BLACK ENGLISH

by J. L. Dillard ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 2, 1972

This will be a radical shift of perspective for even sophisticated and liberal readers (unless they know the work of William A. Stewart) and while it is only secondarily concerned with education, its practical implications will not be ignored. Chiefly it is devoted to the history, structure and distribution of ""Negro Non-standard English,"" which has not yet benefited from the attention of linguists. Such silly and damaging hypotheses as that it is a repository of archaic British regionalisms or the outright fabrication of minstrel show performers have given way to more insidiously biased theories tracing the dialect to ""deprivation"" or ""cognitive impairment."" As a specialist in the relatively new field of pidgin and creole languages, Dillard is able to circumvent such conscientious nonsense and treat the language objectively in terms of its own evolution and the linguistic family to which it most properly belongs. According to his scrupulously documented arguments, Black English seems to have originated as a lingua franca of the slave trade and was imported with the Africans to be disseminated among the other non-English speaking populations. Its grammar has gone unappreciated partly owing to African survivals (as basic as the behavior of verbs) but also to the general disparagement of pidgin and creole languages, including Chinese and American Indian pidgins. American history is the poorer for this neglect, as Dillard makes clear in one of his more fascinating chapters. As for the classroom, Dillard can only endorse the ""second language"" teaching procedures developed by Stewart. He backs that endorsement with the most enlightened and comprehensive study currently available, however, and he will certainly advance the controversy if not the cause.

Pub Date: Aug. 2, 1972

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1972

Categories: NONFICTION