Archive for February 3rd, 2007

I’ve played around long enough. Now it’s time to get down to some sho-nuff vocabulatin.

Looking at that clip from Airplane! that I linked to the other day, which never fails to crack me up, made me think about language again. Specifically, it made me really consider the extent to which “dialect” is different from “language” and why they are different if they, in fact, are.

So think about the scene when the guys order their food. (that’s it up there) Here’s my transcription:

Stewardess: Would you gentlemen care to order your dinners?
Jive Talker 1: Bet, babe. Slide a piece of the porter. Drink side, run the java.
Jive Talker 2: Looky here: I can dig greasin’ chompin’ on some …???

Now, if I were to break it down, I’d say that the first dude is speaking a fairly conventional dialect. That is, we know all the words he’s saying, although I’m sure that some people miss a good bit of it because all the phrases are so closely connected. In other words, he sentence diagrammers among us could probably draw that up with no problems. We can see the nouns and the verbs clearly. Honestly, those are pretty simple sentences. For Jive Talker 2, it’s a different story altogether.

First of all, I don’t know what that dude said. I mean, I got about half the line out, but on that second half, the most important half, I’m utterly clueless. Which brings me to the part I wonder about.

When we talk linguistics, particularly for the learners of a new language, the first thing we talk about is ‘phonemic awareness.’ That’s the ability to distinguish the individual sounds in that language, and depending on the discussion, the ability to connect a specific sound to an individual grapheme. Well, I would posit that when it comes to JT2, we’re all lacking in phonemic awareness. Now, having watched the extras and add-ins on the Airplane! DVD, I know that the two actors who played the Jive Talkers actually made up the language with which they spoke their dialogue. So they knew what the subscripts were going to say and they made up their script to reflect that. Which means that it’s not jibberish. They are both using real words which really express the thoughts described by the subtitles. (Although per the first sample, the subtitles obviously understate what’s being said.)

Now, expanding this to a more general reflection on the nature of AAVE, I think this begins to get at the heart of the question of whether AAVE is a separate language or just a dialect. In the example of the first speaker, I think the dialectical nature is pretty clear. The vocabulary he’s using is not entirely unfamiliar. Even “porter” for steak is understandable. That other cat, however… I just can’t figure it out. That’s why I think he’s so important. He’s the one who’s forcing me to metacognitively look at the processes I use when breaking down unfamiliar information. He’s the one who’s forcing me to try to figure out where one word stops and the next one begins.

He’s the one who’s gonna make me a better teacher.