Ebonics Is Not Black English. (1998)

Abstract December 18, 1996 resolution of the Oakland Unified School District Board officially recognizing as an Language System, and not a dialect of sparked anew much debate concerning the speech and language of American people. In the aftermath of the resolution passed by the Board, due in part to some abstruseness in the wording, a considerable amount of confusion and controversy emerged. A great deal of the confusion had nothing to do with the abstruse wording, but rather, was due to the popular press and media's misapprehension and use of the appellation Ebonics as being a synonym for the phrase or appellation . As an centered term that legitimizes the language of Americans as an based linguistic system, rather than allowing the deviancy model to persist, this article traces the true origin and meaning of the term Ebonics. In this article it is posited by the writers that inherent in the very use of the phrase there is a tacit inference that the language being discussed is a variant of and hence that, there is, ipso facto, a genetic kinship between and the Germanic language family to which belongs. writers contend that since was not coined as a synonym for the appellation and when it is used as such those who do so reveal an ignorance of the in fact origin and meaning of the term Ebonics that is so profound their confusion is pathetic. Introduction features of the language of or Americans, i.e., United States slave descendants of West and Niger-Congo origin, has been recognized, described and discussed for several decades. When an exploration is made of the literature on the language of slave descendants of origin it will be found that the appellation is a post 1950's label. This is because, prior to the 1950's Blacks in America were not referred to as Blacks. Prior to 1950 the most prevalent term used to designate the race of United States slave descendants of origin was Negro. Thus, in the pre-1950's literature on the language of the descendants of slaves, the appellation used to designate their language was The Dialect, Speech, Non-standard or Non-Standard and Nonstandard Dialect etc. (Defrantz, 1975) In the late 1950's, during what is commonly called the civil rights era, the appellation used for the language of the descendants of slaves changed. United States slave descendants of origin began to call themselves Black and the word Black became acceptable. With the widespread acceptance of the word Black there was, in the literature on the language of the descendants of slaves, a concomitant substitution of the word Black for Negro in front of the word Throughout the 1960's and on into the 1990's, although the appellations Vernacular and more recently African American have gained some popularity, the most prevalent phrase used is English. What is English? In the 1970's and in the 1980's several books appeared on the language of slave descendants of origin with as their title. To name but a few, there is English: Its History and Usage in the United States (Dillard, 1972), American English: Its Background and Its Usage in the Schools and in Literature (Stoller, 1975), English: A Seminar (Harrison & Trabasso, 1976) and English: Educational Equity and the Law (Chambers, Jr., 1983). Conspicuously, in none of these works is there a phrase that explicitly defines English. Presuming, inherently, by the very use of the word English that the language of slave descendants of origin is a variant of English, the inference is also made that, being a dialect of there is a genetic kinship between and the Germanic language family to which belongs. …