African American Vernacular English Is Not Standard English with Mistakes (1999) [pdf]
This is a fantastic essay, and you&#x27;re cheating yourself out of a great read if you dismiss it as a political argument.<p>Geoffrey Pullum is a research professor specializing in the description of English and a contributor to the always-excellent Language Log. He is, as a friend of mine described him, an &quot;Internet Linguistics Super Hero&quot;.<p>This is the nerdiest and most interesting piece on African-American dialect you will ever read. Every Standard-English-speaking elite with an opinion on AAVE is wrong about it! And when they&#x27;re wrong about it, they&#x27;re wrong in funny ways! The payoff towards the end with William Raspberry trying to mimic AAVE is worth all the build-up --- not that it needs to be, since I couldn&#x27;t stop reading that build-up either.<p>The central thesis of the essay is this: elites dismiss AAVE as simplified or &quot;street-talk&quot; English. But it isn&#x27;t: its rules are rigorous and intricate. You can&#x27;t simply simplify Standard English and arrive at AAVE. You have to learn it, like any other dialect. Some of AAVE&#x27;s rules are shared with other dialects, like Cockney. Some of its more idiosyncratic rules, like double-negatives, are mainstream features of other high-status languages. Whatever your political affiliation is, it&#x27;s hard to read this piece and come away thinking anything other than AAVE should should take its place among all the other well-accepted English dialects.<p>Having read the whole thread here, I&#x27;ll take a second to point out what the essay is <i>not</i> about:<p>* It&#x27;s not about &quot;teaching AAVE at school&quot;. The only case it makes for AAVE&#x27;s role in education is to suggest that <i>AAVE-aware</i> instruction will improve outcomes for learning <i>Standard English</i>.<p>* It&#x27;s not about whether we should take special efforts to preserve AAVE, which makes about as much sense as contriving a long argument about whether we should preserve Cockney or Quebecois.<p>* It&#x27;s not about whether AAVE speakers should speak only AAVE. In fact, the essay heavily implies the opposite. Had it not been written before the mainstreaming of the term &quot;code-switching&quot;, I imagine code-switching would factor heavily in the essay.