Mus tek cyear a de root fa heal de tree: Black English

Two years ago, the Oakland, California school board directed teachers to study "Ebonics." The media immediately misinterpreted this directive as an order to conduct classes in Black English. (In fact, the board's sole intent was to facilitate teaching standard English to black students.) For a few weeks, linguistics actually competed with sex for American media attention, before the issue faded from the headlines without resolution.

Missing from the racially-charged rhetoric was any objective consideration of what Black English is, or its role in American culture. The word "Ebonics" (often spelled with a lowercase E for some reason) is partly responsible for this. An inarticulate hybrid of "ebony" (a tree) and "phonics" (a reading methodology), this dippy, pretentious buzzword suggests black Americans speak a uniform language distinct from English. These implications, which are patently false, dishonour Black English.

Africans have lived in North America since the dawn of the colonial era. Merging tribal languages with local Native and European tongues, their usage traditions have vastly broadened humanity's linguistic heritage. Gullah, a people, culture, and dialect of South Carolina's Sea Islands, is a particularly striking example. Unintelligible to speakers of standard English, Gullah is essentially 17th century English refitted with Igbo syntax and pronunciation. Gullah has no writing system of its own; indeed, most speakers were illiterate until recently. Yet like most African media, Gullah is deeply poetic. The Beaufort, SC, public library offers several examples, including:

Ty oonuh ma-wt: Be quiet! (Literally, "tie your mouth.")

I han shaht pay-shun: He steals. (Literally, "his hand short patience.")

Beat on ayun: Mechanic. (Literally, "beat on iron;" probably first meant blacksmith.)

Mainland African American speech patterns resemble standard English more closely. However, racism has severely limited interaction between blacks and whites. Coupled with formal education's historical inaccessibility to blacks, social isolation prompted the development of recognisable black dialects. The insularity of many black communities fostered tremendous diversity under the Black English umbrella. Writer Joel Chandler Harris painstakingly transcribed one such dialect in his Uncle Remus stories:

"Brer Fox went ter wuk en got 'im some tar, en mix it wid some turkentime, en fix up a contrapshun w'at he call a Tar-Baby... en he sot 'er in de big road, en den he lay off in de bushes fer to see what de news wuz gwine ter be."

Anthropologists have identified West African speech patterns in Uncle Remus' English (once dismissed as an expression of white bigotry), and found West African folk tales, translated virtually verbatim, his stories. Such cultural tenacity is uncanny, given the dominant class' strenuous efforts in times past literally to beat the Africa out of black Americans.

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