Rosalyn Domenick

I sat quietly and listened in class on Thursday as Dr. Brian lectured on Ebonics.  As an SLP in the public school and as a result of my education,  I have always considered Ebonics or African American English (AAE) as a dialect of the standard English language.  However, after listening to Dr. Brian, I decided I needed to find out what the American Speech and Hearing Association (ASHA), the professional organization for SLPs, has to say about this issue.  I did not succeed in finding ASHA’s perspective because as I searched I came across other internet scholarly articles that grabbed my interest.  They might have been mentioned by Dr. Brain in his lecture.  The first one came from a source familiar to us, Rethinking Schools, and is entitled If Ebonics Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?  written by Wayne O’Neil. (http://www.pbs.org/speak/seatosea/americanvarieties/AAVE/hooked/ In this article, O’Neil strongly supports a resolution of the Oakland, California school board in 1996 that proposed that Ebonics is historically derived from certain West Aftican languages and is recognized as a language.  The resolution says that students who are speakers of Ebonics, also called African Americn Vernacular English (AAVE), should qualify for federally funded programs tradionally restricted to a bilingual population, which would allow for acquisition of and mastery of English language skills. I accessed the resolution on line and yes, that’s what it says. This resolution was soundly condemned by Reverand Jesse Jackson saying that it was “an unacceptable surrender, borderining on disgrace.” The school board also intended to instruct African American students in their primary language (Ebonics) for the purpose of retaining the legitimacy and richness of their language and to facilitate the acquisition and mastery of English language skills. In other words, they were to be instructed as English Language Learners.  So this led me to look at other articles. I found one entitled Hooked on Ebonics by  Dennis Baron from another familiar source, the PBS program Do You Speak American?  http://www.pbs.org/speak/seatosea/americanvarieties/AAVE/hooked/   He writes of the resolution by the Oakland school board, “Black leader and intellectuals condemned the board’s decision…, denounced black speech as slangy, nonstandard and unworthy of the classroom; condemned as racist the separatism that would result from any recognition of black English. They warned that Ebonics would give schoolchildren a misplaced sense of pride and that students’ continued use of black English would exclude students from higher education and the corporate boardrooms of the nation.” The same opposition to the resolution as Jesse Jackson but for a different reason. Another article pointed out a positive perspective on dialects. 

 http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Linguistics/fasold.html  This one is entitled Ebonic Need Not Be English. Notice his spelling of Ebonics without the final s.  The author, Ralph Fasold from Georgetown University,  equates this spelling to the spelling of other languages, such as Arabic, Slavic, and Germanic. He states that linguists who look at Ebonic as a dialect consider it as one of a number of equally , orderly dialects of English, including the standard one, like equal slices of a pie. With that definition, we don’t need to look at a dialect as a corruption of English but instead a legitimate component.  Another very intersting piece is Answers to Some Questions About Ebonics by professor Peter L. Patrick from the University of Essex. http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~patrickp/aavesem/EbonicsQ&A.html One point that he made that impressed me is that language does not need to belong to a country.  Languages have existed long before the modern world was organized into countries. I didn’t get an answer to ASHA’s view on Ebonics as a language, but the reading was fascinating.  I was exposed to varying attitudes on the legitimacy of Ebonics as a language, the origin of Ebonics, the definition and description of languages and dialects and the controversial Oakland resolution.  Although my profession has taught me that AAE or Ebonics is a dialect of standard English, these articles have prompted me to consider it a language in its own right.  I want to read and research it further and, as usual, make my own decision.