One African-centered linguistic paradigm argues the primary language of most descendants of enslaved Africans in the United States is not English but an African language. The language is called “Ebonics.” Clinical linguist Dr. Ernie Adolphus Smith (1938-) is the most conspicuous figure in the history of the paradigm. The reconstructed life story of Dr. Smith from the perspective of the sociology of knowledge suggests his comparative linguistic paradigm may have been a product of the scientific knowledge formation process by which Dr. Smith interpreted and reconstructed the ideological-political, experiential-practical, and theoretical-scientific meanings of his mother tongue, whites’ language, and other relevant experiences, and may have integrated the reconstructed meanings into his paradigm, in the social, political, and economic contexts of Los Angeles from the 1940s through the 1970s. It also suggests the paradigm attempted to address the arbitrariness and selectivity of the dominant paradigms in black linguistics or linguistics in general, which may have gone through the same scientific knowledge formation process. The crux of this study lies in my proposition that both the mainstream paradigms and the Ebonics paradigm are products of the inherent arbitrariness and selectivity of scientific criteria in linguistics which are in symbolic interaction with human subjectivity.
Read
