African Americans React "Your Grammar Is Basic Compared to Black English"
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- Опубликовано: 6 сен 2024
- African Americans React "Your Grammar Is Basic Compared to Black English" | The Demouchets REACT
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african american vernacular english,african american vernacular english accent,african american vernacular english (aave),aave explained,black english,black english accent
So, interesting thing about Language Jones... he actually grew up in an area where AAE was the primary dialect, and so in a sense he's a native speaker, even though he's white. He knows AAE as a primary speaker, not just as an academic. I love his videos!
Language Jones is the real deal, especially on this topic. As per his 'What is AAVE?' video, he explains 'Yes, I grew up in AAE (African American English) speech communities, and yes I got my Phd. In sociolinguistics at the university of Pennsylvania where I wrote my disertation on regional accents in African American English.' Definitely recommend his other videos on the topic, as well as his other videos on language in general. Always top notch stuff!
10:33 yeah i'm from south africa and we have a similar thing going on with the afrikaans language.
It's used by both white and coloured people but the white dialect is considered to be the standard "correct" version while the coloured dialect is seen as improper and wrong.
So I had also been told I'm making mistakes at school when I was just writing how I speak at home.
That language originally comes from.the first generation of mixed children of Koi koi San Xhosa women and Boer and Dutch men. . They became their own people until they could import other European groups to help fully whiten them up again. But Afrikanners is a mixed language as well german Dutch and indigenous languages
What are the differences, or where can I read about the differences? I’m not familiar with Afrikaans, so I’m quite curious to know about the differences you allude to :0
@@daquandoolie for any Americans reading this, "colored" is not an offensive term in South Africa...it's a discription. White, Black, Colored, Asian, and Indian. Is the norm there. "Colored" would be " Multicultural " here.
"A language is a dialect with an army and a navy." -- Max Weinreich
@@daquandoolie similar things happened to my dad who spoke a dialect of German (Swabian) in school, but wasn't allowed to because there's Standard German (High German) which is grammatically.
standardised.
Of course it's not entirely the same, as it's not a case of racial discrimination but social discrimination.
Regarding your question about whether other countries have stuff like this - they do, and they ask the same questions about us. In China, "Mandarin" is like their textbook language, but many provinces have local dialects that have thousands of years of their own history. They call these 方言 "fāngyán", and some of them are considered their own unique languages, such as Cantonese. Some areas, such as Hunan, have so many dialects, that people living in neighboring towns can't understand each other. But, since everyone learns Mandarin in school, they use Mandarin to communicate with outsiders. That being said, people from different dialects bring their own accent and grammar into Mandarin, sometimes making it difficult to communicate even then. One of my Chinese friends from Sichuan once told me that upon visiting Hong Kong, he found it easier to speak with them in English, than to struggle to understand their accent in Mandarin.
Meanwhile, multiple other Chinese people have asked me if we have fāngyán - to which I always show them dialects from Baltimore, Louisiana, and Scotland.
- I also enjoyed your demonstration of how tone is used in your dialect. This is something the Chinese are very aware of, since they have a semantically tonal language, but we don't consider enough in English. Sunn m'Cheaux has a good video on how tone policing can be a vehicle for racism
The degree to which Cantonese and Mandarin have diverged from Middle Chinese is comparable to the degree to which Spanish and French have diverged from Latin. English has prestige dialects, but Chinese has a prestige language.
Chinese isn’t a good example because, while we call Mandarin - Chinese as a general thing, it isn’t. Mandarin as the standard Chinese language is a current political decision to support the idea of a single unified communist China. It’s the reason we refer to separate Chinese languages as dialects despite them being languages.
@@adorabell4253 This is true but the same can be said about scots and certain other dialects of english. "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy" - the distinction between them is not as simple as mutual intelligibility, it is fundamentally a political designation, even in english.
@@user-kv5hh5xo8i no. Scots is not like the Chinese languages. As mentioned upthread Chinese languages are comparable to the Romance languages in that they are in the same language family with a common ancestor but they are now different languages. With Chinese the languages go back even further. Chinese, though, is unique in that it uses a single script to write down many different languages, some of which aren’t even sinitic. It was a genius solution to the imperial language problem.
@@adorabell4253 i agree with everything you said, i'm not trying to make a 100% comparison. i'm glad you know your stuff, and thank you for adding to the dialogue!
It's unfortunate that linguistic prescriptivism (the idea that dictionaries dictate our usage of language, and there being an objectively 'correct' 'form of a language) is a commonly held idea by many people even if they don't realize it. But such preconceptions were largely created by the elite to enforce some sort of hierarchy, usually class, but in this case, of race as well. Denigrating a dialect as a 'broken' form of a language is not something any reputable linguist would do, yet many people commonly espouse those ideas which originate from classism and racism.
Only in this country, too. French academicians studied all French dialects at a time when white American linguists were still debasing ebonics. This is not something I had to read from a book. I can testify from my own personal experience.
@@blasianking4827 yeah, people don’t understand we create the dictionary the dictionary doesn’t dictate us
@@andreabrown4541
That's not true. French is very strict and does not recognize other dialects of French in France. What academics do and how the general populace does are two different things.
And some slang words eventually made it into the dictionary. Like the word awesome.
@@ladybluelotus reading is fundamental! Part of my graduate shool work while a student in a graduate program at the University of Chicago in the 1980s, I wanted to translate la negritude into "ebonics." La negritude was a body of literature written by French-speaking African and Caribbearn writers. My student advisors were able to locate a French linguist who taught at the University of Oxford in the language and linguistics department who could assist me. So are you now disputing the existence of the French academician today????? Are you saying that France never recognized la negritude????? I assure you Sartre did!!!
Englishman here. We got a sort of Jamaican-British creole, with some cockney mixed in, that's distinct from AAVE and unique to these isles - and importantly, spoken by both Black and white kids.
I was going to mention that. I am a foreigner living in the UK and fascinated by British dialects. It struck me that there is a race specific dialect in the USA. In the UK the local dialect will prevail regardless of race. So a black person living in Yorkshire or Durham will speak the local dialect. The exception is the accent you talk about - MLE (Multicultural London English). It is a dialect which originated among black youth in London but what is fascinating is that it has spread to young people of all races including white.
@@blotski there are multicultural dialects in other UK cities. Accents change over time
@@blotski Yes! I remember how older comedians in the 90s used to mock white kids, and especially white London kids, for "pretending to be Black" without realising that it's a legitimate dialect with its own rules, widely spoken these days not only in London, but in regions as far afield as Bristol (although of course it has its own "lilt" over there). It's not Jamaican patois, and it's not AAVE. It's also not affected in any way, it's just how many younger people speak. I worked with a white guy in his 30s who couldn't speak any other way. Even his formal phone manner couldn't quite disguise the accent. It was amusing listening to him relax and lean into it whenever the customer also spoke MLE. 😆
@@apostatereactsits just Jamaican patios. White kids do be copying blacks kids tjot
@@blotskiUmm I don’t know where you’re from but I can tell you the Southern American dialect is AAVE. The American English you see on TV is not what they are speaking all over the country by a specific race. AAVE is spoken in many non-Black homes for over 400 years . 🤷🏽♀️ Ethnic Foundational Black Americans are not immigrants unlike the Black British (Carribean & African) community in the UK.
As a black American teacher, I understand my students, from the way that they talk to their writing. Their writing is grammatically different from how I am trained as a teacher and as a student myself. But I also code-switch myself. So things they would be penalize for I don't take Umbridge with as long as it make senseand is legible im good. I'm a black new yorker, I have a new York accent as well as use AAVE so I can relate to my demographicof kids.
Teachers like you are needed!
N'yawk is its own uber ethnicity so if you are Jewish, Arab, Greek, Italian, Black or whatever and live in N'Yawk, you pick up waiting on line and a way of speaking. But, EVERYONE code switches. You go on a job interview you are not going to talk the way you do when you are hanging out with your friends in Flatbush or Sheepshead Bay.
This is the part I really hated about English classes growing up. I am white and grew up in an overwhelmingly white school system in the south, and even then I knew that the promotion of some "standard" or "correct" English is arbitrary and frustrating. My English teacher was a huge stickler for pronoun-antecedant agreement, and took immense issue to how I used "they" as a gender-epicene singular pronoun (e.g. "I talked to Erin the other day, they told me about their favorite book"). When I brought up why my essay had a 75, she scoffed at me as if it was so clearly invalid that I had chosen a plural pronoun to refer to a single person.
Pulling out the dictionary that we all had under our desk, that _she_ provided to us, I then pointed out the exact definition that said this usage of "they" is not only a perfectly valid and acceptable usage, but has been this way since Early Modern English and was used by Shakespeare (in this case, even when the gender of the antecedant was known):
"There's not a man I meet but doth salute me
As if I were their well-acquainted friend"
_- A Comedy of Errors,_ Act IV, Scene III
My English teacher's response was very ironically "Oh well he just wrote for the common peasantry, so he's not going to use proper grammar all the time." Ya know, as if he didn't write and present royal performances for Elizabeth I numerous times lol.
It is so clearly an enfocrement of classist diction that even her historically-inaccurate half-assed response is oozing with superiority complex. When I've had to grade people's work, I don't take off anything for grammar or word choice, so long as the idea of the paper is communicated clearly enough it doesn't matter to me. Dialect erasion is a terrible thing, I don't want to contribute to that, because really it's entirely arbitrary that I put these words on this webpage in this order, and the fact I can communicate with other people and connect with them is more than enough satisfaction than if I were to point out I misspelled "enforcement" in the first sentence (and there's a good chance you never noticed either, because the overall meaning is much more important than the exact form it takes).
@@BetaDude40 As someone who is both pedantic and for various reasons has a tendency to lean hard on strictly defined and standardized ways of doing things, please allow me to state.. your teacher was an elitist asshat who was less informed than they thought themself to be and use faux pedantry as a cover for their need to be above everyone else. They/them as a gender-epicene singular pronoun has been a part of the English language at least as far back as the 14th century, and has been standard practice in actual English usage as a language.
The whole issue comes down to a rather ridiculous point of contention - the drive to somehow bind English grammar to rules based on Latin, when English's roots are Germanic and not Latin. This was largely a relic of the Norman Conquest and had a massive resurgence in the 18th and 19th centuries, when grammarians of the period got tied up in a rather shameful classist endeavor. Latin was viewed as having prestige and they attempted to shoehorn the grammar rules of Latin onto English, to the detriment of the English language itself.
This is also how we ended up with "he" being used as the default singular pronoun, as Latin defaults to male pronouns due to the patriarchal nature of the language, where the male perspective is always the default one. It's easy to see how grammarians in the dominant culture of the English speaking world seeking to standardize and elevate the language towards elitist, classist ends, would incorporate that flawed singular pronoun default while silently ignoring the extant gender-epicene pronoun in a move to unofficially erase it from that usage, since officially doing so presents an issue for justification.
@@BetaDude40 It can be argued that the antecedent in your Shakespeare example is not really singular, but a construction indicating all men met, which is suggested to be larger than two, and that is one of those problems with referring to the antecedent, and then it becomes an issue whether your language uses grammatical or semantic rules for referring to the antecedent. (i.e. do you follow rules concerning words already used or rules concerning concepts indicated). Not a convincing example of singular they, as it could easily be a semantic they.
I was taught at USC that Black English was a far more sophisticated language than Standard English. I am sorry to find out this is not commonly taught, since it’s quite clearly true.
That's complete nonsense. English has been around for 1500 years. Ebonics is more complex and sophisticated than Shakespeare? Charles Dickens? Mark Twain? Harriet Beecher Stowe? C.S. Lewis? Jane Austen? And the thousands of other English authors since that time, with all the variety and evolution of the English language for several centuries? Nope. Ebonics is relatively recent so your professor at USC taught you hogwash.
I’m a black American from New York. My parents and family were Caribbean (Jamaica &St. Kitts). I spoke “the King’s English” at home and didn’t get into AAVE until middle and high school; I had to hang with my peers. Interestingly, I took German in school and my teacher corrected pronunciation by proclaiming mistakes as belonging to various regional dialects. I remember, particularly, her calling out Plattdeutsch, which is a form of German spoken in the flatlands near the border of the Netherlands.
Regional dialects are common with all languages but a lot of our speech is predicated on communicating with each other without “them” knowing what we mean. There are also regional varieties of so-called Black English.
When I bake what little of AAVE into my speech, I use it to communicate a mood or emphasis that is not available to me in standard English, which is, overall, my first language.
Ur not black American ur Afro Caribbean American
Afro Caribbean here. Homie grew up in New York. He/she is as "Afro Caribbean" as Nicki Minaj is.
@@papoopse100 a
Afro Caribbean American is still black American. We're born and raised here (hence the American), and we're black.
@@shireads2954 no it’s not
@@shireads2954 for instance my mom from the carribean and my dad side from the Carolinas so I’m of Black American descent and of Caribbean descent two different cultures buddy
Slavery wasn’t just in the USA.. Brazil 🇧🇷 had the biggest population of Africans during the slave trade.. multiple Caribbean islands, Arab countries etc
@@ChatillgbtI don't think anyone is claiming otherwise
Slave trade existed in Africa before the colonization and the biggest slave drivers were Africans
@@groupvucic2235 no the biggest were Arabs and your first point is as obvious as the sky is blue during the day lol
@@groupvucic2235 absolutely
@groupvucic2235 so, it was the Africans who built the slave forts and dungeons in West Africa then, and not Europeans? It was Africans who built the ships and profited from huge chunks of their populations being lost and killed -- nothing to do with Europeans? Slavery in Africa was a form of serfdom. How much do you even know about slavery in Africa?
*Africans also fought the transatlantic slave trade*
Why don't you tell us about that instead of implying colonialist Europeans were innocent bystanders.
A content creator named Flower Tower did a video about how a lot of Black American students don't do well in school because of some of the things you were saying in this video. Basically she was saying that a lot of Black American students who don't do as well in school usually don't do well because they tend to have yte teachers who can't communicate to them the way they're used to communicating, but whenever they do have a Black American teacher who speaks the same AAVE as them they tend to do a lot better in school.
Imma see if i can find the video and I'm gonna post the link if you want to check it out.
Unfortunately, it's true! I had experience with both types of teachers and noticed the difference.
This is crazy I just watched this vid yesterday and now Yall made a reaction to it ?!?😅 sweet
@@rz2pp Right 😅
Yeah, slavery was all over, though the southern plantations did have the highest concentration of slaves and the south did fight to retain slavery in the civil war. I think overall languagejones does a good job discussing things respectfully, but that's one thing he should have rewritten. It's too easy to whitewash the image of the northern states because of how things shook out.
They tryna figure out how our language sticks, is considered cool and moldable but still instantly understood amongst the culture. America would love to have the ability to control our language, for now they can only warp what we make; like woke.
well, language can't be controlled because, as þe original video mentions, language change is driven by children. People trying to control language are just fighting against þe inevitable.
Þat being said, it's important to document þese changes so we can understand eachoþer.
And everyone learning standard English is also valuable for þe same reason; so when you meat people from þe oþer side of þe world, you can boþ talk þe same language and understand eachoþer.
@@e1123581321345589144”th” replaced two characters in old English, so you can’t just use “þ” for everyþing. Ðe voiceless dental fricative was written with “þ” while the voiced dental fricative was written with “ð.” Ðat being said, I wish we still had boþ characters.
I be like dat sumtimes
@@e1123581321345589144 Any particular reason you're trying to bring back the thorn?
He’s a Jew selling a product, that’s all.
My family is full of Black teachers.
I never experienced or even thought about how difficult it would be for kids who weren't code switching from birth at schools who taught the way they speak at home was incorrect. I also now understand why my mother wouldn't allow me to go to the mostly White high school in favor of a Black one. I wasn't comfortable using AAVE as I'd never had to with my peers. It was a huge culture shock to go from a multicultural school 90% Black one, but I definitely wouldn't have such a strong Black identity & appreciation if I could've gone to the school of my choice.
😅I literally looked up when kids said what's up & had a notebook of AAVE my first weeks.
Your last line made me laugh out loud.😂 I could write an entire dissertation on this subject. I experienced both schools as a student and as a parent.
@TheDemouchetsREACT I love that there are more of us than I realized at the time! I felt so alone back then.
Really isn’t code switching, we’re bilingual, yet it isn’t recognized as that. We have a very tonal language.
Interestingly, from a Linguistic perspective, you're right. The line between dialect and language is very blurry and has no clear definition. It mainly depends on social/political views of what is a dialect and what is a language. You can make an argument that AAVE is simply a dialect of English and you can argue that AAVE is it's own language. In Linguistics (at least in theory), it should be analysed the same
I’m a bit torn on this one. It’s not really tonal. I speak a tonal language and growing up in Richmond and Oakland i speak black English. There’s no doubt it’s a separate language. Changing inflection on a word can give it a different meaning which is close. But changing fixing to finna that would a hard no in a tonal language.
Hah just looked it up. Inflected languages are a thing and that is what I’d call it for sure.
@@trungnguyen-fl3wnAAVE is not tonal.
@@trungnguyen-fl3wnIt's possible to have inflection in a tonal language. The first languages we think of in terms of tones, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Thai, are all analytic, but many African languages are also tonal, and I'm sure at least one of them has inflection.
10:33
In Japan there are many different dialects, some of which preserve grammar that standard Japanese has lost. For older speakers of those dialects they can easily speak in standard Japanese but it's often with their own pronunciation unless theyve moved to a different area later in life. But now with the younger generations in many regions people have started speaking a more standard Japanese influenced version of their dialects all of the time, but they do still switch to standard when they speak to foreigners, people from other regions job interviews, writing etc. I think part of the reason they switch is because speaking in a dialect is considered less formal and also sometimes looked down unless you're in a casual setting with another speaker of that dialect.
In Scotland there is also a minority language called Scots which is closely related to English but has its own vocabulary and grammar. It also doesn't have a standard form due to suppression so there's not a huge amount of literature written down. So from what i understand there's a bit of a perception of using Scots as being associated with not being educated
1 quick thing. Tense Aspect and Mood are ways we comjugate verbs. Not actual MOOD in how something is said. For Instance, if i said "You SHOULD pick up your trash". That would be in the Hortative Mood meanimg that you ate expressing what someone should do.
Just wanted to clarify that.
The Welsh had a similar experience.
The Welsh Not was a wooden token, typically inscribed with the letters “WN”, used in some Welsh schools during the 19th century to discourage children from speaking Welsh. The punishment system, also known as the “Welsh Stick” or “Cwstom”, aimed to shame children into abandoning their native language and adopting English instead.
How it worked
Teachers would give the Welsh Not to a child who was overheard speaking Welsh during school hours. The token would then be passed from child to child, with the wearer facing corporal punishment, such as a lashing, by the end of the day. This practice was intended to deter children from speaking Welsh and promote the use of English.
Variations and accounts
While the form and use of the Welsh Not varied across schools, accounts suggest that it was often a piece of wood suspended on a string, worn around the child’s neck. Some reports describe the token as being given to children who were caught speaking Welsh, with the wearer receiving punishment at the end of the day. Others mention the use of a “paddle” or a lump of lead, known as the “Welsh lead”.
Criticisms and legacy
The use of the Welsh Not was widely criticized as arbitrary and cruel. The 1847 Reports of the commissioners of enquiry into the state of education in Wales described the practice as “shameful”. Today, the Welsh Not is remembered as a symbol of the efforts to suppress the Welsh language and culture, and its legacy continues to be debated among historians and linguists
Thanks for sharing!
When I was in high school, even when I "understood" what someone was saying in AAVE, I always felt like there were parts I was missing so I never tried to speak it myself. Felt like a surefire way to look like a fool. I'm glad to know that my younger self was being smart.
And damn. There is a LOT of nuance in AAVE that I completely miss. I've loved learning about linguistics in other languages as an adult, but I've never looked at learning the linguistics of AAVE before! This was a really fascinating topic, and thanks for all the extra info you added. :)
Most persons outside of Jamaica believe that all Jamaicans only communicate with the Jamaican dialect/creole/ patois which is not true. Jamaica's colloquial tongue is the dialect but our national tongue is English (British English). A great deal of Jamaicans are not academically inclined hence they struggle with the bilingual switch. What most struggle with is understanding that language, as a post-colonial nation, has to do with context.
No it is Jamaican english and not British english the same way that Australian have Australian english. it has its own features based on domestic reality . And its ok. there is a distinction between that and Patois and even slang and also creole of course. But truly it is Jamaican english.
Jamaican English like many other dialects, Creoles and languages, exists on a continuum
@@javnok9266 that one ain't a dialect though.
@@PHlophe Jamaican English is British English. It is the standard English. Due to the fact that it is English taught, locally, emphasis is place on certain letters, however it is written the same. Colour, programme, etc. are written the same. The Jamaican dialect(broken English) is the broken form used by the majority of the population. Patois is the most localized form of this mix and is an influence of Banto, Spanish, Dutch, French and English used by all Jamaicans in our homes and informal situations. Accents should not be confused for a diiferent language. Fiddy, fifty, fi'e.
I'd like to hear someone explain to me why English is not called broken Latin. Or is it only broken when it applies to Black people?
You asked if people in other countries/languages experience code-switching within the same language. Yes, we do. I speak Spanish, but my Spanish is more like how people speak in the street. I struggle a lot with more academic or "proper" Spanish. I default to my home dialect when trying to speak it and can't write it very well sometimes. I'm fine in English because I'm way more used to code-switching in English as I went to school in the US, but my Spanish is very casual. In fact, how I speak Spanish itself is also a form of code-switching because it's really more Spanglish than Spanish. Aside from that, my ASL is more PSE (Pidgin Signed English) rather than pure ASL. Most of the time though, when I learn a language I prefer to be understood rather than proper or formal. I can always work on that later
Thanks for sharing!
10:30 This is an interesting question because in bilingual households, apparently it is common for children to be able to distinguish between the languages in terms of vocab and grammar, (Often only switching languages when they've not been taught a specific word, but otherwise understanding who needs which language and when) so maybe when it comes to something bordering on dialectal languages, that line is too blurred to understand that you SHOULD switch.
Obviously an adult would understand, but a child might just be thinking "English is English is English" and not understand why other people aren't "getting it."
I know that I certainly wouldn't have caught onto that, and honestly, I still get surprised when my vocabulary clashes with somebody else's because "that's just normal" to me.
I have always found it very interesting that Black Grammar has been called many things over time, but it's not until a YT man talks about it academically that Black Grammar is taken seriously for all it's complexity and nuance.
Our language is beautiful, complex and the way that we communicate is constantly evolving regionally and spreading worldwide with our music and it's not until we reach college that we unlearn the stereotypes surrounding how we communicate and learn to respect and elevate our culture & language to the same level as proper English grammar.
A lot of people have expanded on the topic academically but let's face it. America at large doesn't do "academic". One of the few benefits of social media is the ability to educate. It'd be nice if that reach was used exclusively for good, but that's another topic for another day.
Its a channel about language, so it makes sense that a channel about language would talk about a language. Has nothing to do with ppl now paying attention cuz its a white guy. And quite honestly, this subject just isnt discussed anywhere.
@@timsartistic7328 YT Man? RUclips Man???
The vast majority of people still will never come across that video, so now, they won't take it seriously regardless.
@seananthony7494
Lol. "Yt" as an abbreviation for "white" never made sense to me.
From the “you good?” example, it’s all about inflections and context. Chinese for example is a very tonal language. You can have a word, and if said either in the wrong context or tonally inflected incorrectly, you could be saying something entirely different from what you intended! Standard English doesn’t rely too much on inflections, which is why foreigners learning English can be so confusing. Speaking of…”which” could be confused with “witch” or the various uses of “can”. But the use of inflections and tonal intonations found in AAVE is so impactful. I’m from the Bay Area, so we HELLA use them inflections lol
15:15 he be out the house, but he don't be at work, though. You _been_ knew that!
I loved this video, and I'm glad RUclips recommended it to me. Not only do I love language and culture in general, I was born in the Bronx and grew up in Baltimore -- some AAVE is part of my own deep vernacular. Coming up through the "Ebonics bad" era it is so satisfying to see AAVE finally getting its flowers.
I'll see you in the next one I think.
One of the more interesting words/phrases is how we use shit. Shit means oh crap, i made a mistake & may not be able to fix it...but the black version shiiiiiddd means, i doubt it, thats skeptical & you better go check your sources.
Standard English has the same thing with "right" ("riiiiiiiight").
@@jmodified 100%.
Bottom line: them ppl don't be understanding that context matters and a lot of it is simply code while sometimes it really indicates a lack of intelligence...all of our ppl cannot code switch properly and thats when you know whats what ijs
Even our Negro spirituals were coded language, so how is it that they don't get this!!!!!!
White people: why do you people constantly bring up slavery.
Black people: because white people refuse to understand slavery.
Some choose not to code switch at all🤷🏾♀️
@@TheDemouchetsREACT same anywhere in the world. Some people think they are betraying something if they change their speech to be better understood by who they are speaking to.
I'm a huge fan of Language Jones, and seeing you guys so excited that he's getting stuff right puts a huge smile on my face! And your experiences and your thoughts are also very valuable. "Teaching kids you didn't take the time to learn about..." That's going to stick with me. Thank you for the awesome video!
His videos regularly point out the difference between African American English and African American Vernacular English. It has formal an slangy versions just like any other versions and he oints it out.
Watching this just game me Airplane flashbacks the 'anyone speak jive' gag.
10:33 In ireland we have hiberno english which follows irish language grammar (gaeilge) and in parts of greece or pretty much anywhere ive been with Greek peeps all have their own mix of greek and whatever language is also spoken there and it can follow different grammar too. Namely Greeklish in the states for example. I feel like hiberno english is a better example though to be similar to this or the Scots language in Scotland (not gàidhlig/gaelic)
Also we do the extra 'be' in a lot of hiberno english too, its because in Irish Gaelige we also do the 'conditional' tense. Ive never heard a greek person use it that way unless they grew up in the states but who's to say.
In Norwegian we have Kebabnorsk, but I don’t apeak as much kebabnorsk as y’all speak AAVE. But, maybe I should💡
is it TurkishNorks or something lol!
Kebabnorsk is maybe the most wonderful name for any dialect or language I’ve ever heard
We have the same thing in Sweden, it's called ghettosvenska.
Chrissy out here making up works. That one did not "land"
@@PHlophe I'm not making things up. Kebabnorsk is not a language or a dialect, it does not have grammar rules like AAVE, it's a sociolect, or a multiethnolect, a product of immigration and poor integration, just like ghettosvenska. Do you understand the difference?
It is good to hear that y'all are teaching your children Kouri Vini. Hopefully, more native Louisianians will do the same.
I watched the OP video first, but wanted to see what other folks thought of his video. It was nice seeing the reactions. I think y'all could lean into that more too, and provide additional commentary, opinions, and feedback for the original creator as well as others in the language and culture space.
Thank you.
You're welcome.
I don't think that's what he means by mood, but I hear ya.
Yeah he was using linguistic jargon for a specific type of speech
@@revangerangmood basically means situational context.
@@DOWNR4NGE cool
There isn't this same "code switching" in most places because in most places either you're straight up speaking a different language, more obvious dialect or like in Jamaica, patois is so clearly different there isn't a question of what is happening. The issue in America is that there isn't even a recognition that it's different, it's just thought of as "bad english". In Jamaica there is still some of the same colonial issues, but no one who hates patois would ever say it's just "bad english".
Some do refer to it as bad english/ broken english. In fact, the disdain for it is in the name chosen for it. Patois is a french word meaning rough speech or clumsy, uneducated speech. It’s why I try not to even use “patois” to describe it. I call it Jamaican Creole.
This was a great discourse
As autistic individual, we may do a type of code switching in almost every different situation and setting, even if spaces where we should "fit in"
I am a language teacher and did some research into "dialects" and "slangs". On a linguistic level there is no scientific way to draw a proper line. You could argue that any variation of a language is a language on its own. The lines we draw are cultural, they are politically and socially loaded. When you say that a variation of language is a dialect or slang, you are affirming that there is a hierarchy (the standardised language versus the rest, which is you guessed it, not acceptable). Your experience about switching language at school reminds me of other students I met when studying language. They were from Bayern, Germany. I remember those girls next to me during lesson speaking Bayerish, which for me was German but with a different accent and maybe some different words but mostly I thought it was a German dialect. When the girl next to me stood up and started addressing the teacher, she suddently didn't have any accent ! She was speaking "proper" High German. So I understood that they were really treating Bayerish and High German as two different languages and they were bilingual.
This is an interesting topic to me as someone from switzerland. In the parts where I live, we generally speak German, but our dialect is missing several of the high German tenses and germans generally really do not understand us when we speak. This is why, in school, a lot of swiss kids need to relearn their mother tongue, because the formal language is so different. Of course it would be wrong to compare the background of this with the history of AAL, but the similarity struck me.
To you're question, yes in Honduras we have a certain type of Spanish and when we came to the u.s. we had to adjust not just to learn English but to understand all the other types of Spanish spoken. Also we have a not well known black population that mixes Spanish with other languages depending on their particular backgrounds. My mom was mixed and grew up speaking Spanish in different ways, but at home she made Us speak what she considered "proper Spanish" and this instead made it hard to communicate with our peers who spoke what she called "street Spanish". Love you guys ❤
The first correction is important. The exportation and enslavement of black people was not confined to the Southern states of America. It happened on a global scale.
My white granddaddy spoke Pigeon. He was born in the Cayman Islands in 1903. I used to love the way he spoke, but most people had a hard time understanding him..
Thank you for sharing your perspectives on AAE. I am a writing instructor, and I am learning a lot from videos like this to better serve my students.
Love this! Thanks for caring enough to listen.
Y'all asked if other countries had this type of thing, yeah Germany and Switzerland have a "Standarddeutsch" and then regional dialects. Everyone uses the standard in school and often as a common language. Western Germans can't understand Swiss dialects for example. But even a non native speaker who studied the standard in Germany will understand the standard version from Switzerland bc they're much more similar
My linguistics professor has a whole class on AAVE and it was fascinating. He went through the history and the grammar rules and how everything within that dialect has its own complex grammar rules. He taught that this is just how languages evolve.
My family uses the word "aww" like " you good" even changed the spelling. So we have aww and "awwa" same word . . ..but different meaning. Example... something bad happened: aww. Heres a beautiful baby: awwa.
I think this is more common in American English, where -uh is added to words at the end of sentences for emphasis. I remember seeing a video on this, but I can't find it right now
in switzerland we speak an own dialect, but theres so many variations that theres no grammar, so in school we write and and speak german
I absolutely love this!! Especially the part about cosplaying and having to hear the language butchered. Also loved the talks about not understanding students, my mother learned Spanish to better understand and communicate with her kiddos and I feel if a teacher has decided to work in a predominantly African American community they also should be expected to learn and appreciate the culture of the families they are serving if they’re from outside the community. Again, I really loved this vid! It ended too soon and I hope you make more on this content ❤
Tense doesn’t mean to tense up in this case
To the point of writing how you speak: the thing about this is that writing is a different register than speaking. I find it frustrating and difficult when I have to read something written by someone who writes the way they speak, even if it is prefectly grammatically "correct".
It also makes them look unintelligent whether or not that's the case. I've met plenty of people who are more intelligent than you would give them credit for just looking at things like that. But just like clothes give you an impression of someone, so does their writing.
The issue is more that you are expected to code switxh to a more formal register of english when writing. And again, this applies to everyone.
This is so interesting, my family is from the American South and I have black and white relatives. In grade school my family moved north and lord, I was corrected for pronouncing things incorrectly and using ‘black’ slang. My grandmother would try so hard to help me say things with no accent or anything because she had been considered low IQ because of the way she spoke and didn’t want me to suffer the same. To this day certain words trip me up because I feel I have to pronounce them one way and my instinct is something different.
Only after I joined the Army did I realize that so much of how I speak (born and raised Florida) was not only a weird mix of different "Southern" accents but also "black-sounding" as some put it. I had a few people from up North and the Midwest ask me why I talked "kinda-black"and I was very confused.
10:33 As a person from Puerto Rico who grew up in the island during the 90s, I code-switch between English, Spanish, and Spanglish depending on the audience. Puerto Rico made English and Spanish the official fiscal languages in the early 90s. As a result, school curriculums were changed to be bilingual (many private schools were already bilingual, but public schools were generally not). Students that grew up after this time developed their own way of speaking which combined Spanish with English syntax and anglicisms (this created the island's own version of Spanglish).
For me, it's often difficult to speak just English or Spanish. When speaking to an audience that only speaks Spanish or English, I have to make a concentrated effort to remain in one language. It's especially a problem with older generations in my family who often look down on Spanglish as a bastardization of Spanish.
When speaking to people who speak all three languages, it's very common to hear rapid-fire code-switching with one person making a point in one or multiple languages and the other answering in a different combination of languages. Many people from outside the island become very confused when they witness this 😅
The language switching is fairly common in my neighbourhood- I live in a part of Toronto with a high concentration of immigrants, and you'll often hear someone firing off a less-than-friendly sentence in English peppered with Hindi or Urdu curse words. Why? My friends tell me that Hindi swears are better. I don't speak Hindi myself, but I defintely borrow some of the insults.
Codeswitching happens in all cultures, but not always on the same lines. There are always many dialects and many registers. Sometimes it's cultural, sometimes it's social class or wealth, sometimes it's regional, sometimes all kinds of things. If somebody doesn't know how to codeswitch, it means they live in a very small, very isolated place with a very small number of people.
@@metsfan1873 yeah i'm an Aussie and I will speak general, cultivated and broad (the 3 main Aussie accents) depending on context.
15:27 😂 I tripped out at the same thing omg
Here's an example to answer your question at 10:30. In Scotland, one of the first places to be colonised by England, the local non standard varieties were, just in the same way as your own varieties, "corrected" in the classroom, by mostly Scottish teachers. As is elsewhere in these comments, this is linguistic prescriptivism, but is also part of a wider phenomenon of linguistic imperialism. It shows the complexity in untangling internalised oppression, and really why it's more useful to make the analysis through the lens of class.
In Dutch here in Belgium we will use "tussentaal" which is literally an in-between language between local dialects (which are basically separate languages that are now almost extinct) and standard Dutch. Tussentaal is also significantly more complex gramatically than Dutch. For example, agreement of articles to maculine/feminine gender is extinct in standard Dutch, but still exists in tussentaal.
i was raised in predominantly black areas and schools growing up in FL (don't worry, i left), and i use a lot of this naturally.
Dutch here, in the Netherlands especially in our large metro areas prodominantly in the less affluent neighborhoods a multi-ethno dialect is spoken that is dubbed "street dutch". It is a variant of dutch mixed with vocab from various different words of common miniority group languages as well as some entirely new grammar rules and new words. To my understanding there are some children that grow up in these environments that have a harder time in dutch classes in school. I am not from these areas though so I cannot speak for myself.
I love this so much. I've never watched either of you before but I love learning about cultures and dialects so I clicked on it. I (unfortunately) grew up in a very pro Ted Cruz part of Texas, but then joined the Navy right out of high school and got quickly introduced to so many different cultures who I learned so much from. The amount of built in racism I had to unlearn was staggering and it's something I'm still working on. This video was so interesting tho to see how I still understood parts of aave purely from growing up in the bayou region of Texas but not all of it!
Also y'all are so cute together and so in sync.
I subscribed to see more!
I love this. My first exposure to your channel and his, and it's something I've sort of understood about aave, but never had it broken down in the historical context of where all the modal verbs come from, or how they behave in a strict grammatical sense. You have a sub from me and I'm about to dive into his linguistics.
I'm Scandinavian, and "code switching" kinda used to happen here too a lot. There was a "formal" Norwegian that you had to speak in radio and television for example, and that was the natural dialect of rich people from the capital. Working class and rural dialects were practically non-existent in the public sphere except for in music
And we also have a history of trying to kill off the Sápmi, Kvæn and Roma languages and cultures in Norway during the 1850s-1960s
This was so good!!! Thank you for making this video
Here in Jamaica, patois/patwa was told to us that it was " broken English" and looked down upon and still some people still have not unlearned those colonial thought processes.
In the UK, regional dialects are considered wrong or bad English… so when we go into school and are told we’re not right, it hurts
10:35 to the question, definitely yes in India. Because of the large linguistic diversity & historic class/caste/region hierarchies, people have to do a lot of code switching.
Atleast in Maharashtra, the pesky legitimization of the notion of language purity ('shuddhataa') has a lowkey, but potent effect on society.
Even in America there’s a lot of interesting examples. I’m from Hawaii, and we have our own Hawaiian Pidgin (though despite its name it’s a creole, not a pidgin).
Similar to African American English it was heavily shaped by the plantation system and colonialism-English, native Hawaiian, plus languages from the various immigrants who were brought in to work the plantations (much like indigenous peoples on the mainland many natives died of disease and so an influx of new labor was necessary), including Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Korean, Portuguese, Okinawan, Puerto Rican. So both grammatically and with regard to vocab there’s a lot going on, a lot of complexities. There’s a spectrum, too, from the more heavy, traditional pidgin (often spoken by older people who were around during the plantation days, or people in more isolated rural communities) and a lighter, more modern version spoken often spoken by younger people which is closer to standard English and considered by some linguists to be “de-creolized”.
There’s a lot of code-switching, since it’s often looked down upon as improper or low-class, but there’s definitely been movements in the past half century (particularly since the Hawaiian renaissance) to protect and respect both Hawaiian Pidgin as well as the actual native Hawaiian language (ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi). It’s definitely noticeable when tourists or mainlanders or characters in tv and movies made by mainlanders try to use it-they might get some of the basic vocab right, but the structure is often just plain wrong, either just grafting pidgin vocab and affect onto standard American grammatical structure, or just rambling incoherently because they think it doesn’t really have much of a structure at all.
Hearing your experiences in school brought back a similar memory. I come from the southwest, and my family has been here since it was a Spanish colony. Growing up, I heard my elders speaking a local variety of Spanish that is now dying out. A cousin and I were in the same Spanish class in high school, and we were both marked wrong for conjugating something the way we'd heard it all our lives. As an adult, I am actively trying to use our "wrong" Spanish as much as possible.
I’m so curious what those conjugations you used were- I’m learning Spanish, I’m curious, would you mind writing maybe a few sentences exemplifying that Spanish you grew up with? I’m so curious to experience it!! :0
Hell yeah! I never took Spanish class in school as a Southern Californian because I hated how pretentious they always were about "correct" European Spanish. I wanna take a Mexican Spanish course or even a Chicano language course!
Fun fact about Italy: The regional variants of Italian are so different they're considered their own languages rather than dialects! This is because Italy wasn't a single unified country between the fall of the Roman empire and the mid 1800s. Most Italians today are technically bilingual between their regional language (Sicilian where I grew up) and Italian which is used in schools.
It's crazy, I sent this to my wife 2-3 days ago
Did she want to divorce you?
In England there is absolutely code switching between classes of people. The actual upper class talks completely differently. They wield it over people.
Teaching children that you didn't take the time to learn about is profound.
"Black English" should be taught in school, like a second language. I could imagine it would hugely enhance communication and understanding.
I don't quite agree though when you complain about teachers saying you're not speaking correctly. Yes, you're speaking correctly your language. But if a french kid comes to school, it wouldn't make much sense if they speak correct french. The language in the classroom is standard English. BUT: The problem is, that they don't even know that you speak your language correctly. That's why I believe it's important to teach that in schools.
10:20
To answer your question, yes it happens in other countries.
As part of a colonized colonizer nation with an inferiority complex toward France, we code switch all the time in multiple way.
We have our default québec french. We code switch toward métropolitan french in "proper" professional setting but toward a frenglish Québécois in a "worker" professional setting. Even in english we code switch in our grammar.
Québec has a Context-Focus- S-V-O grammar and we tend to use it in english in loss settings. You'll hear "Me, I", "her, she" a lot for exemple.
We also swear a lot but their is a rythm to it. Part of it is the context like "dog/bat/horse-shit" but mostly its "which has the right amount of syllables to make it flow correctly?"
Part of my family is native (I am too but dont do this) and they code switch even more in both langage.
So they have a network of code switch of
Native coded french to Québécois to Parisian/ to ROC English
And Native coded english to québecois english to ROC english/ directly to ROC english.
Thanks for sharing with us!
I'm white/hispanic and grew up in South Louisiana. I was surrounded by this language, and even now, if I get too relaxed, I can fall into it sometimes. I try not to use it because I don't feel right.
It is trippy to hear someone explain something that you just know from experience.
Many people growing up in Scotland, where I'm from, have historically been pushed into code-switching, and I've always found it a shame that kids who were just speaking regional dialect would get told that what they were doing was "wrong" by teachers. Speaking in regional dialect instead of a form of Scottish English is very usual among working-class people in Scotland, and it rankles me just how many people have probably been told that they are somehow "unintelligent", "rude", "lazy" etc. (as if it were somehow a moral issue) just because they speak in the dialect they have been surrounded with. It's not right. While learning to code-switch is advantageous (like in speaking to non-native speakers used to a more standard form of the language), people should not be pushed to completely avoid their linguistic background.
I'm an European Slavic person, there's no English that's ~mine~ and what I speak is a mix of all the English I heard, including AAVE. You've mentioned cosplaying language and dont wanna mean no disrespect - which I recognize prolly isn't good AAVE, but is what naturally came to my mind and and if I tried hard to say that in the proper standarized academic English I would feel like I'm playing someone, and even worse someone who I'd think an asshole. What's your thoughts on the ESL people incorporating parts of the AAVE into their language?
I'm from a scheme (poor urban sub-area) in Glasgow, Scotland. I need to constantly code switch between English (or 'telephone voice' as it's called sometimes lol) and my natural dialect. The words used, how they're used and the meaning can be and are different from English, despite anyone who asks being told that my native language is English. It's interesting because, much like Sierra's experience, I was well read really young and understood 'proper English' quite well from it, but got my speech corrected constantly in school.
Also interestingly, if I use my natural dialect in interactions with people, they will immediately treat me worse if they're not from a similar background. Class is a big fuckin deal in the UK and my dialect gives away my born class immediately.
On the topic of code switching the Japanese have 3 codes. Home, friends, work/school. I'm Appalachian and I code switch at work as well so I am not looked down on
It's similar for Arabic speakers. Arabic speakers learn a dialect at home that's nearly a different language than what's taught in school and us written and spoken in the news and in media. I wanted to learn the spoken dialect (of Jordan,which is different than the dialects of Egypt, morocco,Saudi Arabia, and even the bedouin dialects within those countries) but there's very few resources to do so, and there's very few books written in the dialects.
Really different from creole origined dialects, specially because it doesn't have any racial connotation, but it really reminds me of how, in Spain, historically, Castilian spanish has been considered the more literate and formal way of speaking, while people that spoke Andaluz (the southern dialect of Spanish) were considered lazy and uneducated. Very interesting topic.
It seems to me that there are the same mechanisms that brings forth dialects. Here in germany we have regional dialects, spatial separation in germany. In the U.S.A. it was/is forced separation.
In Norway we have very different dialects. But we are also very aware of this, So adults usually don't correct the speach of kids too much. Some kids who have a different dialect compared to the local one might get teased sometimes even bullied by the other kids though, but not usually, dialect is a point of pride for us Norwegians. Usually one of the first things that happens when you meet someone new, is that you try to guess where someone is from, based on how they speak. If you get the question of where you are from, it means that they haven't been able to pinpoint a location, otherwise they will tell you what location they guessed
Yall need to read an essay by David Foster Wallace called "Authority and American Usage."
NGL that lil bit at the end almost got me to buy his book right then and there 🤣
I loved y'all's reaction to that video. And he's pretty much on point with ,as you said vernacular. Imma follow and see what else you got 😊
We share a lil bit of everything. Sometimes it’s fun, sometimes it’s uncomfortable. Welcome to the family! Much love!
@@TheDemouchetsREACT we here for it 😁
As a native old white Detroiter who has friends of all ages, this was a very interesting video! While I studied AAVE about 40 years ago, I never really discussed its nuances much with Black friends until recently (and now with much younger friends). And honestly your discussion of your use of language in your home was enlightening. I hadn't realized the complexity from region to region (but of course it makes perfect sense).
And the video you were reacting to explained a lot of things I had picked up instinctively over the years, so that was interesting as well.
I'm currently across the pond learning the Lithuanian language, so I'm particularly keen on language structure right now, though it often befuddles me.
Thank you from a lifelong language lover, language learner, and lover of words.
You're one more subscriber closer to 200k. You came up randomly in my feed today and I'm glad you did.❤
P.S. Don't worry - I'll be back by November to vote in one of the most consequential elections of our history. (I'm on the right side - I mean the correct side - of true democracy).
Thanks so much for your kind words, Esmerelda. Welcome to our family!
There were no free public schools until African American slavery ended in the U.S. Public schools were created for this group and poor European Americans were able to gain an education because of legislation created specifically to aid the freed people.
I remember Jones saying all blacks don't speak AAE and all AAE speakers aren't black
I was born in the USA but my dad is from the middle east and they had to learn formal arabic in school but nobody spoke like that at home. That said nobody pretends the dialects dont exist like white teachers do here.
I saw this video recently and I'm so glad to see someone reviewing it ❤❤💯💯👊🏾👊🏾
I really appreciate hearing y’all’s facts and commentary
Oh yes, we do constantly code switch in Uganda.
Like, in English alone, we speak subtly different in formal situations and in casual situations. And that's when we don't share a local language
In my mother tongues (Runyankole and Jopadhola) in formal situations like church or speaking to persons of authority. I tend to speak slower and deeper. But amongst friends and family, i speak higher, faster and just skip a few words sometimes
Enjoyed this review after having watched the original video. Liked and subscribed. And although I might not have much use for AAVE on the streets of Fujisawa, Japan, it might help me understand current American popular culture in movies and music a bit better. Mata ne.
Welcome to the family!
I grew up in a Jamaican household hearing and speaking patoi, and later learning the dialect from Brooklyn nyc where i was born and raised. Moved to Florida at 12 and learned the dialect here. Depending on who I'm speaking with I'd switch accordingly and those that know me best get a mish mash of all 3 😁 😂😂😂I've been around black folks from different parts of the US and abroad and i love that despite the differences we still understand each other.
Love it!
"SUS" does not actually mean suspicious, it's more likely to be used when a heterosexual man acts or does something that is remotely homosexual or even feminine, especially in the presence of other heterosexual men