Where did Ebonics come from?

It’s my understanding without doing any research that it derives from African-American street language which would explain why it’s an exclusively American dialect. You don’t really hear much about it lately.

Dr. Robert L. Williams in 1973 coined the term is a combination of the words “ebony” and “phonics” and is used to describe the language of African-Americans

Apparently, large segments of the African-American community were speaking English with similar accents, pronunciations, and vocabularies.

I know where the term came from @Forever_Free!

GA @RocketGuy. But for it to ripple through the entire American African American population is so interesting to me.

Could be via music, storytelling, or just migration. I remember hearing about African-American kids getting in trouble in school for not speaking and writing in “proper English”. Then someone realized that they were speaking Ebonics, which was something widespread and not randomly incorrect grammar.

Since most of the African-Americans came up through the South and then migrated, it makes sense that there would be a commonality to their speech patterns.

And they were probably segregated, so didn’t dissipate the dialect for a long time.

Same reason people in the hills speak redneck. I can tell from what part of the hills a person is from based on their particular style of redneck. You know right away when you run across some old timers with a more pure local dialect. Some of it is barely discernable as English. People stayed localized, and circles were much smaller 60+ years ago.

Well sure @Blackwater_Park. And I can tell the difference between an Oklahoma accent from a Texas accents but they’re similar.
Then there are Minnesota accents and Wisconsin accents.
But Ebonics is not a simple accent. It’s an entirely different speech, and yes. Much of it would not pass muster in an English class.
Saying “He got out the car,” for example.
“We gon to a sto…” ..even writing it that way.

And it’s fairly consistent across the US.

Exactly @RocketGuy. Which makes it unusual.
Africans were to Jamaica as slaves, but their descendants don’t speak Ebonics. Other countries too (I’d have look up which countries, tho.)

I still think it’s a segregation thing.

How @Blackwater_Park? Legal segregation was ended in 1963 (?). A concerted effort was made to integrate the kids that continues today.

@Dutchess_III You find a black person raised in the same area and schools as predominantly white people, they take on “white people talk.” Just because segregation “ended” in 63 does not mean redlining, economic disparity and other factors did not keep us segregated. It did, particularly in urban areas. Then there is youth slang. White people did it too, it was just different.

I know @Blackwater_Park.

I was just wondering.

I think of Ebonics as a dialect.

I remember reading an article in the 90’s explaining Ebonics to I think justify it. It said something about the grammar of some of the African languages and that is why African Americans used different grammar in English. Accent also could be blamed on previous languages and other local accents. Some people took that to mean or argued that speaking in Ebonics is totally acceptable and people shouldn’t look down on it and negatively critique it.

I remember Oprah in the final years of her show said something like “English is your friend.” She did a few shows trying to push the African American community to assimilate more and take advantage of what is available to them. That was my take on it.

In my opinion there is nothing wrong with speaking in a dialect, doesn’t matter how it developed. Communities and regions have dialects all around the world. Just like it’s ok to speak in a “foreign” language.

I personally think Ebonics is also partly illiteracy. When a group can’t read then they say things as they think they hear it or what makes sense to them. Couple that with foreign language and evolution of language and you get a dialect over time.

At this point in the US, anyone under the age of 40 should be able to switch to proficient Standard English when need be.

Well I landed on a movie about Nelson Mandella tonight.

I saw a Jubilee youtube where 6 or 8 Black people are blindfolded and one person who isn’t Black trying to pass as Black. They all are supposed to guess who is the fake. I think they used the term “call center voice” something like that, for standard English or “white” English or we could even call it journalist English probably, because it’s not extreme white Southern drawl or extreme Southern dialect English. I saw the episode a while ago. They also said whether they went to a PWI for their education. Predominately White Institution.

I learned all sorts of jargon from that episode.

@JLeslie: “I personally think Ebonics is also partly illiteracy. When a group can’t read then they say things as they think they hear it or what makes sense to them. Couple that with foreign language and evolution of language and you get a dialect over time.

At this point in the US, anyone under the age of 40 should be able to switch to proficient Standard English when need be.”

You know, there is a thing called linguistics. There is plenty of literature on AAVE/Ebonics, and it’s all free. If you prefer to watch videos, there are plenty of linguists online that go into the origins and rules of AAVE. Check out this guy to start.

Please dial down the racism.

Besides some basic literacy in specific dialects in the US, you might want to consider that you and I also speak a dialect that is derived from our culture and environment, including geographic location, age, gender, ethnicity, and socioeconomic factors.

Additionally, we all code switch.

We can stop pretending that our own dialect happens to be correct. There is no such thing. Language is a tool that is used to communicate with others in our social group. The reason you I speak one way and someone else speaks differently is because we have different social groups.

@hat Why is that racist? My husband speaks with an accent. He screws up English sayings and I find it endearing. He mixes up words that make sense, but not used that way. I’m not “racist” against my husband.

I’ve spoken with people in TN and AL who literally I can understand only every third word or so their dialect is so extreme, both white and Black people. They were very poor and probably not more than a few years of education if they had any. That’s not racist, that’s how shitty our country was at one point in history.

Of course we speak a dialect and have accents.

Language is a tool. Exactly right.

Part of the reason I asked this is because of the overwhelming blame so many want lay at the feet of the Education for the perception of so many student’s shortcomings in so many basic skills. English is one of them.

My argument is that family and culture have a much more profound affect on kids and their thoughts and beliefs and actions than the education system.

If a kid said “Joe and me was going to a party,” the education system failed to teach them. Fact is, that’s how their friends and family talk (Rick talked that way! Throttle time!)

In the bigger picture, if the education system had “done their job”, Ebonics wouldn’t even , exist! And that would be a shame.
Same goes for math and reading and every thing else.
Culture has a much bigger influence on students than education.
I flunked HS and college level English by the way, but was guaranteed a position on the K State newspaper my Jr. Year.
But I didn’t make it that far.

@Dutchess_III I don’t completely agree that a perfect education system would result in an absence of dialects, but it would probably make some difference. Even so, plenty of people switch from one dialect to another depending on who they are with. I worked with a guy who sounded like he had been in America since childhood, but when he was with Jamaican friends I couldn’t understand what they were saying.

What I think is we shouldn’t necessarily tell kids how they speak at home is wrong, we should tell them it’s important to know both. Instead, I hear people basically saying all dialects are fine, no need to learn standard English, the country should bend to you. That’s not a very good recipe for success.

As @hat said, language is a tool to communicate. It’s hard enough to communicate when everyone is seemingly speaking in the same language and dialect.

I don’t blame our present day education system that there are 18 year olds who don’t know who the president is or that North Carolina has coastline on the Atlantic. I’m sure the kids were taught those things.

70 years ago less than 50% of the adult population had a high school diploma. My guess is in parts of the South it was more commonplace than northern states for children not to finish school or even not go to school at all. Especially for Black children, sometimes there was a complete absence of a school, or there was a segregated school that was sorely below par. Rosenwald schools helped improve the situation.

I didn’t say thing about a “perfect education system.”
I said people need to stop blaming the education system for kid’s “failures.” There are too many other factors that come into play in a kid’s life to lay the blame in one place, including a kid’s IQ.
A “perfect” education system would have to be programming robots for them to all come out the same.

Every single culture on the planet has pockets of sub culture.

This is why you have Chinese immigrants with southern accents in Louisiana….

It’s hard to imagine….but realize there’s billions of individual, sentient humans on earth….

The permutations….or combination of different types of humans is endless.

I know that @Blackberry. But Ebonics isn’t a “pocket.” It encompasses the entire USA, top to bottom.
It could be a “pocket” when set against the world stage, a pocket specific to the US.

(Once there was a deep, deep south Louisana guy on Judge Judy. His creole was SO thick, that although, he was speaking English, the producers put subtitles on the episode! That’s a pocket. A pocket within a pocket. Like those absurd, tiny change pockets within the front pocket of jeans.)

Just as kids of foreign parents speak their native language at home and English outside, kids of African-American families who normally speak Ebonics at home ought to be able to switch to standard English when outside. It would reduce chances of bias while out and about.

@Dutchess_III Watch pocket.

Well yes and and no @RocketGuy. There is a difference between speaking NO English, and having to learn it to survive (my grandparents didn’t speak English when they arrived from Holland in the late 20s) vs speaking a style of English.
Obviously the Obamas make the transition smoothly @RocketGuy, and many others. But some really can’t
When I was dating Jerry I’d correct him once in a while.
One time he said “Let’s get out the car.”
I said, “Murph, it’s ‘Get out of the car.”
He looked at me like I was crazy.
He said “Val. First you IN the car, then you OUT the car!”
I had to laugh! Well. Yeah he was right!
But he was born and raised in Selma (and had no inkling of the historical magnificence of the town, but he remembered the riots and mounted police…) so he had very little interaction with mainstream English speakers. They certianly didn’t dominate the language there. Ebonics did. He did not KNOW and had no resson to know.

^^But now everyone has opportunity to know. We have television, youtube, streaming, movies, the world is small and the country is even smaller.

No one uses the word Ebonics anymore. Just use AAVE; otherwise, you sound like a clueless Boomer.

I don’t see what the problem is. AAVE is not that hard to understand. Why do you need the people in your personal life to conform to your dialect, or even a personal interaction in the workplace? It’s like being upset that someone is speaking a different language.

In my world, people use a weird combo of English and Spanish in everyday conversation. No it’s not correct. No we don’t speak like that when work is involved. Yes, both English speakers and Spanish speakers can get upset about it. Get over it. Not everything is meant for you.

@tinyfaery It only matters when it does. I use Spanglish. I grew up with Yiddish, Italian, and French words thrown in.

My guess is the lawyers you work with don’t write a brief or litigate using slang and bad grammar. They might use Spanglish in the office if everyone there understands it.

Well, I AM a clueless Boomer @tinyfaery.

@JL yes we have Youtube, yadda yadda yadda. But someone has to want to know different, and notice and practice, or it just passes theem by.
My Dad was raised in a small town in Texas. His dad was the sheriff.
Then he decided to go to Texas Tech, where he graduated with a degree in Electrical Engineering.
He aspired to move in professional circles so he consciously worked to get rid of his Texas twang and drawl.
And he did. No YouTube, TV was new.
But it came out sometimes. At home. :D

Speaking Ebonics/AAVE risks initial profiling and bias, just as the use of poor grammar does. Loss of credibility. That would make it difficult to get one’s ideas and suggestions across.