From Talking Back, Talking Black
by John McWhorter

No more should Black English be presented largely as a dialect that leaves out this and reverses that, with specialists then wondering why the public continues to think of it as a cluster of errors and isn’t impressed that the errors are systematic. Rather, Black English must be introduced via a col­lection of ways in which it is more complex than Standard English, not less.

People respect complexity. People like sim­plicity in their music and in ways of preparing food, but in terms of grammar, not so much. Some people involved with presenting Black English to the public might wonder just what such a collection of complex features would consist of, other than the shadings of verb usage I just mentioned. The simple fact is that specialists in Black English have not been primed to seek out those features that outdo Standard Eng­lish in complexity. Systematicity will intringue and stimulate academic linguistic analysis, but the public isn’t having it, so we must change the lens.

Below I will discuss five things in the dialect that demonstrate that anyone speaking Black English is doing some­thing subtle and complex.

1.  Up what?

I once had occasion to ask a black American with a solid command of Ebonics what up means in a sentence like “We was up in here havin’ a good time:’  [Read more…]