DW 2a

Professor Peter L. Patrick of the University of Essex near London, England uses his website to try to give readers a better understanding of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) or Ebonics. He answers generic questions to give an overview of AAVE. On his website he says that AAVE is a dialect of english. Patrick says, "AAVE is an English dialect, too. Most of its components in the dimensions of grammar, lexicon, and pronunciation are widely shared with English - either with standard American English, or with Southern White English, or with vernacular dialects of English around the world." This helps to give us a comparison to other dialects. We've all learned Standard English through our schooling and we've all heard what a southern accent sounds like. We hear the differences but we know they are both dialects of english. When Patrick compares all of these to we are able to think about AAVE and how it really does sound like English with just a few differences that aren't too noticable.

An interesting question Patrick discusses is that if AAVE is a language then how come it isn't spoken by a particular country. Before this I had never thought about how we associate English with the United States and England, Spanish with Mexico and Spain, Japanese with Japan, etc. We know that these are all languages and they also have countries associated with them. Peter Patrick goes on to say that, "Languages existed long before the modern world became organized into "countries", or nation-states. A languages doesn't need to be the official speech of a nation-state in order to be real. Yet it is a fact that giving such official status tends to increase the prestige of a language." A language is spoken by a particular type of people. Those who speak AAVE are African American. African American's are a particular type of people. Many of these people are decendents of the slaves directly from Africa and still encompass the African culture. By sharing this culture, they developed their own language and there is no reason for us to refer to that as being a wrong way to talk. We never say that something such as French, which we do consider a language, as being wrong. If AAVE is a language then African Americans have the right to speak it and we must accept that.

AAVE is not specifically for African American use. While many African Americans use this language at the very least, at home, not all are fluent in it. In fact, while some African Americans are not fluent in it, some members of other cultures, whether it be white or latino, are fluent in it. As Patrick says, "almost all African Americans have some command of other forms of English, including Standard American English." Not only do African Americans have the ability to use more than one form of English but everyone else usually has more than one form of their language that they can use. We all have some knowledge of different forms and we can use them whenever we need to. AAVE is just another form and there is nothing wrong with that.

*Website* http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~patrickp/aavesem/EbonicsQ&A.html