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Ebonics (word)
''Ebonics'' (a portmanteau of the words ''ebony'' and ''phonics'') is a term that was originally intended to refer to the language of all people descended from African slaves, particularly in West Africa, the Caribbean, and North America. The term ''Ebonics'' was created in 1973 by a group of black scholars who disapproved of the negative terms being used to describe this type of language. Since the 1996 controversy over its use by the Oakland School Board, the term ''Ebonics'' has primarily been used to refer to the sociolect African-American English, a dialect distinctively different from Standard American English. Original usage The word ''Ebonics'' was originally coined in 1973 by African American social psychologist Robert Williams in a discussion with linguist Ernie Smith (as well as other language scholars and researchers) that took place in a conference on "Cognitive and Language Development of the Black Child", held in St. Louis, Missouri. His intention was to give a ...
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Portmanteau
A portmanteau word, or portmanteau (, ) is a blend of wordsGarner's Modern American Usage
, p. 644.
in which parts of multiple words are combined into a new word, as in ''smog'', coined by blending ''smoke'' and ''fog'', or ''motel'', from ''motor'' and ''hotel''. In , a portmanteau is a single morph that is analyzed as representing two (or more) underlying s. When portmanteaus shorten es ...
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African American English
African-American English (or AAE; also known as Black American English, or Black English in American linguistics) is the set of English sociolects spoken by most Black people in the United States and many in Canada; most commonly, it refers to a dialect continuum ranging from African-American Vernacular English to a more standard American English. Like other widely spoken languages, African-American English shows variation stylistically, generationally, geographically (that is, features specific to singular cities or regions only), in rural versus urban characteristics, in vernacular versus standard registers, etc. There has been a significant body of African-American literature and oral tradition for centuries. History African-American English began as early as the 17th century, when the Atlantic slave trade brought African slaves into Southern colonies (which eventually became the Southern United States in the late 18th century). During the development of plantation cultu ...
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Cubonics
The Miami accent is an evolving American English accent or sociolect spoken in South Florida, particularly in Miami-Dade county, originating from central Miami. The Miami accent is most prevalent in American-born Hispanic youth who live in the Greater Miami area. Origin The Miami accent was developed by second- or third-generation Miamians, particularly young adults whose first language was English but were bilingual. Since World War II, Miami's population has grown rapidly every decade partly because of the postwar baby boom. In 1950, the US Census stated that Dade County's population was 495,084. Beginning with rapid international immigration from South America and the Caribbean (exacerbated by the Cuban exodus in the early 1960s), Miami's population has drastically grown every decade since. Many of the immigrants began to inhabit the urban industrial area around Downtown Miami. By 1970, the census stated that Dade County's population was 1,267,792. By 2000, the population re ...
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African American Vernacular English
African-American Vernacular English (AAVE, ), also referred to as Black (Vernacular) English, Black English Vernacular, or occasionally Ebonics (a colloquial, controversial term), is the variety of English natively spoken, particularly in urban communities, by most working- and middle-class African Americans and some Black Canadians. Having its own unique grammatical, vocabulary, and accent features, AAVE is employed by middle-class Black Americans as the more informal and casual end of a sociolinguistic continuum. However, in formal speaking contexts, speakers tend to switch to more standard English grammar and vocabulary, usually while retaining elements of the nonstandard accent. Despite being widespread throughout the United States, AAVE should not be assumed to be the native dialect of all African Americans. As with most African-American English, African-American Vernacular English shares a large portion of its grammar and phonology with the rural dialects of the Southe ...
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Walt Wolfram
Walt Wolfram (; born February 15, 1941) is an American sociolinguist specializing in social and ethnic dialects of American English. He was one of the early pioneers in the study of urban African American English through his work in Detroit in 1969. He is the William C. Friday Distinguished professor, Distinguished University Professor at NC State University, North Carolina State University. Since the 1960s, Wolfram has authored or co-authored more than 20 books and more than 300 articles on variation in American English. He was an active participant in the 1996 debate surrounding the Oakland Ebonics controversy, supporting the legitimacy of African American English as a systematic language system. In addition to African American English, Wolfram has written extensively about Appalachian English, Puerto Rican English, Lumbee English, and many other dialects of North Carolina, particularly those of rural, isolated communities such as Ocracoke Island. Biography Wolfram was born Phi ...
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John McWhorter
John Hamilton McWhorter V (; born October 6, 1965) is an American linguist with a specialty in creole languages, sociolects, and Black English. He is currently associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University, where he also teaches American studies and music history. He has also authored books on race relations and African-American culture. Early life McWhorter was born and raised in Philadelphia. His father, John Hamilton McWhorter IV (1927–1996), was a college administrator, and his mother, Schelysture Gordon McWhorter (1937–2011), taught social work at Temple University. He attended Friends Select School in Philadelphia and after tenth grade was accepted to Simon's Rock College where he earned an AA degree. Later, he attended Rutgers University and received a BA degree in French in 1985. He obtained an MA degree in American Studies from New York University and a PhD degree in Linguistics in 1993 from Stanford University. Career McWhorter taught linguistic ...
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Code-switching
In linguistics, code-switching or language alternation occurs when a speaker alternates between two or more languages, or language varieties, in the context of a single conversation or situation. Code-switching is different from plurilingualism in that plurilingualism refers to the ability of an individual to use multiple languages, while code-switching is the act of using multiple languages together. Multilingualism, Multilinguals (speakers of more than one language) sometimes use elements of multiple languages when conversing with each other. Thus, code-switching is the use of more than one linguistic variety in a manner consistent with the syntax and phonology of each variety. Code-switching may happen between Sentence (linguistics), sentences, sentence fragments, words, or Morpheme, individual morphemes (in synthetic languages). However, some linguists consider the Loanword, borrowing of words or morphemes from another language to be different from other types of code-switchin ...
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Phonics
Phonics is a method for teaching people how to Reading, read and write an alphabetic language (such as English alphabet, English, Arabic alphabet, Arabic or Russian alphabet, Russian). It is done by demonstrating the relationship between the sounds of the spoken language (phonemes), and the letters or groups of letters (graphemes) or syllables of the written language. In English, this is also known as the alphabetic principle or the ''Alphabetic code''. Phonics is taught using a variety of approaches, for example: a) learning ''individual'' sounds and their corresponding letters (e.g. the word cat has three letters and three sounds c - a - t, (in International Phonetic Alphabet, IPA: , , ), whereas the word flower has six letters but four sounds: f - l - ow - er, (IPA , , , ), or b) learning the sounds of letters or groups of letters, at the word level, such as similar sounds (e.g., cat, can, call), or Syllable#Rime, rimes (e.g., hat, mat and sat have the same rime, "at"), or ...
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Standard English
In an English-speaking country, Standard English (SE) is the variety of English that has undergone substantial regularisation and is associated with formal schooling, language assessment, and official print publications, such as public service announcements and newspapers of record, etc. All linguistic features are subject to the effects of standardisation, including morphology, phonology, syntax, lexicon, register, discourse markers, pragmatics, as well as written features such as spelling conventions, punctuation, capitalisation and abbreviation practices. SE is local to nowhere: its grammatical and lexical components are no longer regionally marked, although many of them originated in different, non-adjacent dialects, and it has very little of the variation found in spoken or earlier written varieties of English. According to Peter Trudgill, Standard English is a social dialect pre-eminently used in writing that is distinguishable from other English dialects largely by a ...
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African-American
African Americans (also referred to as Black Americans and Afro-Americans) are an Race and ethnicity in the United States, ethnic group consisting of Americans with partial or total ancestry from sub-Saharan Africa. The term "African American" generally denotes descendants of Slavery in the United States, enslaved Africans who are from the United States. While some Black immigrants or their children may also come to identify as African-American, the majority of first generation immigrants do not, preferring to identify with their nation of origin. African Americans constitute the second largest racial group in the U.S. after White Americans, as well as the third largest ethnic group after Hispanic and Latino Americans. Most African Americans are descendants of enslaved people within the boundaries of the present United States. On average, African Americans are of West Africa, West/Central Africa, Central African with some European descent; some also have Native Americans in th ...
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Board Of Education
A board of education, school committee or school board is the board of directors or board of trustees of a school, local school district or an equivalent institution. The elected council determines the educational policy in a small regional area, such as a city, county, state, or province. Frequently, a board of directors power with a larger institution, such as a higher government's department of education. The name of such board is also often used to refer to the school system under such board's control. The government department that administered education in the United Kingdom before the foundation of the Ministry of Education An education ministry is a national or subnational government agency politically responsible for education. Various other names are commonly used to identify such agencies, such as Ministry of Education, Department of Education, and Ministry of Pub ... was formerly called the Board of Education. See also * National Association of State Boards of E ...
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Oakland, California
Oakland is the largest city and the county seat of Alameda County, California, United States. A major West Coast of the United States, West Coast port, Oakland is the largest city in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area, the third largest city overall in the Bay Area and the List of largest California cities by population, eighth most populated city in California. With a population of 440,646 in 2020, it serves as the Bay Area's trade center and economic engine: the Port of Oakland is the busiest port in Northern California, and the fifth busiest in the United States of America. An act to municipal corporation, incorporate the city was passed on May 4, 1852, and incorporation was later approved on March 25, 1854. Oakland is a charter city. Oakland's territory covers what was once a mosaic of California coastal prairie, California coastal terrace prairie, oak woodland, and north coastal scrub. In the late 18th century, it became part of a large ''rancho'' grant in t ...
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