The Word on the Street: Fact and Fable about American English

  • John McWhorter
Plenum: 1998. Pp.291 £16.94, $27.95
Classroom controversy: Black English is a dialect, not a distinct language, argues McWhorter. Credit: AP/DWAYNE NEWTON

In December 1996, the school board of Oakland, California made national headlines by declaring that ‘Ebonics’ — Black English — was the primary language of African-American children, and that they would study English as a foreign language. The board's resolution relied on studies claiming that Black English was a “genetically based” African language system, rather than a dialect of American English. One proponent of Ebonics, Ernie Smith, argued that African-American children do poorly in school because they are “west and Niger-Congo Africans in diaspora”. Using Ebonics as a bridge to standard English, the board hoped, would build racial pride and improve learning.

Reaction to the decision was predictably heated, with objections from white educators, parodies by journalists such as Chicago's Mike Royko (“I be tired hearing abouts Ebonics. I dislike hearin about it no more”), and calls for the black community to “speak out against Ebonics” from the National Head Start Association, whose intentionally startling newspaper advertisements showed Martin Luther King saying “I HAS a Dream” (see Nature 386, 321–322; 1997).

John McWhorter, linguistics professor at the University of California at Berkeley, was one of the few black scholars who openly disagreed with the board's recommendations and with its claims about language. A specialist in creole and pidgin languages, he has now written a fascinating and provocative book to place the Ebonics controversy in the context of an evolutionary theory of language in general and American English in particular. All languages change and evolve; at any moment they are a “bundle of dialects” which cross-fertilize each other; and grammatical and verbal uses are no more innately ‘correct’ than a giraffe or the coming of spring is ‘correct’. Drawing on an impressive knowledge of the systems of the 5,000 languages now spoken in 170 countries, McWhorter demonstrates that “languages, like ovens, are self-cleaning” — that linguistic innovation does not survive if it impedes communication. Black English is a dialect, not a language, he argues, and indeed is less remote from standard English than the dialects of many linguistic systems.

In the second part of his book, McWhorter tackles three current issues to elaborate his point: prescriptive grammar, which forces people to retain outmoded usages such as “whom”; feminism and the gender-neutral pronoun; and the relevance of Shakespeare to American audiences. He is funniest and most outrageous on the Bard, declaring that “while I have enjoyed the occasional Shakespeare performance and film, most of them have been among the dreariest, most exhausting evenings of my life — although only recently have I begun admitting it”. Shakespeare is incomprehensible to contemporary American audiences because his language is as archaic as Chaucer's. Everyone would benefit, McWhorter believes, from high-quality modern English translations. Then people would flock to see King Lear, and directors would not have to concoct bizarre productions to achieve relevance. After all, McWhorter persuasively notes, the non-English-speaking world has had to read Shakespeare in translation all along.

The argument is not new; critics have suggested it for at least a century, and Shakespearean scholar Maurice Charney revived it a decade ago. But McWhorter's argument undercuts his own theory that language evolves in the human marketplace of communication. After all, Shakespeare is out of copyright, and anyone who wants to produce a modernized version is free to do so. They don't, however, because successful contemporary versions of Shakespeare either transpose the plot and not the language, as in West Side Story, or create strong visual elements to clarify language that is poetic and strange but not incomprehensible, as in the Leonardo DiCaprio film Romeo and Juliet. If Shakespeare survives, he be doing jus fine.

In the final section of the book, McWhorter demolishes the case for Black English as an African language, showing that it has British rather than African linguistic origins, and proving it is not a remnant of the slave-dialect Gullah. And he explains that speakers of Black English do a lot of “code switching” between local and standard English forms. The real explanation for the “shockingly poor performance of black students”, he argues, is “an alienation from education that is prevalent in the African-American population”, and fuelled not only by frustration and rage against poverty and racism, but also by self-destructive adherence to an outmoded victimology.

McWhorter recommends a complex set of educational changes. First, accept Black English as a legitimate and creative dialect, rather than a stigmatized one, and allow young children to speak in their home dialect in the classroom. Teach the African-American cultural heritage alongside others in the American tradition. But teach all children to read in standard English. Do not provide Ebonics readers; immerse children in the language of the mainstream while acknowledging that Black English itself is changing standard American English day by day, as anyone who has teenagers or lives in a city can vouch. The word on the street may eventually be the word in the lecture hall or the senate. And linguistic history shows that the language that survives is going to be the most vivid, economical — and fun.