- Joined
- Aug 5, 2022
I think it's not far from the truth - Southern American English is like a branch of a more archaic form; I'd go as far as to say that sometimes it may even sound almost British, mainly because of it's abundancy of dipthongs.From my understanding, the actual syntax of Southern dialect hasn't changed fundamentally over the last 200 years while Ebonics is mostly patchwork where new euphemisms and "rules" are always cannibalizing the old ones.
Ebonics doesn't really have rules, from what I observed - people try to make up "rules", as if to "teach" it to someone later, but it's not substantial. Being almost entirely comprised of euphemisms is a common trait of lower class dialects overall. It also easily bleeds into criminality - the infamous Russian "Fenya" dialect of the Odessite bandits is a great example of a dialect essentially coding what the people speaking it are conveying. A similar thing happens in Ebonics.
