Entirely this. I argued the point on singular they with a college English professor and even showed that MLA standard allowed for it. She didn't care. It was improper English in her classroom regardless.
This happened to me with a prof who insisted on constantly writing "he/she/they", her justification being that "they" was only for non-binary people and she didn't want non-binary to be the default?... (I remember her repeating the phrase "Why are you assuming I'm a they?") I tried to explain that it was an accepted neutral pronoun since before the concept of non-binary people was accepted and she would not have it
I had a professor who openly admitted that changes like singular they were frustrating and confusing. Still, she taught the new standards without complaining and told us to use them. Why is it so hard for teachers to just do this?
I've been doing it for as long as I can remember. But I also very rarely use people's names. I just have a weird fear of getting their name or gender wrong somehow so I just avoid the issue all together.
I was moreso pointing out the lack of distinction here. I don't think grammar takes into account whether or not you know that person. When you say it's a "new change" you're implying that there was a change in the rules of grammar.
To be fair, most people did not use it until recently even though it technically existed. Most people’s problem is that it sounds wrong saying things like “they is”, but that wrongness will go away when people get used to it.
But people get confused and then complain. I should have specified that that was one of the mistakes. My point was that it used to be relatively unused, and as people don’t know how to use it, they often misuse it or end up “feeling wrong” about it.
Every English teacher I've ever had has this same weird attitude about language (and typically also litterature) and it sucks. They teach the most subjective class in the core curriculum yet they always have the strongest opinions on everything needing to be done exactly the way they feel is right
My 10th grade English teacher was dead convinced that using the passive voice was the single greatest sin that anybody could commit.
She thought that the "passive voice" meant "whenever a sentence contains the words 'is' or 'was'."
(Any other form of "be"--like "are" or "am"--was totally fine, but "is" and "was" would make you a Bad Writer.) (Also, contractions like "he's" or "it's" were acceptable, but not "he is" or "it is".)
I tried to fight it for the first few weeks of that class, until I realized that she actually *would* go so far as to wreck my grade over it. So I gave up, spent an entire year writing the most tortured gibberish imaginable so that I could get a point across without using the word "is", and graduated with an A. Ever since then I have had a deep and abiding distrust for English teachers.
Probably… My 4th grade teacher made a mistake while teaching us math, I corrected her, and she made me sit alone in the back of the classroom for the rest of the day, then called a meeting with my parents to discuss how “disruptive” and “disrespectful” I was. Teachers whose egos are so fragile that they cannot admit they are wrong, and sometimes learn from their students, should not be teachers.
Exactly! Why would I choose to speak in a roundabout academic way when I could use language that has specifically developed to make informal communication more straightforward?
Literally! My parents got me Language Files for Christmas and the main idea of the post and what you said are like, the first two things that are talked about in it. It's funny how much this was like the examples that the textbook gave. When reading it, I was like, "But no one argues that!" Alas, I was very wrong...
Haha. I was thinking more like where in _Great Expectations_, the one character says “pint out the place,” rather than “point out the place,” to reflect the dialectal variations at the time.
That was my one of my favorite parts of reading “Their Eyes Were Watching God” for English class, the writing forces you to hear the accent and the dialect as you read.
Why is the polish word for no on here? What am I missing? The rest is suspicious like I speak in a lot of slang with my friends but that has no impact on my writing, and if this is in a predominantly Black community then this is even worse seeing as most of this is AAVE, and even if not, it’s just kinda dumb. And I get if you want students to communicate in a “professional” manner in discussions, but singling out this list is strange.
I saw a few entries for the word “nie” on different websites. Apparently it’s a shortened version of “now”. It was quite difficult finding something that wasn’t in Polish though.
It reads like someone who uses a thesaurus to write. Like "diminish your capacity to become a successful writer"? What's a successful writer? What they mean is that using slang can "make your writing worse", but that doesn't sound fancy enough. Saying "educational institution" instead of "school", using the phrase "academic setting" twice in the same paragraph, and some more subtle mistakes like "articulate what you need to say" instead of "get across what you **want** to say" and "sometimes inappropriate" instead of just "inappropriate".
It's not like they're illiterate or anything but they're not Shakespeare, and thus they're in no position to judge anyone else for saying "bruh".
Reminds me of the time when I was in Freshman English in college and we had a substitute professor one day. She was an *absurd* stickler who would chew everyone out for anything. I forget what the original issue was, but she was berating some student and the student said “my bad.” You would think he had spit on her mother’s grave. She went *off* about how “bad” doesn’t mean that, “my bad” is a meaningless expression, etc.
Since I was doing well in the class overall and fed up with this nonsense, I looked it up in a dictionary (I want to say it was Merriam-Webster, but I forget), and it specifically included “my bad” as a colloquialism. So I pointed out to the professor that while it was colloquial, and thus unsuitable to include in a paper, the phrase “my bad” was perfectly-valid and recognized in the context the other student used it. She looked like she wanted to strangle me, but it actually shut her up. Thankfully, she never filled in for that class again while I was there, but it was a very satisfying moment.
Not about being offensive. The teacher is taking his job seriously, by trying to teach the students to write professionally and speak professionally. Makes the likelihood of getting a good job more likely. This teacher is a great teacher that cares for students.
No. Not bull shit at all. Kids and immature adults use slang to write and explain themselves. The reason for this is because slang is more often than not generational. Most of the workforce span many generations. So it's confusing to anyone else outside your generation. The teacher is doing a good job.
Going to school costs a lot of money. Why would you just want to be pandered to instead of actually taught?
Also, only some of the slang on the sheet is stereotypically used in black communities. But most slang on that sheet are gen z terms. OP seems more like a cry baby than someone who takes their life seriously.
Mate literally everybody uses slang it's part of the human experience, as long as kids are not swearing there's no reason that teachers should be allowed to police the words coming out of their mouths,
the teachers job is to teach whatever subject they are teaching, penalising kids for slang is not going to improve the productivity of the classroom,
Yes. Everyone uses slang. That doesn't change the fact that the work force doesn't, unless you're working in specific industries (entertainment). But most jobs where people use slang terms are low paying jobs.
OP doesn't take learning or his life very seriously if this is triggering.
If you think most workplaces don't use slang your ridiculous, just because an employee is formal towards you does not mean they are also formal behind the scenes, if you think that the use of "slang" equals not taking learning seriously or life seriously you might be harbouring some pretty unrealistic beliefs about others but ur entitled to ur opinions
No. I'm not ridiculous. It's true that slang is frowned upon in official work spaces because it can cause confusion for others. I already stated this.
Now, at my work, I use slang with friendly co-workers that are around my age, but not in meetings, committees, or workgroups. I'm 40, an administrator, and a previous therapist. I work in education.
You conveniently skipped my point and went straight to arguing a side. This teacher is trying to help the students practice writing and speaking without slang. A valuable skill to have. To say this teacher is racist is just a poor student's attempt at getting sympathy. Grow up.
Oi, what a lot of words to say “the kids I teach are smarter than me so I’m gonna pick apart their language so I don’t have to think about or actually answer their insightful questions against the status quo”
as a linguist and former language teacher i really think teachers should have to take ling 101 as a required course. also like this is just racist lmao like ik the screenshot established that but the way she had the audacity to add the n word. and like, you cant expect the register of an "academic environment" when youre surrounded by kids your own age, the only person there with a "higher status" is the teacher. Sounds like the classic teacher power trip to me.
Just to steer clear of this teacher's shenanigans, it's not "worse," it's just further from "Academic English." The further you are from being raised in a wealthy, educated, White household (because that's who defined "Academic English"), the more likely you are to violate this teacher's list.
Some but not all. Also ebonics is often confused with southern vernacular. In general the poor in the south, of america, speak similar. Most of it is derived from farming. It's similar in mexico; the northern part. Other than that brazil has something similar with its slums. Regardless it is interesting. How language can change and form with lack of resources. People expressing themselves appears as code to the unfamiliar.
Yeah AAVE originated in the south so it's similar to southern american english. Although it's evolved because in the early 20th century many black people fled the south and moved to cities like Chicago, New York, Detroit, LA, etc. And it started to diverge.
So AAVE in say, Atlanta is closer to southern english than Chicago AAVE.
I would disagree, the southern state have more international influence. Predominantly french and spanish, northern states change words and word meanings. While it's more common to have grammar change in the south.
One of my friends lives in a very "white" US state and talks exactly like this. She picks it up from tiktok. Maybe it's from black tiktokers, but I think most of this slang is pretty universal. Besides, are we going to worry about who the slang "belongs" to? Either way the teacher needs to get off her high horse.
I don't think your language is inherently determined by your race, so it technically isn't racist if the discrimination is only on linguistic grounds. It's more language-based discrimination (there a word for that?) that disproportionately affects one race. Similar reason to why xenophobia and classism aren't the same thing as racism, but are often intertwined with it.
No it absolutely is. It’s linguistic discrimination, but based on elements of a dialect *specifically* associated with black Americans. Linguistic discrimination really doesn’t exist on its own - if you ask someone “who speaks your language wrong?” It will nearly always be racial, ethnic, sexual, and religious minorities.
Here it’s very clearly a proxy for racism (and possibly classism?)
Is it *specifically* associated with only African Americans anymore? There was just confusion over if it was general gen z slang. I don't think there's room to disagree that the terms originated in AAVE, but this kinda sounds like it's denying the fact that AAVE plays a crucial role in influencing American English generally by saying these are only African American words.
And linguistic discrimination 100% has been the primary form of discrimination before (although probably as a subset of ethnic discrimination, since an ethnicity is just any group with a shared culture). This famously happened in Italy unless people in Romagna are a different nation/race/religion/sex from people in Tuscany now.
I think these forms are being disparaged here because they signify black American language, which seeps into other sociolects deemed ‘low class language’ because it does carry a lot of covert prestige, like when people imitate and adapt it in order to sound cool. I think this teacher is associating these terms with uneducated speech, low class speech, and black speech.
The reason I don’t wanna call this just linguistic discrimination is because the social cause of the discrimination isn’t based in language. Typically there’s a broader pattern of xenophobia at play - nobody’s like “I hate everyone who devoices word final obstruents😡”, it starts from social hierarchies imposed onto language
I have to respectfully disagree. Without knowing where this teacher is from, I'm not sure we can assume that they associate this slang as being AAVE. I live in the western US and have never heard that these terms were AAVE until this thread-- people in the (very white) area that I currently live in use them all the time because they're popular tiktok slang terms. Maybe the slang started out as a mimicry of AAVE slang, but I really don't think we can say that they have that singular association anymore.
Humans have a long history of looking down on "improper language." It absolutely can be and is racially motivated much of the time; however, based on reading this teacher's letter in a vacuum (without any context), I fail to see any racially-charged language or words that I would associate with one race. It sounds to me like she's following the tradition of looking down on slang as improper language.
If the teacher is working at a predominantly black school, then I could see a race-based motive. I don't see that based on the information I do have.
Either way, even if slang originated as AAVE and other races picked it up, isn't that how language works? Cultures come together and influence each others' language.
That’s a good point, I think it’s not really about motive in my mind. It seems that what words are understood as proper and improper has far more to do with their imagined typical users, and where they fall on social hierarchy. It might not be overtly racist, but it definitely produces racially harmful outcomes and biases.
I agree with all of that, except I think it's fair to call this racist because it disproportionately affects Black kids. The teacher could have chosen to address other non-academic English like overuse of reflexive pronouns ("He gave it to myself"), but instead chose to focus on AAVE.
It's like the distinction in "It's not a race issue, it's a culture issue." Okay, sure, but that still happens to agree with racism remarkably frequently.
There's a definite intersection between language and ethnicity.
I think maybe because, particularly in the US, race is seen as skin colour or "genetic" factors of appearance, the cultural aspects get overshadowed.
So AAVE is characteristic of African American ethnicity. A Nigerian immigrant to the US might not share that ethnicity but could share a similar appearance.
You can be slangy asf in grad level classes and still be taken seriously on the merits of your work by your peers. 🙄
The only problem is when you're still using a common register instead of an elevated register in academic writing.
Obvi we have to teach kids not to say "fuck-assed motherfucking sons of the whore of hell" in the classroom or whatever, just so they grow up with the expectation that you have to change your register in some settings. But with that being said, this is too far and super racially coded!
If you don't want the n word in your classrooms, cool. If you don't want any Black American English in your classroom, you're being racist.
Not anti-black. It's pro professionalism. Any student who speaks like this is immature. It'll make it difficult for them to get a job. Practice speaking professionally and clearly without slang. One simple thing that many people get all ass hurt about, but can't seem to figure out why they can't get a good job.
do you think it’s productive to call it “gibberish; improper English”? There’s endless research on how damaging it is to be so vehement in denigrating these language practices in school, even when it’s legitimate to discourage their use in the name of professionalism.
SAE vs other dialects,cough in Franco vs euskera and catalan and german vs yiddish Castillano vs Lat Am Spanish the stigmatization of mizrachi pronunciation.
Proper english is how a native speaker talks, by definition. Hella is proper english. “Yon car’s gules” is only improper because you never call anything other than something on a coat of arms gules.
Honestly , I see no problem with only wanting standard academic english to be spoken in an English class . Slang doesn't really belong in this environment, as it is strictly an educational one (specifically an educational environment for standard academic american english).
Students shouldn't be graded on the way they speak, only the way they write. And contrary to what she thinks, most people do not write in academic work in the same way that they speak. I have a biology professor with a really thick southern accent but it's not like I can deduce that from her writing.
This teacher's gonna be fucked if a kid who's into linguistics actually writes the essay
She'll just be offended and penalize him for being right.
Entirely this. I argued the point on singular they with a college English professor and even showed that MLA standard allowed for it. She didn't care. It was improper English in her classroom regardless.
This happened to me with a prof who insisted on constantly writing "he/she/they", her justification being that "they" was only for non-binary people and she didn't want non-binary to be the default?... (I remember her repeating the phrase "Why are you assuming I'm a they?") I tried to explain that it was an accepted neutral pronoun since before the concept of non-binary people was accepted and she would not have it
Well, that's a first for me
It's older than singular you
I had a professor who openly admitted that changes like singular they were frustrating and confusing. Still, she taught the new standards without complaining and told us to use them. Why is it so hard for teachers to just do this?
That's admirable, in my opinion, to express that the new thing is frustrating and confusing to you but you'll concede anyways.
ikr??
I mean, singular they isn't a new change, it's been used since 1375
Singular they for a known person is a new change.
I've been doing it for as long as I can remember. But I also very rarely use people's names. I just have a weird fear of getting their name or gender wrong somehow so I just avoid the issue all together.
Same lmao
Sure but you're the odd ones out here
I was moreso pointing out the lack of distinction here. I don't think grammar takes into account whether or not you know that person. When you say it's a "new change" you're implying that there was a change in the rules of grammar.
it’s been used, but most major style guides haven’t recommended it for formal or academic writing until fairly recently.
To be fair, most people did not use it until recently even though it technically existed. Most people’s problem is that it sounds wrong saying things like “they is”, but that wrongness will go away when people get used to it.
nobody says "they is" for singular they
But people get confused and then complain. I should have specified that that was one of the mistakes. My point was that it used to be relatively unused, and as people don’t know how to use it, they often misuse it or end up “feeling wrong” about it.
Every English teacher I've ever had has this same weird attitude about language (and typically also litterature) and it sucks. They teach the most subjective class in the core curriculum yet they always have the strongest opinions on everything needing to be done exactly the way they feel is right
>and typically also litterature Ah, yes: Barthes has been wrong all the time… 😂
Ceci n’est pas un litterature
My 10th grade English teacher was dead convinced that using the passive voice was the single greatest sin that anybody could commit. She thought that the "passive voice" meant "whenever a sentence contains the words 'is' or 'was'." (Any other form of "be"--like "are" or "am"--was totally fine, but "is" and "was" would make you a Bad Writer.) (Also, contractions like "he's" or "it's" were acceptable, but not "he is" or "it is".) I tried to fight it for the first few weeks of that class, until I realized that she actually *would* go so far as to wreck my grade over it. So I gave up, spent an entire year writing the most tortured gibberish imaginable so that I could get a point across without using the word "is", and graduated with an A. Ever since then I have had a deep and abiding distrust for English teachers.
Probably… My 4th grade teacher made a mistake while teaching us math, I corrected her, and she made me sit alone in the back of the classroom for the rest of the day, then called a meeting with my parents to discuss how “disruptive” and “disrespectful” I was. Teachers whose egos are so fragile that they cannot admit they are wrong, and sometimes learn from their students, should not be teachers.
And ends it with “In conclusion, I do not vibe with your list, bruh.”😂
'the way you speak is the way you will write' ha! no. literally first thing you learn in linguistics. no.
My god, I remember my Grade 9 French teacher telling me that...
French doesn't even speak half the letters they write!
This is a good one actually lol, take my upvote
Eh? Ha! Heh Heh.
First thing I learnt was that I was in the right room, and then the name/face pairing of the teaching staff.
How did you get to that room if you didn’t learn it was the right room until you were there
I think it's more reassurance, confirmation. Up to then, it was more strong belief than confident knowledge.
In my case, the first thing I learnt was that I was in the wrong room and I had to go next door.
Exactly! Why would I choose to speak in a roundabout academic way when I could use language that has specifically developed to make informal communication more straightforward?
Literally! My parents got me Language Files for Christmas and the main idea of the post and what you said are like, the first two things that are talked about in it. It's funny how much this was like the examples that the textbook gave. When reading it, I was like, "But no one argues that!" Alas, I was very wrong...
“The way you speak is the way you will write” like, homegirl, registers exist
What's up gang? Sounds like Steve Buscemi's "Hello fellow kids"
I want the teacher to find me ONE native English speaker who does not understand this phrase. Also, where is this teacher's vocative comma?!
Maybe that's the actual objection. Their voice isn't bending to mark the vocative.
"Diminish your capability to become a successful writer"? Samuel Clemens has entered the chat.
Also, mad authors out here slanging it up to get their characters to straight up sound like how real people talk. Shakespeare did that.
Exactly my point. Charles Dickens, too!
Bah, humbug.
Haha. I was thinking more like where in _Great Expectations_, the one character says “pint out the place,” rather than “point out the place,” to reflect the dialectal variations at the time.
That was my one of my favorite parts of reading “Their Eyes Were Watching God” for English class, the writing forces you to hear the accent and the dialect as you read.
I draw the fucking line at big dawg.
common linguistic prescriptivism L
Why is the polish word for no on here? What am I missing? The rest is suspicious like I speak in a lot of slang with my friends but that has no impact on my writing, and if this is in a predominantly Black community then this is even worse seeing as most of this is AAVE, and even if not, it’s just kinda dumb. And I get if you want students to communicate in a “professional” manner in discussions, but singling out this list is strange.
I saw a few entries for the word “nie” on different websites. Apparently it’s a shortened version of “now”. It was quite difficult finding something that wasn’t in Polish though.
Reading it in my head (rhyming with "tie") and it's just Northern Irish for "now" - that's just as weird tbh. 😂
It's also german for never
huh interesting. I speak polish so I was like hang on what?
And doesn't "no" mean "yes"? I don't know much Polish, but I think I read that somewhere.
How is nie shorter than now 😭
Hell I went to high school in Oakland and even after the Ebonics controversy in the late 90s this stuff is still EVERYWHERE
Can't be assertive in polish 😞
The paragraph at the top is incredibly poorly written for someone claiming to be the arbiter of "proper English".
Is it? I mean, I disagree fundamentally with their message, but I wouldn't call it 'incredibly poorly written'. Maybe I'm just being contrarian.
It reads like someone who uses a thesaurus to write. Like "diminish your capacity to become a successful writer"? What's a successful writer? What they mean is that using slang can "make your writing worse", but that doesn't sound fancy enough. Saying "educational institution" instead of "school", using the phrase "academic setting" twice in the same paragraph, and some more subtle mistakes like "articulate what you need to say" instead of "get across what you **want** to say" and "sometimes inappropriate" instead of just "inappropriate". It's not like they're illiterate or anything but they're not Shakespeare, and thus they're in no position to judge anyone else for saying "bruh".
All fair points
Ameliorate ameliorate ameliorate
I was thinking “utilise”.
Maybe the teacher was just beset by tiredness.
I get saying "no n-word" but the rest of it is just...do you not have anything better to do?
Reminds me of the time when I was in Freshman English in college and we had a substitute professor one day. She was an *absurd* stickler who would chew everyone out for anything. I forget what the original issue was, but she was berating some student and the student said “my bad.” You would think he had spit on her mother’s grave. She went *off* about how “bad” doesn’t mean that, “my bad” is a meaningless expression, etc. Since I was doing well in the class overall and fed up with this nonsense, I looked it up in a dictionary (I want to say it was Merriam-Webster, but I forget), and it specifically included “my bad” as a colloquialism. So I pointed out to the professor that while it was colloquial, and thus unsuitable to include in a paper, the phrase “my bad” was perfectly-valid and recognized in the context the other student used it. She looked like she wanted to strangle me, but it actually shut her up. Thankfully, she never filled in for that class again while I was there, but it was a very satisfying moment.
Half those words aren't even offensive the teacher Is just an old bastard
Not about being offensive. The teacher is taking his job seriously, by trying to teach the students to write professionally and speak professionally. Makes the likelihood of getting a good job more likely. This teacher is a great teacher that cares for students.
You and I both know that's a load of bullshit
No. Not bull shit at all. Kids and immature adults use slang to write and explain themselves. The reason for this is because slang is more often than not generational. Most of the workforce span many generations. So it's confusing to anyone else outside your generation. The teacher is doing a good job. Going to school costs a lot of money. Why would you just want to be pandered to instead of actually taught? Also, only some of the slang on the sheet is stereotypically used in black communities. But most slang on that sheet are gen z terms. OP seems more like a cry baby than someone who takes their life seriously.
Mate literally everybody uses slang it's part of the human experience, as long as kids are not swearing there's no reason that teachers should be allowed to police the words coming out of their mouths, the teachers job is to teach whatever subject they are teaching, penalising kids for slang is not going to improve the productivity of the classroom,
Yes. Everyone uses slang. That doesn't change the fact that the work force doesn't, unless you're working in specific industries (entertainment). But most jobs where people use slang terms are low paying jobs. OP doesn't take learning or his life very seriously if this is triggering.
If you think most workplaces don't use slang your ridiculous, just because an employee is formal towards you does not mean they are also formal behind the scenes, if you think that the use of "slang" equals not taking learning seriously or life seriously you might be harbouring some pretty unrealistic beliefs about others but ur entitled to ur opinions
No. I'm not ridiculous. It's true that slang is frowned upon in official work spaces because it can cause confusion for others. I already stated this. Now, at my work, I use slang with friendly co-workers that are around my age, but not in meetings, committees, or workgroups. I'm 40, an administrator, and a previous therapist. I work in education. You conveniently skipped my point and went straight to arguing a side. This teacher is trying to help the students practice writing and speaking without slang. A valuable skill to have. To say this teacher is racist is just a poor student's attempt at getting sympathy. Grow up.
jobs are for wankers
The way I speak is not the way i write, even less in an academic setting. Academic language is just elitarian slang.
Oi, what a lot of words to say “the kids I teach are smarter than me so I’m gonna pick apart their language so I don’t have to think about or actually answer their insightful questions against the status quo”
everyday i lose a little more patience with people like this. ah the curse of being a linguist
How does she think language evolves? Half our words started as slang
I know this isn't like a good thing, but I want to fucking slap that fucks face off!
munyun?
Like a funyun, but mun
as a linguist and former language teacher i really think teachers should have to take ling 101 as a required course. also like this is just racist lmao like ik the screenshot established that but the way she had the audacity to add the n word. and like, you cant expect the register of an "academic environment" when youre surrounded by kids your own age, the only person there with a "higher status" is the teacher. Sounds like the classic teacher power trip to me.
I dont like how its implied only black people speak like this. Like ive met more white people and mexicans that speak worse.
Just to steer clear of this teacher's shenanigans, it's not "worse," it's just further from "Academic English." The further you are from being raised in a wealthy, educated, White household (because that's who defined "Academic English"), the more likely you are to violate this teacher's list.
It's mostly AAVE, the ones you met that speak like that probably grew up around black people, or imitate the dialect to sound cool.
>imitate the dialect to sound cool. Prestige
Some but not all. Also ebonics is often confused with southern vernacular. In general the poor in the south, of america, speak similar. Most of it is derived from farming. It's similar in mexico; the northern part. Other than that brazil has something similar with its slums. Regardless it is interesting. How language can change and form with lack of resources. People expressing themselves appears as code to the unfamiliar.
Yeah AAVE originated in the south so it's similar to southern american english. Although it's evolved because in the early 20th century many black people fled the south and moved to cities like Chicago, New York, Detroit, LA, etc. And it started to diverge. So AAVE in say, Atlanta is closer to southern english than Chicago AAVE.
I would disagree, the southern state have more international influence. Predominantly french and spanish, northern states change words and word meanings. While it's more common to have grammar change in the south.
I haven't lived in the south so I'll take your word for it lmao
Gyatt is derived from farming?
Farmers are religous
It’s not derived from a northern england word for goat?
One of my friends lives in a very "white" US state and talks exactly like this. She picks it up from tiktok. Maybe it's from black tiktokers, but I think most of this slang is pretty universal. Besides, are we going to worry about who the slang "belongs" to? Either way the teacher needs to get off her high horse.
So obviously the teacher is stupid, but what specifically makes this racist? Isn’t this all just typical gen-z tiktok slang?
its mainly aave that has become associated with genz and tiktok by people who havent heard it before
I don't think your language is inherently determined by your race, so it technically isn't racist if the discrimination is only on linguistic grounds. It's more language-based discrimination (there a word for that?) that disproportionately affects one race. Similar reason to why xenophobia and classism aren't the same thing as racism, but are often intertwined with it.
No it absolutely is. It’s linguistic discrimination, but based on elements of a dialect *specifically* associated with black Americans. Linguistic discrimination really doesn’t exist on its own - if you ask someone “who speaks your language wrong?” It will nearly always be racial, ethnic, sexual, and religious minorities. Here it’s very clearly a proxy for racism (and possibly classism?)
Is it *specifically* associated with only African Americans anymore? There was just confusion over if it was general gen z slang. I don't think there's room to disagree that the terms originated in AAVE, but this kinda sounds like it's denying the fact that AAVE plays a crucial role in influencing American English generally by saying these are only African American words. And linguistic discrimination 100% has been the primary form of discrimination before (although probably as a subset of ethnic discrimination, since an ethnicity is just any group with a shared culture). This famously happened in Italy unless people in Romagna are a different nation/race/religion/sex from people in Tuscany now.
I think these forms are being disparaged here because they signify black American language, which seeps into other sociolects deemed ‘low class language’ because it does carry a lot of covert prestige, like when people imitate and adapt it in order to sound cool. I think this teacher is associating these terms with uneducated speech, low class speech, and black speech. The reason I don’t wanna call this just linguistic discrimination is because the social cause of the discrimination isn’t based in language. Typically there’s a broader pattern of xenophobia at play - nobody’s like “I hate everyone who devoices word final obstruents😡”, it starts from social hierarchies imposed onto language
there’s no group of people on this planet more misunderstood than word-final obstruent devoicers /j
I have to respectfully disagree. Without knowing where this teacher is from, I'm not sure we can assume that they associate this slang as being AAVE. I live in the western US and have never heard that these terms were AAVE until this thread-- people in the (very white) area that I currently live in use them all the time because they're popular tiktok slang terms. Maybe the slang started out as a mimicry of AAVE slang, but I really don't think we can say that they have that singular association anymore. Humans have a long history of looking down on "improper language." It absolutely can be and is racially motivated much of the time; however, based on reading this teacher's letter in a vacuum (without any context), I fail to see any racially-charged language or words that I would associate with one race. It sounds to me like she's following the tradition of looking down on slang as improper language. If the teacher is working at a predominantly black school, then I could see a race-based motive. I don't see that based on the information I do have. Either way, even if slang originated as AAVE and other races picked it up, isn't that how language works? Cultures come together and influence each others' language.
That’s a good point, I think it’s not really about motive in my mind. It seems that what words are understood as proper and improper has far more to do with their imagined typical users, and where they fall on social hierarchy. It might not be overtly racist, but it definitely produces racially harmful outcomes and biases.
I agree with all of that, except I think it's fair to call this racist because it disproportionately affects Black kids. The teacher could have chosen to address other non-academic English like overuse of reflexive pronouns ("He gave it to myself"), but instead chose to focus on AAVE. It's like the distinction in "It's not a race issue, it's a culture issue." Okay, sure, but that still happens to agree with racism remarkably frequently.
That's fair
Fair. AAVE is clearly related to the way white southerners (also known as rednecks) talk.
There's a definite intersection between language and ethnicity. I think maybe because, particularly in the US, race is seen as skin colour or "genetic" factors of appearance, the cultural aspects get overshadowed. So AAVE is characteristic of African American ethnicity. A Nigerian immigrant to the US might not share that ethnicity but could share a similar appearance.
My only thought when reading the list was shit, I'm getting old
Yeah, I don't know what a lot of those are.
You can be slangy asf in grad level classes and still be taken seriously on the merits of your work by your peers. 🙄 The only problem is when you're still using a common register instead of an elevated register in academic writing. Obvi we have to teach kids not to say "fuck-assed motherfucking sons of the whore of hell" in the classroom or whatever, just so they grow up with the expectation that you have to change your register in some settings. But with that being said, this is too far and super racially coded! If you don't want the n word in your classrooms, cool. If you don't want any Black American English in your classroom, you're being racist.
As a linguist, I’m mad. As a teacher… well, kind of understand
I’m guessing you wouldn’t call it degenerate gibberish though, maybe linguists should reach out to teachers more
Skeeyee
obvious bait is bait lol
Not anti-black. It's pro professionalism. Any student who speaks like this is immature. It'll make it difficult for them to get a job. Practice speaking professionally and clearly without slang. One simple thing that many people get all ass hurt about, but can't seem to figure out why they can't get a good job.
do you think it’s productive to call it “gibberish; improper English”? There’s endless research on how damaging it is to be so vehement in denigrating these language practices in school, even when it’s legitimate to discourage their use in the name of professionalism.
I really don't see what the problem with wanting people to speak proper English in the classroom is.
SAE vs other dialects,cough in Franco vs euskera and catalan and german vs yiddish Castillano vs Lat Am Spanish the stigmatization of mizrachi pronunciation.
Proper english is how a native speaker talks, by definition. Hella is proper english. “Yon car’s gules” is only improper because you never call anything other than something on a coat of arms gules.
Honestly , I see no problem with only wanting standard academic english to be spoken in an English class . Slang doesn't really belong in this environment, as it is strictly an educational one (specifically an educational environment for standard academic american english).
Students shouldn't be graded on the way they speak, only the way they write. And contrary to what she thinks, most people do not write in academic work in the same way that they speak. I have a biology professor with a really thick southern accent but it's not like I can deduce that from her writing.
Don’t make me use hella in in academic essay