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For most of my life, I was a hardcore language snob. Though I learned early that people don’t appreciate being corrected, I suffered in silence when someone called their meal “healthy” instead of “healthful,” or when I waited with my groceries next to a sign that read “20 items or less.”
Black English — referred to by some as “Ebonics” — sounded to me like an entire speech system dedicated to linguistic anarchy. Speakers habitually misconjugate verbs. Or, sometimes, they just leave them out of sentences entirely. Them might be used as a demonstrative adjective, as in “All them boys smiled at you.”
This was far from a personal pet peeve. Plenty of people, from plenty of different backgrounds, find nonconforming speech unsettling. In a 2004 address before the NAACP, a then-respected Bill Cosby decried the prevalence of black English, complaining that “Everybody knows it’s important to speak English except these knuckleheads!”
I was always aware that racial implications could be read into my disdain for black English. But that did not lessen my irritation, because I was quite sure that race had nothing to do with my feelings. Considering how I felt when a white person would say “a whole nother” or “irregardless,” it would have been kind of racist to spare black English my scorn.
Enter John McWhorter, a linguistics professor at Columbia University, and his most recent book, Talking Back, Talking Black. McWhorter’s linguistic logic succeeded where racial guilt failed. I now see how black English is not just a legitimate form of expression, but one that should be celebrated as an American cultural achievement.
McWhorter has been on a tear lately, exposing the absurdity of language snobbery in general. In a recent talk at UW-Madison (based on his penultimate book, 2016’s Words on the Move), McWhorter demonstrated that language is inherently mutational, much like the innards of a lava lamp. He contends that ‘prescriptivists’ like my former self try to force language to be something it cannot be: uniform and static.
When the Vikings first arrived in Britain, Old English closely resembled German. Most of its nouns were gendered, requiring two forms for each modifier. It also had multiple, complex modes of pluralization.
The Nordic immigrants helped push out such gratuitous complexities, and Modern English was born. As the changes crept into British parlance, early adopters must have sounded barbaric in their syntactic simplicity.
As McWhorter recounts in Talking Back, the same sort of thing happened in America when newly arrived slaves were introduced to our convoluted language. “When humans move, or are moved, in large numbers and have to pick up a language quickly, typically their version of the language is more streamlined than the original one.” So, for one thing, many of the new English speakers dropped the superfluous s at the end of third-person-singular verbs (“she write poetry”).
Unlike British Norsemen, black people continued to be severely segregated long after their arrival in America. Because we learn language from those with whom we congregate, black English evolved in a certain degree of isolation. This allowed it to develop some valuable bells and whistles that Standard English lacks. McWhorter cites, for example, special deployment of the word done to indicate counter-expectation. “She took the train” means the same thing in both black and standard English. But “she done take the train” indicates that the speaker and/or listener expected the subject to use a different mode of transportation. I had never picked up on this, assuming that the black English dones were just casual linguistic flourishes.
Black English is, in fact, as rule-bound and systematic a dialect as standard English. It is in many ways superior to the language we were taught in school. Actually, black English probably owes much of its innovative nature to having been kept out of textbooks, thereby eluding the stifling purview of language snobs.
I contacted Professor McWhorter after his Madison visit to ask why so many of us are uptight about language. Most countries have a number of distinct regional dialects, he explained. But with the exception of black English, the vast majority of Americans share a single dialect, which they speak with various accents. “If there were more dialect diversity in the U.S., the basic idea that people can speak in a fashion different from the standard and not be idiots would be less counterintuitive,” he said.
Of course, racism would prevent some white people from respecting anything associated with black culture, linguistic logic be damned. Fortunately, this cohort comprises mostly aging outliers. There seems to be a growing realization, especially among younger generations, that if multiple people make the same language “mistake,” it’s not a mistake. It’s language.
Michael Cummins is a Madison-based business analyst
