languages (Ebonics)

I hate to be pedantic, but "Ebonics" really is called Black English Vernacular (BEV) by linguists, and has been a recognized form of spoken english by linguists for at least 30 years. It was made most famous in Linguistics circles by William Lebov's paper "Language in the inner city: studies in the Black English Vernacular" in 1972. BEV follows strict rules of grammar and word use, and has syntactic roots in several major west African languages like Ewe, Iwo, and Yoruba. It really is not gibberish at all, no matter how "wrong" it sounds to a native Standard American English speaker (me included). In some ways, it actually allows much finer grained shades of meaning than SAE does. In some ways, less. That's how different languages work. But the fact that it follows a definable complex grammar can't be debated, it's been studied to death by linguists everywhere. How the Oakland School Board was using BEV for its own purposes is an entirely different matter which I won't even begin to touch on. That's politics, not language. For a real thrill, try finding information on the dialect of English spoken on Ocracoke Island in North Carolina. Although it's dying out now, there still remain a few native inhabitants of the island who can speak it. They were mainly descended from Scottish immigrants who were more or less entirely cut off from the mainland when shipping lanes changed in the 18th century, and left to develop their own dialect and speech rules over the course of the next two hundred years. (Yes, I was a linguistics major. No, I haven't done anything useful with it. That's why I'm a programmer now.) -Seth