Wednesday, August 25, 2010

The government and African-American English: language ideology and practice

The Guardian is running this piece by Chris McGreal, called:
US drug agency recruits speakers of 'street slang'
DEA seeks people who understand black vernacular English to translate wiretaps and stand up evidence in court

It's getting a lot of attention, and much of it along this kind of lines from what I've seen. (Yes, there had to be the Airplane video clip.) But there's a big, even massive, point about language in America in this story. The core of it is laid out in this quote from the article:
"It seems ironic that schools that are serving and educating black children have not recognised the legitimacy of this language," said H Samy Alim, a Stanford linguistics professor. "Yet the authorities and the police are recognising that this is a language that they don't understand. It tells us a lot about where we are socially in terms of recognising African-American speech."
Yes, and the government's de facto recognition that (most of) their employees can't understand some kinds of African-American speech makes a powerful point that should be used in future discussions about language and education.

2 comments:

Alex said...

Goes to show how prescriptivist focus on correct language and legitimate languages massively impedes understanding of incorrect and illegitimate forms of speech.

Case in point: that comment about sounding like an Onion article.

Anonymous said...

And see this:
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/postpartisan/2010/08/dea_the_e_is_for_ebonics.html