African American Vernacular English Is Not Standard English with Mistakes (1999) [pdf]
This is fascinating to me. In the UK the words we use to describe every day times is so diverse and unique to an area that to call one term &quot;correct&quot; and the other &quot;incorrect&quot; would lead to a huge argument. It&#x27;s accepted that different areas with their differing backgrounds and cultures have different names.<p>For example, what would you call a small piece of break baked in a broadly spherical shape? The University of Manchester decided to find out: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;projects.alc.manchester.ac.uk&#x2F;ukdialectmaps&#x2F;lexical-variation&#x2F;bread&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;projects.alc.manchester.ac.uk&#x2F;ukdialectmaps&#x2F;lexical-v...</a><p>Your evening meal, what do you call that? That varies, too: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;projects.alc.manchester.ac.uk&#x2F;ukdialectmaps&#x2F;lexical-variation&#x2F;evening-meal&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;projects.alc.manchester.ac.uk&#x2F;ukdialectmaps&#x2F;lexical-v...</a><p>What about grammatical &quot;errors&quot;, such as &quot;The dress what I bought&quot;? They looked at that too: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;projects.alc.manchester.ac.uk&#x2F;ukdialectmaps&#x2F;syntactic-variation&#x2F;the-dress-what-i-bought&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;projects.alc.manchester.ac.uk&#x2F;ukdialectmaps&#x2F;syntactic...</a><p>I encourage people to explore the menus on that site. It&#x27;s fascinating, genuinely.<p>English is a dynamic language, particularly in its first birthplace, structured as it is after multiple invasions from Latin speakers, Germanic&#x2F;Anglo-Saxon speakers, Vikings, the French, and more recently African, Caribbean, Sri Lankan and Indian&#x2F;Asian migration from the former empire and commonwealth.<p>It is why we can turn anything into an adverb and immediately make it rude&#x2F;suspect (&quot;I am so going to have a good penguining tonight&quot;), or delightfully ambiguous on the one hand, but the intent obvious on the other (&quot;This track is so brick, mate, you should listen to it&quot;).<p>English is not French. There is no official version of it. We talk about &quot;proper&quot; English as being &quot;The [King&#x2F;Queen]&#x27;s English&quot;, perhaps, but only to identify it as being distinct from the English used by many others. People aspire to use it as royalty does for obvious reasons, but it is churlish to dismiss variations.<p>The fact that this issue happened in Oakland, that it was an issue relating to African American children in particular, that it is divorced from the reality of English and its traditions, all of this makes me suspicious the underlying cause was a form of implicit&#x2F;subconscious racism. It may even have been explicit.<p>That said, I&#x27;ve noticed America in particular has held onto a form of English and developed it in a way that is quite divorced from the UK. It&#x27;s thought that the modern New York accent and vernacular is not wholly dissimilar to 18th-century English South West, for reasons perhaps obvious to those who understand a little of the history of New York and its earliest settlers. Likewise, Canadian accents have more than a hint of Scottish in many parts: 1950s Canadian films to me sound almost 100% Scottish.<p>What is the point I&#x27;m making? It&#x27;s a language for all of us. Yes there is a standard English. But those who seek to deny its development within sub-cultures and regional variations are not just denying its tradition and history, but avoiding a possibly very beautiful future.