Nuances of Black English
by
Howard Richler
It has been fifty years since linguists have studied
Black English with an emphasis that it represents a variety of standard English rather than its degradation. However, they’re still many false assumptions about
Black English and as this February marks Black History Month, I am
taking the opportunity to present many of realities and nuances of Black
English that linguist John McWhorter illuminates in his book Talking Back, Talking Black.
For
example, McWhorter explains that a construction such as “She be passin’
by” contains “much more than an
unconjugated verb” and that the insertion of “be” is “very specific; it means
that something happens on a regular basis, rather than something going on right
now.” An equivalent sense in standard
English might be “She used to pass every Friday.”
McWhorter
points out that counter to the idea that Black English is inherently a
simplified form of the language, that in several instances it offers more complexities than standard English.
For example, in Black English the word “up” plays a special role when paired
with a location. So, in the Black English sentence “We was sittin’ up at Tony,” we know that
Tony is a friend as the usage of “up” is
a marker of familiarity or intimacy,
just as adding ed to a verb is a
marker of past action. McWhorter points out that unless the speaker is a
masochist he is unlikely to utter “We was waitin’ up at the dentist.” Another nuance occurs with the word “done,” and
in a sentence such as “I done drunk it,” you might think that this refers to
the time frame of your imbibing but McWhorter explains that you’re expressing
something far more subtle – counterexpectation.
He says “whether it’s in a sentence about 1973 or last week, a sentence
with done is always about something
the speaker finds somewhat surprising…”
So if a man tells a woman “I done
had a crush on you since you was thirteen,” the presumption is that the woman
had no idea that the guy held the flame for so long. And if someone said “You
done drunk it,” he may be expressing his
belief that you were going to share the beer with him but when he got back from
the bathroom you had selfishly drained
the bottle.
We
see other verb nuances in Black English.
McWhorter explains the following:
He
been seen it! (He saw it a long time
ago.)
She
done seen seen it. (She saw it
recently.)
He
be seein’ it. (He sees it regularly.)
She
steady seein’ it. (She is right now in the process of seeing it.)
Another
way that Black English is distinct from Standard English is in the narrative
purpose the verb “had” fulfills. McWhorter tells us that some languages, such
as Swahili and other Bantu languages have narrative tenses. Similarly, Black English employs a narrative
tense marker in its use of the verb “had.” He gives this example from a
ten-year old boy describing a scuffle:
“Cause when he hit me like this, he had
upper-cut me like that, and then he had hit
me like that. He had kicked me, it was half-wrestling and then, one, I was
tired, then he just beat me and push me own, that’s when he had push me down.” Rather than signalling a coming finale, the verb
had is integral in telling the story.
On
the other hand, in many ways Black English is less complicated than standard English. McWhorter provides this
sentence as an example: “Why she ain’t call me
when she know dis de best time. ” Here, “Why she ain’t” replaces the
more elaborate “Why didn’t she,” and “know” and “dis” replace “knows” and “this”
respectively. A sentence such as this has led some commentators to issue some
rather pejorative, if not outright racist, views. For example in the 1980s, pop
grammarian John Simon ordained that “the constructions of Black English are the
product not of a language with roots in tradition but of ignorance of how
language works.” More recently,
political commentator Tucker Carlson said that Black English is “a language
where nobody knows how to conjugate verbs.” These opinions are consistent with
what is often called the linguistic inferiority principle which posits that the
speech patterns of a socially subordinate group will always be interpreted as
improper when compared with the socially dominant group.
However,
McWhorter explains that complexity in
grammar doesn’t in any manner connote language superiority He points out that Old English possessed far
more complex grammar than modern English. For example, it had
far more ways than merely adding an s to make a noun plural and whereas
modern English has relatively few irregular plurals such as men, women,
mice and feet, Old English was inundated with these irregularities, But nobody claims that modern English
represents an inferior form of Old English because it is less complex and
thus, the cases where
Black English simplifies standard English doesn’t represent a diminishment of
the language.
Written
in an erudite, yet folksy, manner, Talking
Back, Talking Black examines the intricacies of Black English, and in the
process undermines the stereotypes about this rich flavour of English.
Talking Back,
Talking Black by John McWhorter. Bellevue, 190pp, $25.76
