Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2014 December 27

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December 27

Black English

What is the proper name to describe the manner that blacks speak to one another? I recall hearing it from a professor but simply cannot recall it. It elevates it from broken jargon to a more formal style of speech with distinct characteristics. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2607:FCC8:B283:7100:D09B:B7D4:B7E:F510 (talk) 02:49, 27 December 2014 (UTC)

The proper name is African American Vernacular English, but it is often called Ebonics. Is the latter name perhaps what you were trying to recall? Deor (talk) 03:07, 27 December 2014 (UTC)

• That's not "proper" if the black people you're talking about are, say, British or Australian. --65.94.50.4 (talk) 11:42, 27 December 2014 (UTC)

Agreed, that is a absolutely ludicrous statement. The vast majority of black people speaking English do not speak American. 94.212.132.191 (talk) 15:14, 27 December 2014 (UTC)

English as the primary language? And what's your source? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 16:48, 27 December 2014 (UTC)

Ha, of course. Between the UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia, the West Indies and large swaths of Africa there are going to be far more speakers than in the US. 94.212.132.191 (talk) 17:35, 27 December 2014 (UTC)

Native speakers? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 17:55, 27 December 2014 (UTC)

Yes of course. What about my list did you not understand? Not just English in the US you know. No English in the US anyway really. 94.212.132.191 (talk) 18:03, 27 December 2014 (UTC)

Before you take any more shots at America, maybe you could find a source for the quantities of black native-English speakers in those nations. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 23:10, 27 December 2014 (UTC)

Whatever one calls them, varieties of black English are not "broken" jargon and they are no more elevated by being given a name than is any other variety of English one might identify. μηδείς (talk) 03:50, 27 December 2014 (UTC)

I think it's probably more likely to have been the former, given the context and semantic distinction the OP describes, though admittedly it's a bit ambiguous without knowing the area of expertise of the professor involved; certainly I'd expect almost anyone in linguistics proper to use the former, unless they were talking specifically about the cultural/media debate that arose in the late nineties and early oughts concerning the formal teaching of the dialect in a few public schools. That furor promoted "Ebonics" as a buzzword that entered the public sphere where it has retained a strong association for some (particularly both those who view it as a sign of the "downfall" of "proper" English as well as those who originally utilized it in a more favourable light in discussion of education policy), but academics overwhelming use "African American Vernacular English" when referencing the dialect in empirical contexts, though the terminology varies some when it comes to those whose academic or professional focus is in education. Snow talk 04:01, 27 December 2014 (UTC)

There is also Jive. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 04:19, 27 December 2014 (UTC)

Baseball Bugs -- The use of the word "Jive" as a general term for U.S. Black English (as opposed to a specific historical slang) unfortunately basically derives from the 1970s "Airplane!" comedy movie... AnonMoos (talk) 04:32, 29 December 2014 (UTC)

Mm, sort of. Jargon is distinct from a dialect (or even a vernacular) and Jive, for all of its broad mainstream historical exposure and its undoubtable influence upon African-American English was not necessarily a dialect in itself, so much as a collection of words which widely diffused into dialects. Dialects involve distinct syntactic and morphological features in addition to unique word-stocks and while Jive certainly evolved within, and was a part of, the context of an already highly differentiated African-American manner of speaking, its contributions come mostly in the form of vocabulary and idioms, rather than unique grammatical structures. Though I'll grant you mainstream nomenclature doesn't always reflect this distinction; as late as the 80's, it was not uncommon in popular media to hear African-American dialects (especially those originating in the northeast) referenced as "jive talk". Still, much more accurate to say that Jive was an influence upon the development of African-American English rather than an accurate synonym for same. Snow talk 05:58, 27 December 2014 (UTC)

Are you looking for the word "pidgin"? Akseli9 (talk) 13:21, 27 December 2014 (UTC)

Pidgin is not relevant to the modern situaton. A pidgin is a limited simplified language used in communication by two groups neither of which speaks it natively. The first blacks brought over as slaves would have learned a pidgin in the Americas. As this became the native language of their children it would have become a creole language with standard English as its target lexifier. See Gullah, for example. But at this point black English is basically a sociolect of general American English.

Many people, black, white and other, are capable of code switching between their local sociolects. To an extent, black English and white English in NYC share features that neither shares with black English or white English in New Orleans, while conversely, white English in NYC and New Orleans share features which differ from features that the black Englishes of those areas share. Matters of prestige and in-group-identification cause rapid change, such that terms one only heard among black people in NYC in the 1980's ("mad props", "diss") have become part of the general American lexicon and are even understood in, say, the British backwaters. μηδείς (talk) 18:59, 27 December 2014 (UTC)

This n-gram chart suggests that the term "African American Vernacular English" overtook the term "Black English Vernacular" in the literature in 1999. -- ToE 20:40, 27 December 2014 (UTC)