(Pinker, 1994, p. 28).
Nobody is about to dispute the contribution of Black English to the American vernacular (a dialect of English?)ùoddly called Standard English. From rappers to television preachers and Black sitcomsùnot to speak of Huckleberry Finn's Black English, of the Broadway plays, and of Langston Hughes, Paul Blackburn, LeRoi Jones, Alice Walker, Lorraine Hansberry, Alicia Banks, Andrew Hacker, and others--Americans of all colors are exposed to Ebonics of various ilks. Many wonder, however, whether Ebonics is a true language, or a dialect of Standard English, or creole, pidgin, slang, or a mutant lazy ungrammatical broken English, i.e. what Jeff Katz (1997) calls "butchered English"ùwhich it is okay to teach Afro-American children, thus validating slang as a "foreign language" (n.p.)(A rather shocking notion to many a linguist!).
The "language of soul" or "the shuffling speech of slavery" already drew academic interest in the early twentieth century. George Philip Krapp, a linguist, published The English of the Negro in 1924. To him, Black English was the "baby-talk" that White masters used to address their slaves, i.e. simplified English as parents might use when talking to babies (Smitherman, 1986). Already in the 1890s, the Supreme Court had affirmed the "separate-but-equal" education practices in most states, thereby recognizing the failure of the "equal" past. British sociologist Basil Bernstein claimed that "much of lower-class language consists of a kind of incidental motional accompaniment to action here and now" (Cited in Stoller, 1975, p. 5). Karl Breiter, working with 4-year-old Black children, claimed that "the language of culturally deprived childrenàis not merely an underdeveloped version of Standard English, but it is basically a non-logical mode of expressive behavior" (Cited in Stoller, 1975, p. 5). Thus, to the litany of appellations ascribed to Black literacy, one could add "Non-language"; in ...