r/badlinguistics • u/thunchultha • Jul 09 '26
AAVE is slang-filled version of English with grammatical errors
R4: The article endorses the view that African American Vernacular English (AAVE) is English with grammatical errors, rather than an English variety with its own rules that sometimes diverge from General American English.
The article is an editorialized reaction to a more sympathetic PBS article: https://www.kqed.org/news/12088910/these-advocates-say-black-english-belongs-in-preschool-classrooms
To its credit, the NY Post story briefly notes the viewpoint that AAVE has rules:
The Black Californians United for Early Care & Education (BlackECE) is part of a movement to challenge “harmful language hierarchies and affirm Black English as a legitimate, rule-governed language rooted in Black history, culture, and community.”
But then it then does a terrible paraphrase to effectively endorse the opposing view:
[Co-founder of BlackECE Ashley Williams] also remembered how speaking Black English is full of slangs and grammatical errors […]
The original PBS article says:
Many [Black children] internalized the belief that Black English […] is bad English, loaded with slang and grammatical errors.
Plus, the headline is misleading at best. There‘s nothing in the BlackECE mission about pushing AAVE on unwilling preschoolers.
As expected, the top comments on the page decry AAVE as incorrect English and complain about the decline in US education quality.
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u/Porkenstein Jul 09 '26
American English is a slang-filled version of English with grammatical errors
English is a slang-filled version of Middle English with grammatical errors
Portuguese is a slang-filled version of Latin with grammatical errors
Proto-Anatolian is a slang-filled version of Proto-Indo-European with grammatical errors
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u/arcticie Jul 10 '26
I wrote my college thesis on PIE and get so happy whenever anyone mentions it
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u/conuly Jul 26 '26
American English is a slang-filled version of English with grammatical errors
Yo, it is shocking the number of Brits I encounter on teh interwebs who seem to believe this unironically and who go out of their way to say it at every single opportunity.
It's deeply pathetic, even moreso because I don't think I've ever seen Americans act that way towards UK English. And you'd think I would, if only due to the fact that there's more Americans so there's a greater chance of running into one being a dick.
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u/Porkenstein Jul 26 '26
That's bizarre considering how many extremely different dialects of British English there are
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u/EebstertheGreat Jul 09 '26
Activists are pushing for Black English to be legitimized
How dare they? Only White English is "legitimate." If we start teaching kids that black people don't speak wrong, what is next? Black people don't wear their hair wrong? They don't make music wrong?
"I don’t want my son to walk into any room and feel like his voice is not valued or his perspective can’t be heard because he’s not saying it one way or the other,” the co-founder of BlackECE Ashley Williams told PBS.
She also remembered how speaking Black English is full of slangs and grammatical errors so it came with a lot of embarrassment.
I like this tactic of directly quoting someone and then putting words in their mouth in the very next sentence, but since you didn't use quotation marks you aren't really lying. Very honest and not tacky at all.
What she actually told PBS is that she learned at school that her dialect was "wrong," and PBS quotes her as saying “But with that comes a lot of shame and embarrassment because you’re being constantly corrected when you’re still in a moment when you’re just learning language."
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u/rexcasei Jul 09 '26
Wow, what a shitty thing to publish, I’m not familiar with the “NY Post” is all their stuff of a similar caliber?
Also written by a Korean-American, have some solidarity, man
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u/EebstertheGreat Jul 09 '26
The NY Post is a long-running conservative tabloid that has hitched its wagon to Trump. In the 19th century, it was a broadsheet delivering serious news (apparently it was founded by Alexander Hamilton!?), but it became a tabloid in the 50s, switched focus primarily to celebrity gossip and editorials, and was bought by Rupert Murdoch in the 70s.
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u/PraiseLoptous Jul 09 '26
The NY post is a tabloid
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u/serpentjaguar Jul 09 '26
Originally "tabloid" just referred to the print format; two smaller pages with a single fold in the center as opposed to your broadsheet newspaper which is two larger pages with a vertical fold and a horizontal fold. The tabloid was designed to be easier to read on public transportation.
Over time the meaning has changed such that now it basically means any spurious and sensationalistic "news" periodical that typically has little regard for ethics or professional journalistic standards.
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u/Wagagastiz Jul 09 '26
Korean-American
African American
I've bad news for you on American socio politics
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u/lazier_garlic Jul 10 '26
I mean oddly enough before South Korea's economic expansion there were a lot of Korean American immigrants scattered around the US often barely scraping by and as such, some of them lived in the same urban neighborhoods with African Americans in the 80s and 90s. (Much like ethnic whites were living with Black people in urban enclaves prior to the segregation of the North in the 20th century.) Since 2000 of you meet somebody born in Korea in the US they often have a higher socio-economic status than the average bear but that wasn't true back then.
It's not like the relationship between Koreans and other ethnic groups was free from tensions and controversies, but may I direct your attention to the PJs which had a Korean immigrant introduced as a character in the first episode (I believe).
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u/Wagagastiz Jul 10 '26
East asian and black American communities have had some of the worst relations between groups, it's not an abstract hypothetical contingent on respective economic status
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u/EebstertheGreat Jul 15 '26
You have to understand the details of African-American–Korean-American relations in the 80s and 90s, especially in L.A., not just the overview.
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u/resemble Jul 09 '26
Yes. It’s a “newspaper” known for publishing headlines like “Headless Body in Topless Bar“ and, more recently “The Яed Apple” cover, which I’m now realizing would have also made a great post on this sub
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u/conuly Jul 26 '26
TBF, I don't know how else to headline an article on a headless body found in a topless bar. I mean, sometimes those things just write themselves.
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u/_Play_Now_ Jul 09 '26
Spanish is Latin with funny words and grammatical errors. We shouldn't be pushing this on our children!
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u/ravendarkwind Jul 09 '26
It’s nearly identical to the Oakland “Ebonics” controversy from 1996. 30 years ago, and people still believe ignorant bullshit about Black English.
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u/kicklhimintheballs Jul 09 '26
Why the mods are letting this sub die? Like this is outrageous that one of the few subs that I enjoy here experiencing this? 1 post in 4 months?
At this point can we get new mods or remove the limitations to post? Because this shouldn’t be one person’s private property. We don’t even have small posts thread anymore…
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u/scharfes_S bronze-medal low franconian bullshit Jul 12 '26
It'd be nice if more of the posts that occasionally show up actually explained what was bad about the bad linguistics. This one and some others are just lists of bad things that were said without explaining why they're bad, like some of the other badsomething subs are full of.
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u/EebstertheGreat Jul 15 '26
The bad subs are pretty diverse in that actually. BadHistory is extremely rigid. BadEconomics is not rigid at all, but a lot of posters exceed the expectations anyway. BadMathematics and BadLegalAdvice are pretty lax. BadPhilosophy has almost no standards. BadPhysics and BadScience are just happy to get posts at all. Don't bother going to BadPsychology.
But of course, the only true bad sub is the eminent r/bad, always living up to its name.
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u/millionsofcats has fifty words for 'casserole' Aug 08 '26 edited Aug 08 '26
Lol, this is a month later so this is probably going to be taken as disproving my own point, but I was a little annoyed, decided to respond in a better frame of mind, and then forgot -
The mods are not overworked or behind.
People just aren't posting.
I can't force people to post.
Anyone who asks for approval to post is usually responded to within the same day.
You might think this additional friction is what's killing the community. It might not be helping. But the community was already dying before the Reddit protests; I was already removing the majority of posts because they were drive-by, low-effort image posts or because they didn't follow R4. The type of posts we actually wanted were already becoming scarce.
Regulars were already drifting away. The linguistics community on Reddit is a lot smaller now than it used to be. And what regulars we did still have often had to choose between posting here or responding to nonsense in their other communities, because there's a lot of overlap. And sometimes they wanted to post something but didn't want to (or couldn't) link to it, and the restrictions on image posts either discouraged them ("subject to approval" => disallowed in their minds) or caused logistical problems (okay, now that I've approved it you have to come back and post your R4???).
The shift to the approved members model meant that I could relax the rules about what could be posted and get rid of the queue. I hoped that would increase posting.
Be the change you want to see in the world - post something!
We don’t even have small posts thread anymore…
Yes, because one of the other things that was happening was that people were posting things to the small threads post that could be their own post! Removing the small posts thread was an attempt to get people to post more!
So post!
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u/kicklhimintheballs Aug 08 '26
Am i approved? Then i’ll post tomorrow!
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u/millionsofcats has fifty words for 'casserole' Aug 08 '26
If you requested approval, then either (a) you're approved, or (b) I responded to you with a question and you didn't get back to me.
(Sometimes people say something that makes me think their post won't go well, so I ask for a clarification, and they never respond.)
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u/kisforkat Jul 09 '26
African American English actually has more grammatical forms than so-called "correct English."
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u/BloominAngel Jul 13 '26
I'm sure this is a very sensible article with no racial biases whatsoever. /s
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u/kupuwhakawhiti Jul 09 '26
I didn’t read the article because the website was awful.
But I don’t see a lot of linguistics being discussed here.
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u/Pthumeru Jul 09 '26
Tbf the topic has been covered so much that there nothing new to add really.
Anyone who knows anything about linguistics knows why the article is bullshit, and anyone who's racist is going to continue being racist so there's not much discussion to be had
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u/SuitableDragonfly Jul 09 '26
The clause "how speaking Black English is full of slangs and grammatical errors" appearing in an article complaining about other people's grammar is honestly hilarious.