@Yetanotheruser Does an old English similarity justify using it when meeting with HR for a job at CBS? It does sound ignorant and it is Ebonics. The south is full of words and expressions that come from British roots that sound ignorant to the rest of the country. Not only black people, but white people use some of them as well.
The articles was interesting, and I really do understand how language is part of who you are. I think keeping the aks pronounciation for friends and family is fine. Just like my husband uses Spanish with his family, but conducts business in English. He makes a few mistakes now and then being ESL, but his English is better than some black people I know, and they were born and raised in America. It drives me crazy. One major problem is the word is spelled ask. In writing there is no fooling with it. This helps the person sound illiterate.
Many dialects grew from an overwhelming percentage of the community being illiterate. Another influence in America can be the community has a lot of people from a specific country who speak a foreign language. Most “mistakes” fade with the next generation, because the children are educated in American schools. However, sometimes when they are educated in ghetto schools they maintain the dialect and never learn to speak standard English well, and for the life of me I don’t understand how that can be. It happens in black communities and Hispanic, maybe others too. There is obviously a social class component to it, and social class cues can be regardless of race or ethnicity.
America doesn’t like to talk about race or class. All taboo subjects. There have been Q’s on fluther with people upset that someone would say there is such a thing as someone sounding black. If I am on the phone with someone who sounds black, I think there is a a greater than 90% chance they are. If they sound white, I have no idea if they are black, Vietnamese, Italian, Irish, Mexican, etc. I don’t picture someone using standard English as any particular race, ethnicity or nationality.
I know black people who consciously do not want to give in to the white people in power. They don’t want to dress like them and don’t want to speak like them. I guess as black people move up in the class structure they might have more influence on these things, even on what words evolve in our language, but I hate that it is scene as black vs. white. I don’t think white people see it that way, but I think some black people do. In my own experience I only find this way of thinking in the south, and I think it’s because of the financial and social divide being so great in many cities there.