People Don’t Speak Only Black English

JOHN McWHORTER

Assistant professor of linguistics, UC Berkeley; author of “The Word on the Street,” a book on dialects and Ebonics

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It is possible that a white person could have a heightened sensitivity to a black dialect, although it’s usually other blacks who more readily understand black English. There is no difference between what people are calling “Ebonics” and standard African American language. It’s slang and intonation. There’s no tongue in America that only blacks can speak, unless you’re from islands off the coast of South Carolina, where they have developed a Creole language of their own.

There is no such thing as a black English that is incomprehensible to the general population. Of course, there are different ways of packaging information from culture to culture. There have been studies done of the New York Jewish community, in which arguing is part of the culture. Some outside the culture saw the group as combative, whereas the community was only using argument as a form of expression.

The idea that this guy, Terrell Young, is speaking something that no one can literally understand is, from a linguistic sense, simply ridiculous. But it’s not as if this guy only speaks in these slang phrases. If a person says, “I’m going to jet to the heezee”--current Oakland slang for “I’m going to go home”--there’s no way that he does not know how to say the phrase in standard English.

There is a general misconception in America that somebody who speaks a nonstandard dialect is only able to speak that. In linguistics, that person is considered bidialectical. That means that in casual speech, you speak in dialect; in a prison cell, speaking to a lawyer, you switch into formal, standard English.

There have been numerous studies pointing out the amount of standard English blacks command, even those living in poverty. The black person who is only capable of speaking black English is generally 5 years old or retarded.