Subject:      
Ebonics meets Elizabethan
----
     
Two of the prominent themes dominating ADS-L exchanges of late - Ebonics 
and so-called Elizabethan English in the South - have met
in a column penned by Little Rock editorialist Paul Greenberg. Greenberg 
is an editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, but his column is 
systematically reprinted here in the Tuscaloosa News. Here are some 
excerpts from one that appeared on Jan 3:
     
"Today's lesson: You dis somebody's language, you be in trouble. This 
caveat needs to be kept in mind as a national debate with a lot more 
heat than light erupts out of Oakland, Calif., where a school board 
seeking the usual federal grant set out to get one for the study of 
something called Ebonics.  ...
     
"But anyone who understands English and has an ear can pick up the 
rudiments of its various subsets, and there are many of them in this 
country: Downeast New England Yankee, Chicago-ese, Newallins, and
so continentally and incontinentally on. ...
     
"Dixie alone offers an encyclopedic range of strange tongues from the 
heavily Elizabethan in remote Appalacia and tidewater Virginia to 
Sothron-in-slow-motion in faulknerian Mississippi. Shall we establish
a corps of teachers to valiate all these interesting languages, too? ...
     
"What we have here is an intimate language of home or street or fields - 
much like Redneck Southern or an Irish brogue, Cajun French or pure 
Texican - presented as a fully developed foreign language. This kind of 
scholarship is about as impressive as socks on a rooster, to lapse into 
Arkinsaw. ...
     
"Yes, it would be a good thing if teachers could understand what their 
pupils are saying. Exposing teachers to the rudiments of Black English 
might be sensible as part of their undergraduate education - but not 
conducting class in it. What many of these children need most is 
*unilingual* education, and the unilanguage should be American. They 
already speak Black English; it's their native tongue. And they employ 
it when appropriate - on the street, say, rather than when, one day, 
accepting their Nobel Prize or being inaugurated as U.S. president. ..."
     
End of quoted material.
     
On the subject of Ebonics:
I am sure that a lot of thinly veiled racism is finding expression in 
the derisive paradying of Ebonics/AAVE. To see practically the entire 
political spectrum close ranks in condemning the dignification
of AAVE, some elements feel they now have free license to parady 
African Americans in derogatory ways via their language. Listening 
to a country-music radio station on the way to work a couple of days 
ago (yes, I do like some country music), I was dismayed to hear one
of the emcees launch into an imitation of AAVE, as he constructed some 
ficticious African American woman complaining about juvenile delinquents 
who turn out to be her own daughters. Apparently this is a regular 
feature now, the comic motif (I use the term "comic" advisedly) being 
lessons in Ebonics. I never heard anyone take such liberties on the air 
prior to the Ebonics debate.
     
Mike Picone
University of Alabama