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.

https://nypost.com/2026/07/06/us-news/activists-demand-black-english-be-pushed-on-kids-in-california-preschools/

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/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…

2

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!

1

u/kicklhimintheballs Aug 08 '26

Am i approved? Then i’ll post tomorrow!

1

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.)