Ebonics and Standard English

Ebonics and Standard English

  • Submitted By: lucaskozitza
  • Date Submitted: 11/26/2009 10:06 AM
  • Category: English
  • Words: 1905
  • Page: 8
  • Views: 766

Growing up in a white society with very few other nationalities it was pretty easy to understand everyone around me because we all spoke with the same slang or form of the English language. As I got older and moved around a little bit and started in much bigger schools in different neighborhoods, I started to notice different people and different ways of communication. What I mean by is this is that I have never been in a racially mixed school or community before and felt very out of place and did not know how to communicate with others because of different dialects I was hearing. My first reaction to this was when I was at a new middle school and I was in a gym class and could not believe the bad grammar I was hearing, and thought how in the world these students even passed any class. Obviously I was stereotyping them, which was wrong, but I was very young and ignorant and did not understand the concept of other forms of English, and when I heard these forms I just assumed it was bad grammar. I thought there was only one style of English and that’s it. At that time I considered any slang I heard to not be a real form of English language, but through hearing multiple styles of communication with others in a racially mixed school my views completely changed. For instance, Ebonics or Spoken Soul is one of the most known dialects in the United States today and to a lot of people or societies, which some people think this form is bad English that makes no sense, and is due to bad teaching and bad neighborhood upbringings. This is where through my personal experience with focusing on Ebonics, it should not be considered bad grammar and it is a way for people to have their own sort of individual identity with a certain group, or community. In the “What’s Going On?” essay by John Russell Rickford and Russell John Rickford they point out that Ebonics “marks black identity” and “it serves as a creative expressive instrument”(6). I watched a fellow student of...

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