Many of these sites have been closely studied – not to document errors
(of which there are many) – but to look at the way an anti-Ebonics
ideology is constructed (Hill 1995, 1998; Rickford and Rickford 2000;
Ronkin and Karn 1999). For example, the so-called translation of the
nursery rhyme “Jack and Jill went up the hill” into Ebonics includes the
line “Jack be felt down,” which Ronkin and Karn (1999: 366) cite as a case
of the misuse of the passive voice, as well as the hyper-use of habitual
“be.” That is, non-AAVE speakers who set out to mock the language show
a fondness for adding superfluous instances of “be” in places it does not
belong. “Jack be felt down,” is as ill formed in AAVE as the sentence
“Jack down were fallen” is ill formed in any variety of American English.
Ronkin and Karn provide many similar examples of AAVE that has been
mangled (out of ignorance or an attempt at humor) with the apparent
purpose of highlighting how very different AAVE is from “good” or
“proper” English.
It has been established that AAVE has a rule-governed grammar. As this
is the case for all living languages, it could be said that grammar is
inevitable, and resistance is futile. To ignore this fact about AAVE is to
demonstrate ignorance, condescension and disrespect.
Linguists do bear some responsibility for language-focused stereotypes,
for the simple reason that for some 40 years, most of the scholarly work
on AAVE has focused on the inner-city poor. There were many reasons for
this, some of them practical, as in Rickford’s observation that the most
segregated and poorest African Americans are the most persistent speakers
of AAVE and thus provide a great deal of useful data (Rickford 2010: 28).
There are also ideological and practical motivations evident in the earliest
work on the African American language community:
[S]ociolinguists’ validation of [AAVE] as a legitimate linguistic
variety [was] a revolu-tionary viewpoint that challenged generations
of racism, linguistic and otherwise ... Thus the most useful
conceptualization of the AAVE speech community at the time, both
politically and theoretically, was one in which those speakers whose
speech was mislabeled as substandard or even as not really language
at all were placed at the very center, as the most competent and
systematic speakers of a complete and systematic variety.
(Bucholtz 2003: 402)