Hooked on Ebonics?

Originally Posted by PUG1911

RacinReaver and Guiinrubbersuit, thanks. It's interesting to see what qualifies as a dialect. Even more so to see some of the official divergences that are recognized.

I have a hard time wrapping my mind around some examples such as spelling changes. Like that in Baltimore you would spell shower as sharr, eagle as iggle, oil as ull, wash as warsh, etc. But I guess that's just my ignorance. I don't know if these are accepted spellings in writing or not.

It's still spelled the same way, those are just samples of how they pronounciate things (which is more of an accent thing). Like, I have a Philadelphia/Pennsylvania-Dutch accent. I say water as whut-er, but I still know that it's supposed to be spelled 'water'. I think what makes something an actual dialect is changing the actual grammatical structure of sentences. Like in Pittsburgh, you hear "The car needs wash" instead of "The car needs to be washed." (Just ask capo or wojo, they both do it.)

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knkwzrd, of course languages change. But don't you think it odd that neighbours will one day speak the same language/dialect, and then the next one neighbour speaks ebonics while the other speaks standard english? That's not how things have happened in history, and *is* a deliberate attempt to speak the language incorrectly, though on a scale that legitimizes it. And is not at all the same as the examples provided where it was an influx of different languages that became part of the local english. Nor is it the same as one redefining one's language to reflect an accent that has developed. It's just changing shit for the hell of it.

I haven't read about it in a long time, but didn't early English come out of the lower classes speaking a certain mixture of languages while the higher classes tended to speak in a different set?

Just wondering, does anyone actually have difficulty understanding ebonics, or any English dialect for that matter?

I've never known someone to have trouble with it. Accents, sometimes, but that just takes a bit of effort on the listener's part, and some time.

There is certainly a stigma attached to someone who uses poor grammar for the area in the business world though. What is considered poor grammar in American Standard English might be perfectly acceptable in Ebonics for example. The different grammar may be acceptable in areas where Ebonics is the norm, but outside of those areas it'd be quite detrimental.