Disadvantage

D isadvantag
e
In this chapter, we will look at two different linguistic situations which have been widely discussed in terms of such disadvantage. One of these concerns certain social class differences in the use of language in England; the other is the variety of English found in the United States that is now usually referred to as African American Vernacular English. We will attempt to look at some of the basic facts and issues and to assess the various claims that have been made about both those linguistic differences and the consequences that are said to follow.

D isadvantag
e Codes Again
African American Vernacular English Consequences for Education

Codes Again
Bernsteins views of the relationship between language and culture are heavily inuenced by his reading of Whorf (see chapter 9). On more than one occasion he has pointed out how Whorf alerted him to what he calls the deep structure of linguistically regulated communication. Bernstein regards language as something which both inuences culture and is in turn inuenced by culture. A child growing up in a particular linguistic environment and culture learns the language of that environment and that culture and then proceeds to pass on that learning to the next generation.

 Bernstein claims that there are two quite distinct varieties of language in use in society. He calls one variety elaborated code (originally formal code) and the other variety restricted code (originally public code). According to Bernstein, these codes have very different characteristics.

Codes Again

 For example, elaborated code makes use of accurate in the sense of standard grammatical order and syntax to regulate what is said; uses complex sentences that employ a range of devices for conjunction and subordination; employs prepositions to show relationships of both a temporal and logical nature; shows frequent use of the pronoun I; uses with care a wide range of adjectives and adverbs; allows for remarks to be qualied; and, according to Bernstein (1961, p. 169), is a language use which points to the possibilities inherent in a complex conceptual hierarchy for the organizing of experience.

Codes Again

African American Vernacular English

Linguists who have described the speech that is characteristic of many black residents of the northern United States have noticed how uniform that speech is in many respects. In other words, blacks who live in New York City, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, and Seattle speak very much alike, whereas the same cannot be said of non-blacks who live in the same cities. The speech of blacks in these cities also resembles the speech of blacks in southern states in many respects.

African American Vernacular English

In one respect this similarity is the result of the relatively recent migrations of blacks out of the south; in another, it is one reection of longstanding patterns of racial segregation only now slowly changing, patterns which have tended to separate the population of the United States along color lines. Linguists have referred to this variety of speech as Black English, Black Vernacular English, and Afro-American Vernacular English. Today, the most-used term is African American Vernacular English (AAVE) but Ebonics (a blend of Ebony and phonics) has also recently achieved a certain currency.

African American Vernacular English

AAVE has certain phonological, morphological, and syntactic characteristics. Words like thing and this may be pronounced as ting and dis. Bath may sound like baff, brother like bruvver, nothing like nufn, and thread like tred. Still other examples are bik for big, kit for kid, and cup for cub, as nal stops are devoiced. Others may be lost. Test, desk, and end may be pronounced without their nal consonants. The plural of test may actually be tess or tesses, depending on how an individual forms the plural. Carol, Paris, protect, and from may show loss of r, and car and cart will nearly always show loss of r. As a result, your brother may become identical to you brother. Cold may show loss of the nal d (col) or even loss of both l and d (co), because l after a vowel is often deleted. The result may be that bold and bowl become homophonous with bow.

African American Vernacular English

Vowels may be nasalized and nasal consonants lost: run and end may just be in the rst case an r followed by a nasalized vowel and in the second case a simple nasalized vowel with no pronunciation at all of the nal nd. The diphthongs in words like nd and found may be both monophthongized and nasalized, and the words may lack any pronunciation of the nal nd. Consequently, nd, found, and even fond may become homophonous, all pronounced with an f and a following nasalized vowel.

African American Vernacular English

In morphology, because nal t and d are often unpronounced, there may be no overt signaling of the past tense, so that I walked sounds just like I walk. There may also be no signaling of the third-person singular in the present tense of the verb, resulting in a form like he go.

African American Vernacular English

Syntactically, AAVE has special uses of be, or lack of be (the zero copula), as in a contrast between He nice (He is nice right now) and He be nice (He is nice sometimes). The negatives of these sentences would also be He aint nice and He dont be nice, respectively. You tired may be an equivalent of the standard Youre tired. AAVE also employs constructions such as I asked Joe what can he do, Cant nobody do that (as a statement), and It aint no heaven for you to go to, in which it functions like there in Standard English (or SE). Aint is used frequently, as is multiple negation, and there are also special auxiliary verb uses of done and been, as in He done told me and I been washing it.

African American Vernacular English

Those who speak AAVE recognize that what they speak is something different from the varieties employed by most non-blacks. Most Americans are prepared to categorize someone who contacts them by telephone as either black or non-black using speech alone as the criterion, and most such categorizations are correct. In cases of mis-categorization, it is usually because of special circumstances: a black person has been brought up among non-blacks, or a nonblack has been brought up among blacks.

Consequences for Education

Bereiter and Engelmann (1966, p. 39) state that such children show a total lack of ability to use language as a device for acquiring and processing information. Language for them is unwieldy and not very useful. In the late 1960s, this view led to certain proposals to teach black children the standard variety of the language. The child is in an asymmetrical situation where anything he says can literally be held against him. He has learned a number of devices to avoid saying anything in this situation, and he works very hard to achieve this end.

Consequences for Education

Race and language were united, however, in two important incidents affecting the schooling of blacks in the United States. The by-now famous Ann Arbor Decision of 1979 is an example of a successful claim that AAVE is a bona de dialect that schools must recognize. The parents of eleven African American children attending Martin Luther King School in Ann Arbor, Michigan, sued the school board in federal court saying that their children had been denied the equal opportunity to which they were entitled on account of the variety of English they spoke.

Consequences for Education

Such a view of education places both AAVE and Bernsteins views concerning the linguistic socialization of children into a much broader framework than the one within which linguists usually work. We should also remind ourselves that the problems that educators must deal with in their work are extremely complex, and, while linguists may make a contribution toward solving some of these problems, that contribution may not be a particularly large one. Language is but one factor among many that we must consider when we try to solve pressing social problems. A total solution must take other factors into account too. Linguists must be prepared to recognize that fact.