Date: Tue, 21 Jan 1997 07:46:00 -0800 (PST) From: Aaron Fox Subject: Leila Monaghan on MLK, AAFE, and Fluency (fwd) Sender: owner-linganth@cc.rochester.edu To: linganthro list MIME-version: 1.0 Precedence: bulk,BR> Leila asked me to forward this to the list after she sent it to me.
great topic!
af

Date: Tue, 21 Jan 97 1:03:18 PST
From: Leila Monaghan To: Aaron Fox
Subject: MLK, AAFE, and Fluency

Sleep is a wonderful thing. I lept out of bed after a nap this evening going "of course, Aaron put his finger right on a huge amount of the confusion going on around Ebonics."

I've been listening to snippets of celebrations of Dr. Martin Luther King day all day--a lecture on examining the full life of King by (I think) Vincent Harding, and Jesse Jackson's MLK/inaugural day sermon and of course bits of King speeches on NPR. All three were speaking in cadences and discourse structures that I identity with a formal African American English (which perhaps we should call AAFE, in contrast to AAVE).

AAFE and AAVE can perhaps be seen as being in an almost diglossic situation with each other. Jesse Jackson, (I've had enough of "competence", let us talk "fluency") is a fluent user of AAFE, which in grammatical structure is much closer to "Standard English"--Note Ira (apologies for erasing his last name)'s words that Aaron sent us has many of the characteristics of White Standard English but with the very different cadences of AAFE preaching. Interesting thing is that "Why is That?," a more vernacular piece than Ira's _also_ shares these characteristics (including copula). If the "target High language" (and see Hal Schiffman's nice new book on language policy for a very modern application of such notions as "diglossic", "high" and "low" that goes far beyond the static versions of the '60s) is AAFE, which is associated linguistically with Standard English, then _of course_ people are going to object to using L varieties in school. Oakland School Board broke more than norms external to the African American community, it also broke norms internal. This is not to say that norms shouldn't be broken.. Which language is a H language is of course a political decision, and trying to give access to schooling to the children of Oakland is as important a political cause as we can have. The children are probably best served, however, by understanding the variation within African American English, the range from the vernacular to

And if America is to be a great nation,
this must become true.
So let freedom ring
from the prodigious hill tops of New Hampshire, Let freedom ring
from the mighty mountains of New York
Let freedom ring.

Martin Luther King, 8/23/63

And as long as I'm at this, let me urge us not to talk of competence, but of fluency. Competence is rightly thought of as a universal trait. The great majority of humans beings are gifted with the competence to learn language, with the ability to hear or see language and produce grammatical versions of our own. But fluency requires long exposure, practice. We often pay people for their fluency--disk jockies, lawyers, academics and song writers would be a couple of examples in our own society. Looking at the list it is clear that fluency is not a unidimensional trait--Charles Fillmore in a reference I don't have at hand lays out four different kinds of fluency including ability to fill up long periods of time with talk and creativity. Ability to get other people to talk might be considered another "fluency".

Hmmm, now that I'm thinking about it, perhaps let us distinguish competence from fluency. To see how fluencies are often built on languages we have access to as children but have the characteristics of specialized settings, of institutions, be they on street corners or in halls with high ceilings and large audiences, where language is the medium for building and striving. Places beyond competence, nearer the multiple grails of fluency.

Leila
monaghan@borges.ucsd.edu

Aaron Fox wrote:

>same town) like the formal African American register often associated (in local metapragmatic ideology) with preaching (if only you could hear the prosody, because this man has *competence* in performance!)

>IRA:
>I don believe in black and white,
>I believe in EQUAL.
>You're no better than I am.
>I'm no better than you.
>Can't do nothin about that!
>^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>Your blood is red,
>my blood is red.
>The same thing!
>You live and . . . die,
>I live and die too.


>"We're not here for glamor or FAshion
>but here's the question I'm askin
>Why isn't young black kids taught BLACK? They're only taught to read, write, and act It's like teaching a dog to be a cat
>you don't teach a DOG to be a cat
>you don't teach WHITE kids to be BLACK
>why IS that?
>Is it because we're the miNOrity?"

>KRS-1/BoogieDownProductions "Why Is That?" From *Ghetto Music: THe Blueprint of Hip Hop.* Copyright 1989 Jive Records (BMG)
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