Black English

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Black English

Peter Farb

1 Very few white Americans are aware of the extent to which the great majority of black Americans suffer from linguistic schizophrenia --- of a unique sort. The diglossia problem of the lower-class black is unusual because he does not speak a colloquial or “incorrect”form of standard English. Instead, he speaks a dialect that has a strikingly different grammar and sound system, even though to white ears the black appears to be trying to speak Standard English. Anyone who speaks Black English is likely to find himself stigmatized as a user of an inferior kind of Standard Englisn, whereas actually he is speaking a radically different dialect that is as consistent and elegant as whites consider their Standard English to be.

2 The whole subject of Black English is so tied up with both racism and good intention that it rarely is discussed calmly, even by specialists in the field. At one extreme is the racist, conscious or unconscious, who attributes black speech to some physical characteristic like thick lips or a large tongue; he is certain that it is inferior speech and that it must be eradicated. At the other extreme is the well-intentioned liberal who denies that he detects much of a departure from white speech; he regards Blace English as simply a southern United States dialect, and he is likely to

attribute any departure from white speech to the black’s educational deprivation. Both views are wrong. Black English’s radical departure from Standard English has nothing to do with the anatomy of race or with educational deprivation. The history of the English spoken by New World blacks shows that it has been different from the very beginning, and that it is more different the farther back in time one goes. Of course, some blacks speak exactly like whites, but these cases are both recent and exceptional; the overwhelming majority speak Black English some or all of the time.

3 By “Black English”I do not mean the spirited vocabulary whose adoption by some whites gives them the mistaken impression that they are talking real soul to their black brothers. These rich and metaphoric words are much less important than grammar for a description of Black English. They originated by the same processes that gave rise to the slang, jargon, and argot words of Standard English, and, like the Standard words, they have seeped out to become part of the general vocabulary. Many words that were once the exclusive property of speakers of Black English --- groovy, square, jive, rap, cool, chick, dig, rip off, and so on --- are now commonly used by speakers of white Standard English. I do not refer to the superficial vocabulary which changes from year to year, but to its largely different history, sound system, and basic structure.

4 What we hear today as Black English is probably the result of five

major influences: African languages; West African pidgin; a Plantation Creole once spoken by slaves in the southern United States as well as by blacks as far north as Canada; Standard English; and, finally, urbanization in the northern ghettoes. The influence of African languages on black speech was long denied, until in 1949 Lorenzo Dow Turner published the results of his fifteen-year study of Gullah, a black dialect spoken in the coastal region around Charleston, South Carolina, and Savannah, Georgia. Gullah is importantin the history of Black English because this region continued to receive slaves direct from Arica as late as 1858 --- and so any influence from Africa would be expected to survive there longer. Turner accumulated compelling evidence of resemblances in pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar between Gullah and various Western African languages. He listed some 4,000 Gullah words for personal names, numbers, and objects that are derived directly from African languages. Some of these words --- such as tote, chigger, yam, and tater (“potato”) --- eventually entered Standard English.

5 The second influence, pidginization, is more apparent because the languages spoken today by the descendants of slaves almost everywhere in the New World --- regardless of whether these languages were based on English, French, Dutch, Spanish, or Portuguese --- share similarities in sound patterns and in grammar. For example, the common Black English construction He done close the door has no direct equivalent in Standard

English, but it is similar to structures found in Portuguese Pidgin, Weskos of West Africa, French Creole of Haiti, the Shanan Creole of Surinam, and so on. An analysis of the speech of slaves--- as recorded in eighteenth-century letters, histories, and books of travel --- incicates that the great majority of them in the continental United States spoke pidgin English, as much in the North as in the South. This was to be expected since blacks speaking many languages were thrown together in the West African slave factories and they had to develop some means of communication. No matter what their mother tongues were, they had been forced to learn a second language, an African Pidgin English that at least as early as 1719 had been spread around the world by the slave trade. We can be certain of that year because it marked the publication of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe,which contains numerous examples of this pidgin and also uses, in the character Friday, the West African and slave tradition of bestowing personal names based on the days of the week.

6 Therefore most slaves must have arrived in the New World speaking a pidgin that enabled them to communicate with each other and eventually also with overseers. In the succeeding generations a small number of blacks were taught Standard English. But the great majority apparently expanded their pidgin into a Creole language --- called Plantation Creole by some linguists even though it was also spoken in the North--- by grafting an English vocabulary onto the structures of their native

languages and pidgins.

7 The wonder is that it took people so long to realize that Black English is neither a mispronunciation of Standard English nor an accumulation of random errors made in the grammar of Standard. Utterances in Black English are grammatically consistent and they are generated by rules in the same way that utterances in Standard English are generated by rules. People may not regard utterances in Black English to be “good English”--- but that is beside the point, because Black English is using a different set of rules than those of Standard English.