Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 536

 

Here are a couple of excerpts from a book I recently read, "Talking Back, Talking Black: Truths About America's Lingua Franca," by John McWhorter 

There is a term for people whose casual and formal speech differs to this degree: diglossia, from the Greek for “two tongues.” However, I have held off on introducing that term, because giving this bidialectal linguistic existence a label implies that it is exotic, when in fact it is extremely common and even a norm. Around the world, if a language has a strong written tradition and is also spoken widely, then often its spoken versions have drifted from the conservative written standard to varying degrees. As often as not, this means that there is a gulf between the way people chat and the way they speak. They speak the written version; they talk the other version. As such, there is ample diglossia in many languages of South Asia, across Indonesia, and in Tibetan, Swahili, German, and Italian itself, as well as in Greece, China, parts of Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, and elsewhere. If anything, what merits a special term is monoglossia—speaking always basically one thing. 

Black Americans are disglossic—perfectly normally diglossic. Whether they would be allowed to use Black English in a job interview is as loopy an issue to focus on as whether a Moroccan would defend his master’s thesis in Moroccan Arabic—almost as different from Standard Arabic as French is from Latin—or whether a Finn who gets a job as a newscaster would talk on the air the same way as she does to her mom.

I want you to be truly comfortable with the idea that there is indeed a black way of speaking, that there isn’t anything wrong with it, that it would be bizarre if such speech did not exist, and that it is spoken alongside Standard English, not in opposition to it. However, Black English (and there is a such thing!) is spoken in a society in which racism still exists, and the issue of what we do about racism is decidedly complex.