The US Drug Enforcement Administration has reignited debate by putting out a call for fluent speakers of "Ebonics"—what linguists usually call African-American Vernacular English.
The DEA has sought to hire speakers of 114 languages, including Jamaican Patois and Spanish, but its advertisement seeking nine Ebonics experts has caught public attention.
The job of linguists in the DEA is to listen to and interpret "oral intercepts"—secretly recorded conversations between suspects.
However, Ebonics has been a source of controversy since the term first gained prominence in 1996. It followed a decision by an Oakland, California, school board to acknowledge the language and use it in schools as a bridge between the language of African-American students and Standard English.
Critics claimed Ebonics was street slang, incorrect English, and a sign of laziness and bad education.
In fact, linguists have long recognized that AAVE has all the characteristics of a dialect or language in its own right, including a grammar and syntax as consistent as that of any other language.
Speaking to The Telegraph (London), Stanford University linguist H. Samy Alim said, "It seems ironic that schools that are serving and educating black children have not recognized the legitimacy of this language, yet the authorities and the police are recognizing that this is a language that they don't understand.
"It really tells us a lot about where we are socially in terms of recognizing African-American speech."
The Linguistic Society of America has said that recognizing languages such as AAVE as legitimate is a "linguistically and pedagogically sound" way to teach Standard English.
Following the Oakland controversy, the LSA said that it was "incorrect and demeaning" to describe Ebonics as "mutant," "lazy," "defective," "ungrammatical" or "broken English."
30 August 2010
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