How Ebonics Took Over the World
- 4 hours ago
- 10 min read
Whether I call it African American Vernacular English, African American Language, Black English, or Ebonics, someone will be upset— and that’s just the beginning of the many internal disputes surrounding the ways black Americans speak. The other dispute is whether or not AAVE is its own language, a dialect, or simply a lexicon of slang. Language is a broad method of human communication, like English or French. Dialect is a particular form of a language that is specific to a region or social group— impacting speech patterns and even how we pronounce words, like aunt, Caribbean, caramel, schedule, adult, pajama, and mayonnaise. Slang, meanwhile, are the words used among particular cultural groups and dialects that historically were not formally accepted. Slang has typically had a life cycle, going from fringe use, to popular status, then to being passe. This life cycle is growing shorter and shorter thanks to the internet, while at the same time, slang has been incorporated into American dictionaries, blurring the lines between what is American English and what is slang. This is especially pertinent when it comes to Ebonics. Think of the term “bae,” which was widely a black term of endearment prior to 2014— then white tweeters got ahold of it from their trips to black Twitter and “bae” won an entry in Merriam-Webster in 2023.
It’s well documented and discussed that Ebonics originated in part from West African languages that fused with American English largely in the plantation south. The earliest enslaved came from all kinds of African groups with different languages— meaning this speech was never uniform. Sojourner Truth, a native Dutch speaker, delivered a speech in 1851 that a white abolitionist, Frances Gage, rewrote. Not only did Gage falsely say that Sojourner claimed to be able to take a lashing as well as a man, but she also added a Southern enslaved dialect that would become central to negative stereotypes about Black Americans.
Black speech patterns further diversified during The Great Migration, as black people moved to concentrated areas of the country that provided more distinctions. While some of the most prominent black leaders and thinkers— Mary Church Terrell, WBE Dubois, Booker T Washington, etc— were celebrated because of their middle class achievements, respectable natures, and their command of the standard English language, poems, music, enslaved narratives, WPA narratives, and writings like Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Barracoon reflected how the majority of the population spoke. But this speech was targeted. Long before actresses like Awkwafina and TikTok videos about speaking like a black person, our speech patterns and slang words were mocked and appropriated in minstrel shows by blackface wearing white actors, and later during racist radio shows like Amos 'n Andy. By the way, there are still tons of fans of minstrel content— Amazon sells minstrel records that people say “brings back happy memories.”
The use of Ebonics was seen as a sign of inferior intelligence, and various biographies and memoirs detail how black people who want to get ahead must eschew sounding “ghetto” or “hood”. Having an accent that wasn’t fully assimilated into standard English was looked down upon. As someone who occasionally mispronounces words and gets comments that seek to serve as an intellectual slam dunk, I was fascinated to find that a 1973 study of first-grade black children in the classroom observed black children would often answer questions correctly but would be chided for pronunciation or grammar, leading them to become moody and withdrawn.The study also showed that interrupted students had lower test scores. Some would argue that additionally, what was being lost in the instruction was teachers' inability to speak the way their students did. Was Ebonics interfering with standard American English instruction? Ebonics itself was coined in 1973 by Dr. Robert Williams, an African American social psychologist who helped establish black studies. It’s a blend of ebony and phonics. He and other black social scientists had gathered at a conference to discuss the psychological development of black children, and disliked the term “black English”.
In 1975, Williams published Ebonics: The True Language of Black Folks”, to reflect the multinational linguistic results of the African Slave Trade. Who knew that 21 years later, Ebonics would cause a massive controversy— but more on that in a second. Through the remainder of the 70s and into the 1980s, Ebonics the term lived purely in academia, but Ebonics itself was shared in mass media like Blaxploitation films and music. '
Shonuff.
Also in the 70s, there was a shift towards targeted black consumer advertising. McDonalds was notorious for dropping the g on words in its urban ads, and rolled out the “Get Down” campaign. Claimed one ad covered by Lenika Cruz for The Atlantic, “On the real, kids can really dig gettin’ down with McDonald’s” Black speech was also mocked, like when in the early 80s habitual piece of shit, felon, and racist Dinesh D’Souza, then just the editor of The Dartmouth Review, published an anti-affirmative action article entitled, "Dis Sho Ain’t No Jive, Bro,” which was written in ebonics. Editorials like these would lead to student protests.
In the 1980 film Airplane!, 'Jive' was a central joke.
As those of us born in the late 1900s will attest, there were way more speech patterns, dialects, and accents before the internet. Videos of people from the past show a wide variety of speech patterns, cadences, and pronunciations. The “valleyspeak” dialect and accompanying slang was first highlighted among young white girls in the San Fernando Valley in the 80s and became popular nationwide thanks to MTV and depictions in mass media, like Frank Zappa’s song Valley Girl. However, the upward lilt at the end where everything is a question, has been alleged to have been around in other places like Australia, England, and New Zealand as early as the 50s. The 80s California valspeak popularized terms like “gag me with a spoon” and “whats your damage?” The connotation of valley girl speak was negative— it was associated with vanity and stupidity. There was even a book by a speech pathologist that attempted to teach Val Girls “how to talk again.”
In the 90s, Generation X’s slang and dialect would further be impacted by everything from gangster rap music to Buffy The Vampire Slayer. America’s cultural currency, or soft power via the largest movie industry in the world, and music, meant that slang and standards of American English were being exported worldwide. For instance, hip hop and Boyz In The Hood popularized the black term for “whore”, aka ho, with it entering mainstream use by 1993. Merriam-Webster was also growing more inclusive with its entries. In 1993, it was reported that “Aint” was published “without any warning against its use.“ That news didn’t reach my teachers, because aint was still considered “bad English,” and a sign of intellectual inferiority in the 2000s. It was the kind of word I’d use with friends, but never in class or around white classmates, to avoid being stereotyped. That’s a form of code-switching.
On December 18, 1996, the Oakland School Board, overseeing a student population that was over 50% Black, passed a resolution declaring Ebonics to be the language of its 28,000 black students. Citing the fact that black students had lower literacy rates than white ones, and that 71% of those enrolled in special education courses were black, the resolution was supported by linguists, who believed that using a child’s home dialect to help teach standard English would yield higher literacy rates. The pilot program had been successful, and the 1973 study showing how pronunciation correction affected learning added weight to the theory. The elementary years are a crucial time to foster a love for learning, not a repulsion or anxiety around it— so that the love of learning sticks for life. The Oakland Resolution intended for teachers and textbooks to incorporate AAVE in the same way that teachers were teaching English as a Second Language, to meet children’s needs that weren’t being covered by standard education.
This meant some students did not know how to code-switch and needed a bit of different instruction. Wrote a Washington Post columnist, “studies show that once students understand the structural differences between Ebonics and standard English, they begin to demonstrate a greater proficiency in standard English and to minimize their use of Ebonics.” The resolution was misunderstood as a program intended to teach AAVE and slang, and was criticized by republicans, prominent democrats, and the likes of Maya Angelou and Jesse Jackson. Said Angelou, "The very idea that African-American language is a language separate and apart can be very threatening, because it can encourage young men and women not to learn standard English." This is quite different from her passage in I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, saying, “We were alert to the gap separating the written word from the colloquial. We learned to slide out of one language and into another without being conscious of the effort. At school, in a given situation, we might respond with "That's not unusual." But in the street, meeting the same situation, we easily said "It be's like that sometimes.” Said Jesse Jackson before changing his mind later, "You don't have to go to school to learn to talk garbage.”
There was a flurry of anti-Ebonics sentiment, including a “I Has a Dream” poster by the National Head Start Association warning against the Oakland Resolution. Warned Education Week in 1997, “[the resolution] also suggests that some African-American students are eligible for state and federal bilingual-education and English-as-a-second-language money.” Defenders of the resolution saw a mainly black school board being attacked by the white media and critics saw it as something that would hold black children back—particularly potent arguments for the black middle class. The U.S. Senate held a hearing on the debate, leading Oakland to release an updated resolution without the word Ebonics. In the nearly 30 years since the controversy caused the resolution to be revised and stripped, not only has mass media and advertising shifted towards incorporating ebonics and black american slang into everything from ad campaigns to political slogans, bilingual education and the use of slang in school instruction is a common practice, and so is understanding that children learn differently and sometimes need alternative types of curriculum to succeed.
Speech pathologist Julie Washington conducted a study that helped explain how code-switching had been left out of the Oakland Controversy. Most black Americans learn by a certain age that speaking in Ebonics in certain settings with white people can cause ridicule or disdain and lessen opportunities, and we effortlessly learn, subconsciously, to code-switch. But Julie Washington’s study, based on nearly 1000 low-income southern elementary schoolers, found that approximately 1/3 of them—black English speakers—do not code-switch. Students who do code-switch, speaking both black English and standard English, usually scored higher than those who didn’t. It is because of this, Washington and other experts argue, that those who do not code-switch have a similar learning experience to that of, say, native Spanish speakers. At a school Washington studied in Michigan, teachers implemented a bilingual curriculum and saw a 75% increase in students who passed state reading tests. Additionally, because so many AAVE terms never go out of style within our community— chile, strap, salty, etc, saying its simply slang seems reductive So taking this all into account, the argument for AAVE and/Ebonics as a language is strong— but let’s consider a few things. If Ebonics is a language, it can be shared, like Spanish or French or Japanese, or Mandarin. If it is language, to hear non-black people speaking it would take on a different meaning. By that same token, if it is a language, it can’t be fundamentally changed from social pressure— think about aint, “we be/she be/ he be”, or even more controversial terms like s-p-a-z.
AAVE has been made more accessible to the masses thanks to social media.
From“bae” to “chile” to the bevy of words from a predominantly black ballroom culture, it is easier than ever for people to pick up terminology. Some white liberal in Idaho can choose an anime avatar, tweet the terminology, and ingratiate themself into any cultural community they choose— if they get the slang down. In the early social media days, slang, and what was considered pejorative were more fluid and confusing than ever. When I first moved to Ohio for school, I picked up local black slang mainly from Cleveland/the midwest that sounded damn near foreign to my family and those back home— I remember saying “I’m weak” while laughing at a party in Charlotte and someone asked me if I needed water or fresh air.
Meanwhile, growing up I never heard black people around me use the terms “coon” or “uncle tom” as an insult, because they were considered solid slurs, but on Black Twitter in the wake of anti-Black Lives Matter sentiment and Donald Trump’s rise, both became commonplace. When I was growing up, to call someone “queer” was an insult— on social media, it became an identity label. Cunt, once limited to ballroom culture and the LGBT community, lost its edge— which by the way, brings up an interesting point- who is allowed to remix words if cunt was originally offensive to mostly white women? Like with Black use of “s-p-a-z”, which does not mean what it means for white people, the meaning of cunt has changed— though it still gets used as a pejorative for women in white culture to massive outrage. Remember when commentator Samantha Bee was dragged for calling Ivanka Trump a cunt? People and advertisers got so mad Samantha was forced to give an apology. Thats not cunt!
Meanwhile, if you call me a cunt, the word would have no edge to it the way it does for white women because I didn’t grow up hearing it. If you are not a woman and you use the word “bitch,” a word that came to be a prominent slur for women after the modern feminist movement, are you allowed to use the re-claimed endearment version or are you misogynistic? Or can we admit we know when a word is simply slang— i.e. a straight man saying looking for a new barber is “a bitch”, a gay man calling his best friend’s outfit “cunty” — versus hateful?
In this new world of language, not only do slang words change, slang words are chewed up and miscredited repeatedly. Remember "On Fleek"? Do you remember who invented the term? Summed up Teen Vogue on Kayla Newman AKA Peaches Monroe, “Kayla’s 6-second Vine [in 2014] left a lasting imprint on pop culture and fashion, too. Rappers and singers like Nicki Minaj, Chris Brown, Christina Milian, and more did not hesitate to hop on the train and use her phrase. The same goes for big companies like Forever 21, IHOP, and Taco Bell, just to name a few.” But like the amazing creators of endless slang terms before her, Kayla didn’t initially get credit as the term spread. But what makes her story stand out is that she eventually did get interviews, a gofundme payout, and indisputable historical credit. This is rare and fascinating for two reasons. One on hand, without the internet the term never would have spread as a cultural phenomenon to be “stolen”, but because of the internet, we were able to pinpoint when the term came into use and thus give credit. Kayla Peaches Monroe Newman will be in etymology history books— but not all creators of slang, regardless of race, will get credit for their creations and never have.
The internet has not only melted a globe of humans together, but across geographic lines, a more uniform English language is forming. Past accents and dialects are disappearing. Ebonics, whether you consider it a language or dialect, as we have discussed, is used by a wider variety of people even if they don’t know where the words come from. Because of that, I think internet users are increasingly centering and expecting a uniform language that disregards region, age, experience, and individual cultures- or even individual preferences.