Education: Black English

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To grow up decent, our children need new clothing to present themself in school in proper neat!! The sun have to shine for our children too. Amen.

—Sign carried by a demonstrator in New York in 1969

To most citizens that complaint seems illiterate. To a linguist it is a good example of Black English, a dialect with its own grammar and vocabulary. For three centuries, it has been the language of most American Negroes, but until recently, both its origins and its rules have remained a mystery. Scholars once thought that it was either an ignorant misuse of Standard English or a remnant of archaic British dialects learned by slaves from their Southern masters. Lately, however, a number of linguists have come to believe that the dialect originated with the slaves themselves.

Pidgin. That theory receives its first book-length substantiation with the publication of Black English (Random House, $10). In it, Linguist J.L. Dillard of the University of Puerto Rico describes how slaves were forced to develop their own lingua franca because traders usually separated groups speaking the same language in order to hinder communication and thereby prevent revolts. The slaves taught each other pidgin varieties of their masters' language.

Black English retained some African words that later entered into Standard English (examples: goober, jazz and banjo). More important, Dillard found that Black English arranged English words according to a syntax resembling that of West African languages. Black English does not require a distinction between present and past tenses, for example, but it does require a differentiation between continuous and momentary action. Thus, Dillard notes, if a black says of a laborer, "He workin' when de boss come in," he means that the man worked only when the boss was present. On the other hand, if he says, "He be workin' when de boss come in," he means the work went on before and after the boss's entry. Similarly, "You makin' sense but you don't be makin' sense" means, roughly "You just made sense, for once."

Frequently when Black English sounds ungrammatical to white ears, it is merely conforming to its own rules. Thus, in the demonstrator's placard, the pronoun themself leaves off the standard English -ves ending because them already establishes plurality. Since Black English rarely uses suffixes, neat means the same as the Standard English noun neatness. Black English also does not differentiate between genders of pronouns, so it is perfectly correct for a speaker to say, "He a nice little girl." In unraveling these rules, however, linguists encounter a problem—almost nobody speaks "pure" Black English. Ghetto blacks, hearing their speech scorned by whites as illiterate, often try to "improve" it to conform more nearly to Standard English.

To Dillard and his frequent collaborator, William A. Stewart, president of the Education Study Center in Washington, the implications of Black English are obvious: ghetto children often have learning difficulties that are basically language problems.