From: djohns@elm.circa.ufl.edu (David A. Johns)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.african.american
Subject: Re: "Acting White"
Date: 16 Aug 92 15:48:38 GMT
Organization: University of Florida, Gainesville

kevinc@sequent.com (Kevin Closson) writes:
# In article <1992Aug4.191120.769@crd.ge.com> mmrwlm@sn116.uca writes:
# > Too many times I had heard, "You talk like a white girl," because I used
#   proper grammer ...
#   Did you get hassled because you speak with proper BEV grammar or
#   proper SAE grammar?

[Actually, Kevin's posting never made it to this site, so I'm copying
this quote from someone else's message.  I apologize if I missed some
important context from the original.]

The term "proper BEV grammar" raises an interesting point.

Throughout the English-speaking world, there is basically only one
standard *grammar*.  The written language is virtually identical in
the U.S., England, Jamaica, Australia, Ireland, etc., and even in
countries like India where it is widely used as a lingua franca.
There are some vocabulary and spelling differences, of course, but in
the overall scheme of things, these are trivial.

However, people in all these countries have unique grammatical
features in casual speech, most obvious in less educated people.
Americans who have never been to the British Isles would be absolutely
astounded by the differences in local speech from one area to the
next.  It's no exaggeration to say that you would have a very hard
time understanding an English, Scottish, or Irish farmer speaking in
local dialect.  The local dialects of areas colonized more recently
(i.e., New World, Southern Hemisphere) tend not to have as much
internal variation, but they do differ significantly from each other.

On the other hand, as far as I know, none of these local dialects has
a "standard" (with the possible exception of recent attempts to
establish a standard Scottish English).  The dialects can all be
*described*, but there is no "proper" Irish or Kenyan or Canadian
Maritime grammar -- and thus, as far as I know, no "proper" BEV.

Now when we hear people from all these people speaking in formal
situations, where they are using standard grammar, they still do have
distinct accents.  There actually is a formal "proper" British accent,
called Received Pronunciation (although fewer and fewer Britons are
bothering to learn it these days), and in the other countries there is
generally one particular accent that is required for actors and
broadcasters.  But however distinct the pronunciation of English is
from around the world, the grammar is the same.

This applies to American blacks as much as to anyone else.  Educated
people like Barbara Jordan or Benjamin Hooks or Louis Sullivan *sound
black* when they speak, but you will never hear non-standard grammar
from them.  They pronounce all their s's, never use the black "be",
etc.

Of course, the fact that there is no "proper BEV" grammar distinct
from "universal English grammar" doesn't mean can't be one.  As I
said, I think Scotland may be trying something like this, and if they
can do it, so can American blacks.  It wouldn't be as easy as it might
seem at first, though, because written language is much "denser" than
spoken language -- i.e., has more information packed into a given
number of words -- and so it needs more complicated grammatical
structures.  Since these don't normally exist in any of the local
spoken dialects, they have to be either invented or borrowed from the
existing standard.

One more point.  In all cultures where there is a significant
difference in level of education among people, you can tell roughly
how much education an individual has by the way he or she speaks.  And
it is hardly unique to the black community that less educated people
make fun of the way more educated people speak -- and vice versa.
There may even be other places where speaking "properly" is seen as a
sign of selling out your own people.  For instance, in Australia until
a generation or so ago educated people had to imitate not a standard
Australian accent, but a standard British accent.

In any case, it would be interesting to see what you might come up
with as a standard for BEV grammar.

David

Newsgroups: soc.culture.african.american