In the month of February, in the United States
and Canada, we celebrate Black History Month to honour the achievements
of black men and women throughout history. As such in this month's
column, I reflect on the speech patterns of blacks.
While negative attitudes towards black English still persist,
we have to look back to yesteryear to see that there has been
a sea change in how this dialect is viewed. To wit, in the 1830s,
a cartoonist in Philadelphia published a series of popular cartoons
that mocked the pretensions of the evolving black middle class
trying to act ‘white.’ One cartoon displayed a bewigged
partygoer asking the following captioned question: “Shall
I hab de honor to dance de next quadrille with you, Miss Minta.”
Although despicably racist, these cartoons highlight the realization
of the distinct nature of black English. They are also a rather
flagrant pictorial example of a process called the linguistic
inferiority principle that postulates that the speech of a socially
subordinate group will always be interpreted as inadequate when
compared to the speech of the socially dominant group. A corollary
of this principle, sometimes called the grammaticality myth,
holds that any structure not in conformity with the strictures
of standard English, is thus ‘ungrammatical.’
However in the last 50 years since linguists have studied
Black English with an emphasis that it represents a variety
of standard English rather than its degradation. However, they
are still many false assumptions about Black English, I am taking
the opportunity to present many of realities and nuances of
Black English that linguist John McWhorter illuminates in his
2017 book Talking Back, Talking Black.
For example, McWhorter explains that a construction such as
“She be passin’ by” contains “much more
than an unconjugated verb” and that the insertion of “be”
is “very specific; it means that something happens on
a regular basis, rather than something going on right now.”
An equivalent sense in standard English might be “She
used to pass every Friday.”
McWhorter points out that counter to the idea that Black English
is inherently a simplified form of the language, that in several
instances it offers more complexities than standard English.
For example, in Black English the word “up” plays
a special role when paired with a location. So, in the Black
English sentence “We was sittin’ up at Tony,”
we know that Tony is a friend as the usage of “up”
is a marker of familiarity or intimacy, just as adding ed
to a verb is a marker of past action. McWhorter points out that
unless the speaker is a masochist he is unlikely to utter “We
was waitin’ up at the dentist.” Another nuance occurs
with the word “done,” and in a sentence such as
“I done drunk it,” you might think that this refers
to the time frame of your imbibing but McWhorter explains that
you’re expressing something far more subtle – counterexpectation.
He says “whether it’s in a sentence about 1973 or
last week, a sentence with done is always about something
the speaker finds somewhat surprising . . . ” So if a
man tells a woman “I done had a crush on you
since you was thirteen,” the presumption is that the woman
had no idea that the guy held the flame for so long. And if
someone said “You done drunk it,” he may be expressing
his belief that you were going to share the beer with him but
when he got back from the bathroom you had selfishly drained
the bottle.
We see other verb nuances in Black English. McWhorter explains
the following:
He been seen it! (He saw it a long time ago.)
She done seen seen it. (She saw it recently.)
He be seein’ it. (He sees it regularly.)
She steady seein’ it. (She is right now in the process
of seeing it.)
Another way that Black English is distinct from Standard English
is in the narrative purpose the verb “had” fulfills.
McWhorter tells us that some languages, such as Swahili and
other Bantu languages have narrative tenses. Similarly, Black
English employs a narrative tense marker in its use of the verb
“had.” He gives this example from a ten-year old
boy describing a scuffle: “Cause when he hit me like this,
he had upper-cut me like that, and then he had
hit me like that. He had kicked me, it was half-wrestling
and then, one, I was tired, then he just beat me and push me
own, that’s when he had push me down.”
Rather than signalling a coming finale, the verb had
is integral in telling the story.
On the other hand, in many ways Black English is less complicated
than standard English. McWhorter provides this sentence as an
example: “Why she ain’t call me when she know dis
de best time. ” Here, “Why she ain’t”
replaces the more elaborate “Why didn’t she,”
and “know” and “dis” replace “knows”
and “this” respectively. A sentence such as this
has led some commentators to issue some rather pejorative, if
not outright racist, views. For example in the 1980s, pop grammarian
John Simon ordained that “the constructions of Black English
are the product not of a language with roots in tradition but
of ignorance of how language works.” More recently, political
commentator Tucker Carlson said that Black English is “a
language where nobody knows how to conjugate verbs.” These
opinions are consistent with what is often called the linguistic
inferiority principle which posits that the speech patterns
of a socially subordinate group will always be interpreted as
improper when compared with the socially dominant group.
However, McWhorter explains that complexity in grammar doesn’t
in any manner connote language superiority He points out that
Old English possessed far more complex grammar than modern English.
For example, it had far more ways than merely adding an s to
make a noun plural and whereas modern English has relatively
few irregular plurals such as men, women, mice and feet, Old
English was inundated with these irregularities, But nobody
claims that modern English represents an inferior form of Old
English because it is less complex and thus, the cases where
Black English simplifies standard English doesn’t represent
a diminishment of the language.
