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John McWhorter Quotes
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It would be good if teachers could genuinely understand that black English is not mistakes, it’s just different English, and that what you want to do is add an additional dialect to black students’ repertoire rather than teaching them out of what’s thought of as a bad habit, like sloppy posture or chewing with your mouth open. (John McWhorter Quotes)
Black English is simpler than standard English in some ways; for example, it often gets by with just ‘be’ and drops ‘am,’ ‘is,’ and ‘are.’ That’s because black English arose when adult African slaves learned the language. (John McWhorter Quotes)
Black English is something which - it’s a natural system in itself. And even though it is a dialect of English, it can be very difficult for people who don’t speak it, or who haven’t been raised in it, to understand when it’s running by quickly, spoken in particular by young men colloquially to each other. So that really is an issue. (John McWhorter Quotes)
The contribution of West African languages to Ebonics is absolutely infinitesimal. What it actually is is a very interesting hybrid of regional dialects of Great Britain that slaves in America were exposed to because they often worked alongside the indentured servants who spoke those dialects that we often learn about in school. (John McWhorter Quotes)
LOL’ is one of several texting expressions that convey nuance in a system where you don’t have the voice and face to do it the way you normally would. (John McWhorter Quotes)
Rap and spoken word have reawakened the country to poetry in itself. Texting and Twitter encourage creative uses of casual language, in ways I have celebrated widely. But we’ve fallen behind on savoring the formal layer of our language. (John McWhorter Quotes)
As languages go, English is pretty user friendly. If you look at a tiny language spoken somewhere that most of us have never heard of, chances are it’s going to be so complicated that you have a hard time imagining how people can walk around speaking it without having a stroke. (John McWhorter Quotes)