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.