Why do some American Blacks speak such broken English

[Standardized Profile]

I believe the academic hypothesis is that slaves modified English to express the grammar of their native languages, which is why AAVE has so many strange constructions to express tense and aspect. This table from Wikipedia is informative:

I'm not a specialist, but for various reasons I don't think it's really a well-defined dialect with rules like this. It's also evident AAVE evolves very rapidly, introducing new words at a lightning rate. Could such a rapidly evolving dialect maintain these rather fine distinctions in meaning? Perhaps, maybe, I don't know.

I'm also not sure I buy the idea it's just hillbilly-speak either. In Huckleberry Finn, Twain uses several distinct dialects, which he identifies as "the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods Southwestern dialect; the ordinary 'Pike County' dialect; and four modified varieties of this last." In a letter to William Dean Howells, Twain opined that "a negro sometimes (rarely) says 'goin' and sometimes says 'gwyne,' and they make such discrepancies in other words--and when you come to reproduce them on paper they look as if the variation resulted from the writer's carelessness." He also praised Joel Chandler Harris (author/compiler of Uncle Remus) and George Washington Cable's handling of the "negro and creole dialects." So the unique nature of the negro or African American dialect was acknowledged in the mid-to-late 19th century. It wasn't considered identical to backwoods/hillbilly speech at the time.

 

[BiggerChungus]

From what I've read proper speaking was considered a "white" thing. For a long time smart black kids would be bullied by dumb black kids if they tried to speak intelligently and learn things, and later on teachers stopped correcting black slang because of muh racism. Same shit happens with kids of all races except maybe Asians, being smart = get bullied, but with black kids it's especially bad. It's become ingrained in parts of their culture that speaking properly is "uppity" and haughty.

It's worth noting black slang vernacular was more sophisticated back in the late 1800s/early 1900s, despite the AW SHOOWEE MASSA memes. The worst parts of it blended with the worst parts of white redneck speak and got us to where we are today.

 

[Feefee81093]

I think ebonics is fun for everyone.

 

[Lemmingwiser]

You know sub-Saharan Africa isn't a monolith of poverty, poor education, malnutrition and violence, right?

Shit, I always forget about Wakanda, my bad.

 

[beet644]

They were given the bare min just to understand master and it kind of stuck.

 

[Jibbers Cribbers]

Americans worship niggers daily.

 

[Smokingpoop]

I just want aunt jemima back. I miss that big black nigger bitch holding all my syrup

 

[CapricornusRex]

 

[Fathomless Eminence]

I just want aunt jemima back. I miss that big black nigger bitch holding all my syrup

She's gotten all kinds of fucked up, no way the powers that be will sign her again after this

As for the OP's question: Victim mentality, hatred of White People, crab-in-a-bucket shit and because it's so ingrained in the street culture that pussy blacks do it to try to sound gangster. If you have ever worked in a public school or have done social work in an area with lots of blacks you learn how many truly are bitch niggers.

It's entirely possible for blacks to speak intelligently, I'm a big fan on this guy, for example. 100% cultural. The only ones who say it's a real language are the woke ones who also think Egypt is black and that White People steal melanin from shooting victims and turn it into melatonin.

 

[quackrock]

It's entirely possible for blacks to speak intelligently, I'm a big fan on this guy, for example.

Great video, thanks for the link. Apparently I already saw this guy's "Ixian Problem" video via random YT suggestion. Subscribed.

Aside from grammar and vocab, I've always been perplexed by nonstandard spelling in ebonics. I chalk some of it up to kids with shitty parents who don't learn to spel gud in school, but even professional black adults use a trailing "z" instead of "s" a lot. Why is that?

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

It’s meant to signal that you’re from the streets. You speak the dialect and language of streets, you gets street cred.

Notice that last section in the previous sentence. Despite it not being grammatically correct, you can understand it. But it probably conjures up a certain tone. You can envision the kind of person that says it.

It’s all about presentation. Most urban cultures will have this kind of short, broken language. I presume it has something to do with the speed of city life requiring people to talk quickly and to the point. Urban life is tough and so people will emulate that speech in order to give the impression that they are tough. Given enough time, that repetition becomes a habit and then then norm.

If a group of people speaks the same way and understand each other then it’s not grammatically incorrect. Language is made by humans, not frigid English professors.

 

[CowPox]

They hate the idea of assimilating to white society to such an extent that they refuse to speak the same language, same with the goofy names.

 

[POWER IN MISERY]

i think they just do it on purpose

 

[Absurdist Laughter]

I believe the academic hypothesis is that slaves modified English to express the grammar of their native languages, which is why AAVE has so many strange constructions to express tense and aspect. This table from Wikipedia is informative:
View attachment 5040750
I'm not a specialist, but for various reasons I don't think it's really a well-defined dialect with rules like this. It's also evident AAVE evolves very rapidly, introducing new words at a lightning rate. Could such a rapidly evolving dialect maintain these rather fine distinctions in meaning? Perhaps, maybe, I don't know.

I'm also not sure I buy the idea it's just hillbilly-speak either. In Huckleberry Finn, Twain uses several distinct dialects, which he identifies as "the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods Southwestern dialect; the ordinary 'Pike County' dialect; and four modified varieties of this last." In a letter to William Dean Howells, Twain opined that "a negro sometimes (rarely) says 'goin' and sometimes says 'gwyne,' and they make such discrepancies in other words--and when you come to reproduce them on paper they look as if the variation resulted from the writer's carelessness." He also praised Joel Chandler Harris (author/compiler of Uncle Remus) and George Washington Cable's handling of the "negro and creole dialects." So the unique nature of the negro or African American dialect was acknowledged in the mid-to-late 19th century. It wasn't considered identical to backwoods/hillbilly speech at the time.

Damn, you beat me to it. It's basically like Pidgin, but probably not creole just depends on what dialect of African the slaves used. There is something similar that developed in Hawaii that spawned out of language barriers between plantation workers and ranchers (Spaniards) (slavery wasn't a thing in Hawaii). You had a mix of Spanish influence, Hawaiian influence, Pilipino influence, Japanese, Chinese etc. They all needed to communicate with each other and a new micro language was born through various mixes of all the languages.

 

[PipTheAlchemist]

Thumbnail nigga do be having some titties tho'

 

[Spud]

apeoidic niggers interbreedable with APES had no alphabet, not even NUMERALS! Who are nothing more than simple-languaged mongrel-mulatto- apeoidic NIGGERS!!

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

I'm not a specialist, but for various reasons I don't think it's really a well-defined dialect with rules like this.

So the unique nature of the negro or African American dialect was acknowledged in the mid-to-late 19th century. It wasn't considered identical to backwoods/hillbilly speech at the time.

It's not. Grammar is something academics, specifically academics with the backing of political elites, invent. Imagine how a language evolves. It starts with someone coining a new word, or mispronouncing something, or misusing grammar. Whatever the case, the language mutates in that person. Usually it stays confined to them or a small group of friends, but sometimes, for whatever reason, the mutation catches on and starts a snowball effect until it gains widespread acceptance. There's a purposeful aspect to it in that people tend to adopt the speech of whatever group they aspire to be more like, or to seek reward/avoid punishment. If the mutation becomes widespread enough it becomes an accepted part of the language.

What power adds to the mix is that a group can pretend that they're specific system, created through random mutations, is objectively correct and everybody else objectively wrong. With no basis to it. What makes American English correct and not just a misuse of British English, for example? What makes modern Queen's English correct and not just a bastardized, degenerate form of Anglo-Saxon that Beowulf spoke? Nothing at all except that the leading figures (usually a loathsome lot) agree that a certain way of speaking (their own) is correct and the fact that they're the leaders means it must be so.

This is a big sticking point for me and this sort of attitude has been used, by nationalists around the world, to ground down minorities local traditions. The French are probably the biggest example - they have a very centralized approach to managing their language and trampling over local dialects like Occitan - but Italians and Spaniards also do it and peoples like British and Americans do it informally.

To me it is inherently anti-conservative to insist some group of people assimilate to a national tongue because that way of speaking is not their own traditions.

As far as the variety goes, Albion's Seed argues, though I'm skeptical because the author has way too much enthusiasm for proving his case, that a lot of Black speech does actually share elements of Southwest English circa the 1600s, and was seen in Whites of that time, to the point that Black speech is kind of the remnant of that. You can definitely see it in the modern day that the only people who speak Plantation English are Blacks and the elderly. It wasn't the same thing as White English at any point but the two were related. Upper Southern/Appalachian English were very different from Deep Southern (and there are elements of Appalachian that match with Great Lakes Northern just as there are elements of Deep Southern that match with Northeastern, each reflecting that both Appalachian and Midwesterners emerged out of North England and both the planter class and Yankees out of South England). Missouri was Upper Southern. Presumably the Blacks would have sounded especially different there from the Upper Southern Whites. Elsewhere in the South it is easy to find places where the accents are very similar.

 

[Cool Dog Returns]

Its nigger mentality but thats within amerilardia, I seen the same shit in other groups of other countries that werent black

And guess what? they didnt do very well, and the more numerous that group was the worse off the country is

But back to amerilards, observe how every other minority still gets ahead of blacks, and dont give me the slavery bullshit I much rather be a black guy born with the right to gibs than a mexican illegal with no papers who has to do the shittiest jobs for less than minimum pay or get deported

 

[Cool Dog Returns]

Its nigger mentality but thats within amerilardia, I seen the same shit in other groups of other countries that werent black

And guess what? they didnt do very well, and the more numerous that group was the worse off the country is

But back to amerilards, observe how every other minority still gets ahead of blacks, and dont give me the slavery bullshit I much rather be a black guy born with the right to gibs than a mexican illegal with no papers who has to do the shittiest jobs for less than minimum pay or get deported

And yet no matter the group when the further you go into their social strata the more they resemble the nigger mentality, be it trailer trash, cholos, some asians, etc.

I hope he's doing alright out there.

Niggers hate when a black guy corrects them, if its anybody else they laugh or just dismiss it because you're an outsider, but when a black guy does then it becomes a "nigga moment", a "y'all think you better than I?" and then comes the violence

 

[Fathomless Eminence]

If a group of people speaks the same way and understand each other then it’s not grammatically incorrect. Language is made by humans, not frigid English professors.

Bro that is pure cope, that's basically just the "glass half full" equivalent of exactly what I said. Also that would imply that black people don't try to out-do each other with their lingo coming up with ridiculous fucking terms like "glizzy" just to be increasingly obscure. There is no fucking way that hot dog turned into fucking "glizzy" through the natural evolution of language.