[dsfasfasf]

Seriously, you are equating AAVE with Spanish. AAVE is how people of poorer means speak or with less education speak, even if it's not politically correct to say it. Spanish is an actual language hundreds of years old and spoken by multiple nations. By your logic you might as well recognize English slang as an actual language.

-Edit: So for those arguing that AAVE is a dialect, then If I add a few rules to any other language does that mean I've just invented a new language. That is what AAVE is, it is just English with a few additional rules that some people of low socioeconomic mean have learned (reinforced through bad education). Hardly what I would call a new language. Maybe in 500 years if the people speaking it become isolated, right now is just bad English.

In spanish there are people with low socioeconomic means that will also talk a bit different. Even with their own rules for some things. You do not call that a new language to spare their feelings. You call them uneducated and rightly so or else when will they learn if they are not ever corrected? Being politically correct just to spare the feelings of some people is not doing anybody any good.

I know is insensitive but by trying to be too nice problems never get solved.

[greggman]

Some cultures consider non standard dialects just that, "non standard". They don't deride people who speak them as poor or less educated.

For example consider Japan. Nearly every region in Japan has its own dialect. Everyone learns, for lack of a better way to say it, "standard Japanese" which is the kind used by news broadcasters. But, to their friends and family in their hometown they speak their local dialect which is often not understandable by people outside their region.

They know when to speak standard Japanese (for example a job interview) and when it's okay to speak the dialect.

The article is suggesting that AAVE should be considered a dialect and treated the same way. That seems reasonable to me given it's the same in many other countries. It also means respect for the culture of AAVE instead of contempt which seems like a good thing to me. So many people speak it. Why is their culture any less valid than another?

[auctiontheory]

I think that "is the culture that speaks AAVE a valid culture?" is a vanishingly insignificant question compared to the critical real-life problem of providing black inner-city kids the education and communication skills necessary to make it in today's world.

If you graduate from high school speaking only AAVE, you are in big trouble. Students need to learn to speak standard English, whatever else they may or may not speak. Distracting from this huge priority with intellectual arguments about the validity of cultures does these kids a huge disservice.

[kscaldef]

You're arguing against a strawman. The article states that no one is suggesting that students not learn Standard American English. The point it is making is that it is more useful in teaching SAE to recognize that some students arrive at school speaking a different dialect rather than with an incorrect understanding of SAE, and that acknowledging that explicitly is more productive than telling them never to speak their home language.

[dsfasfasf]

>>and that acknowledging that explicitly is more productive than telling them never to speak their home language.

Home Language... Hahahahahahahahah. Seriously, you guys need to lower the BS. It is no more a language then the Spanish Puerto Ricans speak (Some people claim Puerto Ricans speak a dialect of Spanish. Seriously, what the hell? I've had to argue with people that it is just a different accent and some of them are simply mispronouncing some words because of the accent which they quickly loose if they go international). I have a bridge to sell all of you.

[Evbn]

You sound far stupider than someone speaking Ebonics, and all else equal, I would certainly hire an intelligent and peceptive Ebonics speaker and than someone who displays muddled thinking in grammatical SE.

[dsfasfasf]

I know you are but what am I....?

[greggman]

Agree with your first point.

The article is not suggesting teaching AAVE. The article is suggesting not deriding people who speak AAVE at home, teaching them the difference between AAVE and "standard English", why it's important to know the difference, and when it's appropriate to use one vs the other.

[dsfasfasf]

I'm getting tire of this BS.

Give me examples of the "AAVE dialect" that are not just examples of bad English. In Latin America there are a lot of dialects which are called like that simply because a minority of people speak it. But in reality they are full spoken languages (i.e. not just a few rules on top of an existing living language like English) You saying that AAVE is a language is an insult to those dialects like Nahualt and Mayan.

[Evbn]

I stopped reading at "I am tire", as you have shown yourself to be worthlessly illiterate.

[dsfasfasf]

What are you talking about? It is a new dialect. No, it wasn't a typo made at a rush, that is how I spell "tired" in my new dialect. Rather than ridiculing me you should tell me the difference between the dialect I speak at home and standard English which I imagine you speak.

[Afton]

I'm not downvoting you. But your position is untenable, and comes from a misunderstanding about what a language is. It's not that it's not politically correct, it's that it's factually incorrect.

No one is arguing that there is or isn't a class and racial component to who speakers of AAVE are. They are primarily black and poor. But that point is irrelevant. Kids raised where people speak AAVE will grow up speaking AAVE. Simply declaring it 'not a language' gets you nothing. It's not 'just slang', it's a system of speaking with its own set of rules, just like any other language.

[pekk]

Simply declaring that it is a language gets you nothing too. If every minor variation creates a whole new language, then almost no two people with a vocabulary of a few thousand words actually speak 'the same language'.

[Afton]

Sure, and if you want to go down the road of constructing metrics for language, you can. I should warn you that you will likely find it fruitless and arbitrary.

Your point about how every variation makes a language is correct. The term is idiolect. Language (like 'English'), is an abstraction over idiolects. But getting people who want to argue about "correct English" to an understanding of idiolects is more work than I can put into a comment during a work day. I'll try and dig up a general description of the issue and link it here.

Edit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiolect#Idiolect_and_language is the best I could do on short notice.

[Crake]

This.

[nollidge]

> AAVE is how people of poorer means speak or with less education speak

That doesn't make it not a language. What you're saying is that we should base categorize forms of communication based on the social status of their speakers. I hope you can see why that might be problematic.

> By your logic you might as well recognize English slang as an actual language.

This doesn't make any sense. AAVE is not slang, which you'd know if you read the OP.

[antiterra]

> That is what AAVE is, it is just English with a few additional rules that some people of low socioeconomic mean have learned (reinforced through bad education).

Nope: take, for example, the "axe" pronunciation of "ask." You can trace this usage in an unbroken line from AAVE to Southern American English to Modern English to Middle English to Old English. You see, it's not just synthesis that can create a dialect or language, but also retention.

By your argument, Modern English isn't much of a language either. Instead, it's just the result of hundreds of unskilled speakers through the trajectory from Old English to Middle English to Early Modern English not learning how to properly use cases and inserting foreign Latinate words because they couldn't speak OE properly.

[stan_rogers]

Responding to your edit: no, the rules of AAVE nearly all originate in non-standard dialects of British and Irish (Hirberno-) English. They aren't something that spontaneously arose from a deprived economic climate or a dysfunctional society. There are only a very tiny number of differences between AAVE and American Standard English that can be explained by an element of weak creolization (such as the dropping of to be in statements of identity and optional inversion in forming questions); the rest find exact parallels in dialects on the ground throughout Britain and Ireland. In fact, most Newfoundlanders would have little trouble with the grammar (though not necessarily the slang) of AAVE, since their native dialect derives from a very similar mixture of British and Irish dialects. While it can probably be fairly stated that the colour bar has been responsible for the isolation of the black vernacular grammar (and its failure to transition to something closer to American Standard English), it is not dissimilar to the native English dialects of the people who were once working alongside them as indentured servants rather than as slaves.

The idea that diglossia (or triglossia) does not exist in the mouths of educated, and even privileged speakers of English (wherever they may live) is preposterous outside of a relatively small part of the American socioeconomic strata (and by American, I mean North American — much of Canada is weirdly homogeneous as well). Most native speakers of English speak two or more "Englishes", each with its own grammar and vocabulary. AAVE is not a "lesser" dialect; despite its speakers often being disadvantaged, the language itself is no less legitimate. However, like most of us, in order to move outside of their dialectical grouping, speakers of AAVE must also have command of the prevailing standard — just like Jeff Foxworthy's redneck brain surgeon.

[NoahTheDuke]

You didn't read the article, and you're saying gibberish. Please stop.

[rayiner]

In the U.S., Spanish is also how people of poorer means or less education speak. That doesn't make it not a language.

[anigbrowl]

Not unless they're of Hispanic heritage, in general.

[Lagged2Death]

Define "actual language."