Read Their Lips - It's Ebonics

Eric Ellis, Los Angeles

12/23/1996

IT WAS the Ford Motor Company in Dearborn, Michigan, that gave rise to the hitherto most famous example of the Black English used among the United States' 32 million African-Americans.

After an ugly industrial relations spat with the auto giant, local workers daubed "Fo' Mo' Co Issa Mo' Fo' Co!" on the walls of one of its plants.

But California may have topped Michigan for a Greater Moment in African-American History. A school district outside San Francisco has given birth to the United States' first official second language - Ebonics, or "Black English", the patois of the "'hood".

More a dialect than a language, Ebonics - the word is a conjunction of "ebony" and "phonics" - has been officially adopted by the Oakland Unified School District to be recognised as used by many of its 52,000 student population, 53 per cent of whom are black.

The district council has unanimously declared that all teachers in its jurisdiction should be trained to respect the "Ebonics" spoken by their charges. Moreover, teachers can receive bonuses if they study Ebonics and apply it in class.

"It's not poor English," Oakland Unified School District spokeswoman Sherri Willis told The Australian Financial Review. "We're acknowledging language skills with the goal to help students improve standard English." Oakland's black students are its under-achievers. More than 70 per cent are in special programs and more than 60 per cent are held back from advancement by poor grades. The Oakland council is now trying a different tack to get its kids in class, off the streets and, in many cases, out of the crime statistics.

It has engaged academics and linguists to dignify what they admit is an inability to adequately educate by describing Ebonics as a "recognition of the existence and the cultural and historic bases of West and Niger-Congo African language systems".

It also requires implementing programs to teach black students "in their primary language for the combined purposes of maintaining the legitimacy and richness of (Ebonics) and to facilitate their acquisition and mastery of English language skills".

Thus, a student will not be penalised academically for using the Ebonics "He-uh be firsen larn" for what in standard English would be "He will be first in line".

The school board says Ebonics has a distinct syntax and grammar, such as the absence of the verb "to be".

"Whatever we are using now is not working. In my day, they would teach you how to talk like the white folks," school board member Toni Cook told the San Francisco Chronicle. "Because someone says 'I be', does not mean someone is intellectually deficient."

The move is already stirring problems. Oakland's African-American mayor, Mr Elihu Harris, rejects the Ebonics move and sees it as simply a slang. "We will not tolerate or support any form of sub-standard English." he said. "Our commitment is to excellence in education."

The Ebonics move is distinct to the US Government policy of multiculturalism under which funding is provided for schooling in the major languages spoken by the US cultural minorities.

African-American groups have hailed the Oakland move but also argue that its dialect is by no means common to other predominantly Black areas of the US, such as south-central Los Angeles.