"EBONICS:A Serious Analysis of African American Speech Patterns"

Many Black Americans do not speak standard English. They speak Ebonics
("Ebony," meaning "black" and "phonics," meaning "sound") -- a language
which evolved in the Americas as a result of the adaptation of English
words to an African language system. Since many African Americans do
not speak standard English, "it is more than reasonable to suggest that
in order to effectively and sussessfully teach the culturally and
linguistically different Black child in the urban school the English
language, the logical place to begin is with the cultural and
linguistic experiences of the Black child. That is, with Ebonics, using
a bilingual and bicultural approach."

This is the view of Dr. Ernie A. Smith, a distinguished author,
lecturer and professor of linguistics at California State University at
Fullerton. Dr. Smith believes that the high failure and drop-out rate
of Black children across the United States is traceable to the fact
that they are limited or non-English speakers, but neither the United
States government, state departments of education nor local school
boards recognize this fact. Hence, millions of dollars are spent to
teach English as a second language to Mexican, Asian, Indian, Persian,
Oriental and other non-English speaking people, while black children
must be content with attempting to grasp knowledge imparted to them in
a language that is not their own.

Dr. Smith emphatically rejects the view that Black Americans speak a
version of "Black English," "Black vernacular" or "Black dialect." He
believes that this was the chief misconception in the so-called "Black
English" decision reached by Justice Charles Joiner of the United
States District Court in Martin Luther King Junior Elementary School
Children, et al. v. Ann Arbor School District (July 12, 1979).

According to Dr. Smith, the concept or term "Black English," as it is
currently used in the literature, is contradictory. "It is like saying
my sister is an only child. How can a person be your sister and still
be an only child? If you say 'Black English' and speak utterances using
syntactical patterns that are not English, it is impossible to maintain
that you are speaking the English language.

"From a linguistic principle," Dr. Smith continues, "when you say two
people of two speech communities speak the same language or different
dialects thereof, the relative evidence for saying that it is the same
language is that there is continuity of the morphology [defined below].
Knowing the sounds of the language will not make you a speaker of the
language; nor will knowing the vocabulary of the language make you a
speaker of the language. What you must know and master in order to
speak any language, are: (1) the morphology, i.e., the rules combining
the sounds to make words or the shaping and forming of words; and (2)
the rules for arranging those words in a pattern or string to make a
sentence, which is called syntax."

Black Americans, according to Dr. Smith, actually "think in and use
African syntactical patterns, but they have borrowed and extensively
used European words." Ebonics "follows the African deep structure in
every respect when it is different from English, and there is solid
empirical linguistic evidence of identical deep structure or
syntactical patterns in West African languages."

What this means is that African people in America originally adapted
English words to their own African system of pronunication, enuciation,
morphology and grammatical sentence structure. So that the so-called
"Black English" or "substandard English" still spoken by many Black
Americans is in fact a separate language, Ebonics, whose basic
foundation is clearly African.

Dr. Smith's conclusions are largely based on his research and the
research of other scientists on the language and culture of Africans
and African Americans.

For thousands of years, a number of languages have evolved on the
continent of Africa. Included among these were the world's earliest
written languages, which first appeared in the region of the modern day
Congo and the upper Nile Valley about six thousand years ago. By the
16th century A.D., a number of different dialects were spoken in West
Africa, homeland of the ancestors of most Black Americans. Although in
many instances these dialects were mutually unintelligible, each of
them possessed common phonological (sound) features and grammatical
sentence structures. Therefore, many linguists believe that these
languages had the same or similar origins and belonged to a single
language family.

Furthermore, there are solid bits of empirical evidence that suggest
that at this same time West Africans had developed a Lingua Franca or
trade language spoken by common agreement between different language
groups. According to Dr. Smith, this communication was facilitated by
the vocabulary from several dominant languages such as Ngola, Fulani,
Wolof, Yorbuba, Mandingo, Malinke, Bambara and Dwe. Because of these
shared linguistic features, West Africans, who were brought to the New
World as slaves, were able to retain a singular African language
structure.

"When the black man was brought to the Americas from Africa," states
Dr. Smith, "he was speaking Niger-Congo or what are called Hamito-Bantu
languages. Niger-Congo is a geographical designation for the languages
of West Africa. Hamito-Bantu is a cultural designation of these people
-- Hamito and Bantu, referring to Black Africans as opposed to Afro-
Asiatics, who are Arabs and Berbers, etc. These Hamitic and Bantu
people, who were captured in West Africa, were speaking languages whose
phonology, grammar and lexicon (words) were different from those of the
Indo-European languages with which they came into contact in the New
World.

"The African people," Dr. Smith continues, "were brought into America
and the Caribbean speaking African languages; and as a result you see
that, to the extent that they have been integrated into white society,
there is more likelihood of their sounding European or borrowing more
European features. To the extent that (Black Americans) have lived in
social isolation, you will find the linguistic retention of an African
Hamito-Bantu substratum in their phonology, grammar and vocabulary."

The early Black slaves actually spoke very little of the European
languages, whether the dominant language in a particular country was
English, Spanish, Dutch, French or Portuguese. "The Africans," Dr.
Smith insists, "knew the words," but because most were denied a formal
education and could not read, they generally did not learn the grammar
of the European language to which they were exposed. "The greatest
difficulty one has in mastering a foreign language is learning the
grammar. You can learn the sounds that are different and you can learn
and extensively memorize the vocabulary, but learning Spanish words
won't make one a speaker of Spanish. What one has to know and speak in
order to have competence in Spanish is the Spanish morphology or verb
system." What the Africans spontaneously chose to do, then, was to
maintain the "deep structure" (i.e., word formation and syntactical
rules) of their own African languages and by relexification (i.e.,
using words from one language in the verb system or grammar of another
without a change in the grammar), they adapted the vocabulary of the
Indo-European languages to the structure of the languages that they had
in Africa. "Ebonics," then, asserts Dr. Smith, "is an African
morphology or substratum with French, Portuguese, Dutch, Spanish and
English words in it," depending on where the Africans lived in the New
World.

"A good analogous situation", states Dr. Smith, "is the English
language. At one time the English language was not spoken on the
British Isles. The islands were inhabited predominantly by what are
called Celtic people. In about 449 A.D., the Celtics were under the
domination of the Romans and Latin was spoken throughout the Isles. The
Celtics began to hire mercenaries to help them expel the Scots and the
Picts after the power of the Roman legions had waned. They hired some
Jutes but mostly Anglos and Saxons, who were German tribesmen who spoke
German. These people fought the Scots and Picts for the Celtic King,
Vertigern...Following their expelling the Scots and Picts, after the
Roman legions had disbanded, we find the English language -- an
unintelligible dialect of German - being spoken on the British Isles.
The word English comes from the word Anglish -- the Anglo-Saxon. These
people had brought German to the British Isles, but English had evolved
as a German dialect.

"The Anglo-Saxons dominated until 1066 A.D. when William the
Conqueror, in what was called the Norman Invasion, established the rule
of the French language, which was deeply rooted in the Latin spoken by
the early Romans. French became the official language of the church,
the schools and parliament, but the masses of people on the British
Isle now spoke 'Anglish' This language, then, began to be influenced by
the French, which was already genetically a Latin language kin to that
of the Romans. 'Anglish' borrowed so extensively from the French
language that even today, if you look at the etymology of 85 or 90
percent of the English vocabulary in any dictionary, you will find that
English has received most of its vocabulary from the Romance languages,
but the grammar of English still basically follows the German syntax
and word order. For that reason, English is not considered to be a
Romance language. The Romance languages are French, Portuguese,
Spanish, Romanian, Italian, etc. The Germanic languages are German,
English, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, etc.

"The same thing, I submit, occurred with the slave descendants of
African origin...Black Americans are speaking an African language
(Ebonics) with some European influence."

In supporting his contention that Black Americans speak Ebonics, Dr.
Smith provides a number of phonetic illustrations, most of which are
difficult to explain to laymen on the printed page. To get the full
effect of Ebonics, one must actually hear the pronunciation of the
words and syllables. In the case of consonant clusters, however, Dr.
Smith's illustrations are very clear. Consonant clusters occur when two
or more consonants appear together usually at the end of a word (for
example,/ft/,/kt/ and /st/).

In his extensive study of the phonological structures of West African
languages, Peter Ladefoged observed that "(m)any West African
languages, including most of the Kwa groups, can be considered to have
no consonant clusters." In the same vein, William Welmers, in his text,
African Language Structures, states: "And Alan Kaye, reporting on the
Chadic and Sudanese Arabic languages, adds: 'Sudanese Colloquial Arabic
does not permit consonant clusters within a syllable.'"

After considering the opinions of these authorities, Dr. Smith states:

If we take the Ladefoged, Welmers, and Kaye report here as valid and
substantially correct observations regarding West and Central African
languages, the conclusion which I am compelled to draw from these
collateral sources is that, in the West and Central African Hamito-
Bantu, Niger-Congo languages, consonant clusters rarely if ever exist.
Therefore, given the historical fact that African American people are
descendants of West and Central Africans who were originally speakers
of West and Central African Hamito-Bantu and Niger-Congo languages, it
logically follows, from my perspective, that the existence of a
systematic, rule-governed, and predictably undistributed consonant
cluster configuration in African American speech today, may well be a
linguistic feature of African-American speech which will be traced to
the base of the historical process.

It is most important in this context, then, to note that, according to
a number of other authorities on Black language (including J.C. Baratz,
Ralph W. Fasold, William Labov, Paul Stoller and William Thomas)
African-Americans, in speaking Ebonics, indeed do not pronounce final
and past tense consonant clusters found in English. Therefore, in
Ebonics, the English words left, drift, swift and lift will be
pronounced /lef/, /drif/, /swif/, and /lif/, etc., just as they would
be prounounced by Central and West Africans.

In Ebonics, the consonant cluster /ct/ (which in linguistic circles is
recognized as /kt/) also does not occur. Therefore, in Ebonics the
English words object, reject, respect and collect will be pronounced
/abjek/, /rijek/, /rispek/ and /kelek/.

In Ebonics, the final consonant cluster /pt/ is also absent. Hence,
the English words except, slept, crept and wept are pronounced /eksep/,
/slep/, /krep/ and /wep/.

The /sk/ and /st/ consonant clusters found in English also do not
exist in Ebonics. Therefore, the English words mask, desk, tusk and
husk are pronounced in Ebonics as /mas/, /des/, /tus/, and /hus/; and
the English words west, best, test, fast, last, list and mist are
pronounced /wes/, /bes/, /tes/, /fas/, /las/, /lis/ and /mis/ in
Ebonics.

In Ebonics the /ld/ and /nd/ consonant clusters are alo absent.
Therefore, such English words as build, bold, hold, told, cold, mold,
wild and child will be pronounced /bil/, /bol/, /hol/, /tol/, /kol/,
/mol/, /wayl/, and /chayl/. Likewise the English words sand, hand,
stand, land and grand or find, mind, kind and blind will be pronounced
as /saen/, /haen/, /staen/, /laen/, and /graen/ or /fayn/, /mayn/,
/kayn/, and /blayn/ in Ebonics.

Also absent from Ebonics is what is called the progressive suffix
(ing). So that such English words as looking, talking and walking will
be pronounced as /lukin/, /tokin/ and /wokin/ in Ebonics.

Another important example of the distinction between English and
Ebonics, that clearly demonstrates what Dr. Smith calls "a linguistic
continuation of the African Hamito-Bantu and Niger-Congo languages in
Black America," is the use of the "retroflex velar spirant" /r/. In
many European, Asian and African languages, as well as in Ebonics, this
velar spirant /r/ does not exist; however, it is common in English.
Hence, such English words as more, store, Sharon, carrots, Lord and
Board are pronounced /mo/, /sto/, /saran/, /kaets/, /lawd/ and /bode/
in Ebonics. Likewise, the English words door, floor, pour and four are
pronounced as /do/, /flo/, /po/ and /fo/ in Ebonics.

Another most interesting similarity between African languages and
Ebonics is the absence of the interdental /th/ sound in both West
African and African-American speech. Hence, such English words as this,
that, these and those will occur in Ebonics as post-dental /dis/,
/daet/, /diz/ and /doz/. Likewise, bath, mouth, both, breath, teeth,
bathe, breathe and teethe will be pronounced as /baef/, /mawf/, /bof/,
/bref/, /tif/, /bav/, /briv/ and /tiv/.

Dr. Smith recognizes that some scholars have argued that many of the
features of Ebonics "can be found in Southern white and other varities
of `White-trash' English," and therefore he is incorrect in his
assumption that Ebonics is indeed a distinct language peculiar to Black
people.

"To this argument," he states, "I can only point out that many Whites
during antebellum slavery and even in modern times are reared during
the ontogenetic [developing] period of their language. . .by Black
mammies and therefore have adopted many African elements in their
speech. Secondly, `White trash' as a population of America's poor are
naturally more likely to rub elbows, like it or not, with Blacks and
other suppressed minorities in low-paying occupational and low-rent or
low-cost housing and school situations than they are going to rub
elbows or interact with the more affluent Whites. Therefore, it should
not be at all a mystery to any learned and honest individual as to why
`White-trash English' sounds somewhat similar to Ebonics. On the
surface structure. . . (phonetically and lexically), Ebonics is related
to `White-trash English', however, in its deep structure, Ebonics and
'White-trash' English are autonomous languages."

Why has Dr. Smith spent several years studying Ebonics, lecturing and
teaching about it on various college and university campuses and
otherwise seeking to have it recognized as an autonomous language? "We
should be taught English," he states, "as a second language. The
English language. . .is a tool just like a tool for fixing a flat tire.
It was one of the tools that I have found that was pivotal to my own
growth and development.

"Every child does not come to a given classroom with the same degree
of interference from Ebonics. So there is no one method of teaching
English as a second language. There are different strategies that you
use commensurate with the degree of interference from Ebonics that the
child has. So that if the child is more phonologically different, that
may be a basis for his spelling errors in that a child would tend to
spell the words as they sound to him. But what he has to do is learn
the English sound system or at least learn the demarcation between
English and Ebonics so that he doesn't follow the phonic spelling...You
can't use phonics, then, as a method of teaching English to Black
people because our sound system is different from (the white) sound
system. Phonics is okay if you are talking to a person who is basically
an English speaker, but phonics alone does not help the average Black
learner."

Dr. Smith, who also tutors Black junior high school children in
English, tells of how eager the children are to learn once they realize
that they are in effect learning a new language. "You teach them
English as if it were French or German," he says. "Once you establish
in their minds that this is English and what they speak is Ebonics,
their whole attitude about what they are learning becomes different."
And it is this change of attitude that spurs Dr. Smith on and convinces
him that his drive to have Ebonics recognized as a legitimate, separate
language of Black Americans will ultimately result in their mastery of
English itself.

¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤
To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, go to the Gambia-L Web interface
at: http://listserv.icors.org/archives/gambia-l.html

To Search in the Gambia-L archives, go to: http://listserv.icors.org/SCRIPTS/WA-ICORS.EXE?S1=gambia-l
To contact the List Management, please send an e-mail to:
[log in to unmask]
¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤