Posted on 08/06/2013 12:04:45 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Last week, Don West, defense attorney in the George Zimmerman murder trial, asked friend of Trayvon Martin and case witness Rachel Jeantel a strange question. “Are you claiming in any way that you don’t understand English?” he inquired, though she had been answering his questions in fluent English throughout much of the previous day. Jeantel, who was born and raised in Miami, insisted that she did, but West wasn’t convinced. He asked her once more whether perhaps, because her first language was Creole (transmitted to her by her Haitian mother), she had any trouble understanding English.
West was not alone. In the days that followed Jeantel’s testimony, the internet was ablaze with comments about her “poor English,” some of them willfully mean-spirited and others prescribing well-intentioned solutions to the perceived problem of widespread ungrammatical English. Well-intentioned or not, ungrammaticality is not a problem that Jeantel had. We need to look elsewhere to understand the strange phenomenon of being accused of not speaking your own language.
Some have rightly denounced the racism implicit in Jeantel’s questioning, admittedly unknown to West, who may well have been confused about her linguistic background. But even well-meaning commentators aiming to vindicate Jeantel have not quite gotten it right. Salon’s Brittney Cooper wrote that Jeantel speaks her own “idiosyncratic” idiom that combines “the three languages – Hatian Kreyol (or Creole), Spanish, and English — that she speaks.” Well, not exactly. Virtually anyone who was born and raised in the United States can speak perfect English without interference from any other language, no matter where their parents came from. The suggestion that Jeantel’s language is peppered with influence from Haitian Creole and Spanish implies that there is something off about her English. There’s nothing wrong with speaking imperfect English, but that doesn’t describe Rachel Jeantel, and to suggest otherwise misses — you might argue even reinforces — the real injustice at the heart of her cross-examination.
That there is nothing incorrect about the way Jeantel speaks is not so much an opinion as an undisputed fact that any authority on language could readily point out. I breathed a sigh of relief last weekend when linguist John McWhorter explained that Jeantel’s “English is perfect. It’s just that it’s Black English.” What McWhorter calls “Black English” is a dialect spoken by millions of Americans, and decades of linguistics research, much of it compiled by McWhorter himself, attests that it is a robust dialect like any other, with an internally consistent grammar and vocabulary. Many of those millions of speakers speak exclusively African American English in their communities, only to be taught from their earliest interactions with American public institutions, as schoolchildren, that their dialect is ungrammatical.
Jeantel’s English is not any more or less grammatical than the Standard American variety spoken by Zimmerman’s attorney, but unlike the defense attorney, she did not have the advantage of speaking the dialect that is sanctioned by America’s dominant social stratum. Linguists like John McWhorter fervidly oppose linguistic prescription — the practice of prescribing rules governing language use that do not reflect the way that people speak in practice — which they hold to baselessly and arbitrarily privilege certain varieties of speech over others. Linguistic prescription may be baseless, but it is not arbitrary at all: Prescriptivism systematically and invariably privileges the language of the already powerful.
Perhaps it should come as no surprise that the Trayvon Martin case, which thrust the persistence of racism in America uncomfortably into the spotlight, has continued to clumsily illustrate the structural disadvantages encountered by millions of black Americans. African Americans are victim not just to gross racial profiling, as was Trayvon Martin, but also to linguistic discrimination, a little-understood prejudice that springs directly from linguistic prescription. Some forms of prescription, like rules against split infinitives and ending sentences in prepositions, illogically impose grammatical rules that do not naturally occur in language, but are, on some level, harmless. Others, like our culture’s categorical repudiation of African American English, have social ramifications easily as severe as racial profiling. It can be awfully difficult to excel in school, to succeed in the professional world, or to deliver credible testimony in court when virtually every institution in your society operates with the assumption that your language is fundamentally incorrect and takes it as an indicator of your intelligence.
Many have already pointed out that Rachel Jeantel was wrongly cast as unreliable and combative last week because of her race, gender, and size. We need to add language to that list. It is not because of her flawed English, as some have suggested, but in spite of her perfectly articulated English that Jeantel was discriminated against. Linguistic discrimination is just one of many mechanisms that systemically disadvantage African Americans in the U.S., but it is a crucial one. There are few things so disempowering as being silenced for the language that you speak.
I believe Cockney is also known as the “rhyming slang”.
You can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig.
Leni
Bingo!
Would it be wrong to point out that the article was written in “Standard English?” Had the author applied for her position using the alternative “African American English,” she would not have been hired, even as a freelancer
I don’t know their situation. I would guess that they’ve picked up bits and pieces of their grandmother’s language, more of a broken good Chinese than a true dialect such as is Ebonics.
Well, not to belabor the point, but “. .our grand kids don’t speak good Chinese” is then not grammatically correct, just as ‘don’t speak good English’, or ‘don’t play good baseball’ are. Which I found ironic considering the topic.
Here’s a simple example of the difference:
“My name is VanShuyten. I am from Lower Slobbovia.”
Those two sentences are good English.
If that is all I can say, I don’t speak English well.
Rachel Jeantel has several things going on. She probably speaks Ebonics, which is a dialect of English which relies on simplification of verb tenses, vocabulary, pronunciation, and sentence structures. ( Standard English also did that by dropping the Old English verb forms and conjugations for most verbs - eat, ate, eaten vs stop, stopped, stopped - and reducing the number and combinations of letters and pronunciations. The modern pronunciation of “knight” is much easier to us than the original, which was said much like it is spelled. Ebonics probably started with slaves from different African language groups using a simplified English to speak with each other.) She also probably never mastered Standard English, and it’s pronunciation and large vocabulary. Because of that, she was unable to completely “code shift” from Ebonics to Standard English and mixed the two. I think she also has trouble going from general, vague thoughts to precise speech, but there could be many reasons for that, not all having to do with her language ability.
There is another assumption by the author that because Ebonics is spoken, it deserves equality with Standard English. Thas retarted. The whole point of having a standard form is so that people with different dialects can understand each other. A person speaking Standard English can go to any place where English is spoken and be understood. That is why it is so important that all students master Standard English, and the failure to do that is just one example of how poorly our schools are doing.
And the point is that you are not writing in standard English and are technically misusing adjectives and adverbs. Well is an adverb and good is an adjective.
‘Speaking good Chinese’ describes the Chinese. Speaking Chinese well’ describes the speaking.
Perhaps your failure to realize this is a result of laziness or an indication of how the education system failed for people like you who now use imprecise language that can cause confusion to those who use ‘standard’ English.
Or, perhaps, language evolves and changes, new words added all the time. New phrases, concepts and structure. The language considered ‘standard’ and ‘proper’ today would be seen as barbaric to English speakers just 100 years ago who were the defenders of proper English.
How well would people from rural Vermont, Appalachia, New York City, West London and Cajun Louisianna understand each other? Which, if any, of these dialects are the ‘proper’ ones? I know I’d probably think it’s the one that most closely resembles the way I speak as it makes the most sense to me, but I’m not the standard bearer for the one true language. I don’t speak a language anywhere close to ‘standard’ oxford English, but if an editor of the Oxford University press were to question my intelligence based on the way I used language, I would probably tell him or her to f off.
Hell, a simple grammatical rule regarding the proper use of adjectives and adverbs has caused this back and forth with no progress even though the grammatical rule is available online with a simple google search, yet you are still insisting that you are correct. You are correct in that it is obviously part of the language since it’s being used daily in this way, but it certainly can’t be considered ‘standard’ or ‘proper’ English, although it more than likely will be should the rule continue to be ignored by those who speak the language causing those to define what is proper to change their definition based on the way the language is actually being used.
“And the point is that you are not writing in standard English and are technically misusing adjectives and adverbs. Well is an adverb and good is an adjective.
Perhaps your failure to realize this is a result of laziness or an indication of how the education system failed for people like you who now use imprecise language that can cause confusion to those who use ‘standard’ English.”
Thank you for making my point even if you don’t understand what you said.
“Good” is an adjective that modifies “Chinese(the language)”. “Well” is an adverb that modifies “speak.”
As far as your personal insults, I’ve taught English at the college level for over 30 years. I am rarely confused by standard English although I often see people with poor reading comprehension and logic skills who are confused by things such as the usage and meanings of adverbs and adjectives.
Note to self: Try to avoid grammar arguments with and never insult any FReeper who is familiar enough with British literature to have a tagline that's a quote describing a dead insane man on a stretcher and taken from Conrad's Heart of Darkness, a novel that explores the contrast between savagery and civilization.
;-)
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