This doesn't make Dutch "realer" than AAVE. As I have said elsewhere, this is no different from a German attempting to parse Dutch, except a Dutch speaker can actually point to a country that has Dutch as official language. Those cognitive biases are called "understanding GA/RP" and "not understanding AAVE". I read the AAVE essay today for the first time, and then re-read DFW's, and had a very different take on DFW as a result. You should consider reading DFW's piece - but do it after re-reading this one. Your comments here are prime example of that confusion at work. It's this constant conflation between usage and morality that David Foster Wallace concerns himself in his review of Garner's dictionary. What's worth noting is that the belief in the intrinsic superiority of one dialect over another is usually not well-founded. There's no question that Standard English speakers consider their dialect superior to AAVE, just as UK Standard English speakers consider theirs superior to Cockney, and Parisian speakers consider their dialect superior to, well, every other place French is spoken. If you try, you'll end up in the same hilarious place William Raspberry ended up in the Washington Post. You can't simply "simplify" Standard English and arrive at AAVE. In fact, the rules for AAVE are intricate enough that well-educated Standard English speakers fail comprehensively to mimic it in writing even given an enormous wealth of samples from which to draw on. As the essay superbly demonstrates in its conclusion, AAVE "sounds uneducated" because well-educated speakers of Standard English have cognitive biases that confuse them into believing that AAVE is merely garbled or "street-talk" Standard English. If you can think of a scenario where AAVE becomes a language everybody wants to speak in order to show off how sophisticated they are (like French in medieval England) or where GA is replaced by a language that is different enough to simply make AAVE sound completely foreign (like if the official language of the US was Chinese or Spanish), I don't see any plausible way to fight its negative connotations (unlike those of blackness in general). Even if you had never met a black person before and never heard AAVE before, as a GA speaker you would think AAVE sounds less sophisticated than GA because of the objective reasons I laid out.
I'm saying it objectively sounds less sophisticated to a speaker of GA or RP.
Note: I'm not saying AAVE "is" objectively less sophisticated. The only thing you can hope for (short of replacing GA with something that makes AAVE sound less jarring - or having AAVE somehow become the language of the sociopolitical elite) is that the association moves from "hoodlums" to "inbred rednecks". No matter what complexity it brings to the table by itself, those changes make it look simpler in comparison and speaking simplified language makes a speaker appear less sophisticated.ĪAVE by itself sounds unsophisticated to GA or RP speakers. The reason that AAVE even in isolation "sounds uneducated" is that it is not only related to Southern American English (which already "sounds uneducated" on its own) but also that it simplifies some grammar and phonemes from English. The only difference is that AAVE also marks the speaker with an ethnicity that also has negative connotations (going by studies into biases, even black Americans have negative associations with black people).įix the negative connotations of that ethnicity and people think of AAVE speakers no less than of uneducated white people. "White trash" or "redneck" is an actual existing stereotype.īoth AAVE and Southern American English have negative connotations. There's a similar negative stigma to the Southern Drawl - and that's really as white as it gets. The negative stigma is not about the language, it's about the ethno-social group as a whole.
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