The Ebonics Controversy

The way some African American children speak when they show up in American schools is so different from standard English that teachers often can't understand what they are saying. These children perform poorly in school and typically fail to acquire the ways of speaking that they'll need in order to succeed in the world outside their neighborhoods. Schools have traditionally treated the speech of these children as bad English, "street slang" and "poor grammar". But,…

…African slaves learned English from White settlers, and that they did so relatively quickly and successfully, with little continuing influence from their African linguistic heritage. There is also a third view in this complex picture, the Afrocentric or Ethnolinguistic view, that most of the distinctive pronunciation and grammatical features of AAVE represent transfers or continuities from African languages, since West Africans acquiring English as slaves restructured it according to the patterns of their native languages.