Talking Back, Talking Black: Truths About America's Lingua Franca

by John McWhorter

To some, the term Black English may have a musty air. Specialists have long moved on to African-American Vernacular English, while among laymen, the term Ebonics gained a foothold in the wake of the Oakland controversy, which revived it, although it had otherwise fallen out of usage after a brief vogue in the 1970s. I am eschewing African-American Vernacular English partly because in this book I am addressing not only vernacular speech but also standard speech. Black Americans can sound identifiably black even when using neither slang nor grammatical features of the dialect. African-American English could be a possible substitute, but, along with African-American Vernacular English, it runs up against the fact that the dialect has very little identifiable African influence in it. Also, since the 1990s, the number of immigrants from Africa in the United States has grown so much that the very term African-American is becoming increasingly confusing. White South African immigrants are genuinely perplexed that they do not qualify as African Americans, for example.

However, systematic flouting sounds like something one could alternately call “linguistic delinquency,” which puts into a sad perspective a defense of Black English founded on lists of rules it breaks. As I write this, the Wikipedia entry for Black English lists twenty-three grammatical traits, of which twelve are reductions and droppings. That’s over half, and among the other traits are such things as multiple negatives (“Ain’t nothin’ nobody can do for no man no how”) and good old aks and graps for grasp. Now, when consonants are reversed in cases like that, linguists call it “metathesis” and just think of it as something that happens to sounds sometimes. For example, the word for miracle in Latin was miraculum, but in Spanish the r and the l traded places and the result was milagro. But in the here and now, walking around listening to people speak English far, far away from Old Castile in both time and space, let’s face it, aks just sounds like the wrong way to say ask.

Hebrew sort of has that place trading too!

Linguists have yet to discover a single instance in any human language or dialect where people randomly toss a word into their conversations all the time for no reason at all, just because it feels good to say it or because everyone has mysteriously been possessed by some kind of tic. If people are using a word, it’s there for a reason, just as the ed on walked is there to mark the past and we use will in will walk to mark the future. No matter how slangy, or even profane, something sounds to us, if people are saying it all the time, it’s speech, and speech has rules.

What about "like"?

Plus, if we really want to get into it, the y in the nostril word—nosðyrlu—was pronounced like the cute and tricky u in French in words like lune. Old English had sounds like that; Modern English dumped them. And of course, here in our time none of this matters a whit. Modern English chucked most of what made Old English complicated, in fact. It happened when the Vikings invaded England, learned Old English badly because as adults they picked it up imperfectly, and then passed their rendition on to the kids they conceived with English-speaking women. But here we are, quite unashamed, even if apprised of the reality. The English we speak certainly seems to do everything a language should, even if eons ago some people too old to completely learn a language tore off some of its tinsel.

The point is that later in the same way, English got another close shave when African adults were taken as slaves to the American South. They, too, were past the age when one can learn a language perfectly, and didn’t pick up some of the bells and whistles that native speakers used, such as “Why didn’t she call,” “she knows,” and other things that, as familiar as they are to us, are not exactly necessary to communication. The s in the third-person-singular verb, for example, is no more necessary to expressing a point than silverware having genders was in Old English; life thrives without both features, and so very many others. Black English subtracts from Standard English, then, for the very same reason Modern English subtracts from Old English. However, in the grand scheme of things, it bears mentioning that what Black English shaved away from Standard English is but a dribble compared to what Modern English dumped from Old. Roughly, Old English dumped a roasting pan’s worth of grammar to become Modern English. To become Black English, Modern English dumped only about as much grammar as would fill the small glass one is typically served Bailey’s liqueur in—you only ever get a generous smidgen, so little that if you spilled it on yourself, you’d barely bother to wipe it off.

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.

English has occupied England now for sixteen hundred years, allowing lots of time for divergence. English came to America only four hundred years ago, at which time various dialects from across the Atlantic mixed together into something new and set things at the starting point again. Four hundred years is a relatively short time for major regional differences to evolve. Moreover, increasing literacy and then modern media have made it harder for that kind of thing to happen in America’s life span anyway. Since, especially, commercial radio and sound films in the 1930s—plus the explosion in college degrees after the GI Bill of the 1940s—Americans have come to speak more like one another than they used to. Warnings that dialects are disappearing in the United States entirely are overblown, but dialects are less diverse from one another than before.

At an open house, I recall a black school principal once addressing the student body’s parents, listing “Mr. Rivers, which is the athletic instructor, and Mrs. Jenkins, which is the librarian” (upon which someone in the audience whispered, “And after this will be the reception, who is in the auditorium!”).

Garrard McClendon, black professor and talk-show host, has titled a book Ax or Ask: The African American Guide to Better English. “What’s with aks?” someone regularly asks after a talk I give on language, with the audience dependably nodding and tittering. So, what is with it? The answer a linguist is supposed to give is that way back in Old English, the word for ask swung randomly between ascian and acsian. And this is true—black people didn’t simply take ask and change it. They received aks, which was a perfectly normal thing to happen to a word like ask. Fish was, believe it or not, a similar case. It started as fisk, ending in sk just as ask does. Some people started saying fiks rather than fisk. Others said fish instead. After a while, fish won out over fiks—and so we say fish and wonder that anyone ever said anything different. Mash was similar. It started as mask. Some people said maks, while others said mash. Mash won, and now the idea of anyone “masking” potatoes sounds absurd.

our general sense of how language changes undershoots the reality. What we usually mean by “language changes” is that: 1. slang changes 2. we always need new words for new things 3. when different people come together, they will exchange words. That is, we imagine language change as driven by cultural factors, because this is the kind of language change we can hear happening in our daily lives. Sext, iPad, quinoa—slang, terminology, and foreign words, respectively—this is the language change we know. Less obvious is that besides these things, language also always changes just by itself. In other words, it is “inherently mutational.” Each generation hears sounds a little differently from the previous one and produces them differently.

When there are alternate ways of saying the same thing and no specific reason to choose between them, in one era one of them wins out, but in the next one, the other one may take over. A hundred years ago, most people used dived as the past tense of dive; now many prefer dove. The past tense of sneak? Most would now, after a pause, say snuck. But the Americans you see in starchy clothes barely smiling in old black-and-white photographs liked sneaked more. Why? For no more reason than over the past couple of decades, people have started saying “Based off of her point, I would say that . . .” rather than “Based on . . .” or “Going from . . .” These things happen, in the same way as fashions and fonts change.

Abraham Lincoln would find it odd to hear someone say “A house is being built over there” since for someone of his time the proper expression was “There is a house building over there.” In the same way, a rural black woman in 1850 would find it odd to hear her great-great-great-grandson saying “Folks be tryin’ all the time,” because in 1850 the unconjugated habitual be didn’t exist yet—it only came in around World War I. Her great-great-great-grandson would find it odd to hear her say, as she might, “Dose people am your other relatives an’ you gwine to town to meet ’um tomorrow.” But hear it he very well might, because back then, a great many normal black people spoke in that way.