grammatical features.
“Standard English was imposed on children of immigrant parents, then the children were separated from native English speakers, then the children were labeled “inferior” and “ignorant” (Hughes 70) because they could not speak Standard English. In addition to feeling inferior about their second language skills, these students also felt inadequate in regard to speaking their own mother tongues” (qtd in Kanae)
This marginalization is still prevalent today, as Black English is still overwhelmingly stigmatized and discredited in nearly all academic settings, particularly within American culture. Jordan’s demonstration that Black English is not given respect or afforded validity in academic and social settings still rings true today. Black English-speaking students see little to no representation of their language in the classroom, and are often actively discouraged from speaking the language of their community and of their upbringing. This suppression and delegitimization of a valid method of communication represents colonialist and white supremacist notions of language, social homogeneity, and latent institutional racism, and has negative, even dire, consequences for the students
Because workplace discrimination is closely tied with underemployment and unemployment, it’s important to know why blacks continue to obtain lower positions and promotions than their white co-workers. In The Social Psychological Costs of Racial Segmentation, Tyrone A. Forman discusses explanations of the separation of middle class African Americans in the workplace. The amount of blacks and whites co-working has grown, but blacks are often given the jobs with the lower prestige and rarely any chance of promotion. Despite increasing numbers of middle-class blacks working the same types of jobs, African Americans are primarily segmented...
MacNeil, Robert, and William Cran. "Bad-Mouthing Black English." Do You Speak American? Orlando: Harcourt, 2005. 115-49. Print.
As cliché as it sounds, it is true that many African American students come from very harsh and poverty stricken environments. They tend to go to under resourced schools as well that do not provide the proper knowledge for them to further their education. And even worse, these schools tend to be segregated since they are usually in the harsher parts of a neighborhood. Sadly, it’s the segregated schools are one of the main reasons why black students decide not to go on to pursue a higher education. According to "The Way Out of the Black Poverty Cycle", a black student that attends an integrated suburban school is six times more likely to graduate compared to a segregated under resourced school. An African Americans family structure and the opinions of family members affects if their decision to further their education as well. Many African American children grow up un...
Luo’s central argument in his OpEd piece is that there is a large disparity in racial inequality between blacks and whites when it comes to employment. But Luo says that this difference is even more pronounced for those with a college degree. According to Luo, the unemployment rate in 2009 for black male graduates, 25-years-old and up, was 8.4%, while for a white male of the same credentials, the rate was 4.4%. Luo points out that he does not think that this discrimination is intentional (which usually correlates to personal discrimination). Instead, he thinks employers are used to gravitating toward people who are similar to them, meaning that the discrimination blacks face in the workforce is due to cultural discrimination. There are laws that prohibit institutional discrimination, as well as legislation that encourages a diverse workspace, so there is nothing built into the system that is discriminatory. What Luo argues is that employers discriminate subconsciously because of the way the media has influenced their way
The African influence of American English can be found as far back as the Seventeenth century. Although its influence may have began that far back, the influence of African American slang has arguably reached its peak (so far) in the last half on the 20th century. Evidence of this can be seen in magazines, music, television, and films. Perhaps more importantly, evidence can be seen in the way that people of ethnic groups, other than African American, have changed their speech due to this influence. The Equal Rights Movement lead to a paradigm shift in African American linguistic consciousness due to Black intellectuals, scholars, activists, artists, and writers deliberately engaging in a search for a way to express Black identity and the particular circumstances of African American life. Although there had been strides in Black pride in the past, this was the first one to call for linguistic Black p...
In an article for The Atlantic titled “The Workforce is Even More Divided by Race Than You Think,” Derek Thomson looks at workforce participation and wages by sex and race. He finds that regardless of sex or participation in the workforce, race takes precedence in determining how much workers make: "White men and women out-earn black men and women, who themselves out-earn Hispanic men and women, among full-time workers—even though Hispanic men have the highest participation rate" (Thomson). The reason for this, Thomson explains, is the accessibility to higher wage jobs, with whites and Asians having a much denser presence in jobs such as construction managers, CEO’s, physicians, surgeons, and software developers, whereas blacks are more likely to work as security guards or bus drivers, and Hispanics are more likely to work as maids, house cleaners, or in landscaping jobs. A central dynamic behind this is the difference in level of education between races: “Blacks and Hispanics, who make up about one-quarter of the workforce, represent 44 percent of the country’s high school dropouts and just 15 percent of its bachelor’s earners.”
Ebonics, also known as Black English, is a nonstandard dialect spoken in many homes in the inner cities of America. This nonstandard language is often looked upon as low-class or lazy talk. This is not the case, however. Due to consistencies found in the dialect, there seems to be an order. It has been found that, when learning English, African-Americans adapted the language using some of the structure and rules of their own native tongue. This Black English has carried on through slavery and then freedom for hundreds of years. Although there is a coexistence of more than two dialects in our society, those in power forget the flexibility of our language and see no other way than the use of Standard English.
The Academic English Mastery Program (AEMP) is a groundbreaking approach to ensuring the language and literacy acquisition of speakers of non-standard varieties in parts of the Los Angeles Unified School District. Headed by former speech pathologist Dr. Noma LeMoine, AEMP is a response to an article entitled, “The Children Can No Longer Wait: An Action Plan to End Low Achievement and Establish Educational Excellence,” which outlines the difficulties of nonstandard English speakers and the failure of the school district to successfully address these deficiencies (LeMoine, 1999, p. 4). The program began in 1990 with nineteen elementary schools and was originally called the Language Development Program for African American Students, thus designed for African American Language speakers. It has now changed its name to appropriately describe its expansion to over three hundred elementary and junior high schools and to include other groups of nonstandard English speakers who are identified as Limited Standard English Proficient students (LeMoine, 2002, lecture). These constituents, what Ogbu (1997, pg. 234, 235) call “castelike minorities,” include African-Americans, Mexican Americans, Hawaiian Americans, and Native Americans, whose native language is not Mainstream American English (MAE). Students are classified as Standard English Language Learners; they are often misclassified by the school district as “English Only” speakers because a great portion of their respective home languages “[incorporate] English vocabulary but [embody] phonology, grammar, and sentence structure rules from indigenous languages other than English” (L...
Social injustice is present in LADO work; however, linguists who work for LADO are not the perpetrators. An individual’s origin cannot be solely determined based on their language use. Lexical can be influenced from various reasons and easily adapted into an individual’s lifestyle. Linguists should not be given the burden to determine if a refugee is being truthful about one’s origin. For instance, in the guidelines it mentions how linguists should not be asked to make determinations about national origin, nationality or citizenship (414). In addition, linguists follow a folk linguistic mindset where applicants can be perceived as uneducated, based on their language usage. These conclusions have no evidence to support their analysis. For example, reports tend to give no indication on how an applicant speaks ungrammatically. Hence, linguists utilize these notions due to being pressured to carry out the role of distinguishing between whether a refugee is telling the truth or
In our society, there are many cultures with language and dialect variations, but Standard English is the language of the dominant culture. Therefore, it is necessary for all students to learn to write and speak Standard English effectively. However, for many students of Urban school districts, especially African Americans, writing and speaking effective Standard English can occasionally pose a problem. Many African American students speak a variation of Standard English (Black Vernacular Speech) whose linguistic patterns sometimes conflict with those of Standard English. It is true that African American speech is an essential aspect of their African American culture, so the educational system would be doing African American students a disservice by insisting that they learn Standard English as a primary discourse. It is also a fact however, that in order to be viewed as a successful, functional member of society, Standard English, if learned as a secondary discourse, should be written and spoken as fluently as the primary discourse.
The distinction between Black Vernacular English and Standard English, occurs at three levels of linguistics, however “AAVE is just like any other dialect of English; has its own innovations but remains strongly influenced by the standard” (Butters 60), this means that Black Vernacular has its own rules in the English language.