ebonics Essay example -- essays research papers

Ebonics means black speech (a blend of the words ebony black and phonics sounds). The phrase was created in 1973 by a group of black scholars who dis comparabled the negative connotations of price like Nonstandard Negro English that had been coined in the 1960s when the first modern big linguistic studies of African American speech communities began. However, the term Ebonics never caught on amongst linguists, much less among the general public. That all changed with the Ebonics controversy of December 1996 when the Oakland (CA) schooltime Board recognized it as the primary style of its majority African American students and resolved to take it into account in teaching them standard or academic English. Clearly there is a problem with these children that may be addressed by looking at langu duration. The role that Ebonics may run in changing the above statistics is a practical question. Only the goal of a program including Ebonics, and time, will reveal the answer. Whatever t he basic agenda in Oakland California, it is important to look at the question of Ebonics from the point of placement of doing what is best for children. Acknowledging the strength of Ebonics in no way suggests teaching Ebonics in place of Standard English. Acknowledging the strength of Ebonics can and should serve to ease the teaching of Standard English. Many muckle see Ebonics as "gutter language", and "slang", and are quite out speak about it. These beliefs are deep rooted in society. Resistance to the acknowledgment that Blacks who use Ebonics may be speaking a unique language is very strong, but I believe it is important to challenge the belief that Ebonics is "slang". Some people have stated that the movement to recognize Ebonics is Afro-Centrism at its worst. I would ask that the attempts to squelch Ebonics are Euro-Centrism at its worst and most in separate out. Ebonics includes non-slang words like ashy (referring to the appearance of dry skin, especially in winter), which have been around for a while, and are used by people of all age groups. These distinctive Ebonics pronunciations are all logical. For example, Ebonics speakers often create sentences without founder tense is and are, as in " They allright or "They allright". But they dont leave out present tense am. Instead of the ungrammatical *"Ah walkin", Eboni... ...uite different and that the conditions necessary for the emergence of a fully-fledged creole language were never met in the US. These scholars have shown on a number of occasions that what look like distinctive features of AAVE today rattling have a precedent in various varieties of English spoken in Great Britain and the Southern United States. It seems reasonable to suggest that two legal opinions are partially correct and that AAVE developed to some extent through and through restructuring while it also inherited many of its today distinctive features from aged(a) varieties o f English, which were once widely spoken.While the situation in this case is do more extreme by the context of racial and ethnic conflict, variation and prejudice in the United States, it is not unique. Such undecided attitudes towards irregular varieties of a language have been documented for many communities around the realness and in the United States.References Smitherman, G. (1991). Talking and testifyin Black English and the Black experience. In Reginald Jones (Ed.) Black Psychology.(3rd ed., pp. 249-268). Berkeley, CA Cobb & Henry Spears, A. K. (1984). Towards a new view of Black English. The Journal, 1, 94-103.