Dialects of English

You'll remember I wrote a post about the insistence on only one dialect of English being "real," or an actual language; and how this foible is because Americans love to have what they consider legitimate reasons for bigotry.

Here's evidence that this is an actual problem. White Americans -- especially conservative White Americans -- are either unable or unwilling to understand AAVE in courtroom settings, which is contributing to unequal justice under the law. 

Court reporters have to be able to transcribe what is being said in a courtroom with at least 95 percent accuracy. According to this article, court reporters tested on AAVE can only transcribe what is being said with less that 83% accuracy. 

In 31 percent of the 2,241 transcriptions, researchers found, the court reporters’ errors changed the content of what the speaker was saying, misinterpreting either who was involved, what was happening, when it happened, and/or where it happened.

Further, juries either can't or claim they can't understand what black witnesses are saying in court.

As the article puts it, there's a real lack of "willingness" to understand AAVE.

This might be an actual lack of comprehension, of course. When I taught World Lit, I would often teach Frederick Douglass's Narrative of a Life, which is written in perfect SAE of the time. That dialect was often well above the literacy level of my students, who could often barely read what they called "modern" English (English written since the year 2000). Still, they never complained they couldn't understand what Douglass was saying (even when it was clear they could not). 

I would also give them half a dozen narratives from the WPA slave narrative collections in the Federal Library. The WPA collectors deliberately transcribed these narratives in the language, the dialect, spoken by the former slaves -- in AAVE, in other words, from the 1930s. (There's a pdf collection here.)

When I would assign these, some of my students (I won't say conservative, although they probably were, being this was a freshman class in Arkansas; they were definitely white kids) would insist they "couldn't" read the narratives. "They're not in English," they would insist.

Mind you, these are Arkansas kids. Most of them grew up speaking Southern English, which has its roots in AAVE. I'm not saying they were all liars. At least one of them I know for a fact just wasn't too bright. They could barely read SAE written in the 21st century, so maybe they actually couldn't understand this text (a sample):

I wuz 'borned in Orange County and I belonged ter Mr. Gilbert Gregg near Hillsboro. I doan know nothin' bout my mammy an daddy, but I had a brother Jim who wuz sold ter dress young missus fer her weddin. De tree am still standin what I set under an' watch ' em sell Jim. I set dar ant I cry an' cry,  specially when dey puts de chain on him an carries him off, an' I ain't neber felt so lonesome in my whole life. I ain't neber hyar from Jim since an' I wonder now sometimes if'en he's still livin.

But maybe they and the other students who complained were just not willing to understand what they saw as "not English." Maybe their point was Black people who couldn't speak in the standard English of the time had no right to be heard.

I also remember a smart (white, conservative) kid, very likeable, from my History of the English Language class who wrote, very nicely, in my end of the semester evaluation that as much as he realized I was educated and intelligent, I was wrong when I taught in the class that different dialects of English were just that, different dialects. Speaking proper English, he said, was moral issue. 

Speaking anything but standard English, that implies, is immoral. Is a sin.

You can see why this might be a problem when people who don't speak SAE show up in court seeking justice. (It's not just Black people who don't speak SAE, and of course some Black Americans do speak SAE. That's not the point here.) When we speak about systemic injustice, this is what we mean. This injustice is baked into the system, and it is approved of and enforced by a sizable percentage of our population, some of whom are lawyers, some of whom sit on juries, and many, many, many of whom are police officers. 

Or ICE agents, but probably that's less important, since ICE agents aren't really interested in what anyone has to say, in SAE or AAVE or the dialect of the Intermountain West or whatever.