Is Ebonics just redneck southern talk?
February 8, 2010 by
Filed under southern redneck
I swear it sounds exactly the same except for a few slang words.
February 8, 2010 by
Filed under southern redneck
I swear it sounds exactly the same except for a few slang words.
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If you think they sound the same then you haven’t been listening at all to either.
They are very different dialects; practically different languages. They follow different rules, and have many different words.
Add-on:
I hardly consider ignorant to consider Ebonics part of academia.
You should remember that English only exists because quite a few people seriously messed up the original German.
The same with Spanish, French, Portugese, Italian, and Romanian; all of which were people unable to properly speak the Latin language. Germanic tribes kept trying to learn Latin, but could not pronounce it properly because of their own accents. What arose were those languages.
Even American is vastly different from its parent tongue of English. Try to understand an person from England; you’d be surprised how hard it is, and they have the same difficulty with American.
Ebonics could be considered the evolution of the American language. It is a language of its own rules, words, idioms, and nuances. It is the creation of a new language, one that is purely American. Unlike American English, which is evolving further and further away from English but similarities do still exist.
Those who fight against it are those afraid of change, of independence for others. In America we talk about independence and freedom, but we only allow it for others as long as they do what we want them to do. If they choose a different path, a different belief, a different language; we react in fear and anger. Now is the time to allow true freedom, to embrace change, and let go of fear in favor of acceptance.
The concept of ebonics is one of the most ignorant suggestions to ever come out of academia. People with a Southern accent, whether white or black will sound similar.
The wikipedia article on ebonics is fairly weak, but the discussion page has a comment that sums up the situation:
In 1996, when the Oakland School Board announced that students would begin getting school credit for speaking Ebonics, there was a national outcry of criticism. The TV show “Saturday Night Live” created a skit that mocked the school board. The plot of the skit was an outbreak of the “Ebonic Plague” which caused members of the skit (all white) to suddenly begin talking in a patois. It was hilarious and evidently the last straw. The school board backed down soon after.
umm….no
20 years ago, a question like this would have started a race riot.
Ebonics was an attempt to square the speech that some people use consistently and regularly in every day life as being legitimate like standard english. Speaking in ebonics is comforting for the people who use it, but it appears wrong when standard english is called for. In school, using ebonics seems like choosing easy comfortable habit over disciplined learning and practicing standard english. Ebonics did not get traction in schools because it seems like just being lax and not requiring standard english of the students. Using ebonics makes the speaker seem therefore uneducated. An outsider might find that the southern accent and ebonics both say groshery for example, so they are the same, but in eboics you would axe a question, or say wif, which are not really southernisms. Some people think that kids would do better in school if they thought that the way that they talk habitually is normal and acceptable.