situations, the carefully researched material made available to the public
was largely ignored or, in some cases, mocked.
The important point is this: in our eagerness to set the record straight on
matters of linguistic science, we missed the larger, far more important
underlying conflict. We addressed the symptoms rather than the disease.
This is where the language subordination model might be able to shed
some light on how the media firestorm came to be.
This sentence occurs early in the resolution:
[Scholarly] studies have also demonstrated that African language
systems are genetically-based and not a dialect of English.^7The annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) happened
to come at the height of the Oakland controversy. During that meeting a
response was drafted, the intent of which was to highlight what was
factually accurate in the proposal while clarifying other points:
What is important from a linguistic and educational point of view is
not whether AAVE is called a “language” or a “dialect” but rather that
its systematicity be recognized.The phrase “African Language Systems are genetically-based” was
another example of poor wording that distracted from the key issues.
Shortly after the resolution was made public, the board issued a
clarification: they had used “genetically-based” in the sense of “originate
in.” But the damage was already done, as some commentators chose to
focus on other readings of “genetic.”
“Black students are genetically predisposed to speaking an inferior
style of English.” What would happen if a white conservative said
that?
(Rush Limbaugh, On Ebonics, The Rush Limbaugh Show, December
22, 1996)The term “genetic” is used in comparative and historical linguistics in the
study of inter-relatedness of language families over time and space. In that
context, you might say that Latin and Italian are genetically related. This
concept is not widely understood outside linguistic circles, where