Black English/Ebonics: What It Be Like?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
L. Ann Jackson is a writer, historian and Sensitivity Reader currently living in her hometown of San Francisco. She enjoys writing about the history of African Americans of the Second Great Migration and their sojourns from the southern United States to the shores of San Francisco Bay, inspired by her own family’s stories.
L. Ann is a recipient of the Muses & Melanin Black Women Creative Writers Fellowship and the San Francisco Arts Commission Emerging Writers award. She presents literary and historical workshops at the San Francisco Public Library. Selections from her short story collection, The Religion of Slaves, were presented at San Francisco’s LitQuake Literary Festival. Ms. Jackson is currently at work on her first novel, Her Good Name, a historical fiction set in post-WWII San Francisco’s African American community.
In addition to her literary endeavors, L. Ann is curator of the Steve Jackson, Jr. Photograph Collection. Spanning more than fifty years, the collection is an inspiration for her writing. A portion of the collection is currently on exhibit at the African American Museum of History & Culture in Washington, DC.
When L. Ann is not writing, she enjoys watercolor painting, walking, listening to true-crime podcasts, baking and preparing her signature Linda’s San Francisco West Coast Gumbo for friends and family.
Black English/Ebonics: What It Be Like?
BY DR. GENEVA SMITHERMAN
©1997. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
I looked at my hands, they looked new
I looked at my feet, and they did too
I got a new way of walkin and
A new way of talkin.
Traditional Black Gospel Song
The month after the Oakland School Board passed its resolution[*], the term Ebonics turned twenty-four years old. Yeah, dass right, the name is over two decades old. It was coined by a group of Black scholars as a new way of talkin bout the language of African slave descendants. Like the message of that old Gospel tune, "Ebonics" was about transformation, about intellectuals among the Talented Tenth striking a blow for the linguistic liberation of our people. The guru in this group of scholars at that "Language and the Urban Child" conference, convened in St. Louis, Missouri, in January 1973, was the brilliant clinical psychologist, Dr. Robert L. Williams, now Professor Emeritus, Washington University. In the book of conference proceedings Williams published in 1975, he captures the thinking of that historical moment:
A significant incident occurred at the conference. The black conferees were so critical of the work on the subject done by white researchers, many of whom also happened to be present, that they decided to caucus among themselves and define black language from a black perspective. It was in this caucus that the term Ebonics was created. [The term refers to] linguistic and paralinguistic features which on a concentric continuum represent the communicative competence of the West African, Caribbean, and United States slave descendant of African origin. It includes the various idioms, patois, argots, ideolects, and social dialects of black people, especially those who have been forced to adapt to colonial circumstances (1975, Preface, Introduction).
For this group of scholars, the conceptual framework of "Ebonics" presented an avenue for decolonization of the African American mind, a way to begin repairing the psycho linguistically maimed psyche of Blacks in America. As Paulo Freire (1985) would put it twelve years later, "language variations (female language, ethnic language, dialects) are intimately interconnected with, coincide with, and express identity. They help defend one's sense of identity and they are absolutely necessary in the process of struggling for liberation" (p. 186). Ebonics reaffirms the interrelatedness of language and culture and links Africans in America with Africans around the globe.
Ebonics: neither "broken" English, nor "sloppy" speech, nor merely slang;' nor some bizarre lingo spoken only by baggy-pants-wearing, Black kids. Rather, the variety of Ebonics spoken in the United States hereafter USEB) is rooted in the Black American Oral Tradition and represents a synthesis of African (primarily West African) and European primarily English) linguistic-cultural traditions. The linguistic shape of the words in USEB can readily be identified as Standard English, that is, the Language of Wider Communication here in the United States (hereafter LWC), but these words do not always have the same meaning in USEB as in LWC. Further, there are many words of direct African origin—for example, okay, gorilla, cola, jazz—that are now part of LWC, often without props to us African slave descendants. However, what gives Black Language (un-huh, dat ain no typo, I meant "language") its distinctiveness is the nuanced meanings of these English words, the pronunciations, the ways in which the words are combined to form grammatical statements, and the communicative practices of the USEBspeaking community. In short, USEB may be thought of as the Africanization of American English.
PATTERNS OF EBONICS
In the next section, I discuss the following patterns of USEB: (1) aspectual be (2) stressed been (3) multiple negation; (4) adjacency/context in possessives; (5) post-vocalic r deletion; (6) copula absence; (7) camouflaged and other unique lexical forms.
Consider this statement, which comes from some Black women just kickin it in the beauty shop (gloss: conversational chit-chat at a hair salon): "The Brotha be lookin good; that's what got the Sista nose open!" In this statement, Brotha is USEB for an African-American man, lookin good refers to his style, his attractive appearance (not necessarily the same thing as physical beauty in USEB), Sista is USEB for an African-American woman, and her passionate love for the Brotha is conveyed by the phrase nose open (in USEB, the kind of passionate love that makes you vulnerable to exploitation). Sista nose is standard USEB grammar for denoting possession, indicated by adjacency/context (that is, rather than the 's/s' used in LWC). The use of be means that the quality of lookin good is not limited to the present moment but reflects the Brotha's past, present, and future essence. As in the case of Efik and other Niger-Congo languages, USEB has an aspectual verb system, conveyed by the use of the English verb be to denote iterativity (that is, a recurring or habitual state-of-affairs; contrast “He be lookin good” with “He lookin good”, which refers to the present moment only, not the kind of lookin good that opens the nose!). Note further that many Black writers and rap artists employ the spellings "Brotha" and "Sista." Now, they ain just tryin to be cute. These orthographic representations are used to convey a phonological pattern derived from the influence of West African languages, many of which do not have an /r/ sound. Also in these language communities, kinship terms may be used when referring to African people, whether biologically related or not.
Of course, there is overlap between USEB and colloquial, everyday American English, for example, use of "ain't," ending sentences with prepositions or double negatives. However, there are critical distinctions that separate linguistically competent USEB speakers from the wannabes. For example, the colloquial speaker uses the nasalized vowel form, producing a sound close to, but not identical with, LWC “gone,” thus: "What she go(n) do now?" That is, in LWC, "What is she going to do now?" Another example is in negation patterns. While those obsessed with the "national mania for correctness" often rail against colloquial speakers' double negatives, USEB is distinctive not only for its negative inversion, but also for its multiple negatives, that is, three or more negatives formed from combinations of indefinite pronouns and/or adjectives. Check out this exclamation of complex negative inversion from a devout churchgoer: "Don't nobody don't know God can't tell me nothin!” That is, in LWC, "A person who doesn't believe in God and isn't saved has no credibility with me.”
As mentioned above, USEB words may look like mainstream American English, but the usage and meaning are different. This is the source of a good deal of miscommunication and misunderstanding between USEB and LWC speakers. In response to the question, "Is she married?” the USEB speaker may answer "She been married." If the speaker pronounces been without stress, it means the woman in question was once married but is now divorced. If the speaker pronounces been with stress, it means she married a long time ago and is still married. Another example is the use of LWC words that are "camouflaged" (Spears, 1982). For example, in the USEB statement, "She come tellin me I'n [didn't] know what I was talkin bout," the verb come does not denote motion as in LWC. Rather the meaning of come in this context is one of indignation, that is, in LWC, "She had the audacity to tell me that I didn't know what I was talking about. How dare she!"
Yet another kind of cross communication example comes from semantic inversion. Due to crossover and the popular appeal of Michael Jackson, most people are aware that bad in USEB translates to good in LWC; however, lexical items that haven't enjoyed such a high degree of crossover are problematic in these cross cultural exchanges. For example, consider the following form of address common among many Black males: Yo, Dog!” “Dog” is a linguistic symbol of male bonding, most likely derived from the African American fraternity tradition of referring to pledges as dogs. “Yo, Dog!” was used by a Brotha on lock down (gloss: imprisoned) to address his European American male psychiatrist as an expression of camaraderie. Turns out, though, that this white psychiatrist was not yet down (gloss: hip, with understanding of the Black Cultural framework). He misinterpreted the Brotha's greeting and made an issue of the "insult.”
The above are only some of the patterns in the grammatical, phonological and semantic systems of USEB. To explore the full 360 degrees of USEB, we need to move on to styles of speaking. In fact, it is the area of communicative practices—rhetorical strategies and modes of discourse—that cut across gender, generation and class in the African American community. USEB speech patterns may be classified as follows: (1) call-response; (2) tonal semantics; (3) narrativizing; (4) proverb use/proverbializing; (5) signification/signifyin and (6) the dozens/snappin/joanin. Discussion of two of these discourse modes follows.
Signification or, more commonly, signifyin, which can be rendered with or without the phonological and morphosyntactical patterns of USEB, is a form of ritualized insult in which a speaker puts down, talks about, needles (signifies) on other speakers. In this communicative practice, the speaker deploys exaggeration, irony and indirection as a way of saying something on two different levels at once. It is often used to send a message of social critique, a bit of social commentary on the actions or statements of someone who is in need of a wake-up call. When signifyin is done with verbal dexterity, it avoids the creation of social distance between speaker and audience because the rich humor makes you laugh to keep from crying. Like Malcolm X, who once began a speech with these words: "Mr. Moderator, Brother Lomax, Brothas and Sistas, friends and enemies." Now, you don't usually begin a speech by addressing your enemies. Thus, Malcolm's signifyin statement let his audience know that he knew inimical forces were in their midst.
Similarly, it takes the style of one of the deacons at a Traditional Black Church; where the preacher would never deal with the problems and issues folk were facing on a daily basis. Rather, he was always preaching about the pearly gates and how great thangs was gon be at dat home up in the sky. So, one day this deacon said to the preacher, "Reb, you know, I got a home in Heaven, but I ain't homesick!
"Signifyin” is engaged in by all age groups and by both males and females in the Black community. It has the following characteristics: (1) indirection, circumlocution; (2) metaphorical-imagistic references (images rooted in the everyday real world); (3) humor, irony; (4) rhythmic fluency; (5) being teachy, but not preachy; (6) directed at person(s) present in the speech situation (signifiers do not talk behind your back); (7) punning, plays on words and (8) introduction of the semantically or logically unexpected.
TYPES OF SIGNIFICATION
There are two types of signification. One type is leveled at a person's mother (and occasionally at other relatives). Traditionally, this first type was referred to as "The Dozens" or "playin The Dozens." The second type of signifyin is aimed at a person, action or thing, either just for fun or for corrective criticism. Today, the two types of signification are being conflated under a more general form of discourse, referred to as "snappin."
To fully appreciate the skill and complexity of signification, we shall analyze in some detail a conversational excerpt involving two Sistas in a group of several women at a wedding shower:
LINDA: Girl, what up with that head? [Referring to her friend's hairstyle.]
BETTY: Ask yo momma. [Laughter from all the Sistas on this conversational set.]
LINDA: Oh, so you going there, huh? Well, I DID ask my momma.And she said, "Cain you see that Betty look like her momma spit her out?" [Laughter from all, including Betty.]
Betty and Linda signify on each other. Instead of answering Linda's question directly, Betty decides to inform Linda that the condition of her hairstyle is none of Linda's business by responding with "Ask yo momma." The usual expectation in a conversation is that a speaker's question will be answered honestly and sincerely; thus, Betty's unexpected indirection produces laughter from the listeners.
Speech act theory indicates that communication succeeds or fails as a result of the illocutionary (that is, intended) and perlocutionary (that is, received) effects of a message. The surface meaning of "yo momma" for those outside the USEB speech community is simply "your mother/ mom." However, within the Black speech community, the utterance immediately signals that an insult has been hurled. The intended and received meaning of yo momma is invective; the game of ritual insult begins with participants creating the most appropriate, humorous, spontaneous, creative, exaggerated/untrue retorts that they can come up with.
The source of the retort ''Ask yo momma" probably stems from family patterns in which mothers are consulted ("asked") about all kinds of things, great or small. Fathers may even respond to their children's questions or requests by saying ''Ask your mother." In USEB, the speaker does not intend the direct meaning, "You should go and ask your mother about this situation." Rather, given the conversational context, the speaker is indirectly saying "Let the game of The Dozens begin." Linda clearly recognizes the entry into this game as indicated by her response, "Oh, so you going there, huh?" Unskilled players, lacking a spontaneous, apposite, humorous retort, would have let the conversation end at this point. However, Linda shows adeptness in playing the game. She regroups momentarily ("Oh, so you goin there, huh?") and fires back skillfully. In fact, she "caps" (gloss: wins) this exchanges with a more clever retort. Although Betty's use of the intragroup expression, ask yo momma, is humorous and sets up a challenge, it is formulaic, simplistic and stylized. In this instance, it cannot, and does not, beat: "Well, I DID ask my momma. And she said, 'Cain you see that Betty look like her momma spit her out?'" (Troutman-Robinson and Smitherman, 1997).
Although Rev. Jesse Jackson and Sista Maya Angelou came out in the national news and dissed the Oakland School oBard's resolution, they are well versed in USEB. Twenty years ago, in my first major work on USEB, Talkin and Testifyin, I quoted both at length and lauded them as linguistic “role models, who are adept at capitalizing on the forms of Black Language to convey profound political messages.”
Jessee is clearly down wit signification when he says, “Pimp, punk, prostitute, preacher, Ph.D.—all the P's, you still in slavery!” Thus, he conveys the message that all members of the African American community regardless of their social status, are marginalized and disempowered, by virtue of U.S. historically institutionalized racism and skin color bias. (Jesse also uses copula absence here—"you still in slavery"—which has not been found in any of the dialects of British English that came over on the Mayflower, but which is used widely in the languages of West Africa.)
THE DOZENS
As mentioned above, The Dozens is one of several significant speech acts in USEB. This ritualized game of insult has analogues in West African communicative practices (see Smitherman, 1995, and the several references cited there). Also referred to as "snappin" by many members of the Hip Hop Nation, The Dozens is like, "Yo momma so dumb she thought a quarterback was a refund!”
Sista Maya Angelou is so bad she don't play The Dozens, she play The Thirteens! She uses this USEB discourse mode to critique the actions of Blacks and Whites. Here how she do it:
(The Thirteens Black):
Your Momma took to shouting
Your Poppa's gone to war,
Your sister's in the streets
Your brother's in the bar,
The thirteens. Right On . . .
And you, you make me sorry
You out here by yourself,
I'd call you something dirty,
But there just ain't nothing left,
cept
The thirteens. Right On . . .
Black English/Ebonics
(The Thirteens White):
Your daughter wears a jock strap,
Your son he wears a bra
Your brother jonesed your cousin
in the back seat of the car.
The thirteens. Right On . . .
Your money thinks you're something
But if I'd learned to curse,
I'd tell you what your name is
But there just ain't nothing worse
Than The thirteens. Right On.
(Angelou, 1971)
African French psychiatrist Frantz Fanon (1967) taught that "every dialect, every language, is a way of thinking. To speak means to assume a culture." To speak Ebonics is to assume the cultural legacy of U.S. slave descendants of African origin. To speak Ebonics is to assert the power of this tradition in the quest to resolve the unfinished business of being African in America. While years of massive research (done in the 1960s and early 1970s) on the language of this group (mostly by White scholars) did indeed debunk cognitive-linguistic deficiency theory, in its place arose social inadequacy theory. Although the language was shown to be systematic and rule-governed, since it is not accepted by the White mainstream, difference became deficit all over again, and in the process, Africans in America suffered further dislocation.
To speak (of/on/about) Ebonics, to consciously employ this terminology and conceptual framework, as those Black scholars did back in 1973, and as the Oakland School Board has done a generation later, is to be bout the business of relocating African Americans to subject position. Large and in charge, as the Hip Hoppers say, Ebonics, then and now, symbolizes a new way of talkin the walk about language and liberatory education for African Americans.
[*] In 1997, the Oakland School Board passed a resolution