1/17/2024 0 Comments Seen vs saw aaveFor the grace of being another language, Black English speech might have been considered as linguistically civilized as a classical Greek or Latin, or as linguistically chic as French or Italian. These grammatical structures in influential foreign languages that are culturally valued by a wider mainstream society are often the very same systematic structures that many unthinkingly despise in more marked or less prestigious dialects of English, such as in Black English. And the usual way to express a negative in oh-so-chic French is with two negative elements (ceci n’est pas une négation, par exemple). Those who consider themselves culturally aware might marvel at a politician’s empty but seemingly erudite smattering of Ancient Greek, in which the double negative construction, for example, is correctly used to emphasize a negative meaning, not cancel it out. On absolutely no scientific basis, linguistically consistent grammatical features like double negatives, along with other marked grammatical differences to standard American English, such as use of habitual be, as in “he be walkin’,” or perfective, as in “he done did it,” have stigmatized the speakers of Black English as linguistically backward, uneducated, or unintelligent.īlack speech has historically been maligned as just a broken form of English, but this is as unfair as it is wrong-many of its core grammatical structures can be found in many other languages. Getting job interviews, renting an apartment, raising kids to have better options and advantages, even getting through an unexpected, fraught interaction with the police- all these things can be made much harder simply because of a particular accent or dialect.Īfrican American Vernacular English (AAVE) speech or Black English (often used as an umbrella term for the many varieties of speech used by African American communities) is a prime example of how a regular way of speaking can have a major impact on people’s lives. This can have a profound effect on how whole speech communities can live, learn, work, and even play. It still is very much the case that many people, without thinking, can harbor negative assumptions about the different ways other people speak. Well, why does this matter? As flippantly as we can talk of language myths, put simply, what’s widely considered bad grammar, or bad language, can have truly problematic repercussions for how many people live, especially for those who speak dialects that aren’t considered standard, mainstream, or prestigious. Nevertheless, standard English speech finally rid itself of this turbulent double negation, until it is now seen as not merely ungrammatical-it’s also socially unacceptable. Surprisingly, it was not impossible that people could have no trouble understanding each other whatsoever. Before then, speakers were using double negatives illogically daily (and probably twice on Sundays), from Chaucer to Shakespeare and many others. Like many language myths that are still fervently repeated, it’s only since the eighteenth century that we became loath to use double negatives in this way (no thanks for nothing to the grammarian Robert Lowth) and to consider it wrong and illogical. This, of course, is a false belief that is still widely shared in mainstream American culture (possibly even among speakers who regularly use double negation themselves). As the assumption goes, because two negatives must logically cancel each other out, people who use double negatives in this way must also logically be uneducated or unintelligent. If I’m not saying nothing, obviously I must be saying something. To a prescriptivist, using double negatives for actually emphasizing more negation is just the worst. Ain’t nobody got time for double negatives…said no grammar pedant ever.
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