What I Think and Feel about Ebonics
What I Think and Feel about Ebonics by Jean J. Lee Have you heard of the word “Ebonics”? Ebonics can be interchangeably used with another term African American Vernacular English (AAVE), especially among Creolists (e.g., Rickford & Dillard) who believed that AAVE were strongly connected to African origins. In other words, Ebonics were viewed as a normal and uniquely separate language which has its own linguistic system. (e.g., phonological features such as /r/ deletion or monophthongizing the diphthongs, morphological features such as zero-copula). This belief can be called “autonomy”, which refers to the language user’s subjective feeling that their language (i.e., Ebonics, here) is different from other languages. In this sense, they argue that Ebonics/ AAVE is not a substandard variety or dialect of English. With this assertion in mind, there was an effort to teach Ebonics in the classroom as a “linguistically and pe...