First published in the United States in 2017 by Bellevue Literary Press, New York

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© 2017 by John McWhorter

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First Edition

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

ebook ISBN: 978-1-942658-21-4

For Vanessa Hamilton McWhorter, who came into this

world, born reflective, while I was writing this book.

I hope that she will read this as soon as she is

old enough to take it in, to make sure she never for a second

thinks black people’s speech is full of mistakes.

And for my cousin Octavia Thompson,

who speaks what I think of as the perfect Black English,

which I dare anybody to diss.

Contents

INTRODUCTION

IT’S COMPLICATED

WHAT DO YOU MEAN “SOUNDS BLACK”?

BUT THEY CAN’T TALK THAT WAY AT A JOB INTERVIEW!

SPEAKING BLACK OR SPEAKING MINSTREL?

THROUGH A LENS DARKLY?

Endnotes

Index

Introduction

IN HAITI, THE LANGUAGE OF PRINT, school, and the media is French, but when speaking outside of formal settings, people use another form of speech: Haitian Creole.

In Sicily, the language of print, school, and the media is standard Italian, but when speaking outside of formal settings, many people use another form of speech: Sicilian.

In Switzerland, the language of print, school, and the media is High German, but for German speakers in that country, outside of formal settings they use something other than High German: Swiss German, which is quite different in sound, vocabulary, and structure from the German one learns from a book.

In the United States, the language of print, school and the media is Standard English, but when speaking outside of formal settings, black American people use . . . a lot of slang and bad grammar.

At least that is the general American take on the matter. However, comparing the situation here with that in other nations, it becomes clear that we may be missing something. Why would it be that in so many places, casual language is an alternative to the standard one, treated as perfectly normal, while here in the United States, the casual speech of millions of people is thought of as a degradation of the standard form, rather than simply something different?

Certainly, racism is part of the answer. However, black Americans themselves lack the clear conception of their speech as an alternate form of language that Haitians, Jamaicans, and Swiss Germans have. They, as well as whites, tend to be perplexed at the notion of themselves as speaking Black English in the way that a Haitian speaks something in addition to French, or a Germanophone Swiss speaks something in addition to High German. To America as a whole, Black English is rather like ultraviolet light. Scientists (linguists, in this case) discuss it, but for almost everybody else it is an unperceived abstraction despite permeating our very existences.

THE RESULT IS DISSONANCES such as one that I experienced twenty years ago. I had the unexpected experience of being taken up for fifteen minutes of modest media notoriety. Suddenly, America’s television shows and newspapers wanted to know what I thought about, of all things, Black English. The matter was actually more specific: Oakland, California’s school board had proposed using Black English as an aid to imparting Standard English to black kids. The idea was to address black students’ lagging scholastic performance, with a hypothesis that part of the reason for it was that the English they encountered on the page was different from the English they spoke as a home language. I happened to be the black linguist—or maybe the linguist who studied black speech varieties—closest by, since I then was teaching at UC Berkeley.

From our vantage point today, it seems almost odd that there was a weeks-long media firestorm over whether a smallish city would be using Black English as a teaching tool. Similar proposals that had popped up in other cities over the twenty-five years before are today recalled only by those involved. It was partly that Oakland made its announcement during a slow news cycle before Christmas, and partly that this was at the dawn of the twenty-four-hour cable/Internet news era. If it had happened just a couple of years before, the whole affair would barely have registered beyond California.

However, the issue also resonated to such a degree because it entailed a judgment not only about black language but about black people. The Oakland school board was roundly disparaged as opportunistic, chasing bilingual education funds with a crackpot proposal that Black English is an “African” language. Jokes about Ebonics in the wake of the fracas circulate online to this day (Ebonics dictionary entry: PENIS—I went to da doctor and he handed me a cup and said penis [pee in this]). Many wondered why black people were supposed to be exempt from leaving the speech of the ghetto behind the way other immigrant groups have done, and saw the whole Oakland proposal as a kind of unreasoning identity politics.

FOR MOST LINGUISTS AND EDUCATORS involved in this saga or observing it, the racist element in all this vitriol and japery was what they carried away. The assumption was, therefore, that the academic’s responsibility in commentary on the issue was to focus on calling attention to the role of racism in how people feel about Black English. That assumption was considered so unassailable that I actually found myself deemed un-PC on the issue by other linguists and educators specializing in Black English, for arguing that the reason black kids have trouble in school is not Black English but the quality of the schools themselves, as well as the problems that life in disadvantaged communities can saddle students with. Yes, indeed: That was considered a disloyal position for a linguist to take.

There was, in fact, something beyond societal inequality that motivated my position, however. Racism is hardly the only thing standing between how linguists see Black English and how the public sees it. What most struck me in 1996, and what I carried away from the whole business, was that America—black as well as white—had no idea that there was even a Black English worthy of discussion.

Linguists talked of grammar. The public talked of slang and mistakes. This never changed. But crucially, even acknowledging racism as an element in the debate, no one could deny that if the dustup had been about teaching white “redneck” in the schools in Mississippi, there would have been very similar anger and ridicule. Racially or not, linguists and the general public see speech very differently.

AMERICANS HAVE TROUBLE comprehending that any vernacular way of speaking is legitimate language. Given this situation, during the Oakland controversy linguists seemed unhinged. “Is Ebonics a language?” people would ask, with the quietly acrid skepticism with which one would ask whether Elmo is a philosopher. Television commentator Tucker Carlson derided Ebonics as “a language where nobody knows how to conjugate the verbs,” as if it is unquestioned that Standard English’s verb conjugations are logically inseparable from any English conceivable as coherent. And the Oakland episode was just one step on a time line. It has now been almost fifty years since linguistic experts began studying Black English as a legitimate speech variety, arguing that black Americans’ colloquial English is not a degradation of English but one of many variations upon English. This effort has been largely in vain.

EVEN NOW, I FEEL MOVED to specify to some degree what I mean by Black English, given that so many factors cloud our vision as to just what the term might refer. There are two main ways that various dialects of a language differ: the sound (or accent) and the sentence structure.

For example, for an American, British people’s English is different in its accent: that pot sounds more like “pawt,” et cetera. The main task that faces an American actor playing the part of a British character is to change the way he articulates the sounds of the words. Black English, in the same way, has some sounds that are different from those in Standard English. It is these different sounds that give Americans the impression that someone can sound black, an intuition often harbored with a certain ambivalence, but based on a genuine difference in accent that linguistic research has confirmed the existence of.

British English also has some sentence structures different from those in American English. In the United States, one says “If she had smelled it, then I would have,” whereas in England, one might more likely say “If she had smelt it, then I would have done.” The past tense of smelled is formed differently, and in British English the do verb is often used differently than in American English. Black English, in this same way, has some sentence structures different from those in Standard English. For example, “If she had smelled it might in Black English be “If she had done smelt it.”

Here is an example of perfect Black English in which we can see how sentence structures differ from those in Standard English:

It a girl name Shirley Jones live in Washington. Most everybody on the street like her, ’cause she a nice girl. Shirley treat all of them just like they was her sister and brother, but most of all she like one boy name Charles. But Shirley keep away from Charles most of the time, ’cause she start to liking him so much she be scared of him. So Charles, he don’t hardly say nothing to her neither. Still, that girl got to go ’round telling everybody Charles s’posed to be liking her. But when Valentine Day start to come ’round, Shirley get to worrying. She worried ’cause she know the rest of them girls going to get Valentine cards from they boyfriends.

Some basic features of Black English structure are in bold. It is used instead of the presentational there; live: the third-person singular s is not necessary; she a: the linking verb be can often be omitted; be: however, this usage of be signals that something goes on over a long period of time, such as Shirley’s fright; nothing: double negatives do not make a positive in Black English; them: often replaces those.

Notice that there is no slang in this passage. Slang is one part of Black English, but then, slang is also rife in anyone’s English, and there is much more to Black English than argot. Slang comes and goes; the Black English I refer to is more long-lived—this dialect is centuries old.

YET DESPITE PEOPLE LAYING OUT DATA about Black English for decades, the perception of the dialect has remained largely unchanged since the first articles on what was then termed Negro English in now-yellowing issues of academic journals in the 1960s. A small community of scholars study Black English intensely, discoursing enthusiastically about African-American Vernacular English, or AAVE, code switching, and identity, it being second nature to them to analyze the speech of black Americans with the same tools other linguists use to study Hungarian and Japanese. Since the 1970s, these scholars have transferred this conception to educators with a certain amount of success. However, even among them, one still encounters teachers attesting that Black English is okay but still harboring a sense of it as a passel of mistakes—only okay, then, in the sense that it’s okay to belch openly at home. And beyond this, other than to occasional self-taught aficionados, Black English specialists’ sense of Black English seems counterintuitive and possibly kooky, like the idea of multiverses or qi. The impression remains that Black English is simply a collection of streety expressions, rather than also a system of grammar and an accent, requiring native mastery to control fully.

I experience one manifestation of this in the classroom. Once, a regular result of teaching a class about Black English as having a grammar was that black students would notice that they spoke this “language” you were putting on the board. These days, not uncommonly, I am noting white students similarly excited that they “speak Black English.” These people are the first generation raised entirely within the era of hip-hop as mainstream music, and there are indeed some white people who truly control the structures of the dialect and would sound black on an audio recording. Most of the time, however, what young white Americans thinking of themselves as Black English speakers are referring to is not the grammatical apparatus that linguists study, but black slang expressions. That is, they, too, have had no way of knowing that Black English is anything but slang. How, in current American discourse, could they have learned the rest of the story?

Meanwhile, something else that encourages ignorance of Black English’s existence is, ironically, a desire not to stereotype. Namely, one is often taught that the only reason we might think there is a “black” way to talk is that we are essentializing black people, and that actually black people simply speak southern English. Back in 1971, Civil Rights leader Bayard Rustin argued that “’Black English,’ after all, has nothing to do with blackness but derives from conditions of lower-class life in the South (poor Southern whites also speak ‘Black English’).” Rustin’s perspective lives on today.

Yet while there is an obvious overlap between Black and southern English, few would say that Jeff Foxworthy and Samuel L. Jackson speak the same dialect. The differences are significant, documented by linguists, and immediately apparent to an American ear. When someone says “He the one” instead of “He’s the one,” uses ain’t for didn’t as in “He ain’t told me,” or uses be in that ongoing sense that Shirley did, they are speaking Black, not southern, English. No one goes about consciously aware of such things, but they are part of the sense we have that there is indeed a “black” way of talking.

Yet there have been remarks that Hillary Clinton adopts a southern accent when talking to black audiences. But does anyone think black people in Pittsburgh would really feel a special connection to the speech style of Dolly Parton or Jim Nabors? People are using southern as a stand-in for black out of a wariness of being criticized—“What do you mean, ‘talking like a black person?’”—and crucially, that wariness is entirely justified. In after-talk question sessions, online chat forums, and even general conversation, speculation persists that Black English is really just southern dialect.

In yet another way, then, people miss a key component in America’s speech repertoire. Since 1996, the media has further sought my opinions about Black English now and then, and each time I confront the very same conception of the dialect that reigned in the middle of the Clinton administration and before: that Black English is simply a flippant lingo. As recently as 2013, media commentators were baffled by the ordinary Black English used on the witness stand by Rachel Jeantel during the trial of the killer of her friend, teenager Trayvon Martin. Jeantel was simply using the grammatical patterns of Black English used all over the United States, and yet intelligent people actually consulted with me as to whether she was more comfortable in her parents’ Haitian Creole than in English.

Before that, in 2010, the media had reported that the Drug Enforcement Administration had called for translators to help understand what surreptitiously recorded black criminals were saying. Black English, with its different accent from Standard English and different ways of putting sentences together, proved hard for nonspeakers to understand on a recording made under less than ideal conditions, where people were speaking rapidly, their voices often overlapping one another, as typically occurs in actual conversation. In Italy, no one would bat an eye if translators were called in to make sense of recordings made under equivalent conditions of Sicilian or Milanese. Here in the United States, however, that Black English could require such treatment seemed absurd to many, baffled at the idea that Black English is anything but lingo and grammatical mistakes. Seen only in part, looked past, or mistaken as something else, Black English in the American mind remains a phantom.

IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY, and the goal of this book is enlightenment. Linguists (including me) are responsible for the fact that almost nobody knows that there exists something called Black English, which is complex enough to require books and academic articles to analyze, and which has its own grammatical structure, just as Standard English does, or Finnish, or Japanese. Certainly plenty of books have been written outlining and celebrating Black English, demonstrating that it is systematic in its structure and also the vehicle of a rich culture. However, the sad and simple fact is that a dialect can be seen as both systematic and culturally rich while processed as “bad grammar” nevertheless.

I see four main barriers to understanding:

1.  When the public encounters the assertion that Black English is more than gutter talk, the argument usually depicts Black English as largely a matter of discarding or distorting standard language forms.

2.  Partly because of the above perception, many Americans worry that even to acknowledge that there is a “black” way of talking may be racist.

3.  The relatively uniform linguistic landscape of Anglophone America encourages a sense that people can’t speak both a standard and a nonstandard form of a language in a complimentary relationship.

4.  Many equate Black English with the distorted dialect that minstrel-show performers used, and suppose that the cartoonish quality of the latter requires treating the former as equally dismissible.

I’m aware that some feel that racism is the reason people disparage Black English, and that issues like those mentioned above may be considered “worth talking about” but that they essentially skirt the point. However, I would request those who feel that way to bear with me. Racism, after all, isn’t going away anytime soon, but in my experience, people can be made to see Black English in a new way regardless. I present approaches here that I have found effective in imparting to reasonable skeptics, unconverted but open-minded—that is, the typical rational person—that Black English is not bad grammar, but alternate grammar.

The book is very directly targeted. I intend these chapters as didactic, and sometimes exploratory, essays. One may come away from them with a sense of having been introduced to the dialect, but for formal and comprehensive introduction to the structures and usage of Black English, the reader must seek other teachers, such as Geneva Smitherman, William Labov, John Rickford, and Lisa Green. This book is intended as building on the groundwork such scholars have established.

A NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY. To some, the term Black English may have a musty air. Specialists have long moved on to African-American Vernacular English, while among laymen, the term Ebonics gained a foothold in the wake of the Oakland controversy, which revived it, although it had otherwise fallen out of usage after a brief vogue in the 1970s. I am eschewing African-American Vernacular English partly because in this book I am addressing not only vernacular speech but also standard speech. Black Americans can sound identifiably black even when using neither slang nor grammatical features of the dialect. African-American English could be a possible substitute, but, along with African-American Vernacular English, it runs up against the fact that the dialect has very little identifiable African influence in it. Also, since the 1990s, the number of immigrants from Africa in the United States has grown so much that the very term African-American is becoming increasingly confusing. White South African immigrants are genuinely perplexed that they do not qualify as African-Americans, for example.

Meanwhile, the term Ebonics, although I have given in to it somewhat over the years, is unfortunate. Its reference to dark skin makes it much too general to apply only to black people in the United States. In fact, it was originally coined to refer to all languages of the African diaspora. Then also, the ics suffix is modeled on the word phonics out of a sense that phonics involves language. However, the ics suffix is not properly applied to the name of a language or dialect, as opposed to, say, a reading program. For our purposes, then, Black English it will be. I have always thought the term does the job quite well.

The concept here is more important than the label. It’s time the dialect was discussed as something both interesting and normal. America hasn’t known how to do that. This book attempts to show the way.

CHAPTER ONE

It’s Complicated

A TOY PIANO ISN’T A STEINWAY, RIGHT? THE REAL STORY ABOUT BLACK ENGLISH GRAMMAR

I‘LL NEVER FORGET THE TIME a woman from Japan, who had been in the United States for a long time and spoke very good English, casually said to me that I was different from other black Americans in that “you don’t use bad grammar.” Her being from another country and culture made her comfortable spelling that out to me so bluntly, but her judgment as to how black Americans talk was, let’s face it, representative of how most Americans feel—including quite a few black ones. For example, James Meredith, who was the first black person admitted to the University of Mississippi, has, later in his life, handed out a flyer before talks to young black audiences that includes this advice:

BLACK ENGLISH LANGUAGE

PROPER ENGLISH LANGAGE

Which one do you use? Most people in this room use a lot of Black English and a little Proper English.

Anyone who wants to become an intellectual giant must learn and use a lot of Proper English and as little Black English as possible.

I am not going to argue with anyone about the matter. You can do what you want to do.

However, I will tell you that anyone who continues to use a lot of Black English will never become an intellectual giant.

To me, Black English is like a clockwork or an engine, a system every bit as coherent as Latin or Chinese. But to most Americans, Black English means error.

Typically, it is thought that the reason the public fails to understand that Black English is coherent speech is racism. A typical reaction to this failure is: “No matter what we say, they just don’t get it! Of course, it’s because they don’t want to get it.” And surely racism plays a part in how Black English is heard. However, here’s a thought: If it happened to be white people from a remote part of the country who spoke exactly the way black people can, do we really think people would in that case just accept their speech as okay? We barely have to wonder, because the speech of uneducated southern whites comes under a lot of fire, as well. The speech of Appalachian whites is condemned to an even greater degree: there are ample testimonials in that community to linguistic self-consciousness and discrimination similar to the kind that black people can attest to.

The truth is that the reason many people think Black English is gutter talk is not all their fault; it’s partly linguists’ fault. We have not made the case to the public in a way that actually convinces, even when we think we have. And racism or not, there are ways of getting across the truth to even skeptical audiences. I’ve seen it, and I want to share what I have learned here. It’s easy for a linguist to forget what language seems like to everyone else. But I feel a responsibility to try my hardest in order to, if I may, bring America out of Plato’s cave.

What I’m Not Going to Do and Why

FIRST, LET’S TAKE A LOOK at what seems not to work, which will also be useful in gaining a sense of what linguists even mean when they say Black English is more than slang. Linguists and fellow travelers often teach people about Black English by discussing how the verb to be is used. In a sentence like “She be passin’ by,” what almost anyone hears most immediately is that the be verb isn’t conjugated, as opposed to Standard English: “She is passing by.” However, there is more going on in a sentence like “She be passin’ by” than it might seem. This usage of be is very specific; it means that something happens on a regular basis, rather than something going on right now. As counterintuitive as it seems, no black person would say “She be passin’ by right now,” because that isn’t what be in that sentence is supposed to mean. Rather, it would be “She be passin’ by every Tuesday when I’m about to leave.”

In other words, that unconjugated be is, of all things, grammar. In Standard English, it’s easier to get a sense of what habitual refers to in language by thinking about how we express it in the past: “She used to pass by every Tuesday” means that it happened regularly. If you were referring to something that happened just once, you would use the simple past: “She passed by just now.” In Black English, you can make that same differentiation in the present: “She’s passin’ by right now;” “She be passin’ by every Tuesday.”

That’s neat, in that you would never think of this from just listening to black people talking, especially since we don’t expect anything elegant or complex when people are just chatting. But linguists are trained to think that explaining this “habitual be,” as it’s called in the “biz,” will teach people that Black English is okay. Specifically, we are taught to argue that the habitual be shows that Black English is systematic. If how the habitual be works is not just random, but based on rules, as in something I had to carefully explain just now, then that means that Black English is as good as Standard English, right?

Wrong. Linguists have been telling people that Black English is systematic for almost fifty years now, and it’s safe to say that the argument has made not a dent in public feelings about the dialect. There’s a reason. As long as the be verb is still unconjugated, the habitual be still sounds “wrong.” People think to themselves, Yeah, it’s systematic—systematically wrong!

It’s the same with other things presented as examples of why there’s nothing wrong with Black English. The layman can hear that in Black English the verb to be is often left out entirely: “She my sister,” “They my friends.” Now, an expert will tell you that, leaving out to be in Black English is not random, but systematic. So, you say “She my sister,” but not “I your sister”—with I, you have to have the am. So, a linguist might couch this as “omission of the copula is ungrammatical in the first-person singular”—copula is a fancy word for (certain uses of) the verb to be, and ungrammatical means that if you say such a thing, you are breaking the rules of the dialect. But a perfectly reasonable person will think, Okay—but the fact that they don’t use the be in the other persons is still wrong. This may be a system, but it’s a broken one!

Quite simply, the systematicity argument doesn’t change minds, as compelling as it can seem to the tiny guild known as linguists, who spend their lives examining the minutiae of how languages and dialects work. To ordinary people, language is two things. One is words. The other is grammar, but grammar in the sense taught in school: as rules one is warned about breaking. To me, grammar means things like the habitual be or the ablative absolute in Latin. But grammar as taught to most people in school means “Don’t say less books, say fewer books” and “Say Billy and I went to the store, not Billy and me went to the store.” Black English cannot help but look bad under this lens, where the words are slang and the grammar faulty. As to systematicity—well, there are plenty of things that are systematic but dismissable.

Think about it: Toy pianos are adorable, and systematic enough that I couldn’t build one at gunpoint, but no one would want to hear Schubert played on one. There’s a reason Andrés Segovia didn’t perform on a ukulele; four strings going plink-a-plink is cute, but no one clamors for a ukulele recital at Carnegie Hall. The Mafia has been awesomely systematic; none of us would choose them to run a town, however. One reads in awe about how viruses thrive and replicate themselves—yet we’d happily never encounter one again. Sadly—and it is sad—systematicity does not score for nonlinguists as an argument in favor of Black English, except among the already converted. Surely we want to reach beyond that small circle.

On that note, it also moves few to say that Black English’s floutings of Standard English rules have parallels in the way other languages work. We often say—and I mean “we,” as I have made this argument often—that Russian doesn’t use a be verb in sentences like “She my sister” either, and so it’s okay that Black English doesn’t. But the response for many is, “But this isn’t Russian; it’s English. Why can’t they talk like everybody else?” Upon which we’re back to systematicity, and well . . .

Further Reasonable Objections

SYSTEMATICITY ISN’T THE ONLY ARGUMENT linguists are taught to present in defense of Black English, but the other ones frankly haven’t cut much more ice with the general public. Take, for example, “Different people speak in different ways,” as it is sometimes put. However, the idea that Black English is simply different feels fake to most people. For them, if different includes not conjugating the be verb or leaving it out entirely, not to mention double negation (“She don’t see nothin’”) and pronunciations like aks, then one thinks of the fact that Lennie in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men is “different” from George. “Special,” perhaps?

Then there is a more sociopolitically charged argument. “After all, as much linguistics and anthropological research has shown, how we feel about a given language, more often than not, reflects how we feel about its speakers,” two Black English specialists have written. In other words, as I once heard this observation most resonantly put—the speaker had one of those lovely educated British accents—“to criticize a dialect is to criticize its speakers.” He was right, and the room applauded. But it was a room full of linguists, education experts, and speech pathologists—part of that small group of the converted. Such a group may assume that to associate criticism of Black English with racism is a smack-down argument. However, it only qualifies as such in that some people upon hearing the argument will clam up.

That’s all, though, and in my experience, many people in private settings have a reasoned and even concerned riposte to the racism argument. That is, someone might say, “What would be racist is if we didn’t teach them not to talk that way!” People of this mind-set are often as aware of racism in black Americans’ past and present as anyone would want them to be, and yet this awareness leads them to statements such as “I know that they talk that way because of segregation and lack of education. But part of us making up for all of that is to teach them not to use broken language.”

In the eighties, I knew a white, educated, urban northeastern woman who, upon reading about efforts to explore and destigmatize Black English in schools with large numbers of black students, fumed at the idea that teachers were going to make already-burdened kids’ lives worse by teaching them that grammatical mistakes were okay. No one listening to her sentiments on this could reasonably have tarred her as a bigot, or even as regrettably ignorant. She was someone one could easily imagine in a film written by Nora Ephron or writing a smart letter to the New York Times. She was a racially enlightened, concerned citizen, raised in New York in the 1970s, who had no way of understanding Black English the way a few thousand experts on language or education do. And that’s because she hadn’t been given the message in a way that could have reached her.

Leaving Things Out Is Legitimate?

THE CORE OF THE PROBLEM is that people have been asked to accept Black English as legitimate when it is presented as a series of exemptions to using Standard English rules. Systematic or not, to any intelligent reader or listener, a defense of Black English based on what looks like a list of transgressions comes off as a shabby political exercise.

And yet, Black English is indeed presented to the public as a list of subtractions from Standard English. If two consonants are next to each other, you can drop one—desk to des’. You can leave verbs unconjugated: “I like the way she talk.” You can omit the be verb. These examples are representative of how Black English was introduced to, say, people like my dismayed friend in 1987, or was introduced during the 1996 Ebonics controversy, when so many of my fellow linguists were distressed that the public didn’t seem to be heeding our message. It can seem almost strange that people expect the public to embrace a dialect portrayed this way—until you remember that the systematicity argument is supposed to make up for all of the flouting.

However, systematic flouting sounds like something one could alternately call “linguistic delinquence,” which puts into a sad perspective a defense of Black English founded on lists of rules it breaks. As I write this, the Wikipedia entry for Black English lists twenty-three grammatical traits, of which twelve are reductions and droppings. That’s over half, and among the other traits are such things as multiple negatives (“Ain’t nothin’ nobody can do for no man no how”) and good old aks and graps for grasp. Now, when consonants are reversed in cases like that, linguists call it “metathesis” and just think of it as something that happens to sounds sometimes. For example, the word for miracle in Latin was miraculum, but in Spanish the r and the l traded places and the result was milagro. But in the here and now, walking around listening to people speak English far, far away from Old Castile in both time and space, let’s face it, aks just sounds like the wrong way to say ask.

The Wikipedia entry is an admirable job in itself. I have no idea who created it, and I single it out only because of its accessibility—it is typical of countless presentations elsewhere. My point is simply that if I weren’t a linguist and I had read this entry or equivalent descriptions of Black English, I would be quietly baffled as to why it was not just bad English. Whether I said anything about it out loud would depend on my temperament, but as they used to say, they can’t put you in jail for what you’re thinking.

There is one feature of Black English that one may come across that does not seem like an abuse of Standard English. Here are some shades of meaning that you can express with a verb in Black English:

He been seen it! (He saw it a long time ago.)

He done seen it. (He saw it recently.)

He be seein’ it. (He sees it regularly.)

He steady seein’ it. (He is right now in the process of seeing it.)

It has often been claimed that Black English lets you express more nuances of this kind with verbs than Standard English does. However, despite my profound respect for and debt to pioneer scholars of the dialect who discovered these things, I must say that this area of the dialect cannot serve to convince people that it is legitimate, either, despite that the point in question is often considered the gold-standard demonstration that Black English is not bad English.

For one, it’s not always clear that Standard English doesn’t have equivalents to these things. If black people can say “He been had that!” and white people can say “He’s had that forever!” does that really mean that Black English is richer somehow? If “He done seen it” refers to the recent past, isn’t that just another way of saying “He has seen it?” Another example one could cite on a list of expressions is finna for fixing to, as in “She finna go, so tell her later.” But I left it off, because finna is just fixing to said quickly. Some question whether the steady in “He steady seein’ it” has ever really been part of Black English’s grammar as such—that is, in its “DNA.” To some, it seems as if it was more of a passing idiom decades ago that modern speakers don’t use much.

I don’t want to drag us too far into the weeds on this, but in the end, how you use verbs to situate things in time is just one item for our list. When told something as counter-intuitive as that the Black English he hears as a rappity, raggedy street mess is something worthy of the term language, the skeptic seeks more than one thing. One might allow that this one small list qualifies as system—albeit there’s still that “unconjugated” be verb with “He be seein’ it.” But one might still feel that the mass of other elements in the dialect, all about not doing things, renders Black English overall exactly what you thought it was. In other words, expressions like “He steady seein’ it” might seem like a few keys on that toy piano—but not part of anything we would consider a proper vehicle of intelligent expression.

Getting to a New Place: Five Ways Black English Outdoes Standard English

THE WAY TO GET PAST THIS RETICENCE to accept Black English is to refashion how it is presented to the public. No more should Black English be presented largely as a dialect that leaves out this and reverses that, with specialists then wondering why the public continues to think of it as a cluster of errors and isn’t impressed that the errors are systematic.

Rather, Black English must be introduced via a collection of ways in which it is more complex than Standard English, not less. People respect complexity. People like simplicity in their music and in ways of preparing food, but in terms of grammar, not so much. Some people involved with presenting Black English to the public might wonder just what such a collection of complex features would consist of, other than the shadings of verb usage I just mentioned. The simple fact is that specialists in Black English have not been primed to seek out those features that outdo Standard English in complexity. Systematicity will intringue and stimulate academic linguistic analysis, but the public isn’t having it, so we must change the lens.

Below I will discuss five things in the dialect that demonstrate that anyone speaking Black English is doing something subtle and complex.

1. Up what?

I once had occasion to ask a black American with a solid command of Ebonics what up means in a sentence like “We was up in here havin’ a good time.” “Well, up is the opposite of down,” she replied. That was a natural answer, since we all think of ourselves as using words according to their basic dictionary meanings. Yet quite often we don’t use them that way. Imagine you peep into a room down the hall and see your little nephew in there playing with an Etch A Sketch when you thought he was outside in the yard with the other kids. “What are you doing in here?” you ask. And yet, it’s quite clear what he’s doing: playing with that Etch A Sketch. What you mean by that sentence, phrased just that way, is why he is in there, not what he’s doing. You may not be conscious of it, but you are not using what in accordance with its basic meaning.

Up in Black English is like that. I said to the woman, “But if you think about it, you’d say ‘We was up in here havin’ a good time’ even if you were in a basement.” She said, “Yeah, I guess so!” “So,” I continued, “what does up mean in that sentence?” Her response: “It’s just slang.” I stopped there—we were at an Outback Steakhouse; it wasn’t the occasion for linguistic analysis. But in fact, up in Black English is not just slang in the sense of being a way of saying something that you’d say a different way in Standard English, such as “Whaddup?” for “How are you?” or even finna for fixing to. Rather, up, as random as it seems, has a meaning, just like of, indeed, and Formica do. But no one has any reason to think about the meaning of a word like up, so you have to smoke the meaning out by listening to how people use it.

Here are five sentences I have overheard:

We was sittin’ up at Tony’s.

Don’t be sittin’ up in my house askin’ me where’s the money.

It was buck naked people up in my house.

I was gettin’ comfortable watchin’ TV up in the bed.

I ain’t got no food up in my house.

The first thing that should be clear is that the vertical meaning of up has nothing to do with these sentences. In fact, the first three sentences came from people who lived on the first floor of their buildings. The fourth one was from someone whose bed I had not had occasion to view, but the chances that her bed was oddly high were infinitesimal—who talks about climbing “up” into bed other than the princess in “The Princess and the Pea”? I heard the fifth one from a passing stranger, but it was similarly unlikely she was referring to her residence being “up” anything. Imagine how odd it would be if you lived on the ninth floor of a building and needed to do a supermarket trip and told someone, “I don’t have any food up in my apartment.” It would sound like you actually live somewhere on the ground but for some reason keep an extra apartment up high where you stashed your groceries like some squirrel.

Linguists have yet to discover a single instance in any human language or dialect where people randomly toss a word into their conversations all the time for no reason at all, just because it just feels good to say it or because everyone has mysteriously been possessed by some kind of tic. If people are using a word, it’s there for a reason, just as the ed on walked is there to mark the past and we use will in will walk to mark the future. No matter how slangy, or even profane, something sounds to us, if people are saying it all the time, it’s speech, and speech has rules.

So what is the function of this up? Up what? In this instance, up signifies that the place you’re in is familiar and comfortable. Humans can choose to have a word that expresses all kinds of things, far beyond what Standard English conveys. Some languages make you mark whether you learned something by seeing it, hearing it, surmising it, or hearing it talked about. Some languages make you mark whether something happened in the morning or the afternoon. And there is one speech variety that makes you mark when the setting you are in is one you have a sense of intimacy with, and that is Black English. Up is a marker of intimacy, just as adding ed to a verb is a marker of past action.

“We was sittin’ up at Tony’s” means that Tony is a friend of yours. To say “We was waitin’ up at the dentist’s” would be incorrect Black English, because the dentist’s office is a place you probably don’t go to that much and experience little comfort in. “It was buck-naked people up in my house” is the statement of a man who was struck by the fact that in his place of residence, the intimate space he had carved for himself in this chaotic world, there were, unexpectedly, naked persons (it had been quite a party, apparently). Because bed is comfortable, naturally one will refer to being “up” in it, especially in the long term, as this woman was referring to. To refer to not having food “up” in one’s house conveys the close, bodily aspect of having no food in one’s home.

This intimacy marker up, then, is a grammatical element. Someone who had to learn Black English would find mastering it challenging. For example, it’d be easy to say something like “I’m up in the 7-Eleven and I can’t find the Slim Jims,” when, no, not quite—You don’t know the cashier there and there’s nowhere to sit; there’s nothing “up,” in the Black English sense, about a 7-Eleven. Black English up is complex—and it isn’t about leaving something out or twisting it around. It’s a nuance that Standard English cannot convey as easily and briefly. In terms of up, Black English has more going on.

2. Done

It has often been written that in a sentence like “I done seen it,” done serves to mark the recent past as opposed to the more distant past. “I done drunk it” supposedly means you drank it this morning or yesterday, while you’d say “I drank it” if it was something like last month or last year.

However, this isn’t the way people actually use done. It isn’t just a random alternate way of indicating the past in general. You wouldn’t say “Last summer after they done planted tomatoes, they planted some cucumbers.” But it isn’t because last summer was too far in the past, because you would say to someone “You done growed up!”—even though presumably the growing up happened years ago. “I done had a crush on you since you was twelve” is perfectly fine—and yet you could say this to somebody who was thirty (or seventy), referring to a crush that began eons ago.

Yet, there must be system to this done, since it is part of fluent human speech. A Black English speaker has a confident sense of whether done is being used properly or not, but figuring out just what determines what’s right and what’s wrong has thrown quite a few, myself included.

Elizabeth Dayton at the University of Puerto Rico did an interesting project where she apparently watched every black movie made from roughly She’s Gotta Have It to The Cookout and tabulated uses of done. From this, she identified that the reason done has proven so elusive is that we have been trying to assign to it descriptions based on what we expect from English, or French or Spanish, where we think about things like the perfect (have gone) versus the simple past (went). But actually, the reason done can mark things in both the recent and the distant past, but only in certain sentences in either case, is that its function is more specific than it seems. It marks counterexpectation. That is, whether it’s used in a sentence about 1973 or last week, a sentence with done is always about something the speaker finds somewhat surprising, contrary to what was expected.

“You done drunk it,” then, does not mean “You drank it a little while ago.” It could—but then you could also say “You done drunk it” about something that happened last summer. “You done drunk it” is something you would say if you left someone sitting outside with a can of soda that you expected to share with him, only to find when you got back that he had drunk the whole can. The done would convey that you hadn’t expected him to do that. But that means that you could also say “You done drunk it” if you had stashed away one can of watermelon-flavored Jolly Rancher soda in the garage over the winter, looking forward to savoring it on the first hot day of the coming summer, only to find it missing on that day, and when you bring this up with your son, he turns out to have drunk it sometime last September. “You done drunk it?” you could ask—despite that it happened almost a year ago. “You done growed up!” conveys that a part of you always imagined the person as a tyke and it’s a little odd to see the person now as an adult. “I done had a crush on you since you was twelve” is something you would impart to someone as news—presumably the woman you say this to hadn’t been aware of it.

A counterexpectational marker—that may seem like bending over backwards a little. Is that really grammar? Do other languages have counterexpectational markers? Well, yes, they do! Take a tribe of people in the Amazon rain forest called the Jarawara. In their language, to say “The water is cold,” you say “Faha siri!” But if you give someone a glass of water that strikes him as extremely cold—say, for example, you give a member of the Jarawara water from a refrigerator and he, as someone who lives in the rain forest, isn’t used to water that cold—then he will say “Faha siri-makoni!” Makoni doesn’t mean “very” or “Whew!”—there are other words for those. To a Jarawara, figuring out what makoni means is as odd and challenging as it is for black (or any) Americans to nail what up means in “We was sittin’ up at Tony’s.” That’s because, when you look at how it’s used in lots of sentences, you glean that it marks the counterintuitive—a Jarawara can also use it to remark on how much bigger a Westerner’s shoes turn out to be than his feet, or how an ant was walking in an odd way on a leaf.

That’s one of endless examples worldwide. Like Jarawara, Black English has a clear and frequently used way of indicating the counterexpectational with a little marker: makoni in the Amazon, done in Atlanta. But done is not used that way in Standard English. Here, as with up, Black English has more going on.

3. Narrative had

Some languages have a verb tense that you use when you’re telling stories. Swahili is one of them. The word I is ni. The word eat is kula. The present tense is na. So to say “I am eating,” you say “ni-na-kula.” To say “I ate,” you use the past tense marker, li – ni-li-kula means “I ate.” But if you’re telling a story about how you sat down and picked up a fork and you were eating when the wind blew out one of your windows, then you use a different marker, ka. You would say “ni-ka-kula.”

That’s called a narrative tense, and it seems rather nice from a distance. But actually, Americans are surrounded by the same thing, because Black English has a narrative tense marker. Those speaking Black English use had in narratives. Here is a real-life example, from a ten-year-old boy describing a scuffle: “’Cause when he hit me like this, he had upper-cut me like that, and then he had hit me like that. He had kicked me, it was half-wrestling and then, one, I was tired, then he just beat me, and push me down, that’s when he had push me down.”

It can be strange to the uninitiated to hear this usage of had. My cousins used it quite fluently when I was a kid, and I remember that when I first noticed it, I felt as if they never quite got to the point when they recounted things at length. “Okay, so all that had happened, but what finally did happen?” (I recall the exact geographical point at which I encountered Black English’s narrative had: at the bottom of the Marion Lane cul-de-sac in front of Carpenter’s Woods on Mt. Pleasant Avenue in Philadelphia. Just thought that should be entered into the record.) But after a while I realized that the use of had did not signal a coming finale—it was telling the story itself. It’s that way with the ten-year-old’s narrative: “That’s when he had push me down” is the conclusion, not a prelude to “. . . upon which my friend came and grabbed him . . . (etc.).”

The narrative had sounds like a flub, no doubt. In Standard English, had is used only for the pluperfect, or “past of the past”: “She had already closed the door, and so the cat couldn’t get in.” However, had is used that way in Black English, as well; it’s just that had has a double function. In this way, a person using Black English happens to arrange the “furniture” differently than someone would in Standard English. Nor is Black English slovenly in the use of had to convey two different meanings. That occurs in Standard English, too. Did you ever notice that putting an s on the end of something can mean either plural or possessive? Dogs or dog’s—to the ear, they are the same; the apostrophe is just on paper. Yet we have no trouble keeping the two meanings apart. “Have you seen Peter?” we ask, but the have in that sentence has nothing to do with what have is supposed to mean, as in “I have a new book.” We don’t think twice about it. In Black English, had moonlights in the same way.

This means that, like Swahili, Black English has a narrative tense: The narrative had is grammar. For Black English speakers, the one phrase “Now, what had happened was . . .” is a running in-joke, associated with someone trying to worm their way out of some kind of jam, and is often thought of as a self-standing expression. Less obvious is that this phrase is an example of a general way of using had in reference to anything happening in the past, which is exactly the kind of thing that distinguishes Black English from Standard English. More to the point, this use of had is one more way in which Black English has more going on than Standard English.

4. Keeping it rill

For all that Black English is dismissed as broken language, it is actually not the easiest to imitate. If a Standard English speaker had to master either an authentic British accent or an authentic black Pittsburgh accent, he’d likely do better with the British one.

This may not be obvious, given the tendency for sources on Black English to stress the ways that Black English sounds are simpler renditions of Standard English ones. For example, in Black English the vowel sound in rice comes out as ah, so that rice is “rahs,” my is “mah” and spider is “spahder.” The Standard English sound is two vowels, in a way: ah plus an ee gliding off, which is why this kind of sound is called a diphthong (di means “two” and the phthong means “sound”). Black English makes that ah-ee into one sound, ah. As such, you will see this described as monophthongization. Whatever it’s called, it’s an easier way of saying the sound than the way it’s said in Standard English.

But Black English balances that monophthongization by outdoing Standard English sounds in some ways. We aren’t trained to hear it and so it goes past our ears. Here’s an example. In Standard English, the words bee and meal have the same vowel, the ee sound. In Black English, they don’t. A speaker or hearer may not be aware of it, but in Black English, before an l and only then, the ee sound comes out more like ih. That means that in Black English, meal is more like mill, or, to be specific, it’s a diphthong. First there is the ih, and then there’s a little uh gliding off: “mih-ull.” Feel is “fih-ull.” For real is “for rih-ull.”

In itself, that seems like a random bit of nothing much. But actually, it means that to know Black English, you don’t just know the sound ee. You also have to know that before l, it takes on a different form and becomes “ih-uh.” In an Ebonics 101 class, this would be an annoying aspect of accent that the teacher would lecture you about, just as the French class schoolmarm chides you about saying a word like lune for moon, where you don’t just say “loon,” but shape your mouth for loon and say lean. “You must improve your accent, my dear! Not ‘loo-oon.’ ‘Leuwwwn.’” Next door in Ebonics 101, “Not ‘fee-eeel.’ ‘Fih-ull’!”

And then, the ih here is not really ih—it’s something in between ee and ih. It’s a whole other sound that Black English has that Standard English doesn’t have. It’s an odd sound because it only comes up in very specific instances. Another one reveals itself thusly: say bed and then pen. Now, in Black English, those don’t rhyme precisely, either. Before an n or an m—and only then!—an eh sound becomes more like ih. It’s that same sound from “fih-ull.” Many are familiar with southerners who pronounce pen and pin the same way; this is one of the many overlaps between Black and southern English. But that means that in Black English, gem and pen sound more like “jim” and “pin.” Not exactly, but close—as in all human speech, distinctions between sounds in Black English can be very fine-grained.

So: in Black English there is a special sound, somewhere between ee and ih, that you turn ee into before l’s, and eh into before m and n. Any speaker of Black English is subconsciously doing that day in and day out. And it isn’t about leaving anything out or off—this adds something, as if Standard English sounds weren’t complicated enough already!

5. Pronouns

A language can be complicated in ways that we never think about; it takes an outsider to notice anything strange going on. Someone I once knew directed a play with a lead who was one of those enviably perfect bilinguals—in her case, between German and English. However, even though she had a perfect American accent and you’d ordinarily never think she was from anywhere but the United States, her Swiss upbringing had made her German ever so slightly better. This came out, for example, in how she read a line in rehearsals where her character asked, “So how do you like them apples?” She put the emphasis on the word apples, thinking the sentence was really about apples. “So how do you like them apples?” she would say.

But we natives know that this is a familiar expression where the proper rendition is “So how do you like them apples?” To be a native American English speaker is to know that you say it with the emphasis on them. None of us knows why we say that; apparently, there was once some situation contrasting certain new apples—them apples—from previous ones. We just say it. It’s an exception, an oddity, something that doesn’t follow the rules. It’s a little challenge in the language, of the kind all languages have.

Now, think about the expression, “I’m going to fire his ass.” Imagine how that Swiss actress would likely have said this. “I’m going to fire his ass,” she’d have said, likely as baffled as to how buttocks can be cast from employment separately from their possessor as she must have been about the stray reference to apples in the middle of a play that was about kings and magic. But we native speakers know, black or not, that the way to say it is “I’m going to fire his ass.” His ass is not emphasized. The sentence is basically a way of saying “I’m going to fire him,” where you don’t emphasize him anymore than you would his ass.

Here is a wider selection of examples from an article about the use of ass with pronuns:

I’ma aggravate his ass.

I pray to the Lord I ain’ got no TBs from his ass.

Ain’ nobody told his ass that.

He fell down with his stupid ass.

One laughs, but there’s also system here. The Swiss actress would perkily enunciate “He fell down with his stupid ass!” But actually, Black English has an alternate pronoun to him, used to convey dismissal. Of course, this is true not only with him but with all of the pronouns: “I could sue they asses,” “I got my ass out of there.” To use this system, you have to know that the emphasis does not fall on ass, anymore than it does on apples in “How do you like them apples?” You also have to know that the meaning is idiomatic, that no actual ass is being discussed. This is, in other words, an irregularity, the kind of thing that makes a language complicated. Standard English requires that you know that the past tense of drink is drank but that of think is thought, and a hundred-plus other cases like that (which Black English speakers use just like everyone else). But in addition to those idiosyncrasies, Black English has pronouns that you have to store in the “irregularity” part of your brain, along with thought and drank.

And there’s even more. “Why’s she complaining about the low turnout? She didn’t even come herself,” someone might say. In that case, herself is an emphatic pronoun. However, Black English has a special set of those: In Black English, it could be “She didn’t even come her damn self.” But I don’t just mean that a black person might curse, because anyone might, of course. There’s an accent emphasis again. The correct enunciation is her damn self, not her damn self. A savvy director of a black play might call someone out on this if it were in a line and they were reading it with the emphasis on the self. “You didn’t even come your damn self,” or, as I recall from an episode of the late, great black sitcom bonbon Living Single, Queen Latifah’s Khadija telling Kim Fields’s Régine “You grew up in the projects your damn self.”

If we put together a Rosetta Stone kit to teach Ebonics, we’d have to get across a system of pronouns that looked like the list below, where you have to know that you use a different set of pronouns to convey dismissal, and that those pronouns are pronounced with unexpected emphasis patterns. To show that his ass, for example, is pronounced not “his ass” but as if you were just saying him, I am putting a grave accent over ass, as per linguists’ practice when showing low pitch or tone. Note that this is all the kind of thing one would quietly dread having to master when paging ahead in a textbook to see what was coming up. This, ladies and gentlemen, is Ebonics!

Black English has, of all things, a list of emphatic dismissive pronouns. Obviously, not all speakers use them, given that ass classifies as a bad word to many. However, profanity is still language: We use it according to rules just as complex and nuanced as those for the rest of the language’s words.

And just in case it’s hard to see that this type of usage makes Black English more rather than less, given that it’s difficult to completely dissociate the profane from the trivial, I will add that I am giving a highly simplified portrait of this aspect of Black English. The ass here is quite complicated, almost intimidatingly so when one really digs in. To take just one example, you can also use the ass pronouns as subjects, at the start of a sentence. To say Frank is shy, you can say in Black English “Frank ass is shy,” where the possessive has been elided from Frank but the sentence means “Frank’s ass is shy.” Or: “Carl’s in trouble” can be “Carl ass in trouble.” Now, what part of speech would you say ass is in “Frank ass is shy” or “Carl ass in trouble”? Is ass a noun, even when no posterior is actually being referred to? The sentence quite simply does not mean that Frank’s butt is uncomfortable upon meeting new people, so how is ass a noun? But if it isn’t, then what is it?

Only a linguist—and even there, only a certain sliver among them—could care. But the lesson is that Black English has a system, and in the case of these ass pronouns, it is more complex than Standard English. And while we’re at it, note also that Black English is also more complex than Standard English in having a different you in the plural, y’all, instead of just having you for both one and more than one person.

But Black English Is Less Complex in So Many Ways. Why?

HOWEVER, THE FACT THAT BLACK ENGLISH “has it going on” as the expression goes, can’t be the whole story. The skeptic—and I am assuming you, the reader, are one—will continue to notice that in so many other ways—and really, more—Black English is less complicated than Standard English. Skeptics, like everyone else, know how to count and are sensitive to issues of degree. Black English does have a narrative tense and a counterexpectational marker and other things, but this is also a dialect in which one expresses oneself in a sentence like this one: “Why she ain’t call me when she know dis de best time?” There’s “Why she ain’t” instead of the more elaborate business of saying “Why didn’t she.” “She know” instead of “she knows.” “Dis” instead of “this.” “Dis de best,” leaving out the “is.” Knowing about the complexities doesn’t render one suddenly deaf to these things, and the skeptic will still wonder, “Isn’t there still something wrong with a way of speaking that leaves out so many things from Standard English, even if it does have some cool stuff of its own? To the skeptic, Black English may now be the equivalent of the person you call “sharp”—nominally a compliment, but actually a term used for people you don’t really think are all that smart. “Sharp” really means “smarter than you’d expect for a dimwit.”

There is a ready response to this, though. Here is a passage of Old English that is pretty easy for us to wrap our heads around, despite the fact that Old English was more like German than like the language we speak:

God gesceop us twa eagan and twa earan,

God made us two eyes and two ears,

twa nosðyrlu, twegen weleras,

two nostrils, two lips,

twa handa, and twegen fet

two hands, and two feet.

There are just two things to notice about the Old English.

First, there were lots more ways to make a noun plural than by adding an s. Today, there is a handful of words whose plurals are irregular: men, women, children, geese, mice, oxen, feet, and a few others. But in Old English, plurals like that were the norm. Thus, in our sentence, the only word that takes the s we’re familiar with is the one for lips, weleras. Otherwise, the words for eye and ear take an an, the word for nostril takes a u, the word for hand takes an a, and then the plural fet is weird, just as forming the plural feet still is.

Then, second, notice that two hands and two feet is twa handa and twegen fet. Why twa for some words and twegen for others? Because in Old English, as in any normal European language, things had genders for no real reason. Twegen was two when used with masculine nouns. Twa was for feminine and neuter ones.

Here’s the point: Modern English has lost almost all of those plural forms, and it doesn’t give gender to inanimate objects at all (except for quaint things like referring to ships as feminine, but, come on). That means that Modern English, for all the pride it has inspired in so many, is really crappy Old English! To someone who spoke English as it originally was, a person saying ears instead of earan and hands instead of handa would have sounded barbarian, and his using the word two with everything, instead of having different forms for different genders, would have sounded equally degraded. Plus—if we really want to get into it, the y in the nostril word—nosðyrlu—was pronounced like the cute and tricky u in French in words like lune. Old English had sounds like that; Modern English dumped them.

And of course, here in our time none of this matters a whit. Modern English chucked most of what made Old English complicated, in fact. It happened when the Vikings invaded England, learned Old English badly because as adults they picked it up imperfectly, and then passed their rendition on to the kids they conceived with English-speaking women. But here we are, quite unashamed, even if apprised of the reality. The English we speak certainly seems to do everything a language should, even if eons ago some people too old to completely learn a language tore off some of its tinsel.

The point is that later in the same way, English got another close shave when African adults were taken as slaves to the American South. They, too, were past the age when one can learn a language perfectly, and didn’t pick up some of the bells and whistles that native speakers used, such as “Why didn’t she call, she knows,” and other things which, as familiar as they are to us, are not exactly necessary to communication. The s in the third-person-singular verb, for example, is no more necessary to expressing a point than silverware having genders was in Old English; life thrives without both features, and so very many others.

Black English subtracts from Standard English, then, for the very same reason Modern English subtracts from Old English. However, in the grand scheme of things, it bears mentioning that what Black English shaved away from Standard English is but a dribble compared to what Modern English dumped from Old. Roughly, Old English dumped a roasting pan’s worth of grammar to become Modern English. To become Black English, Modern English dumped only about as much grammar as would fill the small glass one is typically served Bailey’s liqueur in—you only ever get a generous smidgen, so little that if you spilled it on yourself, you’d barely bother to wipe it off.

So, unless we’re going back to talking about our eagan, earan, nosdyrlu, and handa, what Black English lacks that Standard English has can’t qualify it as the speech of dolts. When humans move, or are moved, in large numbers and have to pick up a language quickly, typically their version of the language is more streamlined than the original one. This is worldwide linguistic reality, not special pleading for the speech of black people in the United States. We know this from Modern English itself, as well as, if anyone asks, from Mandarin Chinese compared to other Chineses like Cantonese, Persian compared to languages related to it, like Pashto and Kurdish, Indonesian, Swahili, and many, many others.

A Worldwide Story

MY APPROACH APPLIES TO A GREAT MANY speech varieties beyond Black English. There are analogous misunderstandings between professors and the public about ways of speaking that linguists describe as a series of shirkings of standard language rules, supposing that the systematicity of the shirkings will earn the respect of the general public. This happens, for example, with Creole languages, created by slaves in the Caribbean and elsewhere, such as Jamaican patois, Guyanese “Creolese,” Belizean Creole, and the “Pidgin” in Hawaii. At academic conferences today on Creole languages, one can attend presentations decrying Creole speakers’ and their teachers’ contempt for their own languages despite linguists’ pointing to their systematicity for eons. Crucially, these presentations are unchanged from ones given in 1990, when I started out as a linguist, and surely even before that. New tactics are needed.

Some may still maintain that a shoe has yet to drop if we don’t address the role that racism plays in people’s evaluation of Black English and sociologically similar varieties. However, while that role is real, telling people that they are immoral if they consider a dialect broken does not do much of a job of convincing. Linguistic logic has a much better chance of doing so. It is reasonable to think that racism will make people resist the force of reason anyway. However, in my experience, this, luckily, is not the case—at least nothing close to always. I hope I have made at least some headway in convincing you that Black English is not broken English, but an alternate English.

CHAPTER TWO

What Do You Mean “Sounds Black”?

DON’T BLACK PEOPLE JUST HAVE SOUTHERN ACCENTS?

WHAT does SOMEBODY MEAN by “sounding black”? To be American is to find the very issue ticklish.

A Delicate Conversation

I WRITE ON RACE AS WELL AS LANGUAGE, and many of my opinions on race are termed controversial. Most people avoid controversy, and as such, many are under the impression that someone like me deliberately seeks out statements that he knows will make people angry, because he enjoys stirring up the pot. Actually, the root of all of my “controversial” ideas is that I initially assume that people have the same take on something that I do, only to discover, much to my surprise, that they do not.

I encountered this at a party in the early nineties when I made a casual reference to black people’s having a dialect of their own. The guests were all black, with a range of educational levels, but all were cultured, intellectually omnivorous, opinionated people. Much to my surprise, no one in the room knew what I meant about there being a black way to talk. The very idea irritated most of them, and the conversation even got tense at times.

It was a learning experience for me, because these were all perfectly reasonable people. More to the point, almost any American would immediately have identified all of them as black on the phone, even if they were reciting from a phone book. That is, they all “sounded black.” And yet, the closest they could come to an understanding of what I meant was that some of them acknowledged that there is uniquely black slang (to show how long ago this was, the prime example adduced was “MacDaddy”).

These people were representative of a general relationship black people—and much of the rest of America—have to the idea that there is a black sound. During O. J. Simpson’s first trial, his lawyer Johnnie Cochran rebutted a witness’s claim to have heard a “black voice” when passing the fence of the house where Simpson’s ex-wife was murdered. “What’s a black voice?” Cochran indignantly asked, with the implication that the very idea was a stereotype founded in racism and minstrel caricature. The mostly black jury agreed.

We can’t know whether Cochran genuinely thought there was no such thing as a black voice, and let’s face it, he was doing his job. However, the very fact that doing it meant casting the “black voice” issue that way for the jury illustrated black America’s take on the whole issue. It is reasonable to suppose that if Cochran and the jury had been at the dinner party I had been at, their response to the idea of a black dialect would have been similar to that of the people who were there.

Why does the very notion of sounding black get under people’s skin? For black people, it’s because Black English is so often associated with stupidity that one can’t help wanting to disidentify from it. Especially when we are trained to avoid stereotyping, and because black people are often the object lessons, the idea of sounding black can bring minstrelsy and other caricatures to mind.

Yet what it all comes down to is something I noticed when I was a kid, something that countless other black people have mentioned noticing, too, as they grew up—with whites only occasionally doing so, because of a sense that the issue is somehow improper. When my mother was driving me to and from school, we used to listen to the local black radio stations (Philadelphia’s WHAT and WDAS for those from there), and I noticed that during the commercials, even when the text was neutral, with no slang, and the man was speaking good old-fashioned announcerese, you could always tell that he or she was black. I asked Mom one day, “How come you can always tell the person talking is black?” She said, “It has something to do with the shape of the sinuses.”

I don’t know where Mom got that explanation, but it made sense to me at the time that there is clearly a black sound, and that it might seem as if black people have a differently shaped resonating chamber in their heads, a different ring or timbre. However, the black sound—and there is one—is not about biology.

Past the Distractions to the Heart of the Matter

I SUBMIT THAT ALMOST ANYBODY who grew up in the United States has a deep-seated sense that indeed there is a black way to sound. I do so on the basis not only of basic perception but of a great many studies that have proved it. Americans white and black are extremely accurate at determining white or black race when hearing only a voice. I doubt that surprises many, deep down. Let’s face it: If Melissa McCarthy and Viola Davis both read the first five pages of Green Eggs and Ham, no one would be under the impression that McCarthy was black or Davis white. And that’s despite the fact that neither of them have idiosyncratic voices that would identify them, in the way that Robin Williams or Joan Rivers did. (Once I heard a voice in a mainstream cartoon television show—Sofia the First—with my back turned, subconsciously processed a queen character’s voice as black, and found on looking up the voice casting that the actress was, in fact, Viola Davis.) Moreover, one of the most paradoxical things I have ever come across as a linguist is that black Americans, despite often being so skeptical that there is such a thing as a black voice, at the same time readily observe it when a black person “doesn’t sound black” or “sounds white.”

All this shows that while resistance to the notion of a black voice is understandable, there is a lack of fit between that overt resistance and people’s internal perceptions. Call it, along the lines taught us by Dr. Kahneman, the difference between thinking fast (“He doesn’t sound black!”) and thinking slow (“How can you sound black?”). The mind operates usefully on both levels.

However, the issue of black speech is so sensitive that various elisions, distractions, and misperceptions have accreted around it—it can be maddeningly difficult to see (or hear) it plain. As such, before analyzing our object of study, we must clarify just what we mean by this sound. We need to peel away some layers to get down to the case itself.

First, speech entails both sentence patterns and sound, and here we are concerned with sound, not the grammatical constructions of the kind discussed earlier. It’s more obvious that some grammatical constructions are specific to black Americans (although of course, generally viewed as mistakes). The dropping of the verb be is an example: “She my sister” is not New England, Minnesota, or even uneducated white southern, but specifically Black English. However, black people don’t say things like “She my sister” when speaking Standard English. The question is why you can hear that someone is black even when the person isn’t saying anything of that kind.

Second, I don’t mean slang. Again, I doubt anyone thinks there is no such thing as black slang, even if there are plenty of whites using it. Hip-hop slang alone makes the point rather clearly. The main thing is that even listening to a recording of an elderly black woman talking to a friend in church, most of us could hear that she was black even though she would be vastly unlikely to be using any street slang.

Third, it isn’t simply that black men have deeper voices, à la Barry White and Isaac Hayes. Yes, some people do think this answers the question, including one of the people at the dinner party I described. And it wouldn’t be impossible if culturally there was a tendency for black men to pitch their regular speaking voices at a lower point than other men do, subconsciously mimicking black men they grow up around who do this. I highly suspect there is such a tendency, although (1) there is no research on the issue and (2) the way such things generally pan out suggests that if one measured the default speaking pitch of hundreds of white men and hundreds of black men, then after averaging out the data we would find that the degree to which the American black male speaking voice is pitched statistically lower than the American white male’s would turn out to be some uninterestingly small figure.

In any case, the whole issue is ultimately another layer of the onion we need to peel away. The black sound we think about can come from voices of any pitch. Does a black boy before his voice has cracked sound white? Of course not, which leads us back to the question: what makes a nine-year-old, or even a two-year-old, already sound black? In the same vein, one might suppose that more black women than white ones have what might be described as a certain huskiness in their vocal tone. That could prove to be true, but do black women without that husky tone sound white? Does the six-year-old black girl, sounding identifiably black already, have a husky vocal tone? No. There is a certain common element, a sound, beyond that.

Fourth, the black sound is not simply a southern one. The black sound and the white southern one overlap, but only that. The first time I heard a white person assume that black speech was simply southern, I was as struck as a person is when, say, they first learn that television shows are produced to sell the products advertised in the commercials, and thus are entertainment between commercials, rather than the commercials being interludes amid the entertainment. I had to change my lens, so to speak.

It had never occurred to me that there was no difference between the speech of my mother’s Atlanta relatives and the speech of the white southerners around them. However, I understood where these whites were coming from. To have learned the dangers of stereotyping properly, one is aware that the sense that black people have their own way of talking may be an illusion. We might imagine, for example, that if we showed a video of a white person talking but dubbed in a black person’s voice on the sound track, we would simply process the person as speaking with a Southern accent. But that’s just it: We wouldn’t. The raft of studies showing how accurate Americans are at telling race from voice alone cuts neatly through the idea that black people simply speak southern English, as does the fact that in describing southern white English versus Black English, linguists have identified a great many differences. Even if our hypothetical video included no slang at all, if someone filmed an interview with a white man, had Dave Chappelle record his words, and then dubbed them in and showed the interview, almost all observers would hear a black voice for some reason coming from a white man, not just a white southern accent.

It shouldn’t be surprising that black people do not sound exactly like white southerners. Given the rather hideous relationship between white and black southerners throughout most of American history, wouldn’t it seem counterintuitive that whites and blacks there ended up talking exactly the same way? Given that whites and blacks have coexisted in the South for so long, we would expect that their speech varieties would overlap partially, of course, and they do. But in newsreels of Montgomery, Selma, and Birmingham in the 1950s and 1960s, the black people most certainly did not speak with the same sound as the whites, and we would be shocked if they had.

Fifth—and this is probably the most important caveat here—I don’t mean that every black person in the United States has this sound.

Of course, just as it is often said that Barack Obama isn’t a Muslim, although there wouldn’t be anything wrong with it if he were, if every black person for some reason sounded black there wouldn’t be anything wrong with that, either, because the “blaccent,” as I like to call it, is not wrong in any way. I am unaware of any sentiment that what makes someone sound black is erroneous per se, in contrast to how people feel about Black English grammatical constructions. However, as it happens, all black people do not have a blaccent. Black people who don’t happen to grow up around many other blacks, or whose black families for one reason or another don’t use the dialect themselves and don’t have the sound, may lack it entirely. There are no official numbers on this, but I would venture, based on my experience since 1965, that while a great many black people don’t use Black English grammar or slang or use it very little, about forty-nine out of fifty black people do, to some degree, sound identifiably black when they speak.

Thus, to assert that there is a black sound is not to assert something as kooky as that anyone who is a black American has, for some genetic reason, a particular way of configuring his mouth and vocal cords when speaking. It is to say that black culture, like most cultures, includes a way of speaking, and that this way of speaking includes not only consciously wielded things such as slang and expressions but also something less consciously wielded, the blaccent.

This sheds light on, for example, an episode in a chat group where someone once asked, “What makes a white person’s voice and a black person’s voice sound different? Usually you can tell if a person is white or black by the sound of their voice, though there are exceptions.” One respondent said it was that black men have deeper voices. More interesting, though, was a later response:

Do you realize how utterly nonsensical this query is? Can you tell the difference between a black Estonian’s voice and a White South African’s? Or, the difference between a White Brazilian and Black Swede’s voice? Or, what about that of a White Nigerian and a Black uruguayan[sic]? You are aware that such people can and do exist, correct? It would only take one test of any of the pairs above to falsify your claim. Perhaps you should get out more. . . .

Shortly after this, one of the administrators declared, “This thread is nonsense, therefore it is closed.” But no, let’s reopen it, because there is no claim about all black people in the world, or, therefore, genes.

We are now prepared to address the actual issue before us. Why is it here in the United States we all sense—or maybe almost all of us sense—that a voice can sound black? I will first present what the difference consists of, and then why it exists.

Blaccent, Level One

ALTHOUGH WE DON’T PUT IT THIS WAY, in relation to white American English, black people tend to have an accent. It isn’t that either way of speaking is better in any way; one could also declare that white people have an accent, or that we all have accents. But given that the majority defines the norm, and there are fewer black people than white people in America, the common intuition will be that black people have an accent, just like Minnesotans, southern whites, and South Bostonians.

This issue can be viewed as having two levels. The surface level, more easily perceptible, has been mined by linguists for decades and constitutes the “classic,” obvious differences in sound between black and white American speech. The deeper level is the aspect of the sound that leads one to wonder why even if a person doesn’t sound black in an immediately obvious way—for example, like the typical rapper—we can still somehow detect “blackness” in their voice. There is a correlation here, imperfect but robust, with class and education: Those black Americans I refer to when describing the deeper level tend to have more access to education and more contact with whites.

On the surface level are such things as ing and ang. One shakes that thang more than that thing; one might hear someone sang rather than sing, and one hears the occasional joke about someone ordering chicken wangs. Such speech paterns are also used by some white southerners, demonstrating the overlap between Black English and southern English.

However, other things are local to Black English. One is that wrinkle I mentioned earlier, that a word like eel sounds more like ill—or, “ih-uhl”—and therefore meal as mill, wheel as will, and so on. I first noticed this while watching, of all things, a Burger King commercial in the early nineties and became aware that I spontaneously knew that the boy doing the voiceover was black, since he pronounced meal as “mih-ull” (I soon found out that specialists had identified this long before). Another subtle feature like that one is that ar sounds more like or—though not exactly like it, but in between, such that “Get in the car” sounds rather like “Get in the cawr”—or, hard is more like hawrd. I recall hearing one person doing this around 1980 as she became close to a circle of black girls, though she hadn’t grown up in the dialect. One of the girls’ names was Warri, and I noticed that the girl who was taking up Black English started pronouncing her name more like “Wore-y,” which was the way the other girls pronounced it. This young lady was subconsciously internalizing the Black English sound system.

As for the consonants, in Black English r is eliminated after vowels, and hence mo’ for more, flo’ for floor, and the famous ho’ for whore. And then there is Tyler Perry’s character’s name Madea, which is a traditional black American shortening of my dear. In other American dialects, r ia dropped like this, too, but is replaced with a little uh sound: The New Yawkese speaker says staw-uh for store. Black English takes it all the way to sto’.

Black English also treats th differently depending on where it sits in the word. We should zero in for a second on something about th: There are two ways to say it. The th sound in thin is different from the th sound in this—we might say that the one in this is softer. At the front of a word, for the softer th, Black English has d: dis, dat, doze. This, of course, is typical of colloquial white English in a great many places, too. But then if the th at the beginning of the word is the harder sound, as in thin, Black English isn’t different at all: Thin in Black English is just thin.

But, when th is at the end of a word, it changes in a different way in Black English. One of the most gracious things I have ever seen a person do was after a wedding. I was standing with a group in the lobby and someone’s father went around passing out Clorets mints, saying “Bad breath . . . , Bad breath . . .” This is one of those cases where print just can’t convey the intonation. Imagine the way someone says, when there’s no danger afoot but he’s just letting you know you should be wary of something, “Watch out—you never know.” “Watch out” is said with “out” higher than “watch” and then falling down a touch, as in “WATCH OUUT. . .” That’s how this man said, gently as he passed each clump of people, “BAD BREATH. . .,” as in “You might have gotten bad breath while sitting with your mouth closed for so long—here’s relief.” A very apt, useful, and generous thing to do. But, I’m leaving something out. He was black, most of the crowd was as well, and so he was naturally dwelling in the dialect, and what he actually was saying was “BAD BREF. . . , BAD BREF. . .”

That was because the harder th of thin, when at the end of a word, becomes f. Meanwhile, if it’s the softer th, as in smooth, then you get v. That’s where someone like black comedian J. B. Smoove (best known for his character on Curb Your Enthusiasm) gets his name: Smoove is good Black English for smooth.

Blaccent, Level Two

I HAVE BY NO MEANS GIVEN A COMPLETE LIST of the ways that the sounds in full-blown Black English differ from their equivalents in Standard English. I needed only sketch in a few of the details. However, some black people don’t use these sounds at all. Most do, but more as seasoning rather than as default speech. A person who might say bref in a certain situation might well say breath in a different one. This is termed code switching, which people do worldwide across separate languages as well as separate dialects, with one code used for formality and another for intimacy. In Black English, bref and aks are for the informal, the humorous, for striking a note of honesty, etc., and are most likely used with other black people, or nonblack people one is especially comfortable with. Otherwise, one says breath and ask and thinks nothing of it. It’s a cookout versus a staff meeting. The practice is largely subconscious; most rarely think of themselves as talking in two ways until it’s brought up. Code switching is often presented as complicated or exotic, but it is a perfectly normal way of using language, as I will discuss later.

However, the kind of blaccent I am interested in is the kind that is not subject to code switching, but is instead a background factor, leading to the question people ask as to how it is that you can always hear a person’s race even when that person doesn’t sound especially black in the classic, surface ways I just described. Even black people saying breath and ask rather than bref and aks are usually still perceptible as black in this subtler but unmistakable way. It is natural to wonder why.

It’s mostly about vowels. Obscure sonic flutters though they seem to be, they are part of the black American cultural tool kit. Five little frills, one could call them, that immediately say black to an American listener even when someone is speaking Standard English. It’s a random collection of things, nevertheless, each frill does much to define black American speech. (My students Samuel Heavenrich and Cole Hickman have shed beautiful light on this—thank you gentlemen!)

Basically, much of what sounds black even when someone is speaking Standard English comes from the middle of the mouth. It can feel as if our speech just comes from the throat, and it does at first. But before it comes out, it gets channeled through different levels of the space inside of our mouths—namely, the top, the middle, and the bottom. It doesn’t feel that way all the time, because we’re not dealing with anything as topward as the nasal cavity or downward as under the tongue. But here’s how to get a feel for it, literally: Say cat, cot. Did you do it? Okay, now say bet, boat, and then say beet, boot. Now say those pairs in sequence: cat, cot; bet, boat; beet, boot. then do it again. Notice that the pairs sit in different places, and that more specifically the pairs sit on different levels in the mouth. Namely, they feel like this:

beet, boot

bet, boat

cat, cot

Cat, cot is down on the bottom, bet, boat is in the middle, and beet, boat is up top.

Here is Frill One. One of the middle vowels is e, and when it comes before m or n, it sounds more like i: this is the famous southern trait where pen sounds more like pin. But it must be understood that this is not a matter of just the one word pen, but any word where e comes before m or n. This trait holds fast among black speakers, even when bref for breath doesn’t, partly because it’s subtle, something almost no one would notice (except with pen, which has by chance attracted a lot of attention). Even among highly Standard-sounding black announcers and newscasters, for example, extent sounds a bit like extint, sense will sound a bit like since, and attention will sound rather like attintion.

Frill Two is also in this middle zone. Say bet, Bert, and boat and notice that all the words sit on one level in your mouth—you didn’t have to shift up or down. Try bet, bat and boat to get a sense of how it would feel to shift levels in the middle, and then do bet, Bert, boat again and sense how it feels like driving a smooth old-fashioned boat of a car, such as the Caprice Classic my parents bought around the time I asked Mom that question (you rolled the windows up by pressing a button!!!!!). Often there’s something going on with the er sound in black Standard English: It is more like “uh-r” than “er.” The word work, instead of the Standard English pronunciation “werk,” is more like “wuh-rk.” Curb is “cuh-rb,” rather than “cerb,” and so on. Not in a drawly, obvious way—but just enough that these words, quietly, different from the way in which whites say them.

Frill Three is one more thing on the middle plain, the sound uh. Nothing seems outwardly middle about that sound, but again, you can feel it with a quick trick. This time say bet, but, and boat, and notice that just as with bet, Bert, and boat, there’s no bump on the path from bet to boat. The vowels are all on the same level, the middle.

One of the things that makes a person sound black is that the uh sound is pronounced a little higher up in the mouth. This difference is utterly impossible to indicate via spelling. However, the way a person might spontaneously try to imitate either a white southerner or a black person saying the sound uh will capture, in exaggerated fashion, what this difference is. Venture a “redneck” pronunciation of love—you are pronouncing uh further up in the mouth than you would normally. That, done to a much lesser, but perceptible, extent, is part of the black sound. But, cut, love, up, must, tub, button, come, does—any word with the uh sound will have that slight difference.

The last two Frills are down on the bottom. To force a metaphor, Black Standard English is just like mainstream Standard English on the top—you have to peel away the surface and look at the middle and then the bottom to see the differences. On the bottom, remember our shop-window words are cat, cot. This is where Frill Four happens. It’s a quiet little chain reaction between those two sounds.

First, many black speakers pronounce the ah sound (as in cot) a little further to the front than most whites, in the direction where the cat vowel is pronounced. That is, a light blaccent often means that, say, cot is pronounced with a shade of cat in it.

Then, because this puts a little pressure on the cat vowel, this vowel moves up a litle bit and sounds a tiny it like “ket.” Just a bit. What happens to the cot and cat vowels is almost impossible to indicate in ordinary writing, but imagine how Chris Rock would say “Got that?” The difference between how he would say that and Rachel Maddow would nails the nature of these vowels in a light blaccent: as subtle as it is, it is part of what reads “black” in the back of an American mind.

Finally, Frill Five is also on the bottom. It involves a little more about the sound ah, this time when it is part of the diphthong ah-ee, as in rice, high, or tidy. I’ve mentioned the monophthongization of this sound into “ah” alone: Nice becoming “nahs.” This isn’t only a trait of full-blown Black English; a shade of it seasons the speech of many black speakers even in Standard English, though not so much that it sounds rural or cartoonish, as if someone were doing a news report and saying “watt rahs” for white rice. However, for such speakers white rice sounds a little more like “watt rahs” than if a white person said it—just enough more that one hears the voice as not coming from a white person.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is quite a bit of why you can tell someone is black even when they are speaking Standard English. To wit, a simple sentence like “But, what’s worse is, the event isn’t even happening” can sound black, simply in that But would have the slightly higher uh sound, worse would sound somewhat like “wuh-rs,” event would sound a little like “evint,” and the a sound in happening would be pronounced a touch further to the front than if a white person was saying it. It’s just tiny things like that, hardly things anyone would consider mispronunciations, or often even consider at all. They just are.

Diversities Amidst the Unity

MY APPROACH HERE IS DEFINITELY more macro than micro. The full picture is busier. Without a doubt, Black English manifests itself in different subdialects nationwide—black people in New York sound different from black people in Atlanta, who sound different from black people in Los Angeles and Texas and Detroit and so on. Competing schools of hip-hop have revealed this more vibrantly than ever, a memorable example being the thurr for there in St. Louis, broadcast nationwide by the hit song “Right Thurr” in 2003. (As always, it’s not just about words but sounds in general; as, for example, in St. Louis, that ere/air sound—at the St. Louis airport I once heard a black woman tell a coworker to get a passenger a “wheelchurr”).

But: the diversity of Black English dialects must not be taken as evidence that it is a distortion to think of a single Black English at all, because the basic traits I have described are found in all these dialects. The New York black person may well pronounce a word like call more like “coo-ull” and boy like “boo-ee,” but she also has the “watt rahs” hint, the tight cat/cot sound, and everything else. Southern black people have various features of speech known only in their region, but also the core ones of everywhere else. A neat example: The St. Louis woman actually said not “wheelchurr” but “willchurr,” with the general Black English pronunciation of the ee sound more like ih before l. The woman’s pronunciation of chair was local; the wheel was national. To speak of one Black English is no less reductive than to speak of cats rather than of specific types of cats, such as Angora, Burmese, and Siamese.

Gender can also condition the extent to which one sounds black and when. Studies of Black English have often found that black men tend to sample the dialect in their speech to a higher degree than black women. This correlates with my intuition from my own experience, and, I highly suspect, that of others, which is that black women are more likely to be completely, or all but, undetectable as black when speaking Standard English than black men. This difference is hardly a quirk about black Americans, but conforms to a worldwide pattern linguists have discovered, according to which women are more proper in their speech in more contexts than men are. While American men and women may both say in’ instead of ing depending on where they are and whom they are talking to, typically men will say in’ more than women, and it will be women who in formal situations are more likely to let in’ go completely. Given that Black English is processed as informal (and even as wrong), it is natural that black women speaking Standard English would leave the “seasoning” of the frills behind more than men do.

Why Do Black People Have Vowels That Are Slightly Different From Those of Other Americans?

THE EXPLANATION BEGINS WITH the kind of thing that makes French different from Spanish, believe it or not. In Latin, the word for new was novum. The Romance languages developed from Latin. In French, new is neuf. In Spanish, it is nuevo. In Italian, it is nuovo; in Romanian, nou. The vowel o in Latin’s novum has changed from language to language because it is natural for vowels to change. In fact, we know they always will. The only question is which new vowel they will change into; there are always many possibilities, the choice of which is often determined by chance. An o sound like the one in Latin’s novum, for example, could become an oo, or an aw, or even become pronounced as “way”—as it did in Spanish’s nuevo (pronounced “nway-vo”). In one place, a vowel will become one thing; somewhere else it will go in a different direction.

This means that the way a language is spoken from place to place will differ in terms of sounds overall. If the differences are allowed to progress for long enough, the two ways of speaking will vary so much that they become separate languages. That’s the case with French and Spanish. But if the process has only gone so far, then all you have is different dialects. That’s cat pronounced a touch more like “ket,” “extint” versus extent, and the other linguistic differences between black and white Americans even when speaking Standard English.

In other words, different communities have different dialects, and this affects vowels. We are not surprised that whites in Brooklyn, New York, speak differently than the ones in Connecticut, or that ones in Minnesota speak differently than the ones in Arizona. One could wonder, then, why black Americans have their own way of speaking despite living so often among whites and hearing Standard English as spoken by whites in the media so much (I have encountered that question now and then). Crucially, however, a community need not be a geographic entity: Communities of people can occupy the same physical space and remain distinct in various ways. The status of community is determined as much by social identification as by location—your community is whom you are closest to socially and emotionally. Also, the way one speaks is primarily shaped by one’s peers in live interaction, not by language as heard on television nor by the speech of people you interact with often but do not consider intimates.

For example, when I refer to the speech of whites in Brooklyn, most will intuit that I mean not the speech of the educated, upwardly mobile characters on Girls, but the working-class Brooklyn “New Yawkese.” Note: One is not surprised that working-class Brooklyn whites do not sound like affluent Brooklyn whites, even though they work among them and are bathed in mainstream Standard English in the media throughout their lives. Working-class white Brooklyn is a community within the larger New York community, and as such, it has its own accent. Naturally, we think “They talk like one another.” In the same way, in the black community, whether or not the community is geographically separate, you learn your vowels not from the people on TV, nor from your white teachers at school or white neighbors, but from your family and especially your friends. Within a community in this sense, black Americans, whether they live in segregated communities or not, have their own vowels, just as Spanish people have their own vowels, which are different from French people’s.

In the 1970s, I lived for the first half of my childhood in the Philadelphia neighborhood of Mount Airy, one of America’s first officially integrated neighborhoods. Black and white people lived there in roughly equal numbers, often with black households alternating with white ones. Black kids growing up there had many white teachers, as well as white neighbors often right next door. Plus, in the seventies, especially, these black kids grew up watching television shows that were still mostly white. Yet, all of them whom I knew grew up identifiable as black on the phone. This is what we would expect: They spoke like the people they were closest to emotionally, not residentially.

The fact that highly educated black American people usually speak with the Five Frills even in the most formal of situations can be taken as an indication that on a profound level, however comfortably they have navigated the mainstream world, their ultimate comfort zone is with other black people. In Mount Airy in the seventies, although there were no overt interethnic tensions, by and large black kids played with black kids and white kids played with white kids. The normal result of black kids spending more time with one another was the preservation of their particular sound colorings, in contrast to the sound colorings of the white kids playing down the street.

One could see the Five Frills as linguistic evidence of the persistence of a color line in America. People truly comfortable with one another talk alike, especially after a while, and certainly after generations. We’re not there yet.

Expressing an Identity?

THERE IS A STRAIN OF THOUGHT that would distort my meaning here—namely, that black people purposely change their speech as a matter of ethnic self-presentation. This approach fits into a larger way of thinking, common in the social sciences, that describes people shaping their language in order to express their identities. They do in some ways, but the reader would be misled in taking that from what I have described. A great deal of language use and the way it changes is subconscious. The Black English sounds evolved because black people have existed separately from whites geographically and spiritually. That means there is no way black people could not have developed a different sound system from whites under these conditions, any more than that people could still be speaking Latin now in France and Spain.

The Five Frills, then, are not intentional, either. They are the last things remaining from Level One, when a black person has had richer contact with the mainstream than all but a sliver of black people did in the past. Operating below the level of consciousness, the Five Frills are not “expressions,” but echoes. In terms of how language and linguistics work, it is predictable that for the most educated black speakers, blaccent would be the one aspect of Black English that they display. When people learn new languages, their native accent is the hardest thing to let go of—we are all familiar with people whose English is perfect except for a slight accent; your sound holds on tight deep within you. For exactly that reason, when black Americans have had enough contact with white Americans to talk very much like them, if a whisper of difference remains, it is in the accent that we would expect to find it. Because accent operates below the level of consciousness, black people may find it genuinely confusing to be told that they sound black when speaking perfect Standard English, just as white Americans might be surprised when told that they pronounce the t’s in butter more like d’s, unlike most Brits, who do not.

Language is hardly the only part of human culture that operates below the level of consciousness. A person often doesn’t realize they exhibit a cultural trait until they come in contact with people of other cultures, as per the common observation that you can’t truly know what it is to be an American until you’ve spent time in a different country. For example, it is often noted that many black American men have a certain way of walking (sometimes termed the short drop). This highly particular sequence of muscular movements is not taught, but subconsciously internalized by boys watching men. Another example: I once watched four black girls doing a dance routine they had informally worked up to a pop song. All four were doing the very same moves. However, one of them had grown up in a mostly white neighborhood and gone to a mostly white school. She was executing every step the other girls were, but there was a certain Element X missing, a very particular kind of connection with the rhythm of the song, a brand of attitude in the motions, that she could not pull off spontaneously the way the other girls did. One of the girls was only six, and yet “had it” just as two of the others did. The three girls had learned a way of moving to music from watching, feeling, and doing it since toddler-hood that the other one simply had not. Unsurprisingly, the fourth girl also did not have a blaccent.

The particular sound of most black Americans’ Standard English is formed in this way. Black toddlers already use the sounds of Black English if they are growing up around those speaking the dialect, and obviously they aren’t working at “expressing” anything. Rather, to be a black American is usually to subconsciously acquire certain positionings of the tongue and lips, slightly different from the ones whites use, when producing certain sounds. Because in our times even that statement lends itself to misinterpretation, note the following: To be a white American is usually to subconsciously acquire certain positionings of the tongue and lips, slightly different from the ones black people use. This is purely observational. I cannot stress more that there is no value judgment here. Different groups of people speaking the same language—whether geographically separate or not—differ in terms of their vowels all over the world. Black people shape their mouths to speak in a certain way because the positionings happen to be the ones that the people closest to them are using when they are learning the subtle and complex thing that language is. As dry as that sounds, it’s what makes it so that you know what color someone is when they say “But what’s worse is, the event isn’t even happening.”

Most important, the blaccent is normal. What would be strange is if it didn’t exist.

Beyond Vowels

IT BEARS MENTIONING THAT VOWELS are not all of the story when it comes to how to sound black. There are aspects of intonation, for one—Black English has different melodies, we might say, from those of Standard English.

Research has revealed, for example, that my mother’s hypothesis about sinuses wasn’t completely off the mark, if recast as grounded in cultural conditioning rather than anatomy. There is evidence that black people tend to produce the basic sound of speech—that is, the vocal airstream independently of how the specific vowels are shaped—in a particular way that reads subconsciously to others as black. That is the kind of thing many sense as awkward or risky to state, but this kind of difference in vocal quality or timbre is by no means a black issue. Aspects of voice quality distinguish different languages and dialects worldwide. For example, formal British English is produced more forward in the mouth than American, for nothing a linguist or anyone else would call a reason; that’s just the way it is. Another example is the “vocal fry” that the media has explored widely in American whites below a certain age (the trait may have begun with women but has rapidly spread to men, as well). This so-called fry is a slightly creaky tone that people frequently use, often to single out a point as significant, toward the end of sentences. This is something almost no one would think about consciously—no one executes it on purpose. It certainly has nothing to do with anyone “expressing an identity,” and most people have to listen closely to recordings even to understand what linguists mean by it. However, this quality of voice has settled in among young people over the past twenty years. An invaluable demonstration is a report by linguistics blog Language Log contrasting the voice of National Public Radio reporter Sarah Koenig in 2000 and 2014, at which time she exemplifies a solid—although, as always, subtle—vocal fry she did not use fourteen years before.

What’s key about vocal fry in our discussion is that it is an utterly subconscious feature of vocal production that has emerged among a certain subpopulation of Americans that has nothing to do with personhood and developed for no more reason than does a particular fingerprint or snowflake pattern. Language is, to an extent it can be ever so hard to wrap our heads around, serendipitous in that way. In Black English, the particular random type of timbre in question is what creates the husky impression, although the study that identified this difference in black vocal quality found it in men as well as women. Specialists in acoustic phonetics have precise characterizations for factors like these, and it will be interesting to see them further applied to this question.

This difference in vocal quality is the last whisper of Black English a person might have. A person speaks a dialect to varying extents—you can do it strong or take it light, with every step in between. However, the steps occur in a certain order, from sentence structure, to sound, to more elusive aspects of melody and vocal quality. To speak full-blown Black English is to have the grammar, the sound, and the quality. However, a person might also not use the grammar but still have a solid, readily perceptible black sound—that is, only the blaccent, specifically the obvious surface-level kind. Or, a person might have only the less immediately identifiable, yet present, deep-level kind of blaccent—that’s taking it even lighter. Finally, a person may not use Black English’s sentence structures or even the vowels but will still have the quality. Then, individuals may slide left and right on this scale from moment to moment, depending on whom they are talking to and what they are talking about. Plus, some black people have more range in this ability than others, depending on life experience.

The order that these components stack in is very important to realize. This schema is a handy way to think of the matter:

This means that there are some aspects of sounding black that you can have only if you have others as well, and only one aspect that you can have only by itself. No one uses Black English grammar without having the sound as well, even though you can indeed have the sound without using the grammar. Why? Because sound sits deep in the brain. The analogy is to someone who speaks your language with full idiomatic command but with an accent. Note: There is no such thing as someone who speaks your language with a perfect accent but whose sentences are full of grammatical mistakes. If the person has mastered the sounds, then it follows that before that, he had the sentence structures down. People learn a language’s parts in order of difficulty. Grammar comes more easily than changing your sound. Crucially, when a group of people start losing their dialect in favor of a dominant dialect, what’s lost goes in the opposite order. It’s easier to pick up the dominant dialect’s grammar than its sound. Your own sound in your own dialect will hold on longer. Only with truly intimate and long-term contact will you lose your sound completely.

This explains our table about degrees of black English and why the features stack in the way that they do. This order explains why there is such a thing as sounding black even when someone isn’t saying anything black in terms of vocabulary or sentence patterns. It also explains why to utter a phrase of Black English with Standard English vowels and intonation sounds ridiculous: “What up, yo? This where the place at?” intoned in the voice of Steve Martin doesn’t work at all. A table like the one above, then, is not just about Black English or black people but about how humans use language in general.

It is possible the vocal quality of Black English will turn out to have links with African speech. I don’t mean African anatomy, but aspects of African languages that black Americans’ ancestors spoke. Despite some claims (usually from outside of linguistics itself) that Black English consists of English words with African grammar, the search for actual inheritances from African languages in Black English has yielded very little. However, I think of a bizarre experience I once had in Senegal. The European language of Senegal is French. A TV show was playing in the next room; I was occupied with something and only passively listening to it. What was being said was pretty mundane—there was nothing “cultural” about it. And yet, after a while I realized that I was hearing these voices as black somehow. It wasn’t because I was in a black country, since during my stay I had already seen a good deal of television, almost all of which had been with white people speaking French (movies and dubbed sitcoms, mostly). My default sense of television language there was, thus, white French. Rather, I had subconsciously processed a black sound in the French of this television show, despite not having directed my attention to the dialogue, and not having enough experience living in a Francophone context to have even ever considered the question as to whether there was a black-sounding French, much less listened for it.

Yet indeed, when I went into the next room to see if by some off chance I might be right, the show turned out to be a cartoon about black people, and when I checked the end credits, the voices were indeed done by people with African-language names. The quality that tipped me off was the same husky quality that people often mention black American women have. Just maybe, this vocal trait is, of all things, part of the African diaspora. Researchers: Go!

Onward

OBVIOUSLY, HOW ONE SOUNDS BLACK is a rich issue. A note to academic specialists on Black English: This topic requires further exploration, and should also be presented in ways that nonlinguists can engage with. We can’t blame the public for not understanding that black American speech is okay if the discussion (1) focuses mainly on what cannot help but look like broken English and (2) is largely only about tiny little crumbs buried in academic articles and books the general public never sees and couldn’t learn from.

In any case, I hope to have shown that there should be no guilt in squarely attesting to the fact that there is a such thing as a black-sounding voice. Whites need not wonder whether they are being racist in discussing it, and black people need not feel like the topic is a coded stamp of approval for minstrel shows. All of us, as long as the facts have been shown, can rest assured that this is one case where what our senses are telling us is utterly harmless fact.

When a child asks, for example, “Why do black people sound different even when they aren’t using slang?” should we tense up and worry that our child might be internalizing racist ideas in their assumption that black people all talk one way? No. We might tell the child that not all black people have that sound. But alone, that doesn’t answer the child’s question, because she can hear just what the rest of us do. Most black people do sound a way that most whites don’t. What’s the answer to her actual question?

“When people spend more time with one another than with other people, they start talking in their own way, just like people do their hair in different ways and listen to different music. Black people spend more time with black people than with white people, and so their sounds are a little different from white people’s sounds, just like Spanish-speaking people’s sounds are even more different from everybody else’s.”

A Lesson for All of Us

SOMETHING ELSE WORTH JUST TOSSING IN, however: There is a quick joke in the French film version of what Americans later came to know as the stage musical La Cage aux Folles, where a black character makes a joke about an expectation that a black man have a deep voice. This idea apparently reigns even beyond the United States, apparently—clearly a study is needed of this business of black men and deep voices. Whether it is proven, disproven, or both, some empirical conclusions would be both interesting and useful.

CHAPTER THREE

But They Can’t Talk That Way at a Job Interview!

WHY AMERICANS THINK YOU CAN TALK ONLY ONE WAY

“BUT THEY CAN’T TALK THAT WAY at a job interview!”

You can almost count on someone saying that during any discussion about the fact that Black English is not bad English. The idea is that even if Black English is complex, even if the ways it differs from Standard English is in the use of alternates rather than bastardizations, real-world factors must guide choices. In that light, Black English will never sound appropriate in a formal setting, and therefore people must be trained out of it. Under this analysis, protestations to the contrary are mere advocacy, a product of the leftward tilt of the academy and schools of education, identity politics, et cetera. There comes a time, people of this mind feel, when we must drop the special pleading and get real.

The objection about the job interview, however, is a gunshot that misses its target. A linguist has to adjust to the very notion that “They can’t talk that way at a job interview!” constitutes a response to the arguments typically made in favor of Black English. It’s because, quite simply, no one thinks people should speak Black English when interviewing for a job.

Perhaps a fringe few call for a world where one could indeed talk however one wanted wherever one wanted. However, this is a fringe indeed, the true left, and even their focus is on the future. None of them would condemn to unemployment a present-day human being by hoping the person will stride into an interviewer’s office saying “Whaddup!?” and “Dis da place I wanna work at.” Even the most vernacular of persons finds the very notion of such a thing funny, because of its sheer absurdity. As such, no Black English advocate is calling for Black English to be allowed in interviews. Frankly, interviews are the last thing on that person’s mind.

Since when is all of life a job interview?

Real Life: Working Hard for the Money versus Thank God It’s Friday

IF “THEY CAN’T TALK THAT WAY on a job interview!” negates any support of Black English as legitimate speech, then presumably people live in a world where they are always in suits, conversing in feigned comfort with strangers. But I, for one, have never encountered such a human being.

Any black person knows there is a way you talk with friends and a way you talk when things are more serious. The scenario of someone jiving around with a perplexed white manager is a hypothetical that some feel especially alarmed about even if it is not an actual problem. Yet this objection about the job interview lives ever on, processed as a smackdown comment, as if it somehow cuts through all the nonsense and zeroes in on common sense. But anyone knows that most of black people’s lives, like the majority of most people’s lives, is lived informally. So what’s the problem with using Black English informally?

The concern about job interviews follows logically from an impression that if black people speak Black English even informally, then they won’t be able to speak Standard English when they need to. The universality of the interview comment, and the confidence with which it is hurled, makes sense only when the assumption is that using Black English somehow cancels Standard English out.

It’s hardly a crazy notion. This person speaks Italian. That one speaks Hebrew. She speaks Spanish. He speaks English. She speaks Black English. But we need to teach her to speak Standard English instead, because Black English—that other thing—sounds low-down.

To be sure, the fact that the person speaking Black English is black affects the evaluation. Race is certainly the reason Black English occasions so much more comment than rural southern English—it makes Black English seem more different, and more wrong. However, I submit that to stop this conversation at pointing out the role of racism is a disengagement. It tacitly classifies the problem as unsolvable, at least within a human lifetime.

People can speak both Black English and Standard English. The two ways of speaking can occupy the same mind and mouth. A person can quite plausibly speak Black English with friends and Standard English at that job interview.

Rather than saying “We need her to speak Black English instead,” we should say, “We need her to speak Standard English, too.” In fact, she probably already does.

The American Sense of Language

FISH DON’T KNOW THEY’RE WET. And Americans, in that sense, don’t know that their typical native linguistic repertoire is narrow and dull compared to that of a great many of the world’s people.

I mean no insult, as I am referring to myself, as well. My native dialect is a bland middle-class Mid-Atlantic (as linguists term it) Standard. I am the kind of American English speaker often described as exhibiting “no dialect” (although technically, everyone speaks a dialect, and what people really mean about speech like mine is that it is not nonstandard). I also had the misfortune of not being raised around Black English enough for it to have become part of my own natural speech patterns (I have a thoroughly robust “passive competence,” as linguists call it). When I open my mouth, what comes out is the voice of a Disney announcer circa 1946, and if you woke me up out of a sound sleep, I’d talk the same way. After glasses of wine, I sound the same way. When I feel comfortable with someone, I sound the same way. I have no real range.

In that, as an American I’m unusual only as a black one. Standard American English, as speech varieties go worldwide, is rather uniform. Yes, if you listen closely, there are all manner of pronunciation differences across this great nation, as the wonderful map by Rick Aschmann that appears online shows (aschmann.net/AmEng). However, the very fact that these differences come as a surprise to us is key. In a great many places in the world, a map like that would occasion no surprise, and would document not just fine differences in pronunciation, plus a few expressions like “needs washed” for “needs to be washed,” but vastly distinct dialects that border on being different languages.

Take, for example, how the difference between the old rural dialects of Cornwall and Dorset, the northern dialects like Yorkshire, the West Country dialects, and then Scots—if one is even to classify it as English, as some would prefer not to—dwarf any differences between southern and California speech in the United States. Those differences are the result of the kind of drifting language change that I described as creating French, Spanish, and Italian from Latin. English has occupied England now for sixteen hundred years, allowing lots of time for divergence. English came to America only four hundred years ago, at which time various dialects from across the Atlantic mixed together into something new and set things at the starting point again. Four hundred years is a relatively short time for major regional differences to evolve. Moreover, increasing literacy and then modern media have made it harder for that kind of thing to happen in America’s life span anyway. Since, especially, commercial radio and sound films in the 1930s—plus the explosion in college degrees after the GI Bill of the 1940s—Americans have come to speak more like one another than they used to. Warnings that dialects are disappearing in the United States entirely are overblown, but dialects are less diverse from one another than before.

As a result, to be, especially, a middle-class educated American is to have a default sense of talking as involving one way of doing it. You open your mouth, and out comes standard American English or something close. You may talk somewhat differently over a beer than at a board meeting, but not differently enough that you’d consider it a topic worthy of discussion. “Dude,” “whatcha” instead of “what do you,” a little “ain’t” here and there, but not much else.

Does this mean that a black person speaking Black English is handicapped? Such an impression reveals us as fish unaware of the legions of creatures up on land living meaningful lives nice and dry. Worldwide, people speak their respective languages in vastly different forms depending on social contexts—one way in that interview, another very different way when talking to a friend about it later.

The Normal Sense of Language: To Talk Differently Than You Speak

AND I REALLY MEAN VASTLY DIFFERENT, not just a little slangier or enunciating a little less crisply. To truly get this, we must look to other countries.

One thing you should know about almost any Arabic speaker you talk to is that the person is not just bilingual, but trilingual. This person speaks English, uses Standard Arabic in school, worship, and ceremonies, but in casual conversation, he or she uses a different language, although it, too, is called Arabic. In actuality, that person’s casual Arabic has the relationship to Standard Arabic that Spanish does to Latin. Standard Arabic is essentially frozen in time, based on the language of the Qur’an. The casual language is what has happened to Arabic when allowed to move on and become, as it were, analagous to Spanish.

While Standard Arabic is the same across the Arabophone world, casual Arabic is a different language in each region. Let’s zero in on what an Egyptian, for example, actually speaks. In Standard Arabic, these is haān, but in Egyptian these is dōl. In Standard Arabic, the is al, but in Egyptian, il. So, in Standard Arabic, “these professors” is:

Haān al-‘ustāān

these the professors

But Egyptian Arabic has other words for these and the, the word for professor is also somewhat different from the standard one, and even the grammar is different: You put the word for these after professors instead of before it:

il-‘ustazn dōl

the professors these

In Standard Arabic, they walk is yamšiyan. In Egyptian, it is biyimšu. The Standard Arabic word for nose is ‘anf. The Egyptian word is manaxir.

As you can see, Standard Arabic and Egyptian Arabic are two different languages. One learns Egyptian as a child, and then picks up Standard Arabic in school and from religious worship. And yet, Egyptians move casually between these two languages day in and day out. An adult Egyptian speaks Egyptian most of the time but uses Standard Arabic in, say, a job interview, if the job is one that would require him to “represent” as a formal, public person.

Not that an Egyptian usually thinks of herself as speaking two languages. To her, the switching is something that just is, in the way that an American knows that for a cookout one puts out chips and salsa and grills hot dogs and burgers but for a more formal dinner puts out Brie and olives and ventures rack of lamb. We assume no one would need to be taught those customs, and wouldn’t even think of them as customs. In the same way, an Egyptian does not think of the difference between the Standard Arabic and Egyptian as exotic. To her, the very idea that she speaks two separate languages seems somewhat counterintuitive, in the same way that it would seem to us if we were told that we had mastered two distinct food cultures.

After all, an Egyptian can use some Standard Arabic words while speaking Egyptian, and may even speak on a kind of intermediate level between Standard Arabic and Egyptian—just as one could serve, if not hot dogs, sausages from Whole Foods to guests at a dinner party. An Egyptian tends to think of Standard Arabic and Egyptian as Arabic, just as an American thinks of Brie, olives, the lamb, chips, and hot dogs as food, and would be bemused to see those things separated on a formality hierarchy. If anything, there is a sense that Egyptian is slang Arabic. But is a whole alternate vocabulary and different grammatical system just slang? Likely there were people speaking early Spanish who called it “Latin slang,” but we’d hear them as speaking a different language from Latin, and it is reasonable to view Egyptian Arabic the same way.

All of which is to say that Arabs continually toggle between two ways of speaking as different as that and yet barely even think about it. People can speak two ways, a standard way and a casual way. No one worries that Egyptian Arabic threatens Standard Arabic, or supposes that someone speaking Egyptian is somehow compromised in their ability to learn Standard Arabic. This is linguistic reality in Egypt, Syria, Palestine, Iraq, Libya, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and elsewhere.

This is a way of living in a language that Americans are poorly positioned to even be able to imagine. We can get a sense of it in differences that we rarely consider explicitly but internalize as matters of formality. Ordinarily, we get things, but in writing about that, we might use receive instead of get. It’s the same with place versus put, child versus kid, and possessions versus stuff. Imagine if there were pairs like this for almost any word—maybe as if we were expected to say house at home but when writing to use domicile instead. Or suppose there were pairs of ways of conjugating verbs, such that we said walks at home but walketh in school. That is roughly what it is to speak Arabic.

For many Canadians, this is true of French. I once had a rather eccentric French literature teacher who casually assigned us a novel written in the French of Quebec, with liberal doses of dialogue in the colloquial French of working-class Montrealers. This was a little inconsiderate, because the French these people speak is so different from the Parisian French taught in American classrooms that it was hard to understand much of anything the characters were saying to one another, even when laid out in cold print. (The book was The Fat Lady Next Door Is Pregnant, by Michel Tremblay, which, for those interested, turned out to be a fantastic book when I went back to it better equipped fifteen years later.)

To give a sense of how different this speech is from textbook Parisian French, the dialect is colloquially called joual, pronounced “jwal.” That word, believe it or not, is the Standard French word for horse, cheval, as pronounced in this dialect. Cheval is pronounced “shuh-VOLL.” Now imagine if the v in that word became a w, which it might, since w is basically what happens if you let your top teeth come away from your bottom lip while saying v, giving you “shuh-WOLL.” Now say that fast a few times, and you get from “shWOLL” to “jWOLL”—that is, joual!

Joual speakers in Canada are hardly unfamiliar with Standard French, which is the language of schooling, print, and the media. For them, casual speech simply differs more from Standard speech than anything most Americans are used to. “Toi, qu’est-ce que tu fais?”—“You, what are you doing?”—someone might ask in Standard French. But in joual, that’s “Twe, que c’est que tu fas?” For those of you who know French, the fas in that last sentence is not a typo. That’s how the “to do” verb faire is conjugated in joual. Overall, look at the difference:

Standard French:

“Twa, KES-kuh tu FAY?”

Joual:

“Tway, kuh SAY-kuh tu FAH?”

The distance from Standard French is quite similar to that of Black English from Standard English, and, in fact, more. Yet no one is writing about how joual needs to be stamped out in favor of Standard French, or insisting that you can’t use it in a job interview—because no one does, unless by chance the interviewer is a fellow joual speaker and wants to bond. A joual speaker has two ways they can talk, and c’est la vie.

There are cases like this all over the world. In Finland, nobody speaks the standard language casually. There is a different kind of Finnish, a kind of universal colloquial alternate, that real Finnish life is lived in, and that someone learning the language has to master alongside the standard forms. The differences between standard and colloquial are similar to these between Standard English and Black English. A Finnish textbook simply lists the colloquial forms along with the standard ones and calmly, in true Finn style, explains that you have to know them, too. No one in Helsinki thinks of colloquial Finnish as something to worry about.

Many Italians call cappicola ham gabagul. That’s because that is the word for cappicola in the Sicilian dialect of Italian: Gabagul is basically cappicola after being said a billion times. The standard’s word cappicola preserves a past state, as standard languages tend to. Gabagul is how the word has come out when left to its own devices. In Sicily, casually people speak Sicilian rather than the Tuscan standard. Really, Sicilian is so different from Italian that in an objective sense, it is a different language—it’s almost as different from Italian as Portuguese is from Spanish, and if Sicily were a separate country, Sicilian would strike no one as a kind of Italian. This is why media depictions of Sicilians talking among themselves, such as in The Godfather, The Sopranos, and Boardwalk Empire, are scrupulous about having the characters speak actual Sicilian rather than Tuscan Italian, which would seem not just imprecise but absurd to any Italian watching. But to Sicilians, as different from schoolroom Italian as their daily speech is, a discussion assuming that to master Standard Italian requires letting Sicilian go would sound absurd—they don’t doubt that people can speak both.

There is a term for people whose casual and formal speech differs to this degree: diglossia, from the Greek for “two tongues.” However, I have held off on introducing that term, because giving this bidialectal linguistic existence a label implies that it is exotic, when in fact it is extremely common and even a norm. Around the world, if a language has a strong written tradition and is also spoken widely, then often its spoken versions have drifted from the conservative written standard to varying degrees. As often as not, this means that there is a gulf between the way people chat and the way they speak. They speak the written version; they talk the other version. As such, there is ample diglossia in many languages of South Asia, across Indonesia, and in Tibetan, Swahili, German, Italian itself, as well as in Greece, China, parts of Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, and elsewhere. If anything, what merits a special term is monoglossia—speaking always basically one thing.

Back to America: How Diglossia Changes Your Lens

BLACK AMERICANS ARE DIGLOSSIC—perfectly normally diglossic. Whether they would be allowed to use Black English in a job interview is as loopy an issue to focus on as whether a Moroccan would defend his master’s thesis in Moroccan Arabic—almost as different from Standard Arabic as French is from Latin—or whether a Finn who gets a job as a newscaster would talk on the air the same way as she does to her mom.

The most perfect expression of this perspective I have ever known is a passage by Maya Angelou in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings:

In the classroom we all learned past participles, but in the streets and in our homes the Blacks learned to drop s’s from plurals and suffixes from past-tense verbs. We were alert to the gap separating the written word from the colloquial. We learned to slide out of one language and into another without being conscious of the effort. At school, in a given situation, we might respond with “That’s not unusual.” But in the street, meeting the same situation, we easily said “It be’s like that sometimes.”

Here is an example of what this perspective can help us with as American English speakers. Just as some are under the impression that someone who speaks Black English cannot speak Standard English, too, others might think that a black person who speaks Standard English cannot also be fluent in Black English. More to the point, they assume that when such a person speaks Black English, they’re a fake.

That impression reveals itself in complaints about Barack Obama’s adoption of black cadences and occasional black slang in public addresses, especially when he speaks to black audiences. Just as it has genuinely surprised me that people consider Black English’s lack of fit in an interview to be a case against Black English as a whole, it truly threw me that some people have heard Obama’s black speech stylings as phony, and even cynical.

The idea seems to be that since Obama can speak Standard English, when he uses Black English he is “putting it on,” fashioning a stunt in order to mesmerize black audiences. The argument is similar to suspicions that George W. Bush’s twangish elocution and moments of stark inarticulateness were designed to make him seem folksy.

But the idea that Obama “knows better” than to speak that way reveals a belief that Black English is fundamentally wrong, rather than being an alternate form of English. One does not switch to Black English randomly, however; the dialect is an expression of cultural fellowship among black people. Obama’s use of aspects of Black English with black audiences is, therefore, natural and not surprising.

The black person who speaks Black English can most likely speak Standard English, too. In the same way, so can the black person who speaks Standard English often speak Black English. The two things do not cancel each other out: They coexist.

Always the Twain Shall Meet

SOME MAY SUSPECT ME OF IDEALIZING when describing black Americans as people who speak two ways. I am. We might ask whether it jibes with reality that all black Americans are, as Maya Angelou had it, readily using their “past participles” and saying things like “That’s not unusual” in formal contexts and then switching into a vernacular mode only when it’s time to chat. That is, do most black people actually talk “white” in public and “black” in private?

That is indeed a highly oversimplified depiction of something subtler—more “dynamic,” as the scholars on the subject put it. The academic literature on Black English richly explores how even in nonformal situations, black Americans do not use Black English forms each and every time they could, while in formal situations, they use some Black English forms according to interlocutor, nuance, and other factors. Often Black English features correlate with the subject as it evolves throughout a dialogue: One is more likely to use a Black English word or construction in reference to something closer to the heart, funnier, or more central in importance while speaking largely in Standard English. This is in line with what linguists who study this kind of variation between formality and informality in speech (the subfield is called “variationist sociolinguistics”) have discovered in many languages and dialects.

This kind of alternation is rapid, fluid, and subtle—it is an art to capture it in written dialogue. In the seventies sitcom The Jeffersons, depicting a black couple of working-class origins having risen to affluence, Louise Jefferson was portrayed as speaking a very Standard English in contrast to her husband. Whether this was a conscious decision or not, it corresponded with the reality that women tend to embrace the standard dialect more than men, regardless of race. In an early episode, however, the writers had the usually almost grandiloquent Louise muse during a speech “. . . but it ain’t.” The writers clearly wanted Louise to indicate her roots in a search for authenticity, but for her to pop off with this “ain’t” just that one time, especially in actress Isabel Sanford’s rather plummy stage diction, was a flub. On the other hand, the variable usage of Black English is depicted magnificently in the campy drama series Empire. The curious could do much worse than to listen to the show’s dialogue to get a sense of how real people use the dialect.

The point is that black Americans do not keep Standard and Black English as separate as Egyptians keep Standard Arabic and Egyptian Arabic. However, it bears mentioning that before the 1970s the two cases were more parallel for many black speakers, for whom one could call my description of things less inaccurate than a little old-fashioned. Angelou, raised in the thirties and forties, grew up during a time when black people tended to speak more formally in public contexts than they do today. This was in line with the more formal atmosphere of public events in America as a whole at the time, an era when one made a speech rather than giving a talk, elocution training and oratory competitions were a standard part of school curricula, and the writer was expected to master layered sentence construction and embrace language arts–style vocabulary. This aspect of American linguistic culture felt no less natural to black people than to anyone else who sought to make a name for themselves in the wider world.

The extent to which many famous black people of the old days sounded white would throw many listeners were they able to travel back in time and hear these people give a talk—or, no, make a speech, as they would have thought of it. Educator and political adviser Mary McLeod Bethune, born poor in South Carolina, sounded like any white society matron when she gave a speech. In her time, it was natural for her to master that way of speaking in order to be taken seriously by the public. Booker T. Washington, born in slavery, also spoke in a way that gave no indication of his childhood environment when giving a public address. I doubt it would occur to anyone today hearing the recording of his Atlanta Compromise speech that a black man was talking, despite the fact that Washington surely spoke the southern Black English of Virginia as a child. Civil Rights pioneer A. Philip Randolph, raised in Florida, also sounded basically white when speaking to the public. Voting rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer was well known for freely speaking in her Mississippian Black English to audiences in the fifties and sixties, but in her time this was considered pushing the envelope, and even made some Civil Rights leaders uncomfortable.

Maya Angelou is a useful example, as well, for the famously grandiloquent air of her speaking style. There was a similar tone in much of her writing. Had she been an Egyptian, she would have had a certain preference for the Standard Arabic words over the Egyptian ones—motoring rather than driving, commodious rather than comfortable, et cetera. One senses that Angelou, like many black writers of her generation and before, was not only conforming to the norms of the era’s language culture but also making a point: that black people, too, can speak as high as anyone else. That was a point more urgent in the era when minstrel speech was either common coin in entertainment or remained within recent memory. The Angelou speaking style was less idiosyncratic than many suppose—black actresses of her time often spoke in that elegantly studied fashion. An example is the orotund diction of Marlene Warfield (born in 1940) when playing the black activist in the film Network. Diana Sands’s diction was often similar (most accessibly as Beneatha in the film Raisin in the Sun).

I am aware of no record of any of these people being thought peculiar in not sounding black in what they were saying. In their time, it would have seemed more intuitive than it may today that black people are bidialectal. Today, however, in addition to the informality of our times—America’s sense of language took it easy along with taking off the hats, coats, gowns, and girdles—grammar is not taught formally in schools as frequently, or as rigorously, as it used to be. As a result, black people are often less stringent about the boundary between public and private language, just as the rest of the nation is. At an open house, I recall a black school principal once addressing the student body’s parents, listing “Mr. Rivers, which is the athletic instructor, and Mrs. Jenkins, which is the librarian” (upon which someone in the audience whispered, “And after this will be the reception, who is in the auditorium!”).

This person was trying her best, and her grammatical slipup had nothing to do with her adminstrative competence. Yet I suspect she wouldn’t have confused which and who that way in a public address in, say, 1940. And the truth is that these days, there are young black Americans who could benefit from some good old-fashioned tutelage in speaking Standard English consistently. The fashion for informality has a way of penalizing black speakers. The white person who “just talks” in a formal setting is classified as approachable, real, sexy. Whether we like it or not, the black person who “just talks” in a formal setting (as opposed to in music, in the movies, or on TV) is more susceptible to being classified as dim.

Yet even today there are plenty of black Americans who are indeed as fluently, effortlessly bidialectal as Egyptians. An especially prominent contemporary example would be the comedians Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele, who can sound like prep school scions on National Public Radio and then use Black English fluently not only in their sketches but also in their casual speech. In happily describing “ax” for ask as something that will “come out” when things get going, they are perfect examples of the fact that to be a bidialectal black American is to speak more English than many Americans, very much a larger English (as I wanted to title an early book of mine and therefore feel the need to squeeze in here). Just as someone who speaks both Standard Arabic and Egyptian Arabic is enviably bilingual, someone who is truly comfortable in Standard English and in Black English has something on the monodialectal American. They are articulate, although we don’t usually apply the term that way.

I once heard a public school chancellor speak about her work; she was one of those people who commanded a goodly range between official Standard English speech and solid Black English. Among the assorted (and mostly white) talking-head sorts at the event, she was definitely, in my mind, the most articulate one there. And yet, just as with most Arabic speakers, it was the last thing on her mind that her ability to speak two ways was of note at all—which made it all that much more impressive.

If Someone Can Speak Standard English, Though, Why Don’t They?

WE MAY NOT BE THERE YET. An Egyptian speaks something different from Standard Arabic, a Sicilian speaks an alternate language from Tuscan Italian, but is the analogy with Black English really apt? One might not be surprised that adult African slaves did not master English perfectly. One might affirm that the imperfect English they created can’t be dismissed as “bad” anymore than Modern English can be dismissed as “bad” because Vikings created it by massacring Old English.

Yet Modern English was accepted in a largely nonliterate context, where almost no one was privy to documents written in the language as it once had been. Even if we might understand why the first generation, or even generations, of slaves’ kids held on to so-called broken English—they were so segregated from whites that it was no surprise they didn’t adopt Standard English as their home language—what about later? Especially after the Civil War, and especially now? As all of us can hear plenty of black people who are speaking Standard English with and around one another day in and day out. So why haven’t black people just adopted Standard English, given its prestige, instead of fashioning a linguistically bifurcated existence in which they speak Standard English and talk Black English? A light blaccent is one thing, but why does any black person today still say things like “Dis da way in?”

This is a legitimate question, and its answer requires understanding that prestige itself is a bifurcated thing. There is overt prestige, connected to a way of speaking considered crucial in formal, public settings. But human beings also place a value on in-group contacts, a sense of belonging to a group within the larger society. Within that in group, too, there will often be nonstandard ways of speaking that are valued, thought of as “what we do.” This, too, is a kind of prestige, although we don’t conventionally associate the word prestige with the vernacular and the informal. More often we circle around the concept with cool, down with, street cred, and so on, but anthropologically speaking, all of these concepts are as much about prestige, in its general meaning, as salad forks and boutonnieres.

Just as an ordinary person might cherish both his tuxedo and his most comfortable jeans, a person can feel as warmly about his informal speech as his formal. This means that ways of speaking that go against the rules of the Standard variety are not always simply rejected as foul. Rather, humans often adopt such varieties as expressions of in-group identity. The fact that the informal variety doesn’t conform to the standard rules is often part of why it feels so appropriate as the in-group way of speaking—there is an aspect of local pride in it.

Of course, feelings about the informal variety will be complex. People may simultaneously embrace it as “us” while also maintaining an analytic sense that it is fundamentally deficient, mistaken, “just slang,” and so on. Some will claim not to speak it, only to reveal themselves as readily using it when the occasion demands it. Most will think more of the words than the grammatical structure, often embracing the words as “ours” while dismissing the grammatical structure as “wrong.” All that is amply documented among diglossic speakers worldwide. And yet, in terms of the survival status of the informal variety, all of it is mere static. Whatever the attitudes, the variety lives, thrives, transforms, and, after a while, even infuses the standard.

This, of course, describes Black English, but as part of a general phenomenon. To wit, second-generation immigrant youth can adopt elements of their parents’ generation’s incomplete rendition of the dominant language as a permanent marker of in-group identity. There is no one term for this process as of now, but it often happens when people speaking different languages settle in a city and fashion their own version of the language as they learn it.

Children of immigrants don’t speak exactly like their parents, any more than a black person born in the United States talked like an African who never truly spoke fluent English. However, the new youth speaking lingua francas do not observe all the rules of the standard language; they shave away a lot of the unnecessarily harder stuff. These varieties seem, at a glance, like Black English versions of whichever language is in question.

For example, in Germany, urban children of immigrants speak what is called “Kiezdeutsch,” with a relationship to Standard German quite similar to the one between Black English and Standard English. Standard German for “Tomorrow I’m going to the movies” is: “Morgen gehe ich ins Kino.”—that is, “Tomorrow go I to movies.” The Kiezdeutsch version is: “Morgen ich geh Kino.”—that is, “Tomorrow I go movies.” Kiezdeutsch leaves off the e ending of the go verb—geh instead of gehe—the word order is more straightforward (“I go” instead of “go I”), and you just “go movies,” not “go to the movies.” This is much like “Why she like me anyway?” in Black English instead of “Why does she like me anyway? Many Germans have the same feelings about Kiezdeutsch that people have about Black English in America, including a fear that Kiezdeutsch somehow cancels out Standard German. However, Kiezdeutsch speakers are quite capable of speaking Standard German when they have to. They just have two ways of communicating—one for the public, one for the realm that in Black English would be referred to as “up in here,” the intimate sphere.

There are versions of this documented in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and the Netherlands, as well. It is certain that increasing emigration to other European countries will produce similar varieties elsewhere on that continent. In Africa, the way dominant African languages like Swahili and Fula are spoken in cities, where speakers of many less dominant languages have long gathered and settled for good, is equivalent to these European varieties. Popularly, these ways of speaking go under any number of names, often misleadingly as “pidgin” versions, as if speakers were merely stringing words together with barely any structure. The reality is that these ways of speaking are complex language, just as Black English is.

In Senegal, for example, Wolof divides things into about ten genders. Unsurprisingly, one of the most obvious traits of the Wolof spoken by Senegalese immigrants and children of these immigrants in cities like St. Louis and Dakar is that often just one gender marker is used instead of a variety of the ten available. That’s what we would likely find ourselves doing if we had to learn Wolof, and yet we would still find learning this “urban Wolof” version of the language a challenge indeed.

Black English, then, is America’s manifestation of something that happens all over the world. Few of us would be prepared to say that languages are falling apart all over the world. Or, if we are, then we have to be ready to say that in earlier times, English, Persian, Mandarin, and Indonesian all fell apart—all those languages developed from more elaborate versions of their past selves, streamlined by grown-ups and passed along in their less encumbered state. I’m assuming no one would go that far, which means that we acknowledge that Black English is a development, not a disaster, and a development that happens alongside the standard variety, not in opposition to it.

Now We Can Aks

AT THIS POINT, WE ARE IN A POSITION to tackle the aks for ask business for real. It’s all well and good to dwell on these things from a distance—language of identity, Old English, but this serves little purpose until we fully understand that it applies to that which really sticks out. And few things stick out more in black American speech than aks for ask.

It’s often the first thing people bring up as an example of why Black English is bad grammar—and in my experience, at least, black people are as eager to discuss it as others. Garrard McClendon, black professor and talk-show host, has titled a book Ax or Ask: The African American Guide to Better English. “What’s with aks?” someone regularly asks after a talk I give on language, with the audience dependably nodding and tittering. So, what is with it?

The answer a linguist is supposed to give is that way back in Old English, the word for ask swung randomly between ascian and acsian. And this is true—black people didn’t simply take ask and change it. They received aks, which was a perfectly normal thing to happen to a word like ask.

Fish was, believe it or not, a similar case. It started as fisk, ending in sk just as ask does. Some people started saying fiks rather than fisk. Others said fish instead. After a while, fish won out over fiks—and so we say fish and wonder that anyone ever said anything different. Mash was similar. It started as mask. Some people said maks, while others said mash. Mash won, and now the idea of anyone “masking” potatoes sounds absurd.

But the fates happened to treat ask differently. Some people said aks, some said ash. But it was aks that won out over ash, for no more explainable reason than why this snowflake differs from that snowflake. Language change is, as we have seen, partly a matter of serendipity. Chaucer used aks quite freely: “Men aksed him, what sholde bifalle” and “Yow loveres axe I now this questioun.” But the original ask hung around on the margins, and the people whose English ended up being anointed as the standard dialect—if you had rolled the dice again, it could have been any number of dialects—happened to be ask people rather than aks people.

This, and only this, is why we hear aks for ask as tacky and ask as correct. Aks was now quaint, typical of indentured servants—whom black slaves in America worked alongside and learned English from. Aks has a long and innocent history, and the way we hear it makes no more logical sense than the fact that one person’s favorite color is green, while another person’s isn’t.

But that answer never truly convinces anyone. Whatever the linguistic tendencies of Iron Age villagers speaking Old English happened to be, we figure that here and now, aks sounds ignorant, and that beyond a certain point there’s no more discussing the whys and wherefores of that than there is of proposing that slush, in all of its ugliness and inconvenience, could be considered good for soil. “Language always changes.” “People talk in different ways.” “Yeah, okay, but why can’t some people stick to the way it’s now being used by most people? After all, when you get a pimple, you don’t say ‘Skin changes.’ Why can’t these others ‘identify’ with the proper language?” Aks is part of the informal wing of black people’s speech repertoire, that alternate track to Standard English. Specifically, aks is part of how a black person, in a fashion both effortless and yet deeply felt, is or “be’s” him or herself.

Aks has a vernacular prestige for black Americans. It is drunk in from childhood and has indelible associations, just as we link gingerbread with childhood and Christmas. That sentiment is powerful enough to cut across conscious feelings as to what is standard or proper. This is why black people can both make fun of and also regularly use aks, even as college graduates.

I’d be dishonest to pretend that this is the end of the story on aks. Reality intrudes. Aks has a way of getting under people’s skin like almost no other aspect of Black English, and nothing will change that. Part of the reason is that the word ask is so commonly used; another part is that the very subject of asking—that is, requesting—refers to courtesy and politeness, an inherently formal topic, in which an alternate pronunciation of ask can’t help but sound especially incongruous.

Given today’s looser sense of formality, because black Americans may sense less of a bright line between Black English and Standard English than they once did, they might use aks sometimes in a work setting or public statement. In other words, when a black speaker gets in a groove, being most articulate, the most themselves, is exactly when he may slide in an aks for ask—and whatever Old English was like, he immediately sounds ignorant to any nonblack person who hears him, not to mention to quite a few black ones. Unpleasant though it may be, that’s the truth, and I fear that the aks issue is largely unreachable by logic.

As such, just as I think all young people should be taught to abstain from using like when seeking to sound authoritative, given that logic simply cannot prevent Americans from hearing “It was, like,” as unauthoritative, I am hardly against black people being taught that one Black English feature that must be kept in the cabinet for private occasions only is aks. On that little item, the stringent requirements of old-time elocution and oratory lessons have modern application.

Yet we can suggest this without thinking of aks as a willful or lazy flouting of Standard English. What’s up with aks? The same thing that’s up with the fact that who in Standard Arabic is man, but in casual speech, an Egyptian says min.

Standard English, Too—Not Standard English Instead

The main lesson here is that Black English is not Standard English spoken badly. It is something else entirely, spoken with, not in substitution for, Standard English. A black person has no intention of speaking Ebonics during a job interview. An educated black person using Black English when talking to black people is not being affected. Black people don’t say aks because they can’t pronounce an s and a k in the right order—just listen to them saying mask, task, and risk as effortlessly as anyone else.

People can talk two ways, is all. We lack a ready terminology to discuss this, and our judgments of people can be clouded by discrimination. Our sense of our own speech can correspond incompletely to how we actually talk. All this makes Black English hard to discuss. The best place to start is to understand that Black English is not instead of Standard English, but in addition to it.

CHAPTER FOUR

Speaking Black or Speaking Minstrel?

AND HOW MUCH OF IT DID WHITE PEOPLE MAKE UP?

NO LONGER IS INFORMATION about minstrel shows available only in old static photos and scholarly monographs. You can actually hear minstrel performers these days without going to an archive, thanks to the Internet as well as to commercially released recordings. White minstrels Leonard Spencer and Billy Williams, celebrated in their day, are now extremely dead and just as obscure. But we can get a listen to what they did way back in 1894, when the president was Grover Cleveland and the Spanish-American War had yet to happen.

High comedy, apparently, included exchanges such as these:

BILLY:

Hey, Leonard.

LEN:

What?

BILLY:

You’se a man with a heap of intellectualities, am you not?

LEN:

Oh, I dunno.

BILLY:

Well I’m not goin’ to ask you a hard one this time.

LEN:

Let ’er go.

BILLY:

What makes a coon dog spotted?

LEN:

Uh-huh, uh-huh, you got me now, boy. I don’t know, Billy, what do make a coon dog spotted?

BILLY:

Why, the spots what am on him, of course!

This kind of dialogue is how black Americans were depicted as speaking in the popular culture of the mid-nineteenth century into the twentieth, when minstrel shows were in flower. Note the use of am instead of is, the you’se for you are, and the made-up Latinate intellectualities. Those were staple elements of minstrelese, and this lingo has modern-day repercussions.

Hovering over discussions of Black English is an idea that a black way to talk has something to do with white racist caricature, if only as something to keep in mind. This is especially when the dialect is written by whites, and more especially when that dialogue was written before 1965. But even when the topic of how black people speak in our time comes up, people sometimes mock the idea by launching into a rendition of minstrelese, with a theatrical pitch, an exaggerated southern twang, sprinkled with the likes of I’se and you’se.

The Way We Talk or The Way They Say We Talk?

IT ISN’T HARD TO SEE WHERE THIS SUSPICION about Black English comes from, especially since black people were portrayed as speaking in minstrelese long after minstrel shows themselves were ancient history. One of the latest examples I know of is a theatrical cartoon series that continued into the 1950s featuring Buzzy the Crow, an obvious retread of the black crows in the Disney film Dumbo. Buzzy is supposed to be black, and in, for example, No Ifs, Ands or Butts (1954) remarks, “Dat cat am a tobacco smokin’ fiend!” The Buzzy cartoons were created by the same studio that otherwise produced fare as bland as Casper the Friendly Ghost and Baby Huey, to give an idea of how much of a mainstream norm this minstrelese was at the time.

Here was what was supposed to be a modern black “person,” speaking in the lingo associated with corked-up white men. In the wake of depictions like this, we are left with a range of suspicions regarding the relationship between minstrelese and reality. Some people suppose that Black English traces back to minstrelese as created by whites, period, with the oppressed having unwittingly internalized the oppressors’ take on them. One black thinker, for example, understands that black Americans developed a way of speaking in the deep past, but he thinks that today’s Black English sprang from a different source: “The Negro dialect as we know it today was formed by White song-writers for minstrel shows around the time of the Civil War.”

That theory is more often shared in conversation than written down, but it is hardly uncommon. Amid the controversy over using Black English in the classroom in Oakland in 1997, Jack White, a black writer, wrote a piece in Time implying that Black English was merely a continuation of the ancient radio show Amos ’n’ Andy, in which white actors played comic characters in minstrel dialect: “I put in a call to the Home of Retired Racial Stereotypes in a black section of Hollywood. The Kingfish answered. ‘Holy mack’rul dere, Andy, somebody wants to talk ’bout dis ’ere Ebonics. Could you or Tonto tell Buckwheat come to da phone? He de resident expert.’” White’s precise belief in the relationship between the speech of Our Gang’s Buckwheat and today’s Black English is unknown. Yet his implications here are that no actual person ever spoke like Buckwheat and that his lines were caricatures.

Some writers have accused journalist H. L. Mencken of supporting this idea, with a comment in his The American Language opus that “The Negro dialect, as we know it today, seems to have been formulated by the song-writers for minstrel shows.” However, Mencken has been misinterpreted. Too seldom consulted is what he wrote after that endlessly quoted sentence, where it is clear that he was referring to Black English in writing, not Black English as spoken. He wrote that Black English “did not appear in literature until the time of the Civil War; before that, as George Phillip Krapp shows in ‘The English Language in America,’ it was a vague and artificial lingo which had little relation to the actual speech of the Southern blacks.” In referring to “the actual speech of Southern blacks,” it is highly unlikely that Mencken thought they spoke the same way as southern whites. An American of his time would neither have assumed such a thing nor felt a compunction to pretend to, as many whites do today in surmising that black people simply speak southern English. Rather, Mencken was aware of an indigenously born black dialect, and considered it different from minstrelese. The black speech “as we know it today” that he referred to was this minstrelese, which would have indeed been the closest most American whites at the time got to any substantive amount of black speech.

Thus, to the extent to which tracing Black English to minstrelese has been influenced by Mencken’s sentence, he didn’t intend this. Nevertheless, given how often Black English is ridiculed, it is hardly a leap to suppose that its very roots are in the same kind of ridicule, which is what minstrel shows were all about.

In fact, many black people agree with Mencken and readily allow that there is a legitimate black speech variety, while perceiving a minstrel distortion ever looming elsewhere. For example, recall Maya Angelou’s passage: “At school, in a given situation, we might respond with ‘That’s not unusual.’ But in the street, meeting the same situation, we easily said ‘It be’s like that sometimes.’”

Yet people who would agree with that passage feel that what Angelou was referring to is different from the lyric to Irving Berlin’s “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” which is actually intended as a black statement, with lines such as “That’s just the bestest band what am!” Or different from Andy on Amos ’n’ Andy, one of whose catchphrases was “I’se regusted” for “I’m disgusted.” That, one senses, is a language no one ever spoke.

Especially clear on this point was Zora Neale Hurston, who laid down a skeptical analysis of minstrelese in 1934. She was fully aware that there was such a thing as Black English, and lovingly described aspects of it. Yet she noted in the meantime, “If we are to believe the majority of writers of Negro dialect and the burnt-cork artists, Negro speech is a weird thing, full of ‘ams’ and ‘Ises’.” She objected that in actuality, “nowhere can be found the Negro who asks ‘am it?’ nor yet his brother who announces ‘Ise uh gwinter.’ He exists only for a certain type of writers and performers.”

Hurston knew of what she wrote, not only because she was a southern black person but also because she had done extensive ethnographic work among poor black southerners under academic supervision. If anyone knew the truth about the most unfiltered Black English—that is, spoken by people in the South, isolated from whites, and semiliterate, such that Standard English exerted a lesser pull away from their most comfortable speaking styles—it was Hurston. She had the further advantage of hearing and documenting this speech as it still existed in her time. Since then, television, improved education, and highways have diluted what Hurston felt lucky to catch the final echoes of. One reading of Hurston’s article is that any depiction of black people using am in ways that seem strange to us, or saying “I’se-a” this and “I’se-a” that, is cartoonish, a slur, a goofy version of black speech concocted by whites.

All Language Has History—and History Holds Surprises

HOWEVER, ACTUAL EVIDENCE OF HOW black Americans spoke in the past has a way of interfering with the assessment that this was speech concocted by whites. One reads and listens to black people born before the Civil War, expecting them to sound somewhere between Celie as limned by Alice Walker in The Color Purple and your favorite rapper. Instead, time and again one finds inconvenient bits of what seems like minstrelsy peeking out here and there. The truth is that minstrelese, while indeed an exaggeration, was also a window into the history of Black English.

Black English has not always been what it is today, and the way black people were depicted as speaking in old plays, skits, and songs was not entirely unmoored from reality. It was one of those cases where stereotype had a basis in fact. This need alarm no one. This perfectly normal human language of the nineteenth century was simply different from the perfectly normal human language that black Americans would come to speak in the century afterward.

To get a handle on how minstrel talk was not purely nonsense, we have to pull the camera back and look into something that may seem only diagonally related to the issue: that human speech is an inherently mutational thing. Alone, that may sound like a fancy way of saying that language always changes. But actually, it’s something more specific, because our general sense of how language changes undershoots the reality.

What we usually mean by “language changes” is that:

1.  slang changes

2.  we always need new words for new things

3.  when different people come together, they will exchange words.

That is, we imagine language change as driven by cultural factors, because this is the kind of language change we can hear happening in our daily lives. Sext, iPad, quinoa—slang, terminology, and foreign words, respectively—this is the language change we know.

Less obvious is that besides these things, language also always changes just by itself. In other words, it is “inherently mutational.” Each generation hears sounds a little differently from the previous one and produces them differently. These days in America, in mainstream English, ever more people are pronouncing aw like ah, so that caught and cot, raw and rah, and hawk and hock rhyme. Aw and ah are similar sounds, and it happens that people started to hear aw more like ah–and for no reason. It’s just the way the cookie crumbled.

When there are alternate ways of saying the same thing and no specific reason to choose between them, in one era one of them wins out, but in the next one, the other one may take over. A hundred years ago, most people used dived as the past tense of dive; now many prefer dove. The past tense of sneak? Most would now, after a pause, say snuck. But the Americans you see in starchy clothes barely smiling in old black-and-white photographs liked sneaked more. Why? For no more reason than over the past couple of decades, people have started saying “Based off of her point, I would say that . . .” rather than “Based on . . .” or “Going from . . .” These things happen, in the same way as fashions and fonts change.

The reason for dwelling on this at all here is that Black English has changed over time by itself in the same way as all human speech has. Old English became Middle English and then became Modern English. Latin became French, Spanish, and Italian. Sanskrit became Hindi. In the same way, Modern Black English is today’s version of something that was different two hundred years ago—or even one hundred. Quite simply, there is no way that it wouldn’t be. We already know that the slang in Black English of the seventies, when such things were first written down in any detailed way, is now antique. Jive turkey, Right on!, boogie—all of these terms signal a different time, one now associated with synthesizers, Afro Sheen, and gauzy videotape. A few decades before that, Hurston in her discussion of the dialect, outlined some in-group slang of her own time, much of which barely ring bells now. Battle-hammed? Double-teen? “I’ll beat you till you smell like onions”?

It was the same way with the basic structure of Black English—how it sounded, how people put sentences together. If a black American were brought from 1850 into our time, we wouldn’t have trouble conversing with him, but one of the first things we would notice is that he would sound weird to us. This is because sounds in Black English have changed since then in the same way as cot and caught are sounding more alike today than they did then.

Lost Sounds

TO BE ABLE TO SEE MINSTRELESE as something other than idiocy—although that was part of it—we have to exercise our Wayback Machine muscles and immerse ourselves in the fact that in 1890, while black America certainly didn’t sound like the rest of America, it didn’t sound like Mary J. Blige or Jamie Foxx, either. The black American vocal soundscape was vastly different from the one we’re used to, simply because it was a different point in time.

We know this because minstrels aren’t the only people from a hundred-plus years ago whom we can now hear talking much more easily than ever before. Recording technology was invented just early enough to capture the sound of the speech of some black Americans born in the mid-nineteenth century.

One of the oddest things about the speech of these people is that they sound rather Irish or Scottish, or perhaps like Jamaicans, but never like black people familiar to us today. Today, we know Minnesotans for their “tight” pronunciation of the oh sound, such that so is not “soh-oo,” the way most of us actually say it, but a pure “sohh,” with no brief oo falloff. Black people in the 1800s pronounced oh in that same way. It was the same with the sound ay. Americans today pronounce say as “say-ee,” with an ee falloff. But black people in the nineteenth century pronounced it as a straight ay, in a way that Americans associate with nonstandard British accents (Downton Abbey fans, think of how Anna says the name of her husband, Mr. Bates). Also, most Americans say me rather like “mih-ee.” Black people of yore really said “mee.”

George Johnson was the first black recording star in America, starting in the 1890s, although utterly forgotten today. It doesn’t help that his two biggest hits were “The Laughing Coon” and “The Whistling Coon”—Johnson was bound by the expectations of white audiences of his time, which were openly and uncompromisingly racist. Yet recordings he did of those songs are, for better or for worse, the first time we can hear a black American using his voice, ever. And if we weren’t told he was black, we would barely know at all, despite that Johnson was born a slave in 1846.

In “The Whistling Coon” (1898), Johnson sings “I had a little lady,” pronouncing lady as “lehh-deee. . .” and thus sounding almost Scottish. He goes on: “I asked her if she’d marry mee, the answer is nohh,” which again reminds us more of tartans or shamrocks (or plantains) than anything we associate with black Americans. In 1906, Johnson even spoke some lines at the end of “The Merry Mailman,” and there isn’t a hint of a black sound we would recognize in his voice at all.

Of course, Johnson was just one person. Plus, a wrinkle in his biography is that from an early age he lived with a white family. Perhaps their speech (whatever it was like—we can’t know from this distance in time and technology) pulled his away from an originally blacker essence. Maybe, but Johnson wasn’t alone. Bert Williams and George Walker were America’s leading black stage stars in the first decade of the twentieth century. They were so popular that despite their color they were actually sought out to make some recordings—this at a time when the voices of all but a sliver of the most prominent black performers were lost to history.

Walker was the lead singer, and his stage persona was that of the quick-tongued, slick-dancing dandy, based on the minstrel-style expectations of the era. One expects Walker, therefore, to sound like some version of what our modern ears process as black, but Walker sounded nothing like that. He was born in the early 1870s in Kansas, and he sounds more like what we would expect of a white person of that background and period. “My Little Zulu Babe” was one of the songs Williams and Walker recorded, and Walker pronounces babe with the same tight vowel that Joanne Froggatt’s Anna on Downton Abbey uses when pronouncing the name Bates—on that vowel he sounds more like Craig Ferguson (or a calypso singer) than we would expect any black American man to sound. In another song, “Pretty Desdemone,” Walker sings “Pretty Desdemohhhn, I want to call mah ohhhhn,” sounding like someone out of Fargo.

Walker also gets in the required minstrelly laughs, showing that he considered himself to be singing “blackly” for the audience, and he also sings “mah ohhn” for my own, with the “mah” for my that no one in Minnesota uses. So it wasn’t that there was no overlap with modern black speech. One clear ongoing thread between the black sound then and the black sound now is the ah for igh, which we pick up even amid the ancient crackles and hisses. Bert Williams, in his recordings during the same time, also sounds half modern “black” and half something we can barely define, uses the tight ay, and also pronounces a word like out more like “eh-oot” (“Where was Moses when the lights went eh-oot?”).

Still, couldn’t this have been a matter of singing conventions? People don’t always pronounce things when they sing the same way they pronounce them when speaking. Today most English-speaking pop singers subconsciously sing with a black dialect sound, whatever their race and however they talk in real life. Could singers like Johnson and Walker and Williams have been singing with vowels tilted toward white speech, in line with the more formal atmosphere of American society at the time?

Recordings of ex-slaves in the late 1930s and 1940s talking rather than singing would indicate otherwise. In them, black people born before the Civil War talk the way the Georges Johnson and Walker sang: kind of like Irishmen, Fountain Hughes (a man) was born in the 1840s in Virginia, in slavery, and was interviewed in 1949. Soberly and casually, he describes his early life with the same vowels as the singers. In one anecdote he says, “I didn’t have nohwhere to goh . . . we knew a man that had a livery stehh-ble . . .” This is the general sound of these ex-slaves in one recording after another. Moreover, around the time when these recordings were made, researchers transcribed the speech of other southern black people of this age on paper, Henry Higgins–style, and the results were the same: “cohts” for coats, “hee” for he, rather than “hih-ee,” and so on.

By the late twentieth century, one could even catch the tail end of this difference in generations of living black people. In North Carolina, linguist Walt Wolfram recorded four generations of a black family: a boy, his mother, his grandfather, and his great-grandfather. The great-grandfather did not sound like an old version of the boy: He had the rural white sound I have been describing of black people of his vintage. It’s the mother who spoke what we immediately recognize as “how black people talk” in our times; the grandfather’s way of speaking was transitional.

This means that movies and plays where black people in the past speak with the same vowels blacks use now—that is, sound like today’s black people—are historically inaccurate. This may not be a bad thing—having such characters talk like the ex-slaves on the recordings would sound so unfamiliar as to detract from the artistry, just as otherwise historically accurate films about the early nineteenth century quietly spare the ample facial hair fashionable in the era for male actors cast as romantic figures. However, the black men at the beginning of the 2012 film Lincoln, or in the Buffalo Soldiers TV movie, or all of the characters in August Wilson’s plays set earliest in the twentieth century, such as Gem of the Ocean and Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, would sound to our modern ears, like weird hybrids of Caribbean and Celtic people, more than like the black people in The Wire.

Indeed, vowels like the ones we hear in the old recordings are also part of what distinguishes West Indians’ speech, and likely, black people had vowels like this in previous centuries because West Indian speech influenced the formation of Black English. The first slaves brought to Charleston, South Carolina, one of the depots from which black America developed, had formerly worked in Barbados and would have spoken that island’s variety of West Indian patois, which then became Gullah Creole. Gullah then entered into the mix of regional Irish and British dialects that became Black English, and the “clean” vowels were probably one of Gullah’s echoes into what became the speech of black people across the South and beyond.

My older relatives say that my paternal grandfather (whom I never met because he died a few years before I was born) sounded somewhat West Indian, even though he was born near Atlanta in 1901 and had nothing to do with the Caribbean. Likely, what sounded West Indian about him to black people of later generations was that he must have had the residual “ay” and “oh” vowels we can hear in scratchy recordings of black Americans born in the nineteenth century. He was raised by children of slaves, black people just a generation after the ex-slaves recorded in the 1930s and 1940s. It would have been surprising had he not sounded anything like them.

Ye Olde Black English

NOW THAT WE UNDERSTAND that sounding black in 1890 was quite different from sounding black in the twenty-first century, we are in a better place to know that putting things in a black way—that is, Black English’s very sentence patterns—was different. As our black time traveler from 1850 got comfortable with us, we’d hear him popping up with strange ways of putting a sentence together, just as white Americans from then would likely talk about how someone dived, rather than dove, into a lake. As disconcerting as this might seem today, some of the ways this man spoke would parallel the way black people were depicted as speaking in minstrel shows. Minstrelese is partly mockery, but partly what Black English actually once was.

A useful example is the use of am in place of is and are. Hurston, recall, ridiculed minstrelese for the am fetish, and some scholarly coverage of Black English implies that Black English has never used am this way, or that the issue is ambiguous. After all, sentences like “All the streets am just the same” sound very awkward today. Sure, Black English has its differences from Standard English, but “streets am just the same”? Nobody says this. It’s hard even to utter it today and feel natural. Certainly this must be just naked minstrel fabrication.

Yet that sentence about the streets is from Harlem Renaissance writer Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem, a chronicle of lower-class black life in Harlem in the 1920s, with rich and endless depiction of the casual speech of southern black people who had moved north. McKay, of course, was black, and he wrote his book with an almost anthropological intent, wanting to reveal and dignify the lives of a kind of black person who most black litterateurs of the period preferred not to dwell upon in public discussion. McKay was not, therefore, making fun of these people or trying to make them seem exotic. And yet his people use am in the way that seems so odd to us:

Oh, these here am different chippies, I tell you.

Lawdy! though, how the brown-skin babies am humping it along!

Black womens when theyse ugly am all sistahs of Satan.

Niggers am awful close-mouthed in some things.

I tell you, niggers am amazing sometimes.

It’s hard to miss that McKay did not hold back in depicting his characters’ honest, and often even vulgar, feelings—but that means that this was real speech, not people dressing up their talk in its Sunday best. And the verb am is all over the place. But was Claude McKay making these up?

To assess this, there are various things we must consider. One is that McKay was unlikely to have gotten down exactly how such people were speaking. McKay grew up in Jamaica and came to the United States only when he was in his early twenties. This means that despite his strong identification with the American black community, he was in no sense a native speaker, or even hearer, of Black English.

Also, if McKay happened to have an explicit interest in getting down on paper exactly how black Harlemites from the South spoke, then we might take his rendition as accurate. However, there is no record of his having that intention. Rather, he was an artist depicting the speech of the people around him in a way that seemed faithful to him, but that may have been a secondary concern to the narrative and artistic substance of his novel. The result would have been close enough to the linguistic reality to satisfy—but hardly documentationally pristine. After all, even black Americans can miss the nuances of Black English when writing it down. Human speech is so complicated that no layman (or even linguist) can fully understand the workings of his own language or dialect.

I know of a book in which a black author, to indicate identification with all black people despite some polite criticisms of certain aspects of inner-city culture, occasionally interjects “I be ghetto!” for a note of humor. The point is clear, and harmless, but if one were to nitpick—which would only be necessary for making this one point here—Black English speakers don’t use be in a sentence like that. As we’ve discussed earlier, that be is used for things that are a regular practice, like going shopping, not permanent things, like existence or membership in a category of people. “I’m ghetto!” is the proper rendition of that sentence in Black English, which wouldn’t have been of much help to the author, since it happens to be the same as it would be in Standard English. All this is to say that if black people themselves can accidentally distort the dialect when reproducing it, then certainly we wouldn’t expect a Jamaican’s rendition to be perfect.

This does not mean, however, that McKay’s rendition of black speech was a caricature. McKay was aware of actual minstrel distortion of black speech, but it is unlikely that he wrote an entire book, an all-black novel, in which the dialect he put in his black characters’ mouths was mere minstrel nonsense. This leads to an inevitable conclusion: McKay’s dialogue is a window into the past.

Another way we know this is that no one seems to have called him on the dialect depicted, despite quite a few black critics who reviled exposing the lower-class side of Harlem life to white readers (W. E. B. DuBois famously wrote that after reading it, he wanted a shower). Their problem was that such people were being shown to the larger public, not that they had been depicted inaccurately. Of course, if we go by Hurston’s comment in 1934 on the depiction of black dialect in general, McKay’s “am” and “I’se gwine” language qualifies automatically as nonsense. But Home to Harlem was published in 1928, six years before Hurston’s comment. The book was a sensation: We can be all but certain that Hurston, as a member of the Harlem Renaissance group to which McKay also belonged, read it.

Hurston’s remarks on the dialect were actually pretty brief—she intended no scholarly investigation of the issue in her article. Here is a reasonable assumption: Hurston had heard black people using the language McKay depicts, or something close to it. Her problem was with depictions of such language that were so inaccurate and clumsy as to qualify as mockery.

Whether McKay was conscious of it or not, there is a systematicity in how his characters use am. While I have declared that systematicity cannot convince people that a Black English trait is “correct,” that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t demonstrate that something people say is based on the cognitive coherence of the human brain. Just as modern black people use up with a particular meaning, McKay’s characters use am with a particular intention: jocularly vulgar evaluation of one kind or another. McKay uses the am with the word nigger—intended in the same in-group love/hate connotation that confuses so many today:

One thing I know is niggers am made foh life.

And niggers am got to work hard foh that.

. . . where bad, hell-bent nigger womens am giving up themselves to open sin.

Some music the niggers am making.

You nevah know when niggers am gwineta git crazy-mad.

Otherwise, the am is used in references of a certain kind to women, as we have already seen, with the line I first cited (“all the streets am just the same”) being the only one in the book that isn’t “salty.”

As awkward as this particular usage may seem, systematicity in language can be about more than marking things like past tense and plurality. We have seen how up is systematic—thus is grammar—in marking intimacy. Another Black English feature is come, which can be used to mark indignation, as in “He comes telling me he won’t have the money till Thursday” or “Don’t come yelling you don’t have a broom when you done threw it out with the rest of the trash.” As linguist Arthur Spears showed the linguistics community in the 1980s, although one would never think of this usage of come as anything but, well, people saying come, it actually doesn’t mean “approach.” It is, of all things, a marker of pique. In the same vein, McKay uses am as a marker of what we might call vernacular affection. Today, Black English does something similar with “brothas” and “sistahs.” McKay’s characters did it with am.

As to whether this kind of usage of am is “broken” (systematic or not), Old English comes up again. In Old English, there were two verbs that meant be, with separate forms. One be meant “being” in a mundane sense—what is for dinner—but the other be meant being in the sense of embodiment, eternity, like mountains, deities, and the future. One had to distinguish those two kinds of being. To learn Old English means dealing with something like the uses shown below (I have altered the forms a little bit toward how they would sound and be spelled in Modern English to avoid the Teutonic unfamiliarity of Old English itself):

So, this was more complicated than the be we’re used to. Today’s am/are/is/are have elbowed bist, bith, and bee-th out of the picture, with no more distinction now between being and Being. Therefore, why is it so barbaric that Black English once spread am around a little?

Yet the fact remains that McKay was making his lines up. What did real people sound like? Given that McKay used am so confidently and freely in Home to Harlem, it shouldn’t surprise us that many of the ex-slaves recorded in the 1930s and 1940s used am where we wouldn’t use it today. Real people said things like these:

The truth am, I can’t ’member like I used to.

And people says now dat Aunt Harriet am de bes’ cook in Madisonville.

Dey brung massa in and I’s jus’ as white as he am den.

Him am kind to everybody.

Charcoal and honey and onions for de li’l baby am good.

(I, too, am mystified by that last one!) These sentences are not the product of ridicule. Sober, committed people, many of them scholars, transcribed what these people said. Now and then they may have misheard, but there are simply too many occurrences of am for all of them to be fiction. Plus, if the people were actually saying is and are, how much like am do those words sound?

So, when minstrelese depicted black people using am in a way that sounds fake to us, it was actually based on an earlier Black English reality. Characters speaking minstrelese often used am across the board, seemingly ignorant that the forms are and is even existed. We can be sure that no black person ever talked like that. However, we can be just as sure that early Black English did involve variably using am beyond the first-person singular. Just as the sound of Black English has changed, its grammar has changed. After all, why would Black English sit still while the English language as a whole kept morphing along in the mouths of everyone else in the United States (and elsewhere). I find it hard to believe that Hurston, for example, never heard anyone using am in a way she wouldn’t have used it. She was concerned with accuracy and degree.

On what the reality with am was, a reasonable hypothesis is that early Black English speakers code-switched. At one pole, they used standard, or standardlike, forms of be—no ex-slave or literary character uses only am and has no command of are and is. At another pole, am could be used for are and is. This would have been a symptom of Black English emerging from adults learning English past the age when they could vacuum a new language up perfectly, the way children can. One of the first things adults simplify under such conditions is be. Think how irregular that verb is: am, are, is, was, were, been, ain’t. Why wouldn’t grown-ups learning all of that, when needing a break, let one form do a lot of the lifting? The Africans did, and the form they leaned on was am.

Those slaves’ children however, were born in the United States, and black people born in the United States had enough contact with whites to know the standard forms as well. Worldwide, in situations like that, often people don’t simply toss away the old rendition. Instead, they retain it in their speech repertoire but assign it a particular social function. They switch between the standard version and the old rendition, with the old rendition used for more casual or intimate speech and topics. This is how black Americans use Black English alongside Standard English today.

As such, for early Black English speakers, the am usage was colloquial, not ignorant. McKay’s usage of am suggests that as generations passed, this usage of am narrowed even more, being used mainly for emotional effect, such as to express a bluff, levelling kind of cameraderie, or express sexual attraction. The undertone would have been that am was old-school and down-to-earth, and therefore handy for striking a note of cultural authenticity. This is the usage of am McKay captures. By World War II, it would seem, the old am’s day had passed and new generations weren’t using it at all.

When we read a line like black writer Pauline Hopkins’s in her 1900 short story “General Washington: A Christmas Story,” where a black character says “Bisness am mighty peart” (peart is a variant of pert and here meant “hopping”), only at our peril do we assume that Hopkins was writing minstrelese to appease white readers. Actual black people of nineteenth-century birth, speaking seriously about their lives, spoke exactly such usages of am into the historical record. In Alex Haley’s Roots, he has slaves at the end of the Revolutionary War saying “Freedom am won!” I remember finding that utterance implausible when I read it in the book back in the seventies (Mom made me read the whole thing). But given that an actual ex-slave is recorded as having recounted in an interview “Den [Then] surrender am ‘nounced and massa tells us we’s free,” I beg Mr. Haley’s pardon. And since a 1973 article was the first to air this sentence beyond the archives, Haley, writing Roots around that time, just may have modeled his sentence on this genuine one.

The same lessons come from other items that sound weird now. Hurston’s “Ise uh gwinter” gives us all we need. Let’s break it down. First, was the “I’se” part just a slur implying that black people can’t conjugate verbs? Today, it is easy to suppose that actual black people never said “I’se” at all and that this was just something minstrel performers made up. Yet the case is actually the same as with am: McKay made use of it (“Ise gwine to show you some real queens”), Langston Hughes used it in one of his “Simple” stories, “Last Whipping” (“I’s a man—and you ain’t gonna whip me”), and ex-slaves used it a lot.

What Hurston was referring to, then, was that black people were so often depicted as using it inaccurately. A random but perfect example is in the melodramatic little novel What Can She Do? (1873), by Edward Payson Roe, one of those three-named authors who was a bestseller before World War I and yet is utterly unheard of and barely readable today. In What Can She Do? Hannibal was a black butler born in the South. Roe’s portrait of Hannibal is intended as poignant rather than comical, and one senses Roe trying to get down how such a person actually spoke. However, Roe clearly operated on a basic premise that Hannibal’s speech is “ungrammatical,” which threw off his ear for how a Hannibal would have used, for example, “I’se.” Hannibal uses it not only the way we now know actual black people did but also in ways no actual black people would have. Roughly, for Hannibal “I’se” is practically a replacement for I overall, in instances such as “I’se hope you’ll forgive me,” “I’se isn’t,” “I’se don’t know ‘zactly,” and “I’se know ‘tis” for “I know it is.” But no ex-slave is recorded using “I’se” in this way, nor do black authors committed to depicting their people honestly have people use I’se in this way. It’s depictions like this, which were common, that motivated comments like Hurston’s.

One might ask, “Did any black people ever actually say ‘gwine’ for ‘going to’?” Today one drops in the word gwine to sound like a cartoonish rube, whether a white or a black one; we associate it with Gone with the Wind and, at least by my own reading, old plays and probably bad ones. Reading Hurston’s dismissal of “Ise uh gwinter” reinforces us in a sense that gwine has always been something caricaturists put in black mouths. Yet again, McKay put it in his characters’ mouths, as in the sentence above, or in “What kind o’ bust-up youse gwine to have with me?” Plus, ex-slaves used gwine quite freely. Lucian Abernathy, eighty-five, born in Mississippi and interviewed in the late 1930s, said, “I knows you gwine take plumb good care of dem chillun.” Boston Blackwell, ninety-eight, and born in Arkansas, was interviewed around the same time. In his narrative, he said, “Here he come, yelling me to get down: he gwine whip me ’cause I’se a thief, he say.” The unpleasant subject matter of many of these ex-slave quotations is harrowing, but it also shows that the forms these people were using were real: No one would have distorted his or her speech amid the urgency and intimacy of recounting events like these.

Yet Hurston was still correct that “Ise uh gwinter” was not a legitimate sentence and demonstrated the exaggeration of minstrelese. The use of that sentence to say “I’m going to” or “I’m gonna” is wrong. Ex-slaves are not recorded as saying it, although it pops up often in white people’s depictions of black people speaking. It isn’t that the “uh”—usually written as a, as in a-rockin’—didn’t exist in itself. It was, like all else, a piece of grammar in early Black English (and much other English in the United States and on the other side of the pond). It usually referred to something going on over some time. “Him was a-settin’ at a window in de house one night” and “Dey was jus’ a-eatin’ green apples” are two examples from the ex-slave narratives. That meaning doesn’t make sense with gwine, as in going to.

When you say you are going to do something as in “gonna” do it, you’re talking about the future, not describing yourself as in the act of locomotion, “a-going,” like “a-settin’ at a window” or “a-eating apples.” This is why “Ise uh gwinter” (chop some wood, go pick up my daughter, etc.)” doesn’t make sense and properly sounded inaccurate to Hurston. Even at a century-plus’s remove from a time when anyone would venture that black Americans anywhere said “a-gwineta,” it feels clumsy in the mouth and head. There’s a reason—it is “bad grammar” in terms of how a- is, or was, used. Hence one suspects that even one of McKay’s lines, “I ain’t agwine to have no Harlem boys seducin’ mah man away fwom me,” wasn’t true to life.

If Black English Never Changed, It Would Be Broken

BLACK ENGLISH IS LEGITIMATE LANGUAGE not only because it has nuanced structure of a kind that would challenge the adult learner, just as learning Finnish or Fijian would. It is legitimate language, driven by normal human minds, because it changes over time while always maintaining functionality as a vehicle of nuanced communication, rather than flaking away like slang or some in-group fad. Black English has a history in the structural sense, just as Standard English has marched from Old to Middle to its present version and it exists in time as well as in space. Abraham Lincoln would find it odd to hear someone say “A house is being built over there”—since for someone of his time the proper expression was “There is a house building over there,” In the same way, a rural black woman in 1850 would find it odd to hear her great-great-great-grandson saying “Folks be tryin’ all the time,” because in 1850 the unconjugated habitual be didn’t exist yet—it only came in around World War I. Her great-great-great-grandson would find it odd to hear her say, as she might, “Dose people am your other relatives an’ you gwine to town to meet ’um tomorrow.” But hear it he very well might, because back then, a great many normal black people spoke in that way.

White minstrel players did not make up out of whole cloth the way they depicted black people as talking, and today’s Black English certainly does not trace to a cynical fabrication by those white men. White minstrels made something up by exaggerating what they heard at one point in Black English’s time line, and because the white version got so much play, it was easier for many to hear, for a while, than the actual black speech of the time.

Today, though, we’re in a better place to understand the reality of the issue. We can hear ex-slaves talking at the press of a button. It’s getting easier every year to listen to ancient recordings of black pop—and blues—singers. We can perceive that Black English, like all forms of English, has glided through time, ever turning over, ever challenging our expectations. That’s what human speech does.

CHAPTER FIVE

Through a Lens Darkly?

PERCEIVING BLACK ENGLISH AS IT IS: LIFE LESSONS

MY AIM HAS NOT BEEN SIMPLY to describe some things and make some points, as if I merely wanted to add to the bookshelf of books on black American speech as a kind of exercise. I have sought to help the reader actually hear Black English in a new way, to hear it as an alternate kind of English rather than as bad grammar and a lively slang. I have not succeeded in this goal if my readers perhaps take in what I have tried to get across in terms of some facts and observations but then, back out in real life, are still prone to hearing the speech of black Americans as regrettable errors, cringing at the idea that there is even a such thing as a Black English in any way, quietly equating the whole concept with minstrel shows or other kinds of distortion, et cetera.

I have failed if the reader’s response to discussions of Ebonics or African-American Vernacular English or Black English is still, to any degree, a question such as “What’s that all about?” or “What exactly do you mean, ‘Black’ English?” or an impression that anyone described as speaking Black English is necessarily being depicted as incapable of speaking Standard English. I want you to be truly comfortable with the idea that there is indeed a black way of speaking, that there isn’t anything wrong with it, that it would be bizarre if such speech did not exist, and that it is spoken alongside Standard English, not in opposition to it.

However, Black English (and there is a such thing!) is spoken in a society in which racism still exists, and the issue of what we do about racism is decidedly complex. On Black English, then, even if we know that there is such a thing beyond slang and perceived mistakes, opinions will differ on where we draw certain lines, where the past leaves off and the future marches on, and where to beware of slippery slopes. The reader may disagree with some of my opinions. That is normal and healthy. However, my intention is to show that even where issues will occasion debate, the debate will be more productive if we understand what Black English is—such as, preliminarily, that it is at all.

Barack Obama’s “Negro Dialect”

IN 2008, SENATE LEADER HARRY REID occasioned some controversy when he traced Barack Obama’s appeal to voters to his being light-skinned, for one, and then also to his speaking with “no Negro dialect unless he wanted to have one.” When this got out into the media in 2010, Reid formally apologized to Obama. Technically, he shouldn’t have had to, because he had been speaking simple truth—and on more than one level.

The word Negro was unfortunate, but more in the sense of being awkward than being a slur. Negro is such an antique term for black Americans that we can be sure that Reid switched from black and then to African-American decades ago. He is not on record as having for some reason continued to refer to black people by a dispreferred name, an insistence that would be odd for a modern politician. Nor is it realistic to suppose that by “Negro dialect” he meant something like the cartoony minstrelese of Amos ’n’ Andy. First, black Americans don’t speak that way, and Reid is a psychologically sane human being who could be under no impression otherwise. Second, if Reid for some reason actually was under the impression that most black people talk like minstrel characters, wouldn’t a basic grasp of the sociopolitical tenor of his times lead him to keep that impression to himself? People don’t get elected to Congress and stay there for so long without certain basic political smarts.

Rather, Reid was grasping for an official term for Black English. That he had to grasp is not surprising, in that we must recall that black people’s speech barely has a widely known official name. To most, the term Ebonics has a slangy association with the street, and is also thought of as a passel of mistakes. Naturally, then, Reid, if he was aware of that term, refrained from applying it to Obama. But then, what else was he going to call it? African-American Vernacular English is primarily an academic term, alien in any black barbershop or church across the nation. Black English is the term I have used, but as we well know, a great many find it difficult to imagine just what this term refers to other than, again, mistakes and slang.

Reid, then, tried something vaguely academic-sounding that he may even have picked up somewhere along the line in the sixties and seventies. Back then, Black English actually was often called “Negro English” in print by those who were beginning to study it; when Negro was still current, “Negro English” didn’t have the condescending tone that it has today. As late as 1973, to take an example at random, an article that got around among linguists and educators interested in black speech was titled “Issues in the Analysis of Nonstandard Negro English,” and this article appeared in the prestigious Journal of English Linguistics. Truth to tell, I’m not sure what most people, including Reid, would have come up with as a “respectable” appellation for black speech.

Of course, however, many would contest that Reid should not have been referring to Barack Obama and Black English in the same breath at all. Reid was taken as condescending—and in a racist way—for praising Obama for not speaking Black English.

Yet Reid thought he was giving Obama a compliment, as many would have likewise assumed. Here is where this book comes in. Underlying the offense many took upon Reid’s remarking upon Obama’s not speaking Black English was the idea that Black English is simply errors. That is, Reid seemed impressed that an educated, accomplished black man could speak without making mistakes.

It is a safe assumption, given how common the misimpression is that Black English is merely error-ridden, that Harry Reid shares with most Americans the idea that not using the verb be or saying “He don’t be going” is broken, rather than alternate, English. However, his finding it notable that an educated man doesn’t make these so-called mistakes cannot be taken as stereotyping: Most black people, regardless of their level of education, do talk in two ways. One is Standard English, but the other is Black English—which is so widely thought of as merely a flouting of the rules. We now know that such people are bidialectal, not just bad at keeping their linguistic pants up. But we would hardly expect a career politician to be one of those in on the good news.

Key in assessing this issue is that it isn’t only whites who have that opinion of Black English. Black people shared the grand old Ebonics e-mail jokes in the nineties as often as whites did. It is a standard experience among specialists in Black English and other nonstandard dialects that people who speak such varieties quite often claim not to, and see the dialect’s features as mere mistakes. During the controversy over whether Oakland’s school board should espouse using Ebonics as a teaching bridge to Standard English, black journalists were as vehement as white ones in trashing Black English as broken language. In their book Spoken Soul, John and Russell Rickford recount:

This was the fundamental conviction of many of the black journalists who sounded off on Ebonics. Whether liberal or conservative, Black English in their minds represented a dark side, a streak of backwardness that had to be shunned, purged, stripped away, or lopped off like an unsightly carbuncle in order for the race to advance.

During this same controversy, when I was giving my various presentations and making media appearances, black moms quite vibrantly competent in Black English often said. “I would never talk that way to my kids.” But frankly, they actually did—alternating normally between the formal and informal poles and using Black English for the latter pole. All of us, when raised in cultures where the standard written language is elevated as “the real language,” have a distorted sense of how we actually speak unmonitored. That’s a race-neutral truth, and if you don’t believe me, set your phone on record mode when you’re chatting with friends and listen later. You will marvel at the gap between what you’d write and how you just gab. Around the same time as the Okland controversy, the guy who cut my hair at a black barbershop in Berkeley dismissively referred to the Ebonics in the news as “Oh yeah, that language!” when “that language” was precisely the dialect he was fluent in. To him, “that language” was just weird, incorrect grammar—despite that it was what he had learned on his mother’s knee. Black educators who have learned that Black English is a system rather than a disaster encounter an uphill climb in convincing not just whites but also black people of what they have learned. Lesson: Harry Reid’s take on Black English is American, not just white.

Reid’s statement, taken as a whole, could be read more sanguinely. In describing Obama as having “no Negro dialect unless he wanted to have one,” Reid was getting at the basic reality that black people use Black English as part of a tool kit when choosing to strike a certain kind of note. The idea that Obama uses Black English when he “wants” it but otherwise speaks Standard English is a more accurate take on how Obama, and many other black people, talk than the less enlightened idea that black speech is merely a matter of stark ignorance, impervious to improvement. Black English is an element in one’s tool kit. This is certainly better than the compliment educated black people often get about being “articulate,” where the implication is that you speak Standard English as a labored stunt, or that black people other than you talk “wrong.”

That impression can truly rankle. Whites are often perplexed that educated black people don’t like being called “articulate.” The rub is that a white person speaking the same way often would not be called “articulate.” The implication is that your not making “mistakes,” alone, renders you remarkable, which feels like a bar being set awfully low. It’s as if you are thought of as executing Standard English, rather than its being as integral to your soul as it is to any white person’s. My favorite example of this type of thinking was a remark made by someone who genuinely thought he was giving me a compliment by praising me for how “confidently” I spoke “my Standard English,” as if I dream in Ebonics and am ever on my guard for the occasional aks or ain’t to pop up. “But you really are articulate,” some people object. And okay, I may have a certain knack with words—but the problem is, you can never be sure how people are really hearing you. So very many articulate white people are never called such, because no one considers it remarkable that they can speak effectively, especially if they have advanced degrees and speak in public a lot.

It’s less fraught, then, for Reid to think of Obama as strategically choosing to fail—even though he, along with many Americans, is wrong in what he thinks of as communicative failure—rather than choosing to speak standardly. Reid gets that one can speak two ways and keep them separate. One wonders whether he actually did happen to peruse an article about “Negro English” back in the day.

Whether or not you agree with my analysis of Reid’s comment, the proper response to it was not simply to dismiss the idea that there is such a thing as a “Negro dialect” variety local to black Americans, or that educated black people often have it as part of their verbal tool kit. Reid’s statement was likely founded in some assumptions about Black English that don’t stand up to science, but those assumptions are, alas, commonplace.

Baby Mama: A Touch of Calypso?

BLACK ENGLISH IS SUCH A PHANTOM CONCEPT that certain elements of it now and then strike listeners as isolated peculiarities rather than as integral components of a living and ordinary system of speaking. It’s like finding a wedding ring on the sidewalk and assuming it’s a little amulet from moon people. We fall into such ideas only because it can be so hard to understand that Black English actually has something worthy of being called grammar.

An example is the proposed etymology of the terms baby mama and baby daddy, referring to a male or female parent of one’s child to whom one is not married. Rap group Outkast’s megahit “Ms. Johnson” mainstreamed baby mama in 2000, dedicated to “all the baby mamas’ mamas,” and by 2008 the term was ensconced enough to be the title of a comedy about middle-class whites. Meanwhile, there have been T-shirts reading JESUS IS MY BABYDADDY.

Why baby mama and not baby’s mama? Even the Oxford English Dictionary has fallen for a tasty notion that the source is Jamaican Creole (patois), in which there is a term baby-mother. However, the chance is infinitesimal that a random locution from the Caribbean would become common coin in black America. Sure, there are Jamaicans in the United States, but black Americans have been no more in the habit of picking up their lingo than other Americans have been in embracing the latest slang from Toronto.

The mistake is in assuming that baby mama and baby daddy are singletons, isolated expressions oddly letting the possessive s go. And that’s what they look like when we are denied awareness of the parallel system of speaking English that Black English is. One trait of Black English grammar is that it can do without the possessive s—not just when talking about parentage but in general. This is the kind of simplificatory trait in the dialect that I argued against highlighting at the outset. However, this hardly means that the trait isn’t real.

“Sometime Rolanda bed don’t be made up” is an example from Lisa Green’s grammatical description of Black English. At a fast-food restaurant staffed by black Americans, I once heard “That’s Brenda drink, not his.” In the eighties, the bawdy black comedian Robin Harris did a comedy routine about a woman’s naughty brood of children, laced with the catchphrase “Dem Bebe kids!” (for “Those are Bebe’s kids!”).

It goes back even further. In the 1943 film This Is the Army, legendary black boxer Joe Louis appears in a cameo, where he says, “All I know is I’m in Uncle Sam’s army and we are on God’s side.” Or at least that’s what the script had, but the way Louis actually rendered the line was, in good Ebonics style, “All I know is I’m in Uncle Sam army.” Louis wasn’t channeling calypso; he was using the same grammatical regularity that elsewhere yields “Rolanda bed,” ‘Bebe kids,” and “baby mama.” To wit: A black person saying “baby mama” is simply rendering “baby’s mama” with the rules of Black English instead of those of Standard English, just as they would say “Brenda drink.” They are expressing the possessive relation in the same way as legions of languages worldwide that have no possessive marker. In Indonesian, mother is ibu, baby is bayi, and “mother of baby” is ibu bayi “mother baby,” used in some places to express the same meaning as “baby mama” is in the United States.

One might ask, though, where black Americans picked up this grammatical regularity. There are two answers. One is that African slaves simplified English somewhat and the next generation modeled their speech partly on their parents’. We know that this did not result in broken speech, because Modern English’s possessive s is the only one left of many possessive endings that Old English had, and yet no one considers this a threatening matter.

Also, many black people in early America likely heard whites dropping the possessive s, too, as hard as it is for us to imagine this today, when it is absent from any white dialect of American English. Remember the indentured servants from schoolroom history lessons who worked alongside slaves on southern plantations? Well, it wasn’t elite Brits who wound up laboring in the Alabama cotton fields; it was slaves who worked alongside folks speaking rural brands of English quite unlike that of Henry Higgins. Even today you might hear someone in Yorkshire say among friends “My sister husband” rather than “My sister’s husband.” Court transcriptions of statements by London prisoners in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries show that lower-class folk regularly said things like “Goldwell wiffe” instead of “Goldwell’s wife” and “Barlowe owne brother” instead of “Barlowe’s own brother.” Many of these people were due for transportation to plantations in Virginia and beyond. The expression baby mama wouldn’t have been long in coming.

So, what’s up with the term baby mama? It’s just baby’s mama with Black English grammar.

Who Dat—What’s That?

IT IS TRADITIONAL TO CHANT “Who dat!” at New Orleans Saints football games. In 2010, there was a brief kerfuffle when the National Football League threatened to sue T-shirt owners who were selling who dat T-shirts, claiming that it owned the trademark to “Who dat.” For a spell, a question circulated” “What’s ‘who dat’ anyway?”

Unpacking the issue leads in any number of directions, many of interest to fans of ancient pop culture. At the football games, the full chant is “Who dat say dey gonna beat dem Saints?” However, this sentence has still led people to ask, “But what’s the who dat, by itself, from?” It turns out that people have been saying “Who dat?” in any number of pop-culture scenarios since the nineteenth century; the expression has a certain percussive essence that lends itself to doggerel. Chants and exchanges involving who dat were staples of old jazz bands, novelty songs, and comedy routines. The source of these, in turn, was minstrel shows, where trading off the question “who dat” was a standard bit.

The pop-culture history of who dat is, in itself, interesting. However, the fact that people were saying “who dat” on minstrel stages does not mean that the people in the stands in New Orleans are unknowingly mouthing minstrelese. Just as the Jamaican etymology of baby mama strays too far away in space, tracing the Saints chant “who dat” to white men corked up during the Reconstruction era takes us needlessly far back in time. It’s like assuming that the Château Lafite wine you’re drinking was made in the late eighteenth century because you’ve read about Thomas Jefferson liking it, but are unaware that Château Lafite is still being made today.

Who dat is simply Black English. In Black English, the verb can often be left out. This means that “Who is that?” Can be “Who dat?” Black culture plays a major part in New Orleans culture, and this includes language—such that a football chant could be phrased as “Who dat say dey gonna beat dem Saints?”, as in “Who is that who says they’re going to beat those Saints?” A natural step from that chant is to shorten it to the simple question “Who dat?”—meant in a taunting “It’s on” way. That’s all there is to it. This is something that could easily happen today, even if no one had ever said “who dat” in minstrel shows or songs. Who dat? isn’t an isolated idiom whose origin requires smoking out like that of raining cats and dogs or dressed to the nines. “Who dat?” is a vanilla sentence from an alternate English that thrives alongside the standard variety, a sentence using the same construction—linguists call it “zero copula”—that yields sentences like “She my sister” for “She’s my sister” and “Where da broom?” for “Where is the broom?” Today’s Saints chant arose naturally from the millions of people still using the grammar that produces it.

That grammar existed in the minstrel era, as well, which is why the phrase Who dat? could be used in routines then. However, in line with my earlier point about minstrelese, the minstrels didn’t make up who dat out of thin air. Zora Neale Hurston’s characters, carefully and lovingly drawn portraits of the poor rural black people she grew up among and later studied, regularly used “Who dat?” in her works of the twenties and thirties. In Jonah’s Gourd Vine, Amy asks, “Who dat coming heah, John?”

Also, unlike in the baby mama case, where its modern origins make a Caribbean etymology unlikely, who dat does likely have some connection to the West Indies. One of the elements in the mix that created early Black English was Gullah Creole, famously spoken by rural black people on the coast of South Carolina and Georgia. Gullah Creole is one offshoot of a family of creole languages. In that family, the most renowned member is Jamaican patois; the creoles spoken in Guyana and Belize are variations on the theme, as are, across the ocean, the Krio language of Sierra Leone and the language misleadingly called “pidgin” or “broken” English by Nigerians and Ghanaians. In many of these creoles, who can be expressed as who dat, such that “Who dat say dey gonna beat dem Saints” would sound rather familiar to speakers of these varieties.

In sum, many of the people who created Black English already spoke West Indian English, in which who dat was basic. Then, the American vernacular that resulted was one where, like those West Indian varieties, it was common to leave out the be verb because its multifarious forms (am, is, were, etc.) are so hard to learn, and communication works just fine without a be verb anyway. The result: “Who dat?” chanted in an American stadium today. It’s all about grammar, as human speech always is.

The N-Word is Dead. Long Live the N-Word?

UNDERSTANDING THAT BLACK ENGLISH is something coherent existing alongside standard English also helps make sense of something around which a hopeless debate endlessly swirls: what we are currently to refer to as the “N-word.” In discussions of this word in American society, the fundamental snag is the idea that there is a single word nigger under consideration, and that the question is merely whether or not a person should say it or not.

To fully understand the mistake in this analysis, it will help to pull the camera far back for a bit—to Scots. In Scotland, the local dialect Scots is not merely a matter of slang, expressions, and an accent. Scots grammar is quite different from English grammar in many ways. When the way to say “I don’t know” is “A dinna ken” and “A’ll intae the hoose” is “I’ll go into the house,” it’s clear that we are dealing with something other than what most people would think of as English in any familiar sense. Many Scots call it a separate language from English; almost anyone else would surely consider it a different dialect of English than the standard.

In Scots, home is hame. However, home and hame do not have the exact same meaning for a Scot; hame is not simply home said with a different vowel in the middle of it. Hame is associated with intimacy, true comfort, close friends—roughly, the home in standard English’s home and hearth. Home is a more neutral or formal term, as in residence, domicile. The reason hame has that in-group meaning is that for Scots who speak Scots, Standard English is the formal language, while Scots is the intimate one. The two ways of speaking correspond to different aspects of existence.

Now, often in discussions of the N-word, a black person—in my experience, usually a man—will opine that whether the word is okay depends on how you pronounce it. Nigger is a slur associated with disrespect from whites, but nigg-ah (and here an audience always laughs warmly) is different. Niggah is friendly.

That analysis gets close to the heart of the matter but also reveals how abstract the concept of Black English is to Americans. More economically put, nigger is Standard English and nigga is Black English. The reason that clean way of parsing it is unavailable to most people is analogous to how hard it is in America to discuss, for example, class. An American will say, “Well, the difference between him and her is that he went to private schools and had fancy vacations and both of his parents went to college, while although she wasn’t poor, she went to public schools that were only okay and neither of her parents went beyond high school; they worked long hours.” We are often reluctant to simply say of the second person that she was, quite simply, working-class—whereas many British people would readily say the equivalent and are perplexed at our discomfort with acknowledging such obvious socioeconomic distinctions.

Linguistically, reality eludes us in a similar way, in that we can only talk around, above, and outside of the obvious nature of the difference between nigger and nigga because we have no graceful way of referring to Black English. We don’t think of it as a category, a concept. That should change, because this metric neatly resolves the otherwise-eternal tension over who is using “that word” and why. Nigger is a standard English slur. Nigga is a word in a different dialect, used among black people themselves, usually men, to mean “buddy.” It emerged from a common tendency, especially among men, to use mockery and joshing as an expression of affection. There have been Russian men who call one another muzhik, which means “peasant.” Fans of Seinfeld will recall the episode when George Costanza starts spending time with middle-aged white good-time Charlies who call one another “bastard” with abandon; that reflected a real-world kind of language usage among guys. It isn’t an accident that these days young men of all colors—including whites ones, as I am now almost accustomed to hearing—call one another “nigga” in warmth. Nigga means “You’re one of us.” Nigger doesn’t.

There is, then, no single word nigger. Nigga is not simply nigger pronounced “blackly,” just as hame in Scotland is not simply home pronounced Scotly. Nor ought we labor under the impression that this situation is even new, despite notions that the prevalence of nigga has some connection to its prominence in rap music, which would date nigga (as opposed to nigger) back only a few decades. Black men have been using nigga in the “buddy” meaning forever; in other words, nigger was recruited into a new meaning and function in Black English a very long time ago. We have already seen that Claude McKay used it liberally in depicting his poor black characters in Home to Harlem in the 1920s; Hurston also used it a great deal, as did Claude Brown in his Manchild in the Promised Land, a novel about growing up in Harlem in the 1940s. Nigger isn’t the only word that underwent this recasting; ace boon coon is familiar to black people of a certain age as a term of affection.

What does all of this mean about the N-word in modern America? Two things. First, the idea that some single word called “the N-word” should not be used by anyone, ever, is not as immediately plausible as it can seem, because there is no single “N-word.” It is true that nigga sounds a lot like nigger, but words are used in context, We can be sure that the black men calling one another nigga don’t intend it as an abusive slur, just as we know that when someone refers to something as “Cool!” they aren’t referring to temperature. Some might object that nevertheless, the word’s origins are in the slur, and that this, plus the sonic resemblance, should be enough justification to stamp out even its descendants. That is a reasonable argument, but only when there is a basic understanding that we are indeed dealing with two words, not one. The question is whether there is a reason to ban a word because of its relationship to another one. As such, a reasonable riposte could be that we can eliminate the source word while allowing that today’s innocent language often has seamy origins. Think of what “that sucks” refers to in terms of its original, literal meaning. Yet who could imagine a campaign against that expression? The debate will go on.

Second, the common question “If we can’t use it, how come black people can?” is incoherent. There is no single “it” under discussion. The question is, more precisely, “If we can’t use the slur, how come they can use the term of affection?” That makes no more sense than asking “If we can’t run red lights, how come they can relax in the park?”

Overall, the confusion over what really could be termed the N-words forces us to approach American language with a more cosmopolitan perspective than we usually have to. Without understanding that nonstandard language is an alternate rather than a destruction, we cannot understand that the guy who ventures that nigger and nigga are different words is not just a comedian but is ahead of the curve. Nigger is dead. Long live nigga.

In closing, we should return to a story we left unfinished: the one about Shirley, told in perfect Black English. When we left off, Shirley was worried that she wasn’t going to get a Valentine from Charles, while the other girls were going to get Valentines from their boyfriends. Well:

That Shirley, she so worried, she just don’t want to be with nobody.

When Shirley get home, her mother say it a letter for her on the table. Right away Shirley start to wondering who it could be from, ’cause she know don’ nobody s’posed to be sending her no kind of letter. So Shirley, she open the envelope up. And when she do, she can see it’s a Valentine card inside, and she see it have Charles name wrote on the bottom.

So now everything going to be all right for Shirley, ’cause what she been telling everybody ’bout Charles being her boyfriend ain’t no story after all. It done come true!

This is the way millions of human beings express themselves in their downtime across the United States. I hope a passage like the one above comes off differently to readers now than it might have when they started this book.

Chapter One: Can you tell why the story has don’ nobody s’posed to be sending her no kind of letter but at the end, Charles being her boyfriend ain’t no story after all? Why not ain’t nobody s’posed to be sending? This isn’t random. It’s because the sentence about the letter is about an ongoing situation; in negative sentences in Black English, you use don’t in such cases rather than ain’t. Black English is not simply unravelled Standard English; it’s complicated.

Chapter Two: Note that the narrator of the Shirley story is obviously not a white southerner; in this particular dialect, the narrator is clearly a black American. The passage, in other words, sounds black.

Chapter Three: We assume that the narrator can also speak standard English, just as we need not fear that Shirley is going to grow up only able to express herself in this dialect regardless of context. This is how the narrator, Shirley, her mother, and her friends talk with one another. Like so many people in the world, they speak differently among themselves than when elsewhere.

Chapter Four: It would be hard to say that this sober, touching, and thoroughly plausible tale is merely minstrel caricature, in a dialect no human being actually uses. It is, rather, a slice of real linguistic life honestly recorded on the page.

English hasn’t existed long enough to diverge into dozens of starkly distinct regional dialects as it has in Great Britain. Black English is America’s only English dialect that combines being strikingly unlike standard English, centuries old, embraced by an ever wider spectrum of people, and represented in an ever-growing written literature. It is worthy of celebration, study, and certainly acceptance. America will never truly grow up linguistically until this is widely understood. This book has been my brick in the wall.

Endnotes

INTRODUCTION

16  “It a girl named Shirley Jones”: From the California State Department of Education’s Lesson Plan Handbook for the Proficiency in Standard English for Speakers of Black Language program, which began in 1981. I am unaware of the author of the text.

19  Southern versus Black English: The handiest presentation is Patricia Cukor-Avila, “Co-existing grammars: the relationship between the evolution of African American and Southern White Vernacular English in the South,” in Sociocultural and Historical Contexts of African American English, ed. Sonja L. Lanehart (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2001), 93–127.

CHAPTER ONE

31  “After all, as much linguistics and anthropological research has shown”: H. Samy Alim and Geneva Smitherman, Articulate While Black: Barack Obama, Language, and Race in the U.S. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 97.

40  Done analysis: Elizabeth Dayton, “Aspect and Modality in Grammaticalization of done in AAE Filmic Speech,” presented at the Society for Caribbean Linguistics meeting, Barbados, August 2010.

42  Jarawara data: R. M. W. Dixon, The Jarawara Language of Southern Amazonia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

42  Narrative had passage: John R. Rickford and Christine Théberge-Rafal, “Preterite had + V-ed in the narratives of African-American pre-adolescents,” American Speech 71 (1996): 227–54.

48  Black English pronouns and ass: Chris Collins, Simanique Moody, and Paul M. Postal, “An AAE Camouflage Construction,” Language 84(2008): 29–68.

CHAPTER TWO

58  People identifying speakers as black over the phone: Guy Bailey and Natalie Maynor, “The Divergence Controversy,” American Speech 64: 12–39; John Baugh, “Perceptions Within a Variable Paradigm: Black and White Racial Detection and Identification Based on Speech,” in Focus on the U.S.A., ed. by Edgar Schneider (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1996) 169–82; Thomas Purnell, John Idsardi, and John Baugh, “Perceptual and Phonetic Experiments on American English Dialect Identification,” Journal of Language and Social Psychology 18(1999): 10–30.

66  Black speakers’ use of sounds differing on the basis of class: Consult Walter Wolfram’s A Sociolinguistic Description of Detroit Negro Speech (Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics, 1969); and more recently Jennifer Nguyen, “The Changing Social and Linguistic Orientation of the African American Middle Class” University of Michigan (PhD diss., 2006) and Jamila Jones and Dennis Preston, “AAE & identity: constructing & deploying linguistic resources,” in The Joy of Language: Proceedings of a Symposium Honoring the Colleagues of David Dwyer on the Occasion of His Retirement, ed. David Dwyer (2011).

70  My description of the vowels in the English of black people speaking in the standard dialect is based on studies by my students Samuel Heavenrich and Cole Hickman.

75  The effect of gender on speech: Findings supporting the difference between black women’s speech and black men’s in terms of grammatical features include Walter Wolfram’s A Sociolinguistic Description of Detroit Negro Speech (Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics, 1969), and Patricia Nichols, “Black Women in the Rural South: Conservative and Innovative,” in Language and Gender: A Reader, ed. Jennifer Coates (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998) 55–63.

84  Black vocal quality study: Julie H. Walton and Robert F. Orlikoff, “Speaker Race Identification from Acoustic Cues in the Vocal Signal,” Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research 37 (1994): 738–45.

CHAPTER THREE

106  Recordings of famous black people: Mary McLeod Bethune can be heard in an audio recording of her speech “What Does American Democracy Mean to Me?” in 1939. Booker T. Washington’s recording of his Atlanta Compromise speech is widely available online. A. Philip Randolph, who lived until 1979, was recorded often; most available is his speech at the March on Washington in 1963, widely uploaded online.

CHAPTER FOUR

119  Recording of minstrels Leonard Spencer and Billy Williams: I heard it on the CD set Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry (Archaeophone Records, 2005). Since the release of this set, recordings of this kind have quite often been made available for listening online, as well.

121  “The Negro dialect”: Joseph A. Bailey II, at blackvoicenews.com, June 29, 2003.

122  “put in a call”: Jack White, “Ebonics According to Buckwheat,” Time, January 13, 1997, p. 62.

122  “the Negro dialect, as we know it today”: H. L. Menken, The American Language: an Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States (New York: Knopf, 1936), p. 71.

124  “we are to believe”: Zora Neale Hurston, “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” in Negro: An Anthology, ed. Nancy Cunard (London Wishart, 1934, p. 6.

129  George Johnson: Lost Sounds CD.

129  Williams and Walker: Various online sites include these men’s surviving recordings from the first decade of the 1900s.

131  Ex-slave recordings: The Web site for the Library of Congress includes uploadings of these invaluable recordings.

132  Four generations of a black family: This is based on the recollection of linguists present at conference presentations by Wolfram in the past. The recordings are recounted in Sali Tagliamonte, Making Waves: The Story of Variationist Sociolinguistics (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2015).

138  “Arthur Spears showed”: Arthur Spears, “The Black Semi-Auxiliary Come,” Language 58: 850–72.

139  Ex-slave narratives and the use of am: Various books and articles present word-by-word transcriptions of interviews with ex-slaves. On am specifically, handy for a quick look is Jeutonne Brewer, “Subject concord of be in Early Black English,” American Speech 48 (1973): 5–21. Books on the ex-slave narratives include Federal Writers’ Project, Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves (Washington D.C., 1941); Edgar Schneider, American Earlier Black English (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1989); Guy Bailey, Natalie Maynor, and Patricia Cukor-Avila, eds., The Emergence of Black English: Text and Commentary (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1991). Also useful is George T. Dorrill, Black and White Speech in the South: Evidence from the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States (New York: Peter Lang, 1986).

CHAPTER FIVE

152  “This was the fundamental conviction”: John Russell Rickford and Russell John Rickford, Spoken Soul (New York: Wiley, 2000), p. 195.

156  “Sometime Rolanda bed”: Lisa Green, African-American English: A Linguistic Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)), p. 102.

158  Court transcriptions of statements by London prisoners: Laura Wright, “Eight grammatical features of southern United States speech present in early modern London prison narratives,” in English in the Southern United States, ed. Stephen J. Nagle and Sara L. Sanders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 36–63.

Index

AAVE. See African-American Vernacular English

academia. See linguists and academics

accent, 15–16. See also dialects; speech

community identity and, 77, 78–79

community segregation impact on, 78, 79–80

diversity in U.S., 77

geographical factors in, 77–79, 82

global differences in racial, 65–66

grammar before, 85

identification of, 59–60, 63

loss of, 85

mastering, 45

monophthongization in, 45, 73

native, in foreign language learning, 80

New York, 75, 77–78

social class and, 77–78, 95

subconscious nature of, 80, 83

in white speech, 59–60, 63, 66, 83

accent, black, 15–16, 45–47

adoption of, 67

African languages connection to, 86–87

anatomy of, 70–74, 81–82

attributes of, 67–69, 70–74, 84–85

with children, 62, 81

code switching in, 69–70

community identity with, 78–79

community segregation and, 79–80

consonants in, 67–68

controversy and judgment with, 58–59, 82

diversity in, 74–75, 84–85, 88

with education level and social class, 66, 78–79, 80

environmental influences on, 64, 81, 88

familiarity and comfort in, 78–79

Five Frills of, 70–74, 76, 78–80, 85

in French, 86–87

gender and, 61–62, 75–76, 87, 171n75

identification of, 59–60, 63

intonation of, 68–69, 83, 86

minstrel speech and stereotypes of, 58, 59

prevalence of, 64–65

without slang, 61

southern English and, 62–64

with Standard English, 70–76

stereotypes of, 58, 59, 63

timbre of, 59, 83, 84, 85

in U.S., 60, 64, 66

vocal quality of, 82–87

vowels in, 67, 70–74, 76–79, 82, 84, 170n70

actors. See television and movies

African-American Vernacular English (AAVE)

scholarship on, 17, 150

terminology critique of, 22–23, 150

African immigrants, 23, 87

African languages, 42–43, 44

black accent connection to, 86–87

dominant compared to non-dominant, 113

influence on Black English, 23

aks for ask, 30, 33, 69–70, 114–17

American English. See English, Standard

am for is, 134–35, 137–42, 144, 172n139

Amos ’n’ Andy, 122, 124, 150

anatomy

of black accent and speech, 70–74, 81–82

of white speech, 80–81

Angelou, Maya

on diglossic nature of Black English, 102, 104, 123

writing style of, 105, 107–8

Appalachian culture, 27

Arabic

diversity in, 95–96, 98, 102

Egyptian and Standard, compared, 96–98, 117

in schools and religion, 96–97

articulateness, 108, 116–17, 154

Aschmann, Rick, 94

Atlanta Compromise speech, 106, 171n106

baby mama and baby daddy, 155–58

belonging, 110–11

Berlin, Irving, 123

Bethune, Mary McLeod, 106, 171n106

“blaccent.” See accent, black

black Americans. See also accent, black; English, Black

Black English critique by, 152–53

cultural traits of, 81

education of, 14, 31

formal and non-formal speech usage of, 104–9

husky or deep voice of, 61–62, 84, 87, 88–89

judgment of, 13, 31

in literature, 105–6, 135–41, 142, 164

minstrel depiction of, 119–21, 150

pre-Civil War, 125

prestige and speech of, 110–11, 116

southern, in North, 134

speech of, prior to 1970s, 105–7, 108

speech of famous, 106, 171n106

Black English. See English, Black

books. See literature

bref for breath, 69–70, 71

British English. See English, British

Brooklyn, 77–78

Brown, Claude, 164

Bush, George W., 103

La Cage aux Folles, 88

California, 12–13, 152–53

calypso, 130, 155, 157

Canada, 98–100

Carlson, Tucker, 15

Chaucer, 115

children

black accent for, 62, 81

of immigrants speech patterns, 111–12, 113

Civil Rights leaders, 19, 106, 171n106

Civil War, 110, 121, 122, 125, 131

class, social, 163

black accent and, 66

Black English association with lower, 19, 134

Black English variability with, 105–6

inequality between, 14, 31

southern white culture and, 19, 26

speech patterns and, 77–78, 95

Cochran, Johnnie, 58–59

code switching, 17

definition of, 69–70

historical use of, 141

colloquial forms

of Finnish, 100

of French, 98–99

of Standard English, 15, 68, 102, 141–42

The Color Purple (Walker), 125

community

identity, 77, 78–79

segregation, 78, 79–80

complexity

of Black over Standard English, 35–36, 39, 44–47, 50–51

of language, 47–48, 113

of Old English, 53

of Standard over Black English, 51–52

with word emphasis, 47–51

consciousness. See subconscious

consonants

in black accent, 67–68

in Black English, 32–33, 67–68

reversal of, 33

copula, 29, 160

counterexpectational marker, 41, 42, 51

counterintuitive, 18, 27, 35, 42, 64, 97

Creole languages

baby mama origins in, 156

Haitian, 11, 12, 20

slaves and, 55

systematicity of, 55–56

who dat origin and, 160–61

criminal law, 20, 58–59

cultural traits, 80–81

Dakar, 113

dance, 81

dialects

criticism of, implications, 31, 56

diversity of, in U.S., 77, 93–95

French, in Canada, 98–100

Negro, 149–50

sentence structure differences in, 15, 16–17

of southern and Black English, 19

sub-, in Black English, 74–75

switching, 85, 101–2, 104, 108–9, 111, 123

vowel usage diversity in, 76–77

dictionary, 13, 36, 156

diglossia (“two tongues”), 101–2, 104, 111, 112–13, 123, 167

diphthong, 45–46, 73

discrimination, 26, 117–18. See also racism; stereotypes

dismissive, emphatic, 48, 49–50

done, 40–42

Dumbo, 121

Ebonics, 36, 122

commentary and critique of, 15, 23, 150, 153

jokes about, 12, 152

revival of, 22

teaching, 46, 49–50

education. See also schools

black accent and, 66, 78–79, 80

of black Americans, 14, 31

Black English of leaders in, 106–9

Ebonics, 46, 49–50

Egyptian Arabic, 96–98, 117

emphasis, word, 47–51

Empire, 105

employment, 90–93

English, Black. See also accent, black

accuracy in depictions of, 134–36, 144–45

African influence on, 23

aks for ask in, 30, 33, 69–70, 114–17

am for is in, 134–35, 137–42, 144, 172n139

barriers to understanding, 21

black Americans critique of, 152–53

code switching in early, 141

complexity of, 35–36, 39, 44–47, 50–52

conceptions and misperceptions of, 12, 20–21, 26–27, 92, 148–52, 154–55

consonants in, 32–33, 67–68

diglossic or dual nature of, 102, 104, 123, 167

evolution and history of, 127–47, 161

features of full, 84–85, 166–67

Five Frills of, 70–74, 76, 78–80, 85

global comparisons of, 30, 42, 111–14

grammar and, 11, 18, 21, 22, 25–26, 33, 61, 84–85, 107–8, 155–58

in job interview, 90–93

judgment on, 90–91, 107–8

legitimacy of, 15, 34–35, 36, 91, 145–46

linguists and academics on, 12–14, 17, 87, 104, 124, 151

in literature, 135–41, 142, 164

lower class association with, 19, 134

media/press on, 12–13, 20

minstrel shows as origin of, 21, 120–25, 134, 140, 144–45, 146

in music, 18, 147

in politics and education, 103, 106–9, 149–51, 153–54, 155

possessive s in, 156–58

racism in debate on, 12–13, 14, 21, 22, 26, 31–32, 56, 88, 92, 149, 151

in schools, 12–13, 31–32, 107–8, 122, 152–53

sentence structure of, 16–17, 84

as slang, 14, 27, 58, 61

social class influence on, 105–6

southern English compared with, 18–19, 46, 62–64, 67, 167

Standard English aided by, 12–13, 152

Standard English compared to, 11, 15–17, 34–52, 54, 162–67

Standard English with, 92–93, 102–3, 117–18, 141, 149, 152, 153–54

stereotypes of, 58, 59, 63

subdialects in, 74–75

subtractions/reductions in, 32–33, 54–55, 67–68

systematicity of, 28–29, 137–38, 153

in television and movies, 104–5, 121–22

terminology of, 22–23, 150–51

translators for, 20

verbs in, 16–17, 27–29, 30, 34–35, 54, 134–35, 137–39, 144, 146, 172n139

vowels in, 32–33, 67–69, 70–74, 76–79, 82, 84

white culture adopting, 18, 156

English, British, 173n158

American English compared with, 15–16, 80

possessive s dropped in, 158

English, Old

aks for ask evolution and, 114–15, 116–17

gender in, 53

plurals in, 52–53

Standard English evolution from, 53–55, 94, 146

verb form of to be in, 139

English, southern, 50–51, 173n158

Black English compared to, 18–19, 46, 62–64, 67, 167

discrimination with, 26

vowels in, 71

English, Standard

black accent with, 70–76

Black English as aid to, 12–13, 152

Black English compared to, 11, 15–17, 34–52, 54, 162–67

Black English with, 92–93, 102–3, 117–18, 141, 149, 152, 153–54

“blandness” of, 93

British and American, compared, 15–16, 80

colloquial forms of, 15, 68, 102, 141–42

complexity of, 35–36, 39, 44–47, 50–52

evolution from Old English of, 53–55, 94, 146

history of, 109–10

idiosyncrasies in, 49

slaves adoption of, 106, 109–10, 115

subtractions/reductions in, from Old English, 54–55

subtractions/reductions in Black English from, 32–33

familiarity

black accent and, 78–79

in nigga over nigger, 163–64

up and, 38–39

films. See television and movies

Finnish, 100, 146

Five Frills, 70–74, 76, 78–80, 85

formal

casual compared to, speech, 97–101, 104–14

writing style of Angelou, 105, 107–8

French, 11

black accent in, 86–87

in Canada compared to France, 98–100

history of, 76–77, 94

Frills. See Five Frills

Fula, 113

gender (nouns), 53, 113

gender (people), 61–62, 75–76, 87, 171n75

geographical factors, 77–79, 82

German, 11, 12, 47, 112

grammar

Black English and, 11, 18, 21, 22, 25–26, 33, 61, 84–85, 107–8, 155–58

in Egyptian compared to Standard Arabic, 96

intellectual success and proper, 24–25

in language learning, 85

in schools, 29

of Scots, 162–63

slang compared with, 18

gwine for going to, 144–45

habitual forms, 27–28, 29, 146

had, 42–45

Haitian Creole, 11, 12, 20

Haley, Alex, 142

Hamer, Fannie Lou, 106

Harlem, 134, 135, 137, 164

Harlem Renaissance writers. See Hurston, Zora Neale; McKay, Claude

Harris, Robin, 156–57

Hawaii, 55

Heavenrich, Samuel, 170n70

Hickman, Cole, 170n70

Hindi, 127

hip-hop culture

Black English popularity and, 18

slang of, 61

Home to Harlem (McKay), 134, 137, 139, 164

Hopkins, Pauline, 142

Hurston, Zora Neale, 127

on minstrel origins of Black English, 124, 134, 144–45

who dat usage by, 160

identity, 17, 77–80

idioms, 35, 160

idiosyncrasies, 49, 60, 107

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Angelou), 102

immigrants

African, 23, 87

children of, speech patterns, 111–12, 113

inequality, 14, 31

in-group, 110–11, 127, 138, 146, 162

intelligence, 52, 59

intimacy

am for is used for, 138–39, 142

in nigga over nigger, 163–64

in non-standard language, 162

up and, 38–39, 138

intonation, 68–69, 83, 86

Ise, 143–44

Italian, 11, 76, 94, 100–101

Jamaica, 135, 156, 161

Jarawara tribe, 42

Jeantel, Rachel, 20

The Jeffersons, 104–5

job interview, 90–93

joual, 99–100

judgment, 118

of aks for ask, 116–17

on black culture, 13, 31

on Black English, 90–91, 107–8

on “sounding” black view, 58–59, 82

Key, Keegan-Michael, 108

“Kiezdeutsch,” 112

Koenig, Sarah, 83

Krapp, George Phillip, 122–23

language. See also African languages; Creole languages

adoption of non-native, 18, 67, 106, 109–10, 115, 156

code switching in, 17, 69–70, 141

complexity of, 47–48, 113

context for, globally, 95–101, 163

dialectical differences of, 15

evolution in, 76–77, 94, 96, 97–98, 125–27, 145–46

identity relationship to, 79–80

idiosyncrasies in, 49

inheritance of, 53–54

learning foreign, 80, 85

legitimacy of, 145–46

“redneck,” 14, 72

Romance, 76

segregation of community impact on, 78, 79–80

subconscious feature of, 80, 83, 153

treatment of, in U.S. compared globally, 11–12, 20, 94

tribal, 42

language, non-standard

adoption of, 18, 67, 106, 109–10, 115, 156

complexity of, 113

global examples of, 11–12

intimacy in, 162

standard and, relationship, 21

language, standard. See also English, Standard

casual speech compared to, 97–101

distortion of, 21

evolution from Latin, 76–77, 94, 96, 97–98, 127

non-standard and, relationship, 21

Latin, 33, 76–77, 94, 96, 97–98, 127

law, criminal, 20, 58–59

legitimacy

of Black English, 15, 34–35, 36, 91, 145–46

language evolution and, 145–46

systematicity and, 29–30, 36

of vernacular speech, 14–15

Library of Congress, 172n131

linguists and academics

on AAVE, 17, 150

on Black English, 12–14, 17, 87, 104, 124, 151

on Creole languages, 55–56

grammar for, 29

Negro terminology for, 151

responsibility of, 21, 27

“vocal fry” report by, 83

literacy, 109–10

literature

Black English in, 135–41, 142, 164

black writing style in, 105–6

Living Single, 49

Manchild in the Promised Land (Brown), 164

March on Washington (1963), 171n106

McClendon, Garrard, 114

McKay, Claude, 134–39, 142, 143, 144, 145, 164

meaning

duality of, 44

shades of, 34–35

of up, 37–38

words used outside of original, 36–37

media/press

on Black English, 12–13, 20

Standard English evolution and, 94

melody, 82, 84

men

black accent and, 61–62, 75–76, 171n75

husky or deep voice of black, 61–62, 84, 88–89

“vocal fry” of, 83

Mencken, H. L., 122–23

Meredith, James, 25–26

metathesis, 33

migration, 55, 87

minstrel speech and shows, 107, 171n119

black accent and stereotypes of, 58, 59

black Americans depicted in, 119–21, 150

origins of Black English and, 21, 120–25, 134, 140, 144–45, 146

racist caricature of, 120

in television and movies, 121

who dat in, 160

monoglossia, 101

monophthongization, 45, 73

murder, 20

music, 123. See also hip-hop culture

Black English in, 18, 147

rap, 66, 155–56

narrative form, 42–45, 51

National Public Radio, 108

negatives, multiple, 17, 30, 33

Negro, 149–50, 151

Network, 107

New Orleans Saints, 158–59, 161

New York, 75, 77–78

nigga, 162–65

nigger

in McKay’s writing, 138

nigga compared with, 162–65

nouns, gender of, 53, 113

Oakland, California, 12–13, 152–53

Obama, Barack, 103, 149–51, 153–54, 155

Old English. See English, Old

Outkast, 155–56

past tense. See tense

Peele, Jordan, 108

Perry, Tyler, 67–68

Philadelphia, 43, 59, 78–79

“pidgin,” 55, 113, 161

pitch, 50, 61–62, 120

plurals

in Old English, 52–53

possessives and, verbally, 44

politics, 103, 106–7, 149–51, 153–54, 155

pop-culture, 159

possessives

dropping, in Black English, 156–58

plurals and, verbally, 44

press. See media/press

prestige, 110–11, 116

profanity, 38, 50

pronouns, 47–50, 51

pronunciation

with aks for ask, 30, 33, 69–70, 115–17

of bref for breath, 69–70, 71

diversity of, in U.S., 77, 93–94

of Old English, 53–54

Quebec. See Canada

the Qur’an, 96

race

in community identity, 78–79

controversial views on, 57–58

global accents and, 65–66

racism

Black English debate and, 12–13, 14, 21, 22, 26, 31–32, 56, 88, 92, 149, 151

of minstrel shows, 120

in “sounding” black view, 58

radio, 108, 122, 124, 150

Randolph, A. Philip, 106, 171n106

rap music, 66, 155–56

“redneck” language, 14, 72

reductions. See subtractions/reductions

Reid, Harry, 149–52, 153–54, 155

religion, 96–97

rhythm, 81

Rickford, John, 152

Rickford, Russell, 152

“Right Thurr,” 74

rill, 45–47

Romance languages, 76

Romanian, 76

Roots (Haley), 142

rule breaking, 110–11

Russian, 30

Rustin, Bayard, 19

St. Louis, 74–75, 113

Sanford, Isabel, 105

Sanskrit, 127

scholars. See linguists and academics

schools

Arabic in Egyptian, 96–97

Black English in, 12–13, 31–32, 107–8, 122, 152–53

grammar in, 29

quality of, impacting black kids, 14, 31

Scotland, 161–63

segregation, 78, 79–80

Senegal, 113

sentence structure, 15, 16–17, 84

“sharp,” 52

Sicilian, 11, 100–101

Simpson, O. J., 58

slang

black accent without, 61

Black English seen as, 14, 27, 58, 61

Egyptian Arabic seen as, 97

evolution of, 127

grammar compared to, 18

impermanence of, 17

up as, 37

slaves, 54

am usage of, 139–40, 141, 142, 144, 172n139

Creole languages and, 55

gwine usage of, 144–45

Ise usage of, 143–44

possessive s dropped by, 157–58

speech of, 139–45, 147, 172n131

Standard English adoption by, 106, 109–10, 115

Smoove, J. B., 69

social class. See class, social

societal inequality, 14, 31

socioeconomic factors, 163

southern English. See English, southern

Spanish, 33, 76–77, 94, 96, 97–98

Spears, Arthur, 138

speech. See also dialects; minstrel speech and shows; white speech

anatomy of, 70–74, 80–82

Atlanta Compromise, 106, 171n106

of black Americans prior to 1970s, 105–7, 108

casual compared to formal, 97–101, 104–14

for children of immigrants, 111–12, 113

colloquial forms of, 15, 68, 98–100, 102, 141–42

diglossic or dual nature of, 101–2, 104, 111, 112–13, 123, 167

emphasis in, 47–51

of famous black Americans, 106, 171n106

global comparisons of localized, 11–12, 100–101, 111–14

legitimacy of vernacular, 14–15

patterns and sound in, 61

prestige and, of black Americans, 110–11, 116

rule breaking in casual, 110–11

of slaves and ex-slaves, 139–45, 147, 172n131

social class impact on, 77–78, 95

subconscious nature of, 80, 83, 153

television impact on, 77

U.S. diversity of, 77, 93–95

Spencer, Leonard, 119, 171n119

Spoken Soul (Rickford, J. and Rickford, R.), 152

Standard English. See English, Standard

stereotypes, 18, 58, 59, 63, 122, 125, 152

subconscious

cultural traits, 80–81

speech, 80, 83, 153

subtractions/reductions, 32–33, 54–55, 67–68

Swahili, 42–43, 44, 113

Swiss German, 11, 12, 47

systematicity

of Black English, 28–29, 137–38, 153

of Creole languages, 55–56

legitimacy and, 29–30, 36

television and movies, 12, 15, 63, 107

Black English in, 104–5, 121–22

minstrelese in, 121

speech impacted by, 77

white speech dominance in, 78, 86–87

tense

narrative, 43–44, 51

past, of done, 40–41

terminology

of African-American Vernacular English, 22–23, 150

of Black English, 22–23, 150–51

Negro, 149–50

of “sharp,” 52

third-person-singular verb, 17, 54

This Is the Army, 157

timbre, 59, 83, 84, 85

translators, 20

trial, murder, 20

tribal language, 42

“two tongues.” See diglossia

United States (U.S.)

African immigrants in, 23

black accent in, 60, 64, 66

diversity of accent and dialects in, 77, 93–95

English in, compared to Britain, 15–16, 80

language treatment in, compared globally, 11–12, 20, 94

up, 36–40, 137–38

U.S. See United States

verbs

to be usage in Black English, 27–29, 30, 134–35, 137–42, 144, 146, 172n139

in Black English compared to Standard English, 16–17, 34–35, 54

conjugation of, 15, 27–28, 30, 32, 35, 98, 99, 143, 146

gwine for going to in, 144–45

narrative, 42–45

in Old English, 139

shades of meaning for, 34–35

third-person-singular, 17, 54

“vocal fry,” 83

voice. See also accent; pronunciation; speech

husky or deep, 61–62, 84, 87, 88–89

intonation of, 68–69, 83, 86

pitch of, 50, 61–62, 120

quality of, 82–87

timbre of, 59, 83, 84, 85

vowels

in Black English and accent, 67, 70–74, 76–79, 82, 84, 170n70

evolution of, from Latin, 76–77

segregated communities and difference in, 78

in southern English, 71

Walker, Alice, 125

walking, style of, 81

Warfield, Marlene, 107

Washington, Booker T., 106, 171n106

West Indies, 160–61

what, 36–37

White, Jack, 122

white culture, 27

black accent and contact with, 66

Black English adoption by, 18, 156

minstrel show caricatures by, 119–24

response to Black English in schools, 31–32

southern lower-class, 19, 26

white speech

accent in, 59–60, 63, 66, 83

anatomy of, 80–81

“redneck” language in, 14, 72

in television shows, 78, 86–87

“vocal fry” in, 83

who dat, 158–61

Williams, Billy, 119, 129n172, 171n119

Wolfram, Walt, 131–32, 172n132

Wolof, 113

women

black accent and, 75–76, 87, 171n75

husky or deep voice of black, 62, 84, 87

“vocal fry” of, 83

y’all, 50–51

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