When I began to work on this assignment, I first thought of doing an easy topic. I read the daily news and saw a lot of material about George Bush leaning on the EPA to weaken ozone standards. That looked promising, but all the sources seemed to rely on the same Associated Press story, and I was faced with either doing a very superficial survey of news articles or doing an incredibly technical thing on ozone (about which I know nothing). I could do the standard student stuff about abortion or alcoholism or gay marriage, but I don't think I could face it—those three topics will probably cover sixty percent of my papers this year, and it's impossible to come up with anything very new.
Then I remembered one of the hottest issues in the teaching of English: Ebonics. It seemed perfect. For one thing, it's not exactly a settled issue. For another, it matters because Black English is the natural language to a significant number of my students. It also matters because I have pretty much stopped reading about this important issue during the last five years, and it's about time to start again.
Defining a few terms:
In the Annotated Bibliography itself, I'm assuming that the reader is aware of some basic definitions, so I have to help you become that reader. Here goes:
- AAE: African American English (sometimes referred to as AAVE—African American Vernacular English). This is the technical name for distinctively nonstandard Black United States English, emphasizing the independence of the latter from standard English.
- Ebonics: A term that comes from combining "ebony" and "phonics." It's a popular word for AAE. (Both of these definitions come from the Wikipedia definition of Ebonics.)
- Language versus Dialect (versus slang or sloppy talking). This is close to the heart of the whole discussion.
- If AAE is just carelessness by people who know better, it should be easy to eliminate—it would be like the current habit of forgetting the "not" in the phrase "he could not care less." (Everyone knows that means he does the least possible caring, and the "not" gets dropped by people who aren't thinking about what they are saying or are trying to be cute.)
- If AAE is just slang, the speakers are really modifying standard English, and it's still a pretty easy matter to deal with.
- If AAE is a dialect of standard English, it's still pretty close, and most of the differences will be in the lexicon (words used and their definitions).
- If AAE is a separate language, we can expect different word order, different verb structure, and so forth. The change-over from one language to another isn't easy, and frequently a person who is making the change (from French to English, for example) will take years and years before becoming as fluent as a native speaker.
After all that introduction (which would perhaps appear in a paper introduction, but not in the annotated bibliography), here's the annotated bibliography itself.
Notes:
- This assignment took me about two hours. I spent some time messing about on the Internet, just long enough to find the Oakland Resolution, then had to leave and do some other work. Then this morning, I returned and did the whole thing in about 90 minutes. Of course, I was working in a field that I know something about. If I had been a total stranger here (a bad idea, by the way, for a research paper), I would have needed more time in general articles to find out just what is going on.
- When I did this as an MLA bibliography, I lifted all the formatting straight from Son of Citation Machine. It's not that difficult.
- Converting this to APA was a bit more difficult, so I ended up referring to the latest version of Rules for Writers by Diana Hacker. It's still not too difficult. The APA part took perhaps half an hour.
- I can't close this without a quick tribute to Akron professor of linguistics Arthur Palacas, who has published several foundational articles on the topic and opened my eyes to it when I was in graduate school.
