As far as I can determine, no study has examined the role, if any, that non-
standard English among teachers plays in children’s language and literacy de-
velopment. As indicated earlier, some teachers and social commentators have
lauded the shift to nonstandard English as part of an effort to bridge the widen-
ing gap between the educated elite and the undereducated underclass. This is
misguided populism at its worst. When students with low skills become teach-
ers with low skills, we can predict that they probably will produce students with
low skills. The cycle becomes self-perpetuating.
Black English
The serious study of Black English Vernacular was impeded for decades by
myths and misconceptions, and it was not until the early 1970s that scholars be-
gan to move beyond the myths and examine BEV in a principled way. Dillard
(1973) reported, for example, that until the 1960s it was often argued that Black
English was a vestige of a British dialect with origins in East Anglia (also see
McCrum, Cran, & MacNeil, 1986). According to this view, American blacks had
somehow managed to avoid significant linguistic change for centuries, even
though it was well known that all living languages are in a constant state of
change. This romantic notion of a dialect somehow suspended in time is totally
without substance. Dillard also described the “physiological theory,” which held
that Black English was the result of “thick lips” that rendered blacks incapable of
producing Standard English. More imaginative and outrageous was Mencken’s
(1936) notion that Black English was the invention of playwrights: “The Negro
dialect, as we know it today, seems to have been formulated by the songwriters
for the minstrel shows; it did not appear in literature until the time of the Civil
War; before that, as George P. Krappe shows ..., it was a vague and artificial lingo
which had little relation to the actual speech of Southern blacks (p. 71).”
Mencken didn’t mention how blacks were supposed to have gone to the min-
strel shows so that they might pick up the new “lingo,” nor why in the world
they would be motivated to do so.
Pidgins
Linguists today support the view that Black English developed from the pidgin
versions of English, Dutch, Spanish, and Portuguese used during the slave era.
A pidgin is a contact vernacular, a form of language that arises spontaneously
whenever two people lack a common language. It is a mixture of two (or possi-
bly more) languages that has been modified to eliminate the more difficult fea-
236 CHAPTER 7