Transcripts For CSPAN2 Talking Back Talking Black 20170528

My name is cynthia chaldekas. Thank you for coming here tonight. Im a librarian at manhattan library. Im happy to present John Mcwhorter. Were lucky that john has come more than once. He has been very kind about that. This is his third visit. Tonight he will speak about his most recent book, talking back, talking black, truth about americas lingua franca. John mcwhorter is associate professor of english and comparative literature at Columbia University where he teaches linguistics, western civilization, Music History and american studies. New york times bestsellerring author and columnist for Time Magazine and regular contributor to the atlantic, the wall street journal, and the Washington Post and he is the author of 16 books, and tonight he is going to be speaking about his most recent book, talking back, talking black. Without further adieu, John Mcwhorter please. [applause] thanks, folks. Thank you for coming here tonight. What i want to talk to you about, for not too long is the last book that i published which was called, talking back, talking black. Itit had a very compact thesis. I wanted to see if i could make the general public have a more positive view of the dialect that most black americans use in casual situations because the general idea is that black english is some sort of a lapse or stain or scourge. Always bothered me. I never heard it that way. But the misperception continues and we linguists, this crowd known as linguists shake our head at this idea that the general public, including the educated general public has, that there is something wrong with the way black people talk. We always say, the public just doesnt get it. But, to tell the truth, i started to feel as if a lot of why the public doesnt get it is linguists fault, and by linguists i include myself. So i thought somebody needs to put something out there that addresses this all in a new way. First what do i mean by black english . These days if the troll the academic literature, you will find it called africanamerican vernacular english or ave. I learned it as black english in the 80s, i formed habits. I will stick with black english but what is meant by that . Okay, it doesnt only mean the slang that is more commonly used by black people and especially black young people than others. Thats part of it. But it is not only the slang. We linguists are not shaking our head about slang. People dont like dissertations about slang. I would not waste a book on just the slang of black english. The slang is maybe 1 8 of it. That is not what we mean by black english. What we really mean is two other things. First of all, there is the different, now in link linguistics we call it phonology but others call it accent. Every american has a sense on some level there is a black way to sound and if it bothers you for me to say that, i will be talking about that in about 15 minutes. But most people have a sense that you can usually tell that a person is a black american even if youre not looking at them, you would know from listening to them over the phone even if no slang were being used. That has been proven scientifically again and again. Americans, both white and black, are very, very good at that. To a linguist it is black english has a different phonology than mainstream standard english. The slang, sort of, especially the sound system, it is a system, and then it is how you put words together. Linguists call that grammar we learned that is not a good word to use in the real world, because the way were all taught grammar, grammar is about a bunch of things people do wrong. So to the general ear, so to the extent black english has grammar it is bad grammar. To a linguist it is genuinely coy inherrent and legitimate grammar. But the grammar is absolutely essential to a different way of speaking. Slang, which i am never going to mention again, really mainly the sound system, and the grammar. That is what im talking about when i say black english. And, who speaks it . Definitely not all black americans. Definitely not. There are black americans who do not speak black english on any of those three levels. However, its impossible to put an exact figure to it especially because, as with almost anything that is interesting, were talking about continuum and climbs. The vast majority of black people control black english to some degree. It may be in only the sound. It might be the sound and the grammar, but the vast majority, in other words this corresponds to the gut sense that we have that there is a black way of speaking or a black sound. So that is what i mean by black english. It is not the same thing as southern whitening like. I will get to that. It is a black heritage possession. That is what black english is. A great many of people think of it as trash. This goes on decade after decade after decade and there are scholars who have come before me who have done magnificent, detailed work on black english and yet whenever the dialect comes up in the news for some reason, people always have the same hoaried misimpressions. It is frustrating and i wonder if it has to be that way. Now there are two things that linguists ha often said about how black english should be perceived. There are two major prongs, there is a message weve given the public. One of them is, is that if you dont like black english, then inherently youre not liking black people. So that means, if you diss black english youre a racist. That has been said, not usually in so few words but thats a point that many people make in classes. You can read it in books. You can have conversations about it. I dont think that goes through and it is not just because as some of you may know, i have a reputation as being a contrarian on race issues. Any linguist would agree with me on this point which is, the people who think black english is bad grammar are the same people who would say the same thing for example, about poor southern whites grammar which is very similar. Nobody is saying those people are using perfect english grammar and black people doing the same things are getting it wrong. There is a general sense we have in this country, in the educated world in general, that most people walk around breaking the rules of their own language. That there are all of these grammatical constructions people get wrong, that people say less books, rather than fewer books. Wrong to say billy and me went to the store rather than billy and i went to the store. Yes, i can do a whole talk on that. We have a sense that people mess up their grammar. So you can listen to black people using constructions that are considered bad grammar in the same way that very similar around often the same constructions as seen as bad grammar when white people use them and you dont have to be a racist. Something i have heard many whites say i would be a racist if i didnt think this was bad grammar. I understand that black people have been condemned bad grammar by slavery and jim crow but our job is to teach them out of it, not to pretend it is okay to use bad grammar. Now you may disagree, but that is not a bigot. Racism alone doesnt help us here. Im not saying that it is not part of it, certainly racism plays a part but is it the only part and more to the point, can the racism itself be changed. But it is not the only part. And by it is not the only part, i dont mean it is 85 . It is really not the only part. Another aspect of it is that linguists will say, black english is okay because it is systemic. And what that means is you look at the things that are different in black english and they actually follow rules in the same way as your own language follows rules. So that means it is a structured and legitimate form of speech and you know, i am sorry to say this to my own dissertation advisor and all the people who came before me and frankly the ones right along with me and the ones that have come after, folks, i know some of you are watching, i will say it, the system argument doesnt convince the public. Im sorry youve seen it. What i mean is Something Like this, deserve to be, which is very different in black english than it is in standard english. A black person might say, she my sister. You dont have the wish, to be, but again the same person would never say i your sister. That is bad grammar in black english. It has to be im. You use the word, to be, with some persons and numbers and not others. So it is omitted as linguists put it, only in certain contexts as we put it. So if a martian were learning how to speak black english for real to be indistinguishable they would have a lot to learn how that to be is used. Would surprise you how high the stack of papers have been written about to be in black english. It is complicated. Most of the people outside, few hundred pointy academics think, it is systemic, but why are they leaving the verb to be at all . This is english, youre supposed to include it. To the extent they leave it out it is bad structure. It is bad systems. The mafia is a system. Nobody would want a mafia to run a town. A toy piano is very systemic. I couldnt build a toy piano at gunpoint. Nobody wants to hear show chopin on a toypy anna. Systemty is no argument. That is the place which started with that book. I thought is that it . Matter of saying youre a racist if you dont like the dialect or it is systemic while the American Public thinks, yeah it is a broken system . So talking back, talking black, gets across four quick points designed to get under or maybe around the typical argument. I will typically outline what they are. One of them is this. Black english is full of things that it does not do that mainstream standard english does. This verb to be is not there. So you think something has been left out, its broken. What is less covered is that black english is more complex in many ways than mainstream standard english but we have a hard time hearing it because all we hear is quote, unquote, bad grammar. The slang also gets in the way. There are all sorts of things in black english that would be more challenging for the foreigner to learn than if they had to learn the language of the wall street journal. I will give you two quick ones. All of these things sound what we classify as slang. Theyre not slang. Theyre bull. For example, you could listen to, i picture a little black boy. First time i heard it, one of cousins. Sounds like theyre over using had when they tell a story. What happened was she come to my house and she had said i she wants lemonade. I will get you some and i dropped pitcher and i bent over on the floor and she had said what are you doing . I had said, im having a bad day. It stops there. Youre wondering, had, had, had, where does it end. You notice that the had is at the end. Some people listen to that, that person doesnt know how to use the perfect. That is not what it is. Black english has something you can find in languages spoken by obscure groups of people all over the world. It has a narrative past separate from the regular past. You can find this in many languages f youre a linguist who describes languages you kind of wait for it. There is a path you use to say Something Like i spilled the lemonade on the floor. There is a past you use, some different suffix or prefix or some little word you use when youre spinning through a narrative. It would be as if in english we didnt have the ed, but he had some other suffix we used. English has to be a speech variety with a narrative past. Not that my cousin doesnt know how to put ed on end of things, i say, he is grown man now but back then, he is fluent speak of english, when he tells the story he piles in the hads. He wouldnt think about that anymore than any of us can really explain when you use ah, and the, when we think about how we use it going throughout the day. Human beings speak english subconsciously. Nobody goes around thinking about the narrative had. There is a sense after joke people say what happened is that . That one thing. Nobody thinks of it as grammar. Really its a kind of grammar. It is more complex what you have to do to tell a story in standard english. For example, done. You done ate it. You hair somebody saying. The natural thought that person is saying something blackly. What do you mean, done ate . Should have done eaten, maybe . Why not in general, you ate it . What is the usage of done . You move on thinking black people did it wrong. Done is really interesting. I dont mean subtle, endless complexity no system at all that. Would be a way tricking you thinking something is complex. That is actually a very precise usage took people a long time to figure out. It is interesting, is it the recent past, like you done ate it, which presumably happened ten minutes ago. No, there are other things that people use done for. Somebody say i done had a crush on you since you were 12. That isnt recent. That was presumably a long time ago. It es recent past, it is distant past, it is in between and challenging but it is not random. Nobody walks around using some bit of stuff in a language randomly. That is not what black people are doing anymore than anybody else is doing. Turns out that done marks counterexpectations. What i mean whenever you hear a black person using done where if you dont speak black english you would just use the past. What theyre talking about is something that you wouldnt have expected. So you done ate it, is somebody who thought it would be there for them to eat. I done had a crush on you since you were 12, means you wouldnt have known it, but here you are 40 and ive had a crush on you since you were 12. It is not, how did you get here, i done took the subway. No, unless the subway was just built yesterday and it was you first time on the subway or Something Like that. Otherwise just took the subway. This is grammar, people. This is what people study. This is books this thick. Black english has lots of those things. Im giving you two for purposes of time. Please think i can only think of one more. Black english is full of these things. You listen to it as trash because it has the slang and breaks mainstream english rules but what is harder to hear, all these things in it more complex than we know. That is the first thing. I wish that had been made clearer to the public than it has been because it has to be stressed. People respect complexity. Not just difference but complexity. Boy, black english is very complex. That is the first thing. Second thing, if were on our way to understanding that black english is not wrong and that it is not, not wrong wrong because the people who speak it are black, but not not wrong but not only systemic but complicated then we can address this prickly issue whether its wrong to say that somebody does or does not sound black. Because, it can be really tricky to talk about sounding or not sounding black because given the way black english is perceived, and given the way black people are often perceived, very hard not to hear that person had a black sound as meaning something negative as sounding like some kind of a slur. The idea, there must be something wrong with the black sound. We think it must mean, that that person uses bad grammar, quote, unquote, et cetera, et cetera. But actually what would be surprising is if there were no black sound, because, human speech starts in one place and then there are some people who go in this direction and some people who go in that direction. Now latin started here, the people who went in this direction ended up speaking french because latin kept changing in various random ways. The people who went in this direction ended up speaking spanish because late tin changed in random ways different from the ones over there. That is how it works. Same thing with dialects. Some people go over here end up speaking a different kind of english than people over here. This is every bit the point even when the people live like this because it is not always a matter of geography. It is also social identification. You talk like the people you are most intimate with. English will naturally change in Different Directions and sounds are always changing in any language. Listen to most americans now, it is getting to the point under 40. You will notice that theyre more likely to say i caught a fish, rather than i caught a fish. Very subtle. There is no value judgment attached to it, but the ah sound is melting in the ah sound. I caught a fish. Sushi is raw fish. Hawks make lazy circle in the sky. If it isnt the way you talk listen to your kids, ever more common, more regions in america every decade. That is a sound change. That is one example what is happening in all human speech all the time. Of course black people has a sound. The sound has nothing to do with sinuses anything like that, just that the vowels are a little bit different. This has been studied in sources so obscure it seems almost willful. Nobody wants to touch this. You find it in journals with nothing to do with linguistics. Journals printed in one issue in finland but it has been proven again and again, a person will study one vowel at a time and basically never tell the world. Great. So about three years ago i decided what would happen if you actually used a specially modern technology and analyze ad few black peoples vowels and a few white peoples vowels, wouldnt you find that the vowels sit in different places in the mouth . I used two students, coal and hickman, thank you, guys. It was like this. I was driving listening to npr, i had a experience i suspect a lot of us have often. Somebody was talking about tax policy, in the back of my mind thought black. How do you know . In the back of my mind. I wasnt sitting there tabulating is this person that is a black person. How do i know . It is interesting because were trained to think no, if youre white, im a racist for even supposing that and black people often think, there is not a black way to talk because it seems like it is playing into the whole idea there is racism. Own a certain level. All of us know southern whites dont sound exactly like black people. What i was listening to on npr was not a southerner, it was a black person. I checked and it was. I thought what were the vowels and there are some. It is kind of hard to talk about in this format. It would be kind of boring but there are different vowels. There is also a different tambre. This is nothing to do with anatomy where you happen to produce your sound. If youre opera singer you are taught to place your voice in a different way. Different languages have different tambre. Different tile elects have different tambre in some way. Different tambre tip you off subconsciously this person is viola davis and not Melissa Mccarthy. You know instantly, it can be analyzed scientifically. That is interesting. Time that got out there. The interesting thing is, what about your kids . Your kids will ask, i asked my mother, in 1973, people ask all over the place, your kids, how can you tell somebody is black even though you cant see them, mommy . The impulse to say that is not true. Black people sound like southerners. You know that is not true. Or the impulse is to say, no, everybody talks in different ways, you shouldnt stereotype. If youre kid has an i. Q. Over 40. Im not stereotyping im hearing the truth. So what do you tell the kid . I think that we need to get comfortable saying, black people have a slightly different sound because they often spend more time with one another just like white people sound more like one another because they tend to spend more time together. That is true of all human groups of the that is not racist. It is just true and harmless. There is nothing wrong with the way viola davis sounds as opposed to the way Melissa Mccarthy sounds but she definitely sounds black. I can tell you, because she does the voice of a queen on the disney cartoon series, sophia the first. Yes it is in my house because i have you small children. Once i had my back turned the queen said something, i had never seen that character. That little bell went off, the queen is black. Is she . I turn around, i forget what the queen looks like but i went on to imdb. Who does the queen. It is viola davis. It wasnt accident. I dont have any special powers. I was hearing what every american can hear. Its a black sound. I have a chapter about that in the book. Third thing, in the book, is the answer to an objection that is traditionally leveled against arguments that black english is okay. Well they cant talk that way in a Job Interview. Somebody always says that. Somebody is talking about what some of the complexity might be how you shouldnt mock the language because youre mocking the speakers and somebody will say, yes, thats true, but they cant talk that way at a Job Interview but, okay, nobody said they were going to. Nobody needs to be that and i think that why you get that response is because after sense we often have that the way somebody speaks casually is going to interfere with their ability to speak the formal variety where they are. Now with black english that is even worse because everybody thinks it is a mistake. It is assume if you talk that way you wont be able to speak standard. Even if we understand there is not mistakes, there is a sense if you you use that system it will keep you from using the standard. That is an american kind of misimpression, perfectly understandable american misimpression because our dialect diversity here is relatively thin. English hasnt been here 2,000 years, as it has in for example, england where different ways of speak having been doing this for much longer. There are kinds of english there that barely sound like english to us. America is 15 minutes old. So we dont have that depth of this. Im not going to call it dialect diversification. It sounds like a disease. Just that there hasnt been much of this going on. Some gulla creole, all varieties are spoken on the geographical margin of the space, louisiana creole french is essentially extinct. Not many people speak that, there are dialect differences. Black english is the most divergent form of english most People Living in the United States has any reason to hair. So what we miss is that living in two very different dialects of the same thing is a very ordinary Human Experience and in the legions of places where this is normal nobody worries that speaking the home thing is going to interfere with speaking the formal thing. Nobody in sicily is worried that somebody who speaks sicilian is going to use it in a Job Interview instead of standard italian. And in sicily, standard italian is a italian language fan takes some of in college or Something Like that. Then there is sicilian is really different enough from that that if you roll the dice again, if sicily were a separate country, sicily would be a separate romance language. It is very different. If you see the godfather or episodes of boardwalk empire, you see characters translate using sicilian rather than standard italian. It is different enough to anybody that knows the territory, show those characters speaking textbook College Classroom italian would be ridiculous. When you see one of the civilians say in the godfather theyre speaking Something Different thannallian or spanish. That person speaks standard italian in school, in the Job Interview. There is no debate in sicily whether sicily threatens standard italian. That would never occur to anybody. Similarly in most arabspeaking countries. If you know somebody speaks arabic, when they say i speak arabic, i speak latin and french. They speak two things, the standard language, then what they learned on their mother as knee is something so different that it is although, often the speakers feel funny having it put this way because of cultural unity, it is really a different language. If you know a moroccan, the language this learned at home is like french. Then they went to school and they learned Something Like latin. Moroccan will say, i learned moroccan and then i learned arabic. Any arabic speaker that you know, unless theyre roughly from malta is like that. They wouldnt say thereby lingual. But the idea that egyptian arabic is a threat to standard arabic, no. I mean, as i mentioned this, there is an article in the new yorker last week that actually addresses it that almost beautiful length. A linguists get to the article, this article will run five minutes but it actually dwells on standard arabic and egyptian arabic and the idea people need to let go of the egyptian because it threatens the standard, no, if anything it is the other way around the black english is the same thing. So what it is black English Speakers will hit you with terminology, doglofic, two tongs. This is a term not made up for black people in the United States. This is people speaking all over the world. The idea you learn something own your mothers knee or fathers knee, and you go to school, that pretty much same way of speaking what your teachers use and that same way of speaking is on the printed page and everybody around you speaks that way, so you have learned this standard, formal way of speaking at home. That sounds so normal to us, that is very strange as linguistic experience. I would venture at least every second person in the world would never dream of that being the situation and that was even more of the case until about 200 years ago when literacy became widespread in many parts of the world such that vernacular languages were used on the page. For very typical experience, there are no figures on this, but a very typical experience is that the way you speak most spontaneously is with you your family and friends. You go to school, what is on the page is something rather different. It is not a different language but its different. As if you say house, what is on the page is domicile. You just have to know, nobody imposes it. It is just the way it always has been. You just make your way, and you learn that school way. Thats humanity. That is how it works. Only 100 of the worlds 7,000 language was are written in any real way. Most people make kind of a jump. Black english is that situation. Black people have a larger english than most white people. I wanted it to call one of my very first books a larger english. They didnt like that. And so, what i meant was that black people have more english. So nobodys going to try to use black english at a Job Interview. If we understand it is really an okay form of speech but different. Something else that any black person intuits there is a way you speak here and another way that you speak there. So black english is not a problem in that way. So the Job Interview is you just falls away. Then, theres the fourth and final thing. Minstrel, there is this unsavory sense that many people have that theres something about minutes strell speech. That is minstrel shows where white people made fun of black people and came up with a cartoonized version of black speech. There is something about minstrel speech and black english, to embrace black english, to speak black english has something to do with this Cartoon Version of black speech foisted upon us starting in the 1840s by whites. Whatever that relationship is supposed to be, it lingers. There is a sense to celebrate the language, to say someone has a black sound, all of that has something to do with minstrels, and a lot of that comes down to actual one word, am. So, if one is inclinedded to looking through old minstrel scripts or watching horrible old movies or Something Like that, or books that one reads, uncle toms cabin, you see black people using am much more than anybody would use it in standard english. Those am the best cigars i ever spoke, that sort of thing. You think, see, they were making fun of black speech and thats the sort of thing that worries me when people talk about black english and black people talking differently because there is that history. That is completely understandable, but it bears mentioning that because black english is normal human speech, coherent human speech, used by the massively sophisticated human brain, it changes over time. All language does and black english has changed over time too, and not just in the slang. Anybody knows that an episode of good times has slang sounds quaint which im old enough to remember sounded fierce and urgent at the time. Not the slang. Forget the slang. It is the sound system and grammar changed. Black people 100 years ago didnt sound like black people now and hard to know they are not with us to show it. Things were quite different. It was different in the sound system f you listen to an ancient gospel recording, listen to a gospel recording from the 30s, for example, and you listen to the black preacher talking, you listen closely, he doesnt sound like a black preacher would today, often he sound vaguely irish or caribbean. Listen to black singers in the 18 90s and 00s, which i tell you now because you dont have to go to the library. It is all on line. You will listen to darkskinned black people who sound more west indian irish than anything we sense as a black sound today. You listen to one of them, you think that person must have just been strange. They all sound that way. If you listen to recordings of exslaves made in the 30s, there were a great many made where you can listen to somebody talking born in the 1840s, they dont sound like jaime foxx and morgan freeman. They sound like something that no longer exists. What it is, just the vowels were in different places back then. Fascinating. Same thing with the grammar and that includes this am business. One of the joys of science is the countier intuitive and something that i never thought was real until i decided to check it out a couple years ago was that black people did used to use am in that way. You would never know it because it sounds utterly itly foreign now and it was done. Be is used in a way the were familiar with, people be going there all the time. Very similar it was am. The way you know it, home to harlem, claude mckay, harlem renaissance, write as loving portrait of black migrants from the south, poor black migrants from the south. They are popping off with the ams. He was trying to give a loving, anthropological portrait of these people and their lives in harlem in the 1920s. Nobody uses be in the way were used to. It is confounding. It is the core of black english today. But they used the am. Go through transcripts of exsafes they use am all the time. One sentence, somebody says, charcoal and honey am good for the baby. I dont know what that meant but it is somebody talking about child care and she says charcoal and honey am good for the baby. That is a transcript of somebody actually speaking named harriet. It is so common that you end up realizing, wait a minute, that is way people talk. Those things change over the years in any human speech. So minstrel speech is often quite distorted. In the book i call about the actual distortions. It is not completely distorted. There is extent the way black people depicted speaking in minstrel shows was reflective of the way the dialect sounded then as opposed to now. So minstrel shows were absolutely rye pull sieve. Even more so than repulsive. In many places they were just entertainment. It wasnt you went to this or that or maybe well go to a minstrel show. The minstrel show was all there was. If you watched people singing, doing skits and blacked up, doing little dances that were supposed to be black. That is how entrenched it was. The language wasnt a complete distortion. It actually gives awe window into something many of us would consider a nontopic, the history of black english. It is not just slang and mistakes, it is a whole another system of speaking black english. Those four things are what the book is about and to wind up, i will just give you two quick things that it sheds a new kind of light on. So for example, harry reid in, i believe 2010 was discovered to have said that barack obama can speak negro dialect when he wants to. Everybody felt, what does he mean . You know, now the negro was unfortunate but, harry reid is somebody who has had the benefit of a very long life and the truth is, that negro dialect is what it was called in the earliest scholarly sources. He didnt know what to call it. Is it called you ebonn nicks . People saying that barack obama uses booed grammar. No. It is not bad grammar. Barack obama can speak two things and switch into black english in the proper situation. Calling it negro dialect is not very graceful but referring to something that makes barack obama a larger speaker than george w. Bush is too easy, than say david letterman. He is a larger speaker. He has a larger, he has a larger repertoire. Speaks negro dialect when he wants to. It wasnt minstrel speech. What he could have just said, black english. I dont think he would have any reason to know the term, africanamerican vernacular english. Black english. To be honest i known white and black people who thought there was something wrong with the former president , unfortunately, switching between mainstream and black english. Black people use aks. It is not because it is hard to say the sk sound. It is used because it was the form used most often by the sorts of people from Great Britain and ireland who black people worked alongside as slaves. Just like legion of very white people crass the pond, black people said ax. It was perfectly normal. Most switch between the two today. Ask is former. Ax is black english. Black english is the home variety and comfortable and casual. That is what it is. It is not a lapse. It is because black people have more english than other people. There are those that think i might be partisan and i am making an Ivy League Defense of the disadvantaged person and i am saying this is the way my family talks and this has to do with the crazy leftism. I beg anyone to considered that is not my reputation in circles. I dont make arguments based on what used to be called kneejerk liber liberalism. I am arguing on the basis not of opinion or gut but of fact. And back to the asks, one of the facts is ask and ax competed as farida far back as old english. There is nothing wrong with people that prefer acts. That is where it comes from and that is the answer to the question. What is with acts . It is a symptom of a larger enlish. So, talking back, talking black is about what i just explained to you. I was trying to talk back about talking black. Thank you. I dont have a question. I just want to make a comment. [inaudible question] yes, um one aspect is something called shimmer for example. It is difficult to demonstrate this because nobody has conscious control over it. To the extent intuition might be and it is usually associated with black women but it is black men that there is a quote unquote up humor. There is a slight quality and you couldnt teach anybody this if they wanted to be taught. It is what you subconsciously grow up imitating from the people around you. There is that shimmer that leads to the fact there are many black people who dont have the vowels i am talking about. Sometimes we are talking about the difference between mainstream english feel, black english fill. How am i filling . That is subtle and vowels. I can do that my measuring somebodys mouth. The shimmer is subtle but it means if somebody doesnt have the vowel you can often tell. The npr person i am talking about whom i am not going to name and use the gender neutral pronoun they and how they would field. That is someone who barely has the vowels but you know it in a heartbeat and it is because of the different camber. It is magnificently subtle. It is not in a word. I couldnt demonstrate this. It is something unconscious. If you are going home on the subway, read your kindle and notice that you know the color of everybody around you. When one person is saying something standard and that guilty light goes on in your head you think black think how did i know and part of you think there will be a huskiness. You will have heard the camber i need. I wish i could do it like i play notes on a clarinet but i cant do that. I am from the Lower East Side of manhattan and a lot of people speak pig latin. Did you hear that . Yes. They didnt speak ordinary english. They made music and movies even about pig latin. Could you comment on that . Yes. There is various forms of gibberish. This is a term people use and the poplar kind of gibberish in that era, and my own, i learned pig latin, too. It is gibberish. Now a days the young ones are using something else. That is not a language but a word game. I would like to ask we mentioned barack obama used code switching to start off in one dialect and switch into another. Would you agree when people are hispanic they will say a few phrases in spanish and quickly switch codes and go into english would that be a good example of code switching . Same thing. Black people can do that too but it just isnt into what is a different language. Code switching. Hi, my question is to what extent do you think is the traditional grammatical system we learn in grade school has become arbitrary . You many the proper grammar rules . Yes. All of that is the right way to say it and they are in the imperical sense fiction. All of those Little Things made up in the 18th century. It makes sense and it is something someone made up. We are human beings and there is also going to be such a thing as fashion. We cant get away from that. All of us are going to subscribe to it. And the truth is billy and me went to the store and it is perceived as wrong. People need to be caught there is a certain batty collection of things you have to observe in formal situations if you are going to be taken seriously. That is unfortunate. If you know the history of the rules, you realize the formal rules have to be taught. However, we need to realize this the person that said billy and me went to the store and that is what most people say most of the time in the English Speaking world are not making a mistake. They are using casual speak. You just have to learn what c u casual versus formal. People should learn how to express themselves in graceful prose. There are all sorts of techniques. Just in saying this, i can predict, i wonder if this will hold it off, but since cspan is he here, and i will get angry emails i want to be a professor and learn this and that and you get used to it but you know what . I am going to keep being a professor. If you want to send me one. Hi, i want to say thank you. I want to ask about african grammatical retention. I know more like in may grandmothers generation people from the west andes and the south and africans i met now sound the same. Also, i am really proud of our great oral tradition as african people. You know, it is one of those things. There are a lot of people who said black english and ebon some of the ones less known. Black english has so much more english influence you cant say that. The sound system is definitely influenced by african language. So, for example, not having r at the end of the syllable. Mow instead of more. That is certainly an africanamerican inheritance and definitely the melody. There is black english that is part of the general system. There is controversy over what is the historical relationship between gulla and black english. You know, there are sides where, you know, they say that there is more relationships. A lot of them for some reason can canadian and i love them to pieces if any are watching. Some people say bella used to be spoken all over the United States where there was any black presence and gulla became black english in those places. It was spoken in women from delaware and the evidence is not really there for that. The fight has gone on were 35 years. I think the cases in the middle. So there was some sort of relationship between gulla creole which is west indian and what became black english. But an equal part is british and irish stuff. A lot of the construction are things said by white people. Your talk brought a lot of comments and questions that are not appropriate to go into right now. But, one of the questions i have for you is, ebonix the same as black english . Same thing. Yes. Okay. Then i will take just the liberty to ask another question. There was an opera sang by black people that the name escapes me. It was obscure. I bet during rehearsal somebody said Something Like that. That was used more for pictorial than camber. They would be afraid to say it is racist there is one. She would not have thought that. That is interesting. Question . I am under the opinion gulla means french for the mouth of animal. I am wondering if there is forced racism . I will speak and i am better because i am animal that speaks. What is your thought on that . Nobody knows for sure. I dont know the source of the reasoning. I think always growing up in french speaking countries i hear gr being thrown around and that is a short hand way of saying i am mad. I am asking what are your thoughts because i really believe that guller has that french root. You have to think allaround the subject coming up with answers. I am not sure there is a Strong Enough current in creole shows that the africanamerican language that survives as songs that people dont remember what they mean anymore is men day. It is mostly down south and in angola. The question is why would angola become the name of the language. So maybe. Thank you for the talk. I think the other thing that is hard is english is not my first language. I find the accent is made by your first language when you were two years old. You talk and listen all day for two years. So you take that in. It can be hard to change. Like chinese, most people when we talk you dont need to look at me to know it is chinese. Same thing. I came to america and i noticed black people talking different from white people but the sound is most different in the acce accent is that true . I wanted to get conformation. Not in this case. I can see how it seems that way from your perspective. Black people have roots in africa and they sound different. That is the way slaves who have grown up in africa would have sounded. For example, in the first root mini series, i forget how they had burton talking but he would have had a thick accent. Then you have the generation that is born in this country. You got Something Different and it wasnt african. This is how we know. This something clear in a city like new york city. We know how africanamerican sounds when they are speaking english as a second language. It is an accent that sounds very different to most of us because it has been commonly heard in the United States for 40 years. This person from nigeria doesnt sound anything like the black person from chicago. They have been here as long as the white people, right . They are true americans. I can tell i dont know why but i said this is not black america. He is africanamerican in my eyes. They were born here, been here for generations already. I can get rid of my accent quickly but if i switch back and talk about my grandmother for a couple months my english is not as fluent as i can be. I think that interfered with me talking good english. You can get rid of most of them. White, black americans, for generations most of them have a slight difference slightly. The analogy is correct in that some influence from the far away home can persist. In black english, the vast majority of had difference is due to the segregation that happened here. There is a dusting of african influence definitely. Hi, i lived in atlanta in the 1990s and a lot of people told me i sound dc. And i dont know what that means . That is gulla. Oh, okay. I wasnt hearing it just now. I wanted to make one more comment that i think black english is about being consciously musical. People know and almost like there is a beat to it. When you are angry there is a certain beat and joyous. Romantically also black men are great when they speak musically. No matter what i say in the setting about that i am wrong. That is definitely apart of the dialect. That is what you could call the diasper. It is another way that the dialect gives a largeness. It is just a broader, richer, repitore than any americans had to poses. To end this on a positive note, i can assure you in two years if the south there is a story about black english involved and you will hear things about bad grammar and i have this hope that just my little book will change opinions on this matter across the United States and beyond. And i hope you will all join me in pushing that effort home. Thank you. [applause] i need to drink some water. I am going to get my bottle of water this is booktv on cspan2. Television for serious readers. Here is our prime time lineup. 6 00 p. M. Eastern, harvard law professor explains how homeland is polarizing american politics social media. And former secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice weighs in on connecticutic movements around the world. And chris hays examines the criminal Justice System in america and argues law and order is carried out differently in White America than black america. Richard harris reports on the challenges facing Scientific Research and we wrap up with former Pepperdine University president David Davenport and his newest book on american individualism. Hundreds of author programs are coming up this week. We write about race in america featuring author and Pennsylvania University professor mary francis berry. On wednesday, we head to the strand bookstore in new york city to here dr. Elizabeth ford about her work in the Mental Health field. Thursday we are live from the Publishing Industries annual trade show book expo america in new york city where former president ial candidate and secretary of state Hillary Clinton talks about her upcoming book. Friday we continue coverage from book expo america as authors visit to talk about soon to be published books. First daughters jenna and barbara bush are joining us, lawrence odonal as well. And our live in Depth Program and matt taibbi who will talk about his several books and take questions. That is a look at some events booktv is covering this week. Many events are open to the public and look for them it air in the near future. Joining us on our booktv set is the author of this book, cleve jones when we rise; my