JOHN MCWHORTER MARCH 4, 2009
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Today I learned that the New York Times will be reviewing my latest book, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English, on March 15.
Happy am I. I should be grateful--the Times has reviewed three of my books before, but not since 2003. I could still be a contender ... !
The main message of "Bastard," as my wife and I call the latest in shorthand, is that a language is not just words but the way the words are put together--the grammar. In contrast to the rest of humanity listening only to words, a linguist listens to language used as grammar around the clock. Which means that we are hearing real life.
Aren’t just words real life? Not always. Here’s what I mean. Watching the new DVD release of the patriotic World War II musical This is the Army recently, when listening to champion boxer Joe Louis in a cameo delivering his one line, I found myself thinking of, of all people, Tina Fey.
Specifically, what came to mind was her movie of last year, Baby Mama, whose title was one of assorted indications of late that baby mama, the black American inner-city term referring to a woman one has had children with but is not married to, has become mainstream. Further evidence was when Fox News used the term in a teaser graphic last summer in reference to Michelle Obama (“Outraged liberals: stop picking on Obama’s baby mama”). Graceless, but in its assumption that viewers were familiar with the term, indicative.
Hunt up the derivation of the term these days and even the OED has fallen for a tasty but mistaken idea that the source is Jamaican Creole (“patois”), in which there is a term “baby-mother.” However, the chance that a random locution from Jamaican Creole becomes common coin across all of black America is small--a fluent speaker of Black English could go several years without uttering a single word born in Jamaican Creole. Plus, usually the Jamaican term doesn’t really mean what baby mama does, referring more generally to a pregnant woman.
The Caribbean derivation is based on a general misconception that language is just words, rather than grammar. Baby mama is not just an “idiom” or “expression”--it is a predictable manifestation of a general grammatical rule of Black English different from the equivalent one in Standard English.
Namely, the possessive ‘s is often not present in Black English--not just between the words baby and mama, nor between baby and daddy as well (baby daddy is also a set expression), but between any two words in a possessive relationship.
Listen to people speaking the dialect the next time you’re in line, on a subway, or watching a black film and you’ll catch it. Lisa Green in her book on Black English gives the basics, with sentences like:
Sometime Rolanda bed don’t be made up.
That’s the church responsibility
I myself recall hearing someone at a fast food restaurant saying “Dass Brenda drink, not his,” and in a barbershop “Melvin can do what he please--dis Melvin day!” (instead of “Melvin’s day”). None of this has anything to do with Jamaica: it’s a structural trait of the grammar of Black English right here at home.
Or, while the folk history of the term currently highlights the rappers Outkast’s 2000 hit “Ms. Jackson” as helping imprint it with its dedication to “all the baby mamas’ mamas,” black America was regaled with an example of the grammatical construction way back in the eighties and early nineties when the late, great Robin Harris was doing comedy routines about the notoriously naughty brood “Bebe’s kids,” (enshrined in a lovely and undersung cartoon film with Harris’ catchphrase “Dem Bebe kids!!!!”) Again, Harris was not aping Jamaican patois--he was using the grammar of his American home dialect.
Crucially: there is nothing “black” about expressing possession in English without that dutiful “’s.” Go to Yorkshire in England today and you will hear people saying “Me sister husband” for “My sister’s husband.” And not only in Yorkshire. It was lower-class Brits of this kind of parlance who black slaves worked alongside in early America--remember the white “indentured servants” you learned about in school. Slaves drank in what they heard: a different, not deficient, English, in which possession was indicated via the juxtaposition of the possessor and the possessed (sophisticated, no?) rather than with a bit of stuff like ‘s.
Which brings us back to Joe Louis. In the film, he says “All I know is I’m in Uncle Sam’s army and we are on God’s side.” Or at least that’s what the script had, and how the line has been quoted in print. But the way Louis, a native speaker of Ebonics one part Alabama and one part Detroit, actually rendered the line was, in fluent Ebonics style, “All I know is I’m in Uncle Sam army.”
So--baby mama is not just “an expression” in which the absence of the possessive 's motivates a comparison to Jamaican Creole or anything similarly exotic. It is an instantiation of one general grammatical rule out of a great many that makes Black English an alternate system that its speakers command alongside standard English.
The conventional wisdom is that standard varieties have “grammar” while vernacular varieties have merely “slang.” But Joe Louis on a soundstage in 1943, dutifully mouthing a carefully memorized written line, used a grammatical feature of his home dialect. He would have been perplexed--rightly--to be told that he was channeling calypso.
Black English is always a matter of breaking rules rather than creating them? A reasonable notion, and wrong. Negate, in good Ebonics, the following:
She be passin' by every Tuesday.
Note: if you posit "She ain't be passin' by" you are wrong--i.e. five points off if there were a such thing as an Ebonics teacher. The proper answer is "She DON'T be passin' by." Welcome to an alternate--and equally complex--inner-city grammar. Yes, grammar.
10 comments
I'm convinced that "baby mama" is "a predictable manifestation of a general grammatical rule of Black English different from the equivalent one in Standard English."
But where does class come into it?
For example you say, and it's interesting, "It was lower-class Brits of this kind of parlance who black slaves worked alongside in early America--remember the white “indentured servants” you learned about in school. Slaves drank in what they heard: a different, not deficient, English, in which possession was indicated via the juxtaposition of the possessor and the possessed (sophisticated, no?) rather than with a bit of stuff like ‘s."
But no one educated I know and hear, no one middle class and up I know and hear speaks this way. Education, I'd think, would want to drum out such "different" grammatical rules, or, alternatively teach for and encourage mastery of standard English. Black English, might then be encourage for particular purposes--say creatvie writing-only after mastery of standard English grammar. I'd think anyone young under your charge as parent, guardian, wise elder, whatever, would be similarly schooled by you.
Not mastering the possessive is a deficiency I'd argue that probably tracks being ill educated, poor, and stuck in a low skilled job, even if the dropping of the possessive is part of the grammar of inner- city English and even if masterpeices like The Wire, the greatest thing ever shown on television and high art, can raise inner-city English to the level of poetry.
- basman
March 5, 2009 at 6:22pm
Mr McWhorter has put himself in a difficult position. Among linguists, there is very little that's controversial about his argument: Black English, as much as Southern speech, as much as Canadian speech, as much as English as spoken in India is simply a variant of English. Not better, not worse, not substandard. As such, it has clear rules, of the type that if you break those, you simply sound 'off' to another speaker of it.
Yet among the general population, including the best-meaning members of it, McWhorter's argument will predictably have trouble being heard. For most of us, speaking well and speaking grammatically and speaking 'right' get confused for speaking the way the person who gives you your job interview expects you to speak. On a job interview, I put on suit and tie, and I speak a particular way: both are performances, but typically only the suit and tie are viewed by the interviewer as a performance. The way I speak is judged in terms of speaking 'right'.
I believe that exposure has a lot to do with how a particular flavor of speech sounds to you. I learned English in school as a second language, and the kind of English I learned was British English. It took me quite a while to appreciate the beauty of American English, which for a long time sounded crude to me - and believe it or not - uneducated. For reasons not quite clear to me I have always loved the sound of Indian English but it took me years to build up an appreciation for Australian English and it is quite recent (after close to 35 years in the United States) that I can honestly say I appreciate the speech of Georgia and the speech of West Virginia. And for a short while, after I had 'acclimated' to American English speech patterns, Brits sounded insufferable to me.
Generally, there is value in the advice to, when in Rome, sound like the Romans do. Especially if they are the ones to give you jobs or to buy your services. In my case, it is obvious that I wouldn't get anywhere in the United States by insisting to speak my native language. At the same time, it is rather obvious that there's nothing 'uneducated' about my speaking my native language.
- bspeelpenning
March 7, 2009 at 5:28am
Education involves learning what you don't know as decided by others for what is important that you know. It is in English speaking countries an uncontroversial truth that mastery of standard English, which means mastery of its grammar, its structural rules, is virtually a necessary condition of being educated. Speaking one's native language is,of course, not uneducated, and allowances have to be made for newcomers to English. But, at a minimum, for the native born in English speaking countries, the failure to master the essential rules of Englsh grammar--which have not so much to do with regional variation, idiom and locution-- is by definition, so to speak, being uneducated. Failing to master the possesive in English is a fairly reliable sign of that sorry state.
Ain't it, y'all?
- basman
March 7, 2009 at 8:38am
English language without its correct grammar and structure is pidgin, or broken, English. All around the world, including England, there are varieties of such, however, English speaking countries, regardless of their English flavor, have a common thread -- the standard grammar and structural rules are exactly the same and those that deviate from that standard are universally ridiculed as illiterate.
Yo, Itzik.
- scrubbyoak
March 7, 2009 at 1:54pm
The following are all headlines of today's BBC online site. BBC, as you know, is that bastion of uneducated non-native English speakers. Do these look grammatical to you?
"Manchester United look unstoppable"
"Wales win world cup"
"Chelsea see off Coventry"
They are grammatical in England; they are not in the United States.
English is as English does. And in each region you happen to be in, there is a secret (or not so secret) handshake that gives access to jobs etc. It is just that the notion of an accepted speech (accepted in a particular community) has nothing to do with the linguistics notion of a correct grammar.
- bspeelpenning
March 7, 2009 at 2:03pm
What is a little confusing is that everyone with some vague idea of language studies (e.g. like me) knows that there is a concept called "code-switching," that involves the ability -- often learned at a very young age -- to "switch" between registers of speech depending on what the immediate environment is, and what the expectations are. So what is said in class in school, at home, hanging out at the mall, with your girl/boyfriend, at your weekend job, in a competitive sport, and so on, differs sometimes widely from one context to another -- word choice, accent, swearing/no swearing, volume can all be radically affected.
Even in countries or regions with very substantial active dialects marked by striking vocabulary, pronounciation, and syntactic idiosyncracies, children from about 7 or so are usually able to change from, say, Plattdeutsch to Standard High German at a moment's notice. Usually, of course, the national standard variant is mandatory for the classroom, whether gently enforced or not.
Code-switching is also perfectly at home among Americans of African background (and not only among them), and has been for a couple of centuries. To put it bluntly, Blacks under slavery needed code-switching to be able to communicate while subject to observation, to be able to signal messages that couldn't be on the immediate surface of the utterance, and to retain some cultural autonomy while also communicating effectively in the new world of the slave South. Why, then, a century and a half after Emancipation, does it seem to be so difficult to bring those talents to bear upon the contemporary American situation, so that African-American kids learn to speak standard American English at school (and prospectively in the workplace) but retain Black English for all sorts of local and non-formal situations where it is totally unobjectionable? As indeed is the case with Asian kids and Latino kids, and many others with distinctive home languages sometimes a world away from English.
It is possible to hold two languages in one's brain. At least.
- ironyroad
March 7, 2009 at 2:26pm
..."Manchester United look unstoppable"
"Wales win world cup"
"Chelsea see off Coventry"..
I can't speak to some convention of how U.K. headlines get written or what the peculiarities are for plural and singular cases for Wales, Manchester whomtever for the purposes of these headlines. But what does that have to do with the ill educated failure to master the possessive. And apart from these odd subject verb couplings, find me a piece of reputable U.K., say jounalistic, prose that is rife with deviations from standard English such that they form an analogous case to not mastering the possessive. Or, easier, find me a piece of reputable U.K. prose shot through with deviating verb subject agreements, Wales and Chelsea and Manchester to the contrary notwithstanding.
If English is as English does then standard English, with allowances for regional variations which will show themselves more in speaking than in writing, a distinction that has to be read into this discussion by the way, then standard English is as it does, and not mastering the possessive is more than a deviation, it's a deficiency.
My mild criticism of McWhorter's post is his not noting the difference between a linguist's neutrailty as to what constitutes grammatical English of a certain kind--inner city English, for example--different not deficient, and the real world deficiency, lack of education, and poverty filled implications of not mastering standard English. The point that inner-city English has its own grammar linguistically speaking is interesting to a point but, for me, begs to be broadened into something more expansive.
Scrubs, I for myself wouldn't ridicule anyone's iliteracy. It's a terrible, terrible circumstance. I once vounteered for a while trying to teach iliterate adults to read.
- basman
March 7, 2009 at 2:32pm
..Why, then, a century and a half after Emancipation, does it seem to be so difficult to bring those talents to bear upon the contemporary American situation, so that African-American kids learn to speak standard American English at school (and prospectively in the workplace) but retain Black English for all sorts of local and non-formal situations where it is totally unobjectionable? As indeed is the case with Asian kids and Latino kids, and many others with distinctive home languages sometimes a world away from English....
What do you think is/are the/some answer(s) to your question?
- basman
March 7, 2009 at 2:35pm
p.s. Scrubs: forshizzle
- basman
March 7, 2009 at 3:19pm
"I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse."
A perfect example of code-switching.
- Mormon Socialist
March 8, 2009 at 8:01pm