Terms for African American English and vernaculars.

Terms for African American English       

 

The terms used by scholars to refer to the unique language variety of many African Americans reflects the changing terms used to refer to African Americans themselves across the decades. Early studies of AAE in the 1960s used the terms Negro speech, Negro English, or Negro American dialect. Starting around 1970 and continuing throughout the decade, the preferred term was Black English or Black English Vernacular (BEV). In the mid-1980s African-American became the preferred term for black Americans, and by 1991 linguists were using the term African American Vernacular English(AAVE). Today African American English (AAE) is the generally accepted term, although AAVE is still used too.

The term Ebonics (a blend of ebony and phonics) gained recognition in 1996 as a result of the Oakland School Board’s use of the term in its proposal to use African American English in teaching Standard English in the Oakland Schools. The term was coined by Robert Williams in 1973, but it wasn’t until the Ebonics controversy that Ebonics became widely used. Most linguists prefer the term African American English as it aligns the variety with regional, national, and sociocultural varieties of English such as British English, Southern English, Cajun English, and so forth.

Sorry I have a hard time believing  Robert Williams jargon, black students that I went to school with and pretty much grew up around were given the same education as white students, they all pretty much spoke American English, until they started busing in blacks from other areas and that is when the broken dialect Ebonics started; and if I want to buy into the AAE slave trade bit of having the same dialect as those slaves, then why don't I speak with an Irish/English or German accent, seeing how that is where my ancestors came from?

Ebony + Phonics

Comprehending  Ebonics
Immigrant groups from every part of the world have routinely brought their languages to the United States, save one: African Americans. John Baugh explains how the African slave trade impacted this unique variety of American, and how the term "Ebonics" came into being.
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Ebonics is greatly misunderstood, largely because of how it gained global attention during a racially charged education controversy in Oakland, California. On Dec. 18, 1996, the Oakland School Board passed a resolution declaring Ebonics to be the language of 28,000 African-American students within that school district. Few people had ever heard of the term Ebonics prior to the passage of that resolution, to say nothing of how it was created or originally defined.

Children learning English at the cost of vernacular languages: Javed Akhtar - 

Bollywood lyricist Javed Akhtar says that children nowadays are learning English at the "cost of vernacular ­languages".

The middle and the upper middle classes have ­abandoned the vernacular languages in preference to English, which has become a necessity now, Akhtar said at an event recently. 

"It is a tragedy. The educational system, the globalisation and liberalization has ­corporatised the society,” he said.“English has become crucial to connect to the rest of the world. But what is happening is that ­children from the middle and the upper-middle classes are learning English at the cost of ­vernacular ­languages. So, where will they go?" he asked.