Date:  Mon, 24 Nov 1997 10:59:28 -0500
From:  Alan Baragona <baragonasa[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]VAX.VMI.EDU>
Subject: Re: vernacular

Ellen Johnson wrote:
>
>   The negative motivation was my shock at hearing Labov say on the radio
>   that only poor, inner-city blacks *really* speak AAVE, that anyone who
>   has learned to code-switch can never go back to speaking the
>   vernacular in a way that is grammatically consistent. I shouldn't
>   have been shocked; it is the logical extension of his idea that
>   people who have been exposed to more dialects will mix them.
snip
>
>   I guess my problem with this is twofold. 1) it shows that we are
>   still firmly entrenched in structuralism, looking for behavior that we
>   can write neat rules for and 2)it leads us to focus on speech that is
>   not really the common, everyday speech for most people in our society,
>   what I thought "vernacular" was supposed to mean. Or do I have too
>   much of a middle-class bias here?
>

It strikes me that there's a third problem--the notion that ghetto AAVE
is not a mix in the first place but is some sort of pure Ur-Sprach, and
that any kind of growth or change from outside influences is some sort
of corruption. It's a poor argument when it's made about the language
at large, so I don't see why it's any more acceptable when applied to a
dialect or vernacular of a sub-culture.