34: Ebonics as a Literacy

Ebonics was created in 1973 by a group of black scholars who disliked the negative connotations of terms like “Nonstandard Negro English.” Ebonics is a blend of the words ebony, meaning “black,” and phonics, meaning “the study of sound.” The term Ebonics is thought of as black speech (Rickford, 2003). But this is not true. Not all African Americans speak Ebonics, and there are non-African Americans who speak Ebonics because they grew up in the communities where it is spoken (Rubba, 1997).

Since 1996, some have considered Ebonics an alternative term for African American Vernacular English (AAVE), but others consider it an antonym of Black English, therefore a language other than English and thus rejecting AAVE. Ebonics has associations with dialects spoken elsewhere in the Black Diaspora, such as Jamaica or Nigeria (Rickford, 2003). There are two theories about the origins of this form of speech: a “dialectal hypothesis” and a “Creole hypothesis.” The “dialectal hypothesis” asserts that Ebonics is a dialect of English. The “Creole hypothesis” asserts that Ebonics evolved out of a pidgin language that developed in West Africa as a result of the slave trade and commercial trade between Africans and Europeans during the 16th–19th centuries (Rubba, 1997).