Relax Oliver
No one is trying to force you to speak ebonics.
Your two threads are interesting.
But your commenter who says he can't find sentence structure in ebonics is full of it.
And this is a fact: language develops from the ground up. It's the reason new words are added to the dictionary regularly, the reason the meanings of phrases slip ("stink" originally had pleasant connotations).
It's hard to say someone is not speaking correctly when everyone (including you, Oliver) understands what they're saying. Furthermore, if you read the original historical documents, you'll find "proper English" is very, very new. The American nation, society and economy were created by people who couldn't spell worth a damn.
The "proper English" you extol is a trade language, like Swahili. It should be taught as such. And like any other skill it adds to your marketability. But "proper English"…like Chinese…has no more significance than that.
