Ebonics: Language, Dialect, and Education Debate

Origins and Definition of Ebonics

Ebonics is a term coined by Robert L. Williams in 1975, developed by merging the words ebony and phonics. It is defined as a system of oral communication used by Americans of African ancestry that encompasses phonology, syntax, morphology, semantics, lexicon, rate, rhythm, stress, and nonverbal communication. Ebonics has its roots in the trans-Atlantic African slave trade of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Africans brought to the New World spoke languages such as Ibo, Yoruba, Hausa, Wolof, Twi, Dogon, Akan, Kimbundu, and Bambara, among others. Despite the use of isolating tactics by slave owners, enslaved Africans developed ways to communicate with one another. White slave owners also recognized that they needed a means of conveying their needs to their slaves and vice versa. This necessity led to the development of a mixture of different African languages and English — a type of language normally referred to as pidgin, a basic mixture of two or more languages used as a common means of communication (Grant, Oka & Baker, 2009).

Since the Oakland School Board's 1996 decision concerning the use of Ebonics as a teaching tool, opinions have conflicted over whether Ebonics is a separate language or merely a dialect of English. Called Black Vernacular English (BVE) in the 1960s and 1970s and African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) in the 1980s and 1990s, Ebonics has conventionally been regarded as a dialect of English by educators and linguists. Understanding why Ebonics might be considered a language distinct from English requires a closer look at what it takes to constitute a language, as well as what the differences are between a language and a dialect (Fasold, 2010).

At its most basic level, Ebonics simply means "black speech." The term was introduced in 1973 by a group of Black scholars who objected to the negative connotations of other terms then in use (Baik, 2011). The term never gained widespread use among linguists or the general public — until the Ebonics debate of December 1996, when the Oakland, California School Board designated it as the primary language of its majority African-American students and resolved to take it into account when teaching Standard English (Rickford, n.d.).

Language or Dialect? The Linguistic Debate

Linguists generally agree that the designation of a language is largely, or entirely, a social and political matter. What makes a language is not merely a set of structural linguistic features or mutual unintelligibility with related linguistic systems, but rather the recognition that the linguistic system in question symbolizes national or ethnic distinctiveness. There are cases worldwide of mutually incomprehensible linguistic varieties belonging to the same language, and conversely of mutually intelligible varieties being classified as separate languages. As Fasold (2010) notes, "there is consequently no linguistic or geographical reason that Ebonics could not obtain status as a language distinct from English." Two common objections are that Ebonics is simply English corrupted by bad grammar and excessive slang, and that Ebonics and English are too similar to be considered distinct languages.

African-American English (AAE) is a dialect of American English used by many African-Americans in certain settings and situations. Like other dialects, AAE is a systematic, rule-governed linguistic variety that differs from other dialects in its grammar, pronunciation, and vocabulary (Dialects, 2010). AAE is an organized linguistic system with patterns of pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, and usage that extend far beyond slang. Because it operates by a distinct set of rules rather than simply deviating from Standard American English, characterizations of the variety as "bad English" are inaccurate. Speakers of AAE do not fail to speak Standard American English — they successfully speak African-American English. Linguists are less concerned with whether AAE is a language or a dialect than with documenting and understanding its systematic nature (Dialects, 2010).

Most linguists refer to the characteristic speech of African-Americans as Black English, African-American English (AAE), or, when they want to distinguish it from the Standard English usage of African-Americans, as African-American Vernacular English (AAVE). Scholars who favor the term Ebonics, or alternatives such as "African-American language," wish to emphasize the African roots of African-American speech and its connections to languages spoken elsewhere in the Black Diaspora — in Jamaica or Nigeria, for example. In practice, however, AAVE and Ebonics fundamentally refer to the same sets of speech forms (Rickford, n.d.).

The original concept of Ebonics was proposed to reflect the international linguistic consequences of the African slave trade. Prior to its introduction, no single term described those linguistic consequences comprehensively. The predominance of relevant research had been conducted in the United States, and terminology shifted frequently: "Nonstandard Negro English" was common in the 1960s, followed by "Black English" or "Black English Vernacular (BEV)" during the 1970s and most of the 1980s. Eventually "African-American Vernacular English (AAVE)" was introduced as yet another synonym. Unlike Ebonics, however, Black English and AAVE never explicitly acknowledged the linguistic legacy of the African slave trade beyond the borders of the United States (Ebony + Phonics, 2005).

Grammatical Structure and African Roots

From a purely scientific standpoint, the linguistic and educational value of Ebonics depends on its exact definition, including the criteria by which the systematic nature of a language or dialect is recognized. From a strictly linguistic perspective, speech communities have never been defined on the basis of the race of their speakers. Nevertheless, because all African slaves were selected, at least in part, because they shared physical characteristics, Ebonics compels scholars, educators, and policymakers to consider the distinctive linguistic circumstances of African slave descendants (Ebony + Phonics, 2005).

Some scholars have suggested that the grammars of Black and White speakers are essentially convergent; however, empirical evidence indicates that they are not identical. Ebonics may borrow words from Standard American English, but grammatical differences exist. Evidence suggests that African-American speech has roots connected to Niger-Congo African languages. Ebonics shares African morphological features and lacks certain phonemes that play an important role in the syntax and comprehension of Standard American English. Their absence affects the connotation and grammatical structure of Ebonics. Though many will continue to debate the nature of Ebonics, sufficient evidence supports the conclusion that it is a distinct linguistic system (Obasaju, Stewart, Jackson & Timberlake, n.d.).

The notion that Ebonics is simply bad English is clearly false to linguists who have studied it carefully. Outside academic linguistics, however, the idea that Ebonics is bad English is frequently assumed to be self-evidently true. Assessment of Ebonics reveals that it is, in fact, more nuanced than English in at least one subsystem: the verbal tense feature system. In regard to verb structure, Ebonics provides its speakers with rich resources for making distinctions among types and times of actions and states — distinctions that can be expressed in Standard English only awkwardly, through longer and more cumbersome constructions (Fasold, 2010).

There are also notable grammatical differences between Ebonics and Standard English related to pronunciation. For instance, because of phonological differences in which "th" is replaced with "f," words such as death and deaf may be easily confused. Similarly, words like mile and mild may be conflated due to consonant cluster reduction (Obasaju, Stewart, Jackson & Timberlake, n.d.).