[yde_java]

Being proud of your culture including your language and exercising it, at the risk of readers not understanding everything immediately, is not racism. In the worst case, a non-British gets curious about one expression or the other and looks it up. That's engagement.

[jrm4]

It's funny, and perhaps not entirely unwarranted, that "racism" pops up here?

As a Black American, I find the author's idea extremely interesting and naturally began to wonder -- what might this idea (in code?) look like for us?

Owing to history and whatnot, the role "Black American English" might play is of course very much a moving target, but it's interesting to think about.

[dhosek]

As a writer and amateur linguist I can always spot the people who don’t understand how AAVE works because they seem to think that it’s just “bad grammar” and don’t realize that it does in fact have its own grammatical rules. One that’s not exclusive to AAVE, but is common across most informal spoken English in the US (maybe beyond—I know there’s at least one Genesis song that uses this which suggests it may exist in informal British spoken grammar), is the use of the oblique case when a subject has two or more elements joined by and: “Steve and him went to the store” insted of “He and Steve went to the store.” (Ordering is also subject to different ordering with formal English dictating that the first person pronoun comes last, but informal English putting it first: “Me and him” vs “He and I.”

The other thing I find interesting is that formal English has eschewed the double negative as an intensifier while most (all?) other Indo-European languages employ it. Compare Spanish “No veo nadie” (literally ”I don’t see nobody“ which is the informal English formulation) to English “I don’t see anybody.”

[mghackerlady]

Is there an internationally agreed upon standard for designating AAV? I suppose it's a large and influential enough dialect it wouldn't hurt to have one

[tialaramex]

The main people who'd want such a thing would be linguists, so that they can label samples.

The non-prestige dialects of a language don't usually attract official interest, not least because officially the people who understand that dialect could also understand a prestige variant. Scousers may not talk like King Charles among themselves, but if he speaks they're not confused about what the King is saying even if they wouldn't use those words or say them that way.

This might get sketchier for Chinese topolects where the official government policy is that China has a single language, "Standard Chinese" but, those topolects sure do seem like different languages if you didn't know about the policy. However AAV is nowhere close to that, I can't imagine that anybody who uses AAV normally watches "Last Week Tonight" and goes "That guy is speaking a completely unrecognisable language, are there subtitles?".

[MrJohz]

In fairness, I think that's partly because AAV doesn't have the political and national identity that some other similar dialects have. I (as a lay person with no training in linguistics) feel like AAV and Scots are similar in terms of how far away from English they are, and many people would describe Scots as its own language, distinct from English.

[tialaramex]

Scots is complicated because there was an entirely distinct language "Gaelic" which just isn't even close to English at all, spoken in that geographic area historically. Now, today there aren't very many people who live there who would even claim to actually speak Gaelic, but the influence of that language seeped into the dialect spoken there, so while the random bloke you meet in Scotland may not speak any Gaelic, if you (maybe as an academic study) know Gaelic some of the vocabulary of their speech is obviously from Gaelic, not English.

Linguists would tell you that Scots is a sibling to English rather than just a dialect of English, having both descended from Middle English and that the dialect of English people in Scotland speak is instead "Scottish English". In practice of course humans don't language tag their speech (indeed they rarely even language tag written text) so it's murky. Maybe one word in ten that a Scottish bloke just said to confuse a tourist was technically Scots not Scottish English and perhaps some of it was even Gaelic. The important thing was that they confused the tourist as desired, for which frankly even an inside joke would work.

Sociolects are fun. In one of my friend circles the word "fish" is understood to mean the controller for a video game, I don't know why exactly, but if you said to one of us "Pass the fish" they'd hand you a controller without even seeming puzzled, that's just obviously what you'd call it. But in another circle it means nothing and you'd be greeted with confusion.

[TFNA]

You misunderstand the region. Gaelic arrived in Scotland as a medieval import from Ireland, and it never extended far enough south to affect Scots overall. The literature on English historical linguistics emphasizes far more the impact of Old Norse on Scots, as the Scots-speaking region was Norse-ruled for some time.

[mghackerlady]

I completely disagree. At least in the US, AAV seems to be a major cultural thing for the people who speak it

[MrJohz]

But I think that national identity doesn't exist in the same way, do you know what I mean? Like, being Black/African American in the US is an important part of a person's identity, but it doesn't necessarily have the trappings of nationhood in the same way that Scottish identity does. That's not to say that the identity is any weaker, just that it manifests itself differently.

This means that AAV is culturally important, but there's not necessarily the same sense of "this is a separate language" that there is with Scots, even though in many ways it has all the same claims of being one.

[mghackerlady]

I have an amateur interest in linguistics, that's partially why I asked.

>That guy is speaking a completely unrecognisable language, are there subtitles?

Interestingly enough, I remember reading somewhere that you could be legally entitled to an interpreter in a court setting (take that with a grain of salt, I forget where I read it)

[jrm4]

Not to my knowledge, and I imagine even trying to do this would stir up.. a lot.

The more I think about it, the more difficult it seems. Not that it shouldn't be done, but wow.

[PaulKeeble]

As one example I have seen plenty of Code read Color redColour = .....

That is how it often manifests, the bits the Brits get to choose is in their own language and spelling.

[gilrain]

Nobody said it was.

[graemep]

The article strongly implies it is a response to a comment complaining the blog is not inclusive because it uses British English.

There is a constant American assumption that their language and culture is the norm and we should all adjust our language to fit their definitions and culture. I intend to keep eating faggots, having a master branch in git, etc.

[throwaway2037]

    > There is a constant American assumption that their language and culture is the norm

You write it like it is a moral flaw in American culture. This cultural phenom isn't special to the United States. In my personal experience, any country with a large population suffers from the same: Russia, Brazil, Indonesia, India, China, etc.

    > having a master branch in git

This is a weird cultural battle to pick. In the 2010s, when renaming the git master branch was at its cultural zeitgeist, none of the Americans that I worked with did the rename. It was always someone not from the US who would raise the issue on a team call. It happened so many times that I asked a few of them why they did it. Almost all of them told the same rough story: They say a "nerd news story" about the trend, then did a little bit of reading on Wiki to learn about the cruel history of slavery in the United States. Motivated by this, they decided to do the rename. All in all, pretty wholesome stuff. Never once was it some weird social justice warrior type of bullcrap. But anyway, you do you: Keep rockin' the "master" branch in git.

[TFNA]

"There is a constant American assumption that their language and culture is the norm"

This is now far more than an American assumption. I have seen younger continental Europeans bristle at UK English because they grew up in a world of social media that is converging on usage that is closer to US English.

[throwaway2037]

Real question: Post 2010, are there any non-English speaking nations that get most of their English language media from the UK? Since everthing went online after 2010, I assume US has the highest influence (linguistically) only because of "mass". Dear UK readers: Please don't interpret my comment that UK language culture is somehow inferior. HN knows and loves UK humor!

[its-summertime]

When I read "inclusive", my mind jumped to accessibility, in that colloquialisms can be difficult to understand for a subset of people with autism (and other conditions), and also that they translate poorly when run through a translator, for those that do not speak English at all.

[afandian]

Equally, I doubt there was a single Brit involved in RFC 2617 Section 4.3 (for example).

[phoronixrly]

Translation for en-US speakers -- Trump is an example of a nonce, as is his buddy - formerly Prince Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.

[throwaway2037]

I don't understand the reference. I looked it up here: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2617#section-4.3

    4.3 Limited Use Nonce Values

    The Digest scheme uses a server-specified nonce to seed the
    generation of the request-digest value (as specified in section
    3.2.2.1 above).  As shown in the example nonce in section 3.2.1, the
    server is free to construct the nonce such that it may only be used
    from a particular client, for a particular resource, for a limited
    period of time or number of uses, or any other restrictions.  Doing
    so strengthens the protection provided against, for example, replay
    attacks (see 4.5).  However, it should be noted that the method
    chosen for generating and checking the nonce also has performance and
    resource implications.  For example, a server may choose to allow
    each nonce value to be used only once by maintaining a record of
    whether or not each recently issued nonce has been returned and
    sending a next-nonce directive in the Authentication-Info header
    field of every response. This protects against even an immediate
    replay attack, but has a high cost checking nonce values, and perhaps
    more important will cause authentication failures for any pipelined
    requests (presumably returning a stale nonce indication).  Similarly,
    incorporating a request-specific element such as the Etag value for a
    resource limits the use of the nonce to that version of the resource
    and also defeats pipelining. Thus it may be useful to do so for
    methods with side effects but have unacceptable performance for those
    that do not.

Can you explain your (assumed) sarcastic remark?

[afandian]

That third word, starting with 'n' is British slang, which you are welcome to look up.

Presumably the etymology was in place before it took on its present meaning, but it is not a word I would use in a professional context.

My comment was oblique, but not sarcastic. Partly because I didn't want to use the word directly, and partly in keeping with the tone of the original blog post!

[graemep]

The British usage predates the RFC and probably the cryptographic use. I definitely heard the term in the late 80s.

[ethersteeds]

In British slang, "nonce" is a highly offensive term for a sex offender, particularly one who has harmed children. It is considered derogatory and should be used with caution.

[jowsie]

I'm guessing this is very context/region dependant. Calling someone a nonce as a bit of banter would be more acceptable than calling them a paedophile when I was growing up. I assume because using the officially recognised term made your accusations seem more ernest, though I've never actually thought much about it before.

[roryirvine]

"number used once" wouldn't be the first definition of that word which springs to mind for most people in the UK.

[jakobnissen]

But being non-inclusive by speaking to a particular cultural reference frame is not the same as being racist.

[graemep]

I agree, but some people seem to think it is, which i think what the article is a response to: just just in the comment, but in the wider push to use certain language.

[dgellow]

> I intend to keep eating

Wait, isn't that a cigarette? Why would you eat it?

edit: nevermind, it's actually meatballs, the short version is for cigarettes