In Defense of My First Language

Molefi Kete Asante, Ph.D.

Such confusion exists around the issue of Ebonics that it is necessary for a thorough discussion of African American language in the public arena.When the Oakland, California School District decided that African American language, Ebonics, was a separate language, and that teachers should be trained to view it as a separate language in order to better teach English, the reaction among some African American leaders and Secretary of Education Riley was appalling.

I am no longer dismayed by the fact that Jesse Jackson and Maya Angelou believe that they should speak out on everything, that is their right, but I am disappointed that they did not seek expert advice from the leading scholars of Ebonics in the world. Kweisi Mfume, leader of the NAACP, came out against Ebonics as a language as well, even though the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People has long had a tradition of honoring Ebonics as a language.

There are four critical points to be made: (1) most African Americans speak a form (dialect) of Ebonics, (2) it is a perfectly legitimate language, (3) we should never disparage the creation of our ancestors, and (4) valoring Ebonics as a way to teach English is a useful pedagogical strategy.

The African people who got off of ships from Africa in the Americas spoke more than one hundred different languages including Yoruba, Wolof, Asante, Fante, Ga, Ewe, Ijo, Efik, Mande and Congo. They did not speak English. These languages were as different as European languages are from one another. When confronted with Europeans who did not speak African languages but who spoke English, Dutch, German and French, our ancestors created a language that maintained characteristics of African languages while employing vocabulary words that were derived principally from English. Next to our music it was our most creative achievement, that is, the molding of numerous African languages and English lexical items into a new language.

Throughout the Americas, including the Caribbean and South America, Africans invented this new language, using whatever vocabulary, that is, lexical items that were available: French in Haiti, Portuguese in Brazil, Spanish in Puerto Rico and Cuba, and English in the United States of America.

Languages do not exist in nature. They are created by a community of speakers who understand and share meaning. Ebonics is a perfectly reasonable language and like other languages is created by a body of speakers who establish it's communicability, consistency, and predictability. What makes Ebonics a legitimate language? The very same things that make any language a language. It is a regularized code which is shared by a group of speakers for whom it's sound patterns, grammatical structure and vocabulary are predictable.

I guess what I find most tragic about the response of our leaders to this issue is the quick attempt to view Ebonics as a deviant form of English, a broken English, as one African American said on radio, a "stupid, ignorant" English. Such abuse has never been heaped upon the creations of genius of another group of people. Never in the history of this country have I seen such passionate reaction to the language of any other people. Ebonics is already spoken by the majority of African Americans. Why can't it be recognized as a language.

The African people who took the basic structure of African languages and dropped into this African structure English words are among the greatest creators of language in the last five hundred years. In fact, the language they created is the most beautiful, rhythmic, colorful, and precise I know. It is not English. It is not attempted English. It is a language created for communication with its own rules and grammar.

This is not to say that all African Americans speak Ebonics. Some people speak it all the time. Others speak it occasionally in social situations. The social situation often determines how and when a person uses the language. I refer to this as an unconscious and easy reflexivity.

There is also regional variation as there is in English. The Ebonics speaker in South Carolina will often differ in pronunciation from a New York speaker. However, both will use the structure and the grammar of the language in similar ways, demonstrating their understanding of the rules of the language by usage. There is certainly nothing wrong with African Americans being bilingual. I have always thought I was bilingual anyway and this has nothing to do with my use or nonuse of slang, colloquial expressions that have temporary viability in the community as a speaker. Ebonics is not slang. There is no grammar to slang. In fact, slang is lexical, that is, vocabulary words that might be added to our speech because of a special interest, fad in society, art, sports, or entertainment. A language carries a much larger burden of culture than slang and is more persistent.

I believe that the Oakland School District's decision to view African American language, Ebonics, as a separate language is one of the most progressive steps to be taken by a school district. If Chinese is a separate language, if Spanish is a separate language, then Ebonics must be viewed as a separate language and our children should be seen as bilingual.

The fact that Ebonics uses English vocabulary creates the mistaken notion that the speakers are speaking English. This is a major problem for English speakers. English as a language has a vocabulary list that is heavily Romance, that is, Latin based, yet it is not a Romance language. English is called a Germanic language because its structure is more clearly related to German and Dutch than to French and Spanish. In the same way, Ebonics is more closely related to West African languages than to English although its vocabulary is predominantly English words.

This is easily tested in the patterns of grammatical errors that we call "poor English" as opposed to what we call Ebonics. As an example, "The man are going to the store" is not Ebonics but "poor English grammar." One should properly say "The man is going to the store." But the error of not having the verb in agreement with the subject is not a predictable pattern and therefore is not consistent to any speakers of English or Ebonics. One suspects that the person who makes such blatant error is trying to speak English, not Ebonics.

However, "The man done gone to the store" or "he been gone to the store" are good examples of Ebonics in both the completive and the remote time perfective. As a matter of fact these two forms normally have no equivalents in English.

What is most encouraging about the Oakland School District's decision is that it takes the onus off of the children who come to school to learn mathematics, reading, art, and English and asks the teachers to appreciate the culture that the children bring to the classroom just as they would appreciate the culture of a Spanish-speaking child or a Russian speaking child. Only the child whose culture is devalued is a devalued child. A child who comes to school with the intent to master English will master it quicker and more expertly if she knows that the teacher values her as a person, and how best can we do that than by valuing the person's language. To devalue the language of a person is to cast dispersions upon the ancestors of that child.

Finally, while the Oakland School District did not ask for the teaching of Ebonics, I personally would like to see the language taught alongside English and other languages. In this I am most militant because if the African American people lose the sense of culture inherent in the language we will have lost our entire minds.