Cheesy name, that. I prefer Ebonics.

Anyway, Kerim at Keywords hit me with a two-fer: A link to Geoffrey Pullum at Language Log's harsh treatment of William Raspberry.

The occasion for writing the letter was that I had just seen the remarkably unfunny humorous column Raspberry published in the Washington Post on December 26, 1996, right after the Oakland story broke. Like everyone else, he was indirectly mocking the Oakland Unified School District and the idea of making an unprejudiced judgment about the sociolinguistic situation of many of Oakland's black schoolchildren, and directly mocking `Ebonics'.

Raspberry's column was bad, I mean ba-a-a-ad, in the Standard English sense, not the AAVE slang sense. The column was probably produced hastily, perhaps during what may have been a bibulous Christmas Day. I rather I hope he is ashamed of it. I won't explain all of the column, but basically it involved an imaginary alter ego of Raspberry himself getting into a cab in Washington DC and having a conversation, full of misunderstandings, in which the cab driver speaks AAVE and Raspberry does not. For example, the cab driver says 'Sup? (for "What's up?") as a greeting and the fictional Mr Raspberry thinks he is being asked if he would like to sup, so he says he has already dined (I did warn you that it was not funny). At the end, when he learns there is money in giving classes on AAVE, the fictional Mr Raspberry suddenly starts speaking it himself (as if all black people really do know it deep down).

And the letter itself:

I'm a linguist, and one of those who claim that African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) is a consistent language with its own rules. What I noticed was that your piece includes two paragraphs -- just 32 words -- in which the characters speak entirely in AAVE. But there appear to me to be grammatical errors in the AAVE. Not cases of difference from standard English, which is of course what correct AAVE frequently has, but rather cases of difference from AAVE as I know it. Let me run through them.

First, you have the cabbie saying What you be talkin' 'bout, my man?. But the uninflected be of AAVE is normally a habitual aspect marker. Your cabbie does not mean 'what do you habitually talk about?', he means 'what are you talking about right now?'. Surely the normal AAVE for this would be What you talkin' 'bout?, with the zero copula, not the uninflected be.

Second, you have the cabbie saying I don't be offerin' you my grub. Again, this is clearly present progressive -- it is what is happening right there and then he is referring to, not some habitual state of affairs. So the be seems wrong here too. Maybe utterances like I don't be lying do sometimes occur in AAVE for 'I am not lying', but I've never heard the construction or encountered any reference to it in the research literature; whereas I've heard I ain't lyin' hundreds of times (as in the blues song 'I Put a Spell on You', where I ain't lyin' is used as a perfect rhyme for because you['re] mine; he doesn't sing, *I don't be lyin').

The second benefit of Kerim's post is a snatch of his own experience in teaching AAVE.