Ebonics has recently created what Black America's Newsmagazine Emerge calls "Histrionics over Ebonics" (1997, April, pp. 32-36). Yet, neither the concept nor the term are new. It is said that it was Psychology Professor Robert L. Williams who coined the term nearly a quarter of a century ago: Ebony + phonics = Black English = African-American English = Black Idiom = Black Dialect. Whatever the name, Ebonics is an American linguistic phenomenon as is, for instance, Cajun in southern Louisiana.
William Labov (1972) studied what he called Black English Vernacular (BEV) in the Inner City. This was the language of poverty. "Many leaders of the African-American community believe that there is no distinctive African-American English and that dialect described by linguists is simply the same bad English spoken by uneducated people anywhere"(p. 171). The critic John Simon (1980) wondered "Why should we consider some usually poorly educated, subculture's notion of the relationship between sound and meaning? And how could a grammarùany grammarùpossibly describe that relationship?" (n.p.).
Ebonics has also been called the language of freedom, of the street, of the young. Richard Wright (1997), professor of sociolinguistics at Howard University, contends that
Black people have helped enrich the vernacular of the American cultureà We have to understand that this thing they're calling Ebonics is really nothing but the American vernacular of mass popular cultureà Language is cultureàThe myth that nonstandard dialects of English are genetically deficient is widespread. In the 1960s, some well-meaning educational psychologists announced that American Black children had been so culturally deprived that they lacked true language and were confined instead to a non-logical mode of expressive behavior (pp. 34-5).
Yet "American Black culture is everywhere highly verbalàThere are areas in which BEV is more precise than Standard English" ...