Another thing just occurred to me. Her article is titled "African American Vernacular English is not Standard English with Mistakes". She seems to spend the whole article making the semantic argument that it is instead a dialect.
Are the two mutually exclusive? Can one dialect not be simply another with mistakes?
Her article is titled "African American Vernacular English is not Standard English with Mistakes". She seems to spend the whole article making the semantic argument that it is instead a dialect.
I don't think this is a meaningless distinction. If you believe the author, speakers of AAVE are speaking a dialect of English that has lower prestige than Standard American English. If you don't, you think that on a daily basis they simply screw up the task of speaking Standard American English. This is a subtle but non-trivial difference: one point of view is about culture while the other is fundamentally about intelligence.
Because many people hold the latter view, I was taught by my parents to avoid speaking AAVE. For similar reasons, I was taught to avoid Pittsburghese[1] even though I grew up with it in school.
Are the two mutually exclusive? Can one dialect not be simply another with mistakes?
I think it comes down to my earlier question: What is any dialect or derived language but a set of consistent mistakes with respect to the ancestor language? More to the point, either all dialects have mistakes or none do. The only difference I can see is the prestige involved.
Well, I wouldn't say the current speakers of AAVE are literally trying to speak English properly and making a mistake. I would say that the people who created it were. And I would say that the people who speak it now suffer for it just as if they were. Thus for all intents and purposes, it is English with mistakes, even if technically it is a dialect.
So I guess her argument that mistakes + tradition = dialect seems silly to me. Even if its true by the dictionary definition of "dialect" it's a harmful viewpoint to take.
Languages aren't really "created." Nobody sat down and formulated the rules that describe AAVE any more than someone took Middle English and decided modern English would really be better, so let's use that instead.
It's a process that's evolved over a few centuries and has its roots in the slave trade. There are people who think AAVE owes a lot to the creoles that formed on Caribbean slave islands like Jamaica.
And I would say that the people who
speak it now suffer for it just as if they were.
They suffer because people with your attitude make them suffer, e.g., calling them dumb, or saying AAVE is illegitimate or devolved. This is basically the definition of a low-prestige dialect.
A similar example is the relationship between people who speak French and people who speak Quebecois.
But be honest: do you really think Quebecois are dumb? Do you think the language is an illegitimate or devolved version of French? Is it just "French with mistakes?"
Quebecois' prestige in the French-speaking world has to do with the historical relationship between French Canadians and France, not the differences in the language.
As I said in another comment, if the South had won the Civil War, you might not object to things like double negatives, double modals, etc.
Thus for all intents and purposes, it is English with
mistakes, even if technically it is a dialect.
No. As _pius said, one point of view is about culture while the other is fundamentally about intelligence.
In an educational context the latter is absolutely destructive. If you're teaching an AAVE speaker SAE and think they're just "making mistakes," you won't get to the root of the issue, which is that their internal model of the language is very different from yours.
Are the two mutually exclusive? Can one dialect not be simply another with mistakes?