Chapter 11: The Influence of West African Languages on African American Vernacular: Ebonics Crisis in Oakland, California Revisited

This chapter examines how language barrier complicates the fluidity of dialogic relationships between teachers and their students of non-Standard English backgrounds in academic arenas. As Gallagher-Geurtsen (2007) suggests, it is difficult for teachers to demonstrate love and care for their students when they reject their students’ home language like Ebonics. The term Ebonics which is literally referred to as Black sound and known as African American Vernacular (AAVE) is spoken mainly by descendants of slaves in the United States; it has long been ridiculed, derided, and styled as slang spoken by those from the ghettoes (Williams, 1997). According to some linguists and historians, Ebonics emanates from an imperfect imitation of European-American Standard English (Rickford, 1998). The term Ebonics was coined in 1973 by Dr. Robert Williams, an African American psychologist during a conference of Black and White Scholars in St. Louis, Missouri. The conference was convened to brainstorm on the cognitive and language development of African American children. These scholars converged to find ways to curb the misrepresentation of African American speech. To circumvent any further use of offensive and despicable terms like Black English, abnormal, dysfunctional, defective (Todd, 1997), and slang, conference participants decided to assign Ebonics as a name to this language (Williams, 1997). It was against this backdrop that the Oakland Unified School District in California set up a task force to study the causes of marginal academic achievements of African American students within the district and report their findings to the Oakland school board for immediate action. A resolution ensuing from the task force recommendations and adopted by the school board gave African American Vernacular full language status.