6 September 2010, 9:08 pm
So many stupid rednecks think that African Americans are just making random errors in the language, such as saying "I be working" instead of "I am working". Did it seriously never occur to them that it would be absolutely impossible for so many millions of them to all be making the EXACT same "errors"? Why is it that they are able to recognize Southern English as a dialect, but not African American English? Did it never occur to them that the people who speak the African American dialect are always consistent and are never making other bizarre constructions like "I are working" or "he am here"? To make this slightly deeper: why is it that so many millions of stupid people in this world are absolutely incapable of logical thinking? It's really not that hard. Tom, what does "correctly" mean to you? Is someone who speaks with a New York accent and says on line instead of in line "just stupid?" What about an Australian who moves to the USA, would you call him "stupid" for using the sayings and accent of his native land and not adopting that of what the majority is speaking? Would you be "just stupid" if you moved to London and continued to speak like an American? Dart, a dialect is defined as "a variety of language used by a group of speakers". What the hell do you use to define "correct" or "incorrect" English? Languages evolve over time. Are those who speak Jamaican English incorrect? Are those who speak British English incorrect to you? (And it is more than an accent. British English, for example, would say "my bank are very kind", which in American English would be a completely ungrammatical statement. Are you going to say that one is correct and another isn't? Or do you recognize that they are merely different variations of the same language? And the "millions of stupid people" are the ones who literally think that the African Americans who speak this dialect are making RANDOM errors. That they are just too stupid to understand that the sentence should be "the people are working" and instead are only intellectually capable of saying "the people be working". My point is, if it were merely random stupidity, the people who speak this dialect would also just as randomly say other constructions like "the people am working". But you NEVER, EVER see this. Why? Because the errors are NOT random, they are ABSOLUTELY CONSISTENT THROUGHOUT THE MILLIONS OF SPEAKERS, meaning it is a different, DIALECT not just random stupidity, that is the reason for the difference between AAVE and SE. @ U w: Well I do believe it is consistent, you can read about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_American_Vernacular_English But your point is valid enough, and I'm not going to go into whether or not the use of this dialect should be as widespread as it is. That's a much thornier topic. I don't think that the language was made in an attempt to 'carve out a subculture' though--I think the subculture already existed--and I think many rednecks have their own dialect that is distinct from Standard English. I am a Southerner, I know, I speak it myself sometimes. The only point I'm trying to make here is that it IS a dialect and it is not just random errors. If it were just random errors, then you wouldn't be able to cite common examples, since the errors would be RANDOM and therefore there would be no patterns. The fact that everyone recognizes the African American dialect for what it is means that it is by definition a dialect.... Read More »
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