EBONICS AND THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
In December of 1996 a national controversy erupted when the Oakland school district suggested that "ebonics," which is also known as Black English, was a genetically based second language. Since Oakland California's decision to allow the teaching of ebonics in its school system, ebonics has become a national issue and has sparked a heated debate form coast to coast. A large part of the ebonics controversy is the fact that many of today's students do not get a good enough grasps of standard written and spoken English to compete successfully in the job market later. In this essay, I will discuss the issue of whether ebonics should be considered a second language.
The argument of ebonics advocates is that their unique programs will permit black children to excel at what critics of ebonics say they want black children to learn: regular English. This brings the comparison of regular English and ebonics into view.
Depiction of Oakland in 1900.
The view from @ebonic's roof. Ridiculous.
View of downtown Oakland looking west across Lake ...The English language is fluid, it is constantly expanding and contracting as new words and meanings are added while others become archaic. In Robert MacNeil's essay, English Belongs to Everybody he wrote, "as people evolve and do new things, their language will evolve too. They will find new ways to describe these things and their changed perspective will give them new ways of talking about old things." English is no longer the primary language of Americans and the British. Increasingly, it is a national language taught with other languages as diverse and multilingual as south Africa, Japan, and India. The term international language is increasingly becoming a replacement for standard English. So what is ebonics?
Ebonics is derived from the words "ebony" and "phonics," when they were put together, ebonics was born. It is considered "black dialect." It is to my understanding...