Suggests that Ebonics deserves respect as a genuine spoken dialect, widely used and important in American culture. Notes that students who are fluent in it benefit when they are allowed to add standard English to their repertoire and taught the appropriate occasions for each way of speaking. (RS)

A description and analysis of the various functions of black language as an integral part of the collective experience and identity of American blacks. (EH)

Describes and explains the sociolinguistic factors that affect the performance of black children speaking standard English. Uses data from a 2-year study of black speech and bidialectalism involving 40 adults and 76 students to show how the black community and its children have difficulty learning proper English because of their incompatible…

The stated purpose of this article is to advocate that those dealing with black people and black problems have some appreciable degree of knowledge concerning black culture, black jargon, black behavior, and the black or Afro-American psyche: only then can therapy be seen as satisfying the purposes for which it was initially intended. (Author/JM)

This paper offers a brief but comprehensive overview of various issues pertaining to the use and origins of Black English. The purpose of the paper is to help educators understand Black English and celebrate this dialect in class while facilitating the acquisition of Standard English. It holds that Ebonics is a dialect of English with its own set…

Black English-Negro Nonstandard English, or Negro dialect,"-although perhaps represented by less divergent varieties in the Northern cities of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is here shown to have been there all along. (JM)

Herbert L. Foster has written a new book about teaching black youngsters in the inner city. A Kappan interviewer extracts some of his success secrets, among them the rules for life-or-death contests. (Editor)

The recent discussions about the teaching of Black English, known as Ebonics, in the Oakland (California) school district have highlighted concerns about the right way to educate African American children. The authors of essays in this collection offer background history that explores the race and power dynamics surrounding the development of…

"Ebonics II" is the position that there is no significant gap between black and standard English but that teaching standard English as a foreign language would alleviate the stigma attached to black English. Acknowledging black English and promoting Afrocentric curricula while teaching standard English would overcome the resistance many children…

The language of Black America is rich and diverse in its utterance, whether through music (Jazz, Blues, Soul, Gospel, and Rap), through street corner "shuckin''n jivin'," or through writing. This language is used as a means of survival, of getting from one day to the next. Blacks have developed a system of taking the fewest words and…

The regularity with which much variation between forms, formerly dismissed as "free variation," can be accounted for on the basis of extra-linguistic and independent linguistic factors has made the concept of the linguistic variable an invaluable construct in the description of patterned speech variation. The linguistic variable, itself…

This book is the fifth in a series of publications concerning the position and role of language in a large metropolitan area. In this sociolinguistic description Detroit is chosen as a case study of a large Northern urban area which has shown a dramatic increase in its Negro population within the last half century. The primary goal of the study…

This dictionary is an encyclopedic survey of the cultural background and development of the black American, covering the basic issues, events, contributions and biographies germane to the subject. The author-compiler is Chairman of Classical Languages Department at Southeastern State College, Durant, Oklahoma. Richard Runes is practicing law as a…

IN CONNECTION WITH RESEARCH INTO THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN STANDARD ENGLISH AND THE NONSTANDARD DIALECTS OF THE URBAN GHETTOS, IT WAS FOUND THAT THERE IS A DIFFERENCE IN THE RELATIVE DEPTH OR ABSTRACTNESS OF THE UNCONSCIOUS GRAMMATICAL RULES. IN MEMORY OR "SHADOW" TESTS, GROUPS OF NEGRO BOYS FROM 10 TO 14 YEARS OLD WERE HIGHLY MOTIVATED TO…

This study of lexical familiarity with black English for 324 African Americans, 266 whites, 21 Latino and "other", and 10 unidentified workers indicates that white industrial workers are more familiar with black English than are white white-collar workers. Black English is the core of an industrial lingua franca. (SLD)