EBONICS AND DR. ERNIE ADOLPHUS SMITH
TOWARD A COMPARATIVE AND HOLISTIC PARADIGM IN BLACK LINGUISTICS
By
Kunihiko Minamoto

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
African American and African Studies―Doctor of Philosophy
2017

ABSTRACT
EBONICS AND DR. ERNIE ADOLPHUS SMITH
TOWARD A COMPARATIVE AND HOLISTIC PARADIGM IN BLACK LINGUISTICS
By
Kunihiko Minamoto1
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 theoreticalscientific 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.

Keywords: Ebonics, comparative, holistic, sociology of knowledge, life story

Dedicated to Sweet Ernie and Noby
Eiko, Yuinosuke, and Kurumi

iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

There were so many people involved in this project, so it is very difficult to begin
acknowledging here all the people that are chiefly responsible for such an undertaking. But the
author wishes to thank some important people and organizations here without whose help,
inspiration, and dedication this dissertation would not have been possible.
There are two men to whom above all others in Nippon1 I wish to express my gratitude at the
commencement of my doctoral research. One is sociolinguist Honna Nobuyuki, Professor
Emeritus, Graduate School of International Politics, Economics and Communication, Aoyama
Gakuin University. He introduced me to the sociology of language or sociolinguistics in the early
1990s, and since then I have been intrigued by the workings of linguistic nationalism and
language planning. His research interests in Englishes in Asia and the glottopolitics in the United
States unexpectedly left a perpetual imprint on my latent research interests and ambitions, which
largely guided me to quit a decent job and enter the world of Ebonics. The other is Kasuya
Keisuke, Professor of Sociology of Language, Graduate School of Language and Society,
Hitotsubashi University. His critical approach to linguistics and his constructive advice on my
research helped me most in the final formulation of my current research and theory. Of the
utmost importance was his educational guidance, whose insightful meanings I always had
overlooked without any serious thought but always noticed at too late a stage. I appreciate that he
always went easy on my immaturities, which navigated me in creatively exploring the uncharted
research territory of my own.
Here in the United States, I wish to express my gratitude to the Guidance Committee
members: Dr. Denise Troutman, Dr. Steven J. Gold, Dr. Glenn A. Chambers, Jr., and Dr. April

iv

Baker-Bell. Dr. Troutman patiently and warmly provided various resources including her moral
support for me to successfully complete my dissertation, and thoughtful, constructive feedback
on various drafts of this work. I appreciate her courage and kindness to accept my research
theme, which most linguists in black linguistics would not dare to take. I still remember my
sensation surging inside when I read one of her works and found some parallel in the staunch
bouquet of a hardcore sociolinguist between her and late sociologist of language Dr. Joshua A.
Fishman. I thank Dr. Gold for his acumen in guiding me through the process of structuring a
sociological approach to a complex project. His laisser-faire style of teaching students in class
led me to notice the importance of exploratory attitude and openmindedness in science. He
personally and professionally encouraged me a lot especially when I faced difficulties which I
wouldn’t have overcome alone. Dr. Chambers gave me incomparable help in the area of
historiography. Especially, in the capacity of Director of African American and African Studies,
he gave me multiple helps in keeping me on track and schedule. Dr. Baker-Bell kindly accepted
my request that she be on my committee, despite the fact that she had a lot of committee work
for other students, particularly considering she had just recently joined the faculty of AAAS. I
remember one of her apt comments helped me steadily and speedily complete one of the
chapters.
I am deeply grateful to Dr. Charles DeBose, who provided me with an incisive, insightful
device to deconstruct and reconstruct Eurocentric linguistics. Ms. Olaocha Nwadiuto Nwabara
has my warm thanks not only for her as a model graduate student, but for her personal gift of
helping lost souls like me to get back onto the right track both personally and professionally. I
extend my sincere thanks to Mrs. Emily Lawler for becoming my friend, correcting interview

v

transcriptions, and generously proofreading part of the manuscript. And thanks to my family,
Eiko, Yuinosuke, and Kurumi, whose love, encouragement, and support have never waned.
I set out on this stroll through Dr. Ernie A. Smith’s past on a mission: to discover the history
of an important linguistic paradigm, which no other linguists would dare to take over, and to
share my findings with current and future linguists and, hopefully, non-linguists. I owe Dr. Smith
too much: my tens of hours of interviews with him gradually led me to a critical investigation of
mainstream linguistics in relation to the comparative linguistic or Africological paradigm, which
finally became my dissertation and my life-time research. I also offer a special "thank you" to
other black pioneers, living and dead, who shared insights and emotions with me and upon
whose shoulders I now stand. May my stewardship of their legacy honor their lives and
memories for generations to come.
Lastly, this study was made possible by financial and moral support from African American
and African Studies, The College of Arts and Letters, The Graduate School, and The Office for
International Students and Scholars, Michigan State University, and Hitotsubashi University,
Tokyo.

vi

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF TABLES ………………………...………….…………………………….......…….….. x
LIST OF FIGURES …………………………………...………………….……………...…...…. xi
1. A HYPOTHETICAL INTRODUCTION TO THE CONSTRUCTION OF BLACK
LINGUISTICS ……………………………………………………………………………....... 1
1.1. Ideological-Political Influences on Paradigms ……………………………………….…... 5
1.2. Experiential-Practical Influences on Paradigms ……………………………….……....… 20
1.3. Theoretical-Scientific Influences on Paradigms ……………………………….……….... 28
1.3.1. Disciplines ………………………………………………………………………….. 29
1.3.2. Subjectivity …………………………………………………………………………. 32
1.3.3. Methodological Criteria and Interpretations …………………………...…………… 36
1.4. Tripartite Formation of Paradigms ………………………………………………….…… 40
1.5. Life Story Study on Dr. Ernie Adolphus Smith …………………………….………….… 43
1.6. Scientific, Practical, and Political Significance of the Study ……………….…..….…… 47
1.7. Structure of the Dissertation ………………………………………………….…….……. 49
2. SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONIST RESEARCH ON BLACK LINGUISTICS ………….……. 52
2.1. Implicational ……………………………..……………………………………...…….… 52
2.2. Ideological-Political ……………………………………………………………......….… 54
2.3. Theoretical-Scientific …………………...……….…………………………….....….….. 56
2.4. Ideological-Political, Experiential-Practical, and Theoretical-Scientific …..…………… 57
3. LIFE STORY AND SOCIOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE …………………….………..…..…. 62
3.1. Perspective and Methodology ……………………………………………………...….… 62
3.2. Storytellers ………………………………………………………………………...…..… 65
3.3. Data Construction and Protection ………………………………………………….…...... 67
3.4. Analytical Tools for Linguistic Knowledge Formation …………………………….……. 70
4. POLITICS OF TRUTHS IN BLACK LINGUISTICS ………………..………….…………... 75
4.1. Historical Trends ………………………………………………………...……….….…... 78
4.1.1. First Phase ……………………………….………………………………………….. 78
4.1.2. Second Phase …………………………………………………………………...…... 78
4.1.3. Third Phase ……………………………………………………………...………….. 79
4.2. Racist Scholarship by White Scholars …………………………………………………… 80
4.3. Conservative Scholarship by White Scholars ……………………………...…………..… 83
4.4. Neo-Racist Scholarship by White Scholars ……………………………………..….…… 85
4.5. Liberalist Scholarship by White Scholars ………………………….…………………..… 88
4.6. Interest Convergence by Black Scholars ……………………………..….……………… 94
4.6.1. Dialect Equality Discourse …………………………………………………………. 98
4.6.2. Dialect Discourse ………………………………………………………………….. 101

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4.7. Interest Divergence by Black Scholars ………………………………………...…….…. 106
5. FORMATION OF THE COMPARATIVE LINGUISTIC PARADIGM ……………..……... 114
5.1. Ideological-Political Factor ………………………..……………...…………….……… 115
5.1.1. Sociohistorical Background for Language Awareness and Loyalty ……………….. 116
5.1.2. Language Awareness and Loyalty Formation in “Ghetto” ……………………….… 118
5.1.3. Nation of Islam and Language ………………………………………………….….. 125
5.1.4. Struggle for Self-Determination and Liberation of Black Nation and Language …. 129
5.1.5. Anti-White Supremacist Art and Language ……………….……………………….. 133
5.1.6. English Literacy for the Descendants of Enslaved Africans in Self-Determined
Way ……………………………………...………………………………………… 137
5.1.7. Nationalist Embodiment of the Descendants’ Language in Science ……….……..... 138
5.1.8. Language Awareness and Loyalty to Nationalist Language Ideology to Ebonics … 143
5.2. Experiential-Practical Factor ………………………..…………………………..….….. 146
5.2.1. Significant Difference between Black and White Language …………………….… 147
5.2.2. Black Language as a Pathology in School ……………………………………….… 152
5.2.3. Black Language as a Factor in IQ Tests …………………….…………….…….….. 155
5.2.4. Bilingual Education in Black Language and English ……………………………… 160
5.2.5. Black Language in the Judiciary System ………………………………….……….. 169
5.2.6. Experiential-Practical “Connections” to Ebonics ……………………………….…. 175
5.3. Theoretical-Scientific Factor ……………………………………….……………….…. 178
5.3.1. Enrollment in Comparative Culture …………………………………...……….….. 179
5.3.2. “Black Studies” in Comparative Culture: Cultural Nationalist Project …………… 181
5.3.3. Guidance Committee Members ………………………………………………….… 187
5.3.4. African-Centered Ideas on Black Language ………………………………………. 192
5.3.4.1. Carter G. Woodson (1875-1950) ……………………………………………… 192
5.3.4.2. Janheinz Jahn (1918-1973) …………………………………………………… 194
5.3.4.3. Mervyn C. Alleyne (1933-) …………………………………………………… 196
5.3.4.4. James Haskins (1941-2005) and Hugh F. Butts (unknown) ………………….. 199
5.3.5. Fieldwork on the Language of Black Children …………………………………….. 201
5.3.6. Conception of an Ethnolinguist’s/Comparative Linguistic Paradigm …………….. 204
5.3.7. Two Dominant Paradigms within the Scale of the English Language …….……….. 206
5.3.7.1. Transformationalist View ………………………………………………...…… 207
5.3.7.2. Creolist View …………………………………………………………………. 207
5.3.8. A Small Conference among Black Scholars in St. Louis ………………………….. 209
5.3.9. Doctoral Dissertation ……………………………………………………...………. 213
5.3.10. Courses on Ebonics ……………..………………………………………………... 219
5.3.11. African-Centered Epistemology: Comparative and Holistic ……………….…….. 223
6. IDEOLOGY-POLITICS, EXPERIENCE-PRACTICE, AND THEORY-SCIENCE IN
INTERACTION …………...……………………………………………………….………. 226
6.1. Ideological-Political ……………………………………………………………...….…. 226
6.2. Experiential-Practical …………………………………………………………..…..….. 232
6.3. Theoretical-Scientific ……………………………………………..……………..…….. 236
6.4. Toward a Theory of Linguistic Knowledge Formation …………….…………………… 239
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7. CONCLUDING SUGGESTIONS ……………………..…………………………...….…… 242
7.1. Tripartite Analysis and Holistic Reconstruction of Black Linguistics ……………….…. 242
7.2. Linguists as Language Planning Visionaries for Ebonics ………………………….…… 249
NOTES ……………………………………………………………………………......…….… 256
APPENDICES …………………………….……………...………………………..…....…….. 272
APPENDIX A. Research Participant Information and Consent Form. ……………..………..... 273
APPENDIX B. Report of Domestic Internship (Summer 2013). ………..……………………. 280
APPENDIX C. List of Categories Produced Based on E-mail Correspondences. …………....... 289
APPENDIX D. Certificate of Graduation for John C. Fremont High School. …………………. 292
APPENDIX E. Certificate of Graduation for Los Angeles Metropolitan College of Business. .. 293
APPENDIX F. Certificate of Graduation for California State College, Los Angeles. …………. 294
APPENDIX G. Certificate of Graduation for the University of California, Irvine. ………….… 295
APPENDIX H. Boyer, Ernest L. US Commissioner of Education. May 13, 1977. A Letter to
Ernie A. Smith in Response to his Paper A Case for Bilingual and
Bicultural Education for United States Slave Descendants of African
Origin. ……………………………………………………………...……..…. 296
REFERENCES ……………………………………………………………………….…….…. 298

ix

LIST OF TABLES

Table 1. Ideology and Social Constructions of “Ebonics.” ……………………….……………. 54

x

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1. Tripartite Formation of Linguistic Paradigm. ….…………........................................... 43
Figure 2. Ernie X. Smith. ………………………………………………..…...……….……….. 126
Figure 3. Vietnam War Teach-in. ……………………………………………………….……… 129
Figure 4. Vigilante Meeting after the Watts Rebellion. ………………………………………… 130
Figure 5. Concentration of Black People in the South in 1970. …………………………….…. 133
Figure 6. Ernie A. Smith at the Entrance of his Gallery “Sheikh Shop” at 243 East Florence,
San Pedro, Los Angeles. ……………………………………..……………….……... 134
Figure 7. Black Man with Attempted Straightened Hair Holds White Woman. ……….………. 135
Figure 8. White Supremacist Christianity Against Black Islam. ……………………………..... 136
Figure 9. Anti-Vietnam War Speech in Gateway Plaza, UCI. ………………………………… 140
Figure 10. Court Trial Against Smith. …………………………….…………………………… 141
Figure 11. A Case for Bilingual and Bicultural Education for United States Slave
Descendants of African Origin. ………………………………..…...….…..…...….. 166
Figure 12. The People of the State of California vs. Ernie Adolphus Smith―Orange County
Harbor District Municipal Court. ………………………..……………………..….. 170
Figure 13. A Letter from LA Deputy Public Defender. ………………………………………… 174
Figure 14. Ernie A. Smith in Operation Bootstrap. ……………………………….……….…… 180
Figure 15. Dr. Smith’s Office at Lillian Mobley Multipurpose Center, 7813 South Central
Avenue, Los Angeles. ………………………..……...……………………….....…. 184
Figure 16. Nigger: A Divine Origin. …………………………………………………………… 186
Figure 17. Dr. Mervyn C. Alleyne at his Home in Jamaica. …………………………………… 197

xi

1. A HYPOTHETICAL INTRODUCTION TO THE CONSTRUCTION OF BLACK
LINGUISTICS

The formation of sciences, i.e., the construction of specialized discourses in the academy has
been influenced by political and economic arrangements in a particular location in a particular
time (Errington 2008; Foucault 1980; Stehr & Meja 2005; Mulkay 2005). For example, language
sciences have a history of constructing systematic discourses on linguistic codes to classify and
stratify them and, consequently or premeditatedly, their speakers or users1 (Errington 2008). The
shifting discourses in linguistics very interestingly have coincided with the elites’ or dominant
groups’ shifting racist or ethnocentric ideas on certain segments of the users of some linguistic
codes at each stage of the history of the political and economic power relations. It may be said of
linguistics, therefore, that:

science can never be divorced from the laboring, thinking, interacting, individual
scientists who employ scientific methods to build up a response to a problematic
situation that arouses their interest because of its exceptional properties . . . scientists
must see their own scientific actions as a product, at least in part, of their social
perspectives. (Manning 1982: 274-275).

It may be suggested that language scientists have produced their knowledge by interpreting,
negotiating, and integrating those social and scientific meanings on the linguistic codes and the
ethnicized or racialized users which the scientists encountered in their daily lives and/or
scholarly works.
It may be safe to say that the elites in power largely determine the society-wide diffusion of a
scientific paradigm2 to deal with a phenomenon with which they are concerned. This segment of

1

people has the greatest leverage in the negotiation of what passes for truths in society. In the case
of the mainstream Anglicist3 and Creolist4 Paradigms and the marginalized comparative
linguistic paradigm5 or Africological6 paradigm in black linguistics, those elites involved directly
or indirectly in the development of these paradigms are in the government, major businesses,
foundations, universities and colleges, or other educational institutions. The dominance of the
Creolist Paradigm today may have been established by a systematic interaction of the elites in
the wider range of controlling institutions enumerated above, whereas the comparative linguistic
paradigm may have been promoted by the counter-elites mainly in less controlling domains such
as universities and colleges and other educational institutions. I postulate that both the dominant
paradigms and the marginalized paradigm are the products of a symbolic interaction of some
ideological-political, experiential-practical (cf. Rock 1982), and theoretical-scientific meanings
which the elites and the counter-elites develop toward their own linguistic codes and others in a
particular chain of power structures in a particular polity at a particular time.7
The dominant Creolist Paradigm may, whether intentionally, unintentionally, or unavoidably,
conform to a certain set of ideological-political needs (e.g., help establish a white state
sovereignty called the United States of America in which other groups and their languages are
supposed to be subjugated or, euphemistically, “dialectal” to white people and language),
experiential-practical concerns (e.g., to experience or imagine a wider language market in which
most linguistic communities in the same polity are recognized as English users in the school, the
court, and other institutions of power), and theoretical-scientific criteria (e.g., to employ the
English writing system to describe linguistic “systems” which sound or look similar to each other
at the level of lexicon and interpret them as dialects or varieties of English based on a certain set

2

of criteria), of mainly white and black elites, whose interests converge (Bell 1980; Chapter 4). To
be sure, most of the linguists in black linguistics would not adopt the hidden agenda of the
dominant paradigm intentionally. For the matter of fairness, most of their acts may be called
“practice,” which “has become a term of art used by social scientists to emphasize the hidden
power of habitual dispositions as shapers of much that is “automatic” and prereflective in human
conduct, and so of textures of social life which lie beyond the purview of conscious, “rational”
thinking” (Errington 2008: 11). On the other hand, the marginalized comparative linguistic
paradigm may respond to another set of ideological-political needs (e.g., to express their
perspective that the black nation does not accept to join the United States), experiential-practical
concerns (e.g., to teach English through an ESL method and to provide black language
interpreters in the court, in both cases treating the black linguistic code as a language, such as
Chinese, French, Nipponese [= Japanese], Spanish, etc.), and theoretical-scientific criteria (e.g.,
to compare Ebonics with various West African languages in a much wider spectrum of linguistic
and paralinguistic features), of mainly the counter-elites of blacks. Therefore, it might be
suggested that each of the paradigms is a result of the process by which both sides of the elites
interpret, define, and act toward (1) ideological-political, (2) experiential-practical, and (3)
theoretical-scientific meanings of a linguistic code in racialized response to individual situations
in a certain political and economic structure in a certain polity at a certain time. Other scholars
present similar classifications of the factors for the formation of a scientific thesis or paradigm.
For example, when Władyław Krajewski (1988) discusses the internal and external factors in
the development of science (especially, natural sciences), he presents three such classifications,
into which the process by which scientists develop their science or paradigm may fit:

3

1) Internal: theory (coherence of scientific theories, their simplicity, etc.)
External: experience
2) Internal: theory/experience
External: economics/politics/philosophy/etc./influences from other social groups and
institutions
3) Internal: theory/experience/relations in scientific community
External: economics/politics/philosophy/etc./influences from other social groups and
institutions

Krajewski notes that the third classification “is often used by sociologists of science, and some
historians of science” (168). The existing classifications which Krajewski identifies are based on
the binary of internal factors and external factors. In its comprehensiveness, the third
classification above may be equivalent to my own classification of the factors in the development
of science, in that it takes into account “relations in scientific community.” Anthropological
linguist Joseph Errington provides a similar bipartite view of linguistics or linguistic work, which
may be also similarly adjusted to my tripartite classification. He observes:

One is to regard them [= linguists] as technicians who deployed alphabetic symbols to
“stand for” sounds of speech in unfamiliar tongues, and then devised descriptions of the
meaningful elements those sounds comprised. The other is to read those texts as the
work not of technicians of literacy but members of literate groups whose work was
enabled and shaped by their social biographies, their broader investments in larger
projects, their membership in certain groups, their broader beliefs, values, and purposes.
(2008: 5)

4

The “scientific” and the “social” into which Ellington divides linguistic work may correspond to
my division, i.e., the theoretical-scientific, on one hand, and the ideological-political and the
experiential-practical, on the other. Therefore, scholars both in natural and social sciences present
a configuration of the factors for scientific knowledge formation similar to my tripartite view of
linguistic knowledge formation process.
In this chapter, I shall develop a hypothetical interaction process of ideological-political
needs, experiential-practical concerns, and theoretical-scientific criteria in the formation of the
two descriptive paradigms, i.e., Creolist and Africological in black linguistics. The first part of
this chapter explores how ideological-political meanings of linguistic codes―both for the
dominant group and the oppressed group―might provide interpretive frameworks for their
descriptive paradigms. The second part of the chapter examines how a chain of institutions and
daily lives, in which the use of the linguistic code of blacks is a racializing and stratifying factor,
might provide experiential-practical justifications for the two paradigms. The third part focuses
on some possible impacts of the disciplinary structure of linguistics upon the selection of
descriptive criteria/interpretations and the development of descriptive paradigms. The fourth
presents some hypothetical integrative structure on how the three components of ideologicalpolitical needs, experiential-practical concerns, and theoretical-scientific criteria might lead to
the construction of the two paradigms.

1.1. Ideological-Political Influences on Paradigms

The motive to change the status of a dialect to that of a language (and vice versa) is tied to

5

political or nationalist meanings (Anderson 2006; Cooper 1989; Fishman 1972), as it is attested
to by nationalisms in eighteenth-century United States (Weinstein 1982), in nineteenth and early
twentieth century Europe (Anderson 2006; Deutsch 1942; Fishman 1972), and in more recent
twentieth century Africa and Asia (Simpson 2008 & 2007, respectively), as well as European and
American colonization worldwide. Language has often been tied to nationalist ideology
(Fishman 1972; Friedrich 1963), similar to the following one from the fundamentals of MarxismLeninism, which Dr. Ernie A. Smith sometimes quotes to me: “A nation is a historically
constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory,
economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture” (Stalin 1953: 307,
cited in Dutt 1961: 186, emphasis in original). A common language is implicitly or explicitly
mobilized in nationalist movements the world over to create, reinforce, or maintain the three
nationalist foci of autonomy, unity, and identity through various political, economic, and other
social institutions. Nationalism can be defined as “an ideological movement for attaining and
maintaining autonomy, unity and identity for a population which some of its members deem to
constitute an actual or potential ‘nation’” (A. D. Smith 2010: 9). It involves not only political but
also cultural and intellectual efforts. It involves itself with the problems of social justice and
distribution of resources, unfortunately on most occasions, primarily among the elites and
secondarily among the masses of the same ethnic or racial group. It also extends itself with a
cultural construction of the group, which: “[t]ypically . . . include[s] the study of ethnic history
and philology, archaeological excavations of historic national sites, the erection of buildings and
structures, and the holding of national games and sports” (Ibid.: 11, italics added). Philology,
later, linguistics becomes one of the cultural nationalist efforts to create, reinforce, or maintain a

6

common national language (e.g., Vuk Stefanovic Karadzic for Serbo-Croatian in Yugoslavia
(Cooper 1989), Henry Sweet for English in England, Ivar Aasen for Nynorsk/Norwegian in
Norway, Jonas Jablonskis for Lithuanian in Lithuania, Josef Dobrovský for Czech in Bohemia,
Leonard Bloomfield for English in the United States (Haugen 1966), Ueda Kazutoshi for
Nipponese in Nippon [= Japan] (Yasuda 2004), Kumaratunga Munidasa for Sinhala in Sri Lanka
(Simpson 2007)). Other than more individual or personal forms of language planning, many
linguists have been involved in organizational language planning in government ministries,
agencies, councils, or institutes. Linguistics concomitantly has helped legitimate the status of
and/or helps spread the use of, a linguistic code in political, economic, and other institutions.
This language nationalism attempts to become implicit or invisible in language sciences because
they attempt to attain scientific objectivity, rationality, legitimacy, non-politicalness, nonideologicalness, whatsoever. Language scientists do not justify their scientific endeavors
explicitly on the grounds of their political beliefs, values, and purposes. For most linguists, their
linguistic research just extends their “[t]aken-for-granted “expectations,” “understandings,” and
“collective practices” (Errington 2008: 11). It may be hypothesized that such hidden political or
nationalist ideologies or agendas8 (e.g., a belief that blacks or other groups of color should use
English as their mother tongue or one of the major media of communication in the United States,
or a belief or resignation that blacks or other groups of color can never have an independent state
sovereignty out of or in the United States) in combination with experiential-practical factors
(e.g., an experience that whites think they can understand the linguistic code used by those
blacks with whom they usually interact, or an experience that both whites and blacks can
recognize the predominant vocabulary of black language as English) might influence or underlie

7

how the scientists look at a linguistic code, as a language or a dialect. Then, they carve out
linguistic data in a way to validate the dichotomy of language and dialect, i.e., merely trace
around the frame through which they look at it rather than the outline of the nature of a linguistic
code (Errington 2008: 7, integrating Wittgenstein 1953: 48).
One of the means of validation is to “describe” a linguistic code in linguistics and language
education in a way it can be seen as an autonomous system which represents particular social,
economic, and political boundaries of the imagined linguistic community. (The so-called
“objective” act of description per se involves a process of politically defining and delimiting,
viz., “prescribing” a linguistic code with a selection of particular linguistic forms, a particular
labeling, and a particular orthography.) On one hand, a certain level of linguistic difference or a
relative lack of mutual intelligibility between “languages,” or a certain level of linguistic
similarity or a relative presence of mutual intelligibility between “dialects” are established after
language planning and research efforts by the government, the language academy, language
scientists, the mass media, the school, and even some individuals; on the other, language
scientists “describe,” more precisely, “descriptively prescribe” the languages or dialects as they
are “natural,” either intentionally or unintentionally indifferent to the social project in which they
are situated both diachronically and synchronically. I’m wondering what may have happened to
the mainstream opinions of black linguistics today, if earlier scholars had attempted to describe
the linguistic code of descendants of enslaved Africans in the United States by employing a
distinct orthography and paying due attention to the West African portion of its linguistic
structure, i.e., a comparative methodology at a time the assimilation of the slaves’ linguistic code
to English may not have progressed so much. In fact, many “described” the mother tongue of the

8

enslaved Africans, but in a “reduced” or “distorted” form of the English writing system by
looking at only an easily identifiable part of the African speaker’s linguistic repertoire in a way
they could compare vis-à-vis the English language (cf. Bailey et al. 1991; Harrison 1884; Krapp
1924). They call it “descriptivism,” as shown in the following excerpts:

[L]inguistics proudly declares itself to be a descriptive science.
(Haugen 1966: 52, emphasis added)

[L]inguists seek to describe human linguistic ability and knowledge, not to prescribe
one system in preference to another. A parallel point of view is adopted in other
scientific disciplines as well. The first concern of all scientists is to describe and explain
the facts that they observe, not to change them.
(O'Grady et al. 1993: 5, emphasis in original with the last one added)

This is merely a post facto statement after prior generations (incl., linguists) indirectly or directly
helped establish or “prescribe” the current hegemonic state language systems all over the world,
in which elites’ or Europeans’ languages hold their dominant, widespread, and standardized
positions in state institutions. It is a liberalist view of science from the perspective of dominant
groups, the status of whose languages is usually secured in political and economic institutions.
Back in colonialism, European and American imperial powers established the solid
foundation for describing the linguistic codes of oppressed peoples, which helped establish the
hegemonic state relationships between the oppressed codes and the oppressors’ codes, as Joseph
Errington (2008) observes:

Colonialists produced texts [= grammars, dictionaries, etc.] about languages over four
centuries, around the world . . . those texts now represent a significant part of the
colonial archive. . . . As a practical matter, linguists worked in zones of colonial contact
on the premise that the languages they were describing could be compared and
9

presented in the image of others more familiar to them. . . . As projects of power, the
work of linguistics I call ‘colonial’ here served the ‘direct territorial appropriation of
another geopolitical entity, and exploitation of its resources and labor, and systematic
interference in the capacity of the appropriated culture . . . to organize its dispensations
of power’ (McClintock 1992: 1) . . . linguists can be regarded as a small, rather special
group of colonial agents who adapted European letters to alien ways of talking and, by
that means, devised necessary conduits for communication across lines of colonial
power. However different the methods they used or objects they described, they
transformed familiar alphabets into visual images of strange speech: their writing
systems, or orthographies, were the common beginning point for the work of writing
grammars, dictionaries, instructional texts, and so on. . . . Always and everywhere, their
written images of alien languages demonstrated underlying comparability: once ‘their’
talk was writable, like ours, resemblances were established between them and ‘us’ . . .
the intellectual work of writing speech was never entirely distinct from the ‘ideological’
work of devising images of people in zones of colonial contact. (3-5)

This systematic “description” and appropriation of linguistic codes for colonial and imperial
purposes also happened in the African diaspora, including in the United States. In the United
States, black language started to be described basically as distant from other nearby diaspora
languages, i.e., closer to white language, thus, reinforcing the image of an aberrational part of the
latter. It was imagined to be an aberration of English and thus the resemblances were established
between black and white language. It was projected onto the English writing system as
“reduced” or “distorted.” All this process of linguistic “description” may have served to contain
blacks within marginalized roles in white institutions. In other parts of the African diaspora,
European and American linguists, directly or indirectly through international organizations such
as UNESCO, have systematically interfered in the “description” of and policy-making for the
linguistic relationships between newly-born African languages and European languages. The
newly-born languages have been consistently “described” in the “deformed” or “reduced” forms
of the writing systems of European languages, obviously reflecting the linguists’ images of those
whom they describe, e.g., primitive or underdeveloped. Under this world and state system, black

10

linguistics in the United States may be more tempted to take over the devised method of
“describing” the prescribed linguistic relationship between white and black linguistic codes,
uncritically through the pre-established dominant epistemology, as dialect-to-dialect rather than
language-to-language―a situation that the linguists and others have long constructed as “facts”
or “empirical data” through an implicit or unconscious negotiation and integration of their
ideological-political, experiential-practical, and theoretical-scientific meanings of the linguistic
relationship.9
Subjugated linguistic codes designated as or coerced into becoming dialects in the nationstate system may lack enough power, finance, and agency to be described or constructed in a way
independent of the dominant paradigms, as dominant linguistic codes possess such to prescribe
the linguistic relationships in which they are situated in relation to the dominated codes today.
However, linguists and other interested parties need to take into due account the social, political,
economic, and scientific oppression of subjugated groups all over the world for centuries. Unless
the subjugated linguistic codes are promoted or differentiated more visibly now, as elites
including linguists acted toward both dominant and dominated linguistic codes in modernization
processes of the past, the subjugated codes or their linguistic and paralinguistic features may
decline or, albeit not entirely, be assimilated into the dominant linguistic codes. The subjugated
codes may remain to be targets of description mostly by creole linguists, dialectologists, or
variationist sociolinguists in the academic mainstream. They may be described as dialects or
varieties of the dominant codes rather than as languages other than the dominant codes. On the
other hand, dominant linguistic codes, which are called “standard language” or just “the . . .
language” and don’t need to be as visibly promoted or differentiated as subjugated linguistic

11

codes called “dialects,” “pidgins,” or “creoles” need to, may have the luxury of being
purportedly “described” rather than “prescribed.” For the status of the dominant codes in
controlling institutions such as the government, the industries, the media, and the school has
already enabled them to less visibly be differentiated, standardized, and spread society-wide.
Since those groups’ mother tongues, which have already been prescribed, differentiated, and
standardized enough, are not threatened any more, most linguists on the dominant sides would
argue for descriptivism. They would self-righteously force the ideology of descriptivism onto
linguists from groups of color. Many of the mother tongues of groups of color, having not had
the luxury of being differentiated equally as the dominant languages, are threatened in myriad
ways. This dominant ideology of descriptivism was explicitly shown when Einar Haugen, a
renowned white linguist and a former president of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA), gave
his interpretation of the history of linguistics. He commented:

Prior to the nineteenth century it is safe to say that ALL LINGUISTICS WAS
NORMATIVE. . . . The Greek and Latin grammarians were text book writers, who
wished to establish immutable norms for the correct writing and speaking of their
languages, the ius et norma loquendi. . . . In the early nineteenth century linguists began
making distinction now accepted between descriptive and prescriptive linguistics.
(1966: 50-51, capitals in original)

I cannot delve into the details of the change in the method of writing a grammar from the prenineteenth century era to the present, but I reasonably suspect that their epistemology or ideology
behind which they conduct their linguistic work has not shifted so much, and older discourses
have been replaced with more sophisticated ones which are more compatible with the ideology
of science. In other words, the purportedly “descriptive” work includes many “prescriptive”

12

roles.
Returning to the point of argument here, in the case of Ebonics, its users have not been
allowed to see their linguistic repertoire in an African-centered way. They have been forced
merely to relate the more visible, English part of their repertoire to white language, i.e., one
dialect to another dialect. In the nation-state system of the United States, they had and still have
to be English dialect users, that is, more covertly subjugated since within the logic of linguistic
standardization the users tend to more easily accept to be “standardized” (actually, a euphemism
for “subjugated”). Therefore, after centuries of linguistic “prescription” (many would contend it
has been “description”), perhaps, to keep black linguistic code in an acceptable distance from
white linguistic code, it would be more justifiable now to describe black code users as English
dialect users in dialectology or variationist sociolinguistics.
However, we must not forget the centuries of linguistic prescription of Africans primarily by
whites. Those linguists who currently study the black code as an African or African American
language should have the right to describe and even openly prescribe the language in a way to
suit their collective interests both as a legitimate scientific and politico-practical endeavor, as
mainstream linguists and other elites of the group which the linguists belonged to and had vested
interests in, did in the past. Charles DeBose (2005) argues the linguist can be a language planner,
i.e., a visionary for the language which they describe. Otherwise, I suspect the descriptivist
ideology may function to assimilate more of the existing linguistic features of black language
into white language because the former, having no established distinct writing system, is far less
standardized and stabilized, although new divergences in black language may continue to be
produced in the multiple segregation of most blacks in the assimilation process (cf. Fasold, et al.

13

1987). On the other hand, white language is probably safe even facing descriptivism since its
distinctness has for centuries been produced and reproduced mainly outside of linguistics, i.e., in
the mass media, major businesses, the government, and the school―state institutions of power
with which language sciences, another institution of power, are on most occasions in tandem
(Errington 2008: 12).
This pattern of scientific behavior towards the oppressing-oppressed linguistic relationship,
i.e., one kind of cultural (incl., language) nationalism primarily embraced and performed by
dominant groups, seems to permeate the current scientific examination of languages and dialects
the world over. The descriptivist discourse and practice in linguistics today seems to
inadvertently or covertly help reproduce the functional and structural relationship between the
oppressing linguistic code and the oppressed linguistic code, and scientifically help reproduce
the political and economic relationship of the subjugating group and the subjugated group within
a polity.
The interests which derive from the interacting meanings/interpretations of the linguistic,
political, and economic relationships in which linguists are situated, may influence the
interpretive orientation, i.e., assimilation or differentiation, of the linguists toward the status and
corpus of another group’s code or their own linguistic code. For example, black linguist Charles
DeBose (2005) suggests that “the social location of a scholar can affect the manner in which an
issue is experienced, perceived or handled” (41); white linguist Walt Wolfram (2015) observes
that “sociolinguists are not exempt from the interpretation of ‘facts’ in a way that reflects their
predisposition, social background, and experience” (339). Linguists may establish particular
paradigms to describe another group’s code or their own code and implicitly endorse their

14

ideological-political position on the status and corpus of another group’s code or their own code.
This interpretive social process of linguistic knowledge formation is represented throughout the
following excerpts from several scholars in various fields of inquiry which have developed for
generations:

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is
the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force . . .
each new class which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it, is compelled,
merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interest as the common interest
of all the members of society, that is, expressed in ideal form: it has to give its ideas the
form of universality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones.
(Marx & Engels 2001: 92, 94, emphasis in original)

[S]cientists are literally constructing their world rather than merely describing it . . .
science is certainly intellectual work with a high degree of personal involvement.
(Krohn 1980: xii, xix)

The knowledge of a thing can only come through an act of judgment involving concept
and ideology. (Asante 1980: 51)

[O]bjective truth . . . does not exist, at least in social science and politics. In these
realms, truth is a social construct created to suit the purposes of the dominant group.
(Delgado & Stefancic 2012: 104)

Academic disciplines arise neither in a natural nor social vacuum. They emerge in order
to serve ranges of interests and purposes . . . discrete conceptual categories are
inseparable from the interests and purposes of the ones who construct them.
(Horn 2007, original in 1997: 412)

All research is about power―who has it, who doesn’t―and the use of power to shape
reality based on research . . . all research is political and derives from a certain
ideological stance . . . even the position that asserts that research should be “objective”
is itself an ideological position. (Smitherman 2000: 8)

15

The frameworks of the dominant group tend to become the master frameworks upon
which all racial actors ground (for or against) their ideological positions.
(Bonilla-Sylva 2014: 9)

[T]he character of the discussion [of African languages, including black language in the
United States] has been dictated by those who had political and economic control over
the lives of African people [in continental Africa and the diaspora].
(Blackshire-Belay 1996: 16)

All the quotes above point to my proposition that the ideological-political interests of the
dominant ethnic or racial group, who is politically, economically, and socially prevailing in a
polity, especially, its elites of various professions or institutions of power, may largely determine
the dominance of one paradigm over another at least in social sciences including linguistics.10
The power or ideological-political interests of elites need or create scientific endorsement, part of
which is an endorsement from linguistics, to objectify and legitimize their oppressive measures
in state institutions against other ethnic or racial groups and their political and economic
domination of the other groups. This process constructs various “high-order” discourses in
various fields of inquiry to devisualize themselves and be accepted as the universal truth.
One of the relevant interests in language matters is to spread the linguistic code of the
dominant group, especially the code of its elites as the only standard throughout the polity. It
attempts to achieve both symbolic integration and politico-operational integration (Fishman
1972) of the dominant group, while often hesitantly dragging in minority groups as dialect users
under the umbrella of the standard language. In this nationalist and ethnocentrist/racist scheme,
the elites of the dominant group, for example, legislators, government officials in the department
or ministry of education, litterateur, journalists, linguists, language practitioners, etc. act under
such social changes as political independence and economic transformation for the following

16

language planning activities: the codification (selection of an overarching code, selection of an
orthography, compilation of a dictionary, description of the grammar <this is the major domain
of linguistics>, etc.), elaboration (expansion of vocabulary, styles, etc.), and/or spread
(differentiation and standardization of the overarching code through education and the mass
media, etc.) of their code over the code of the masses of the dominant group and the codes of the
subjugated groups (cf. Cooper 1989). The distribution of linguistic knowledge and resources
through language planning activities (incl., language sciences) may promote the position of one
linguistic paradigm over another, which then helps create or reinforce the state authority and
authenticity of both the standard language and the dominant group in a plausible manner.
Especially, elites other than linguists may take advantage of the authoritative knowledge which
the latter construct so that the non-linguist elites exploit the masses and the minorities through
linguistic means. Elites, more conscious of their action and, gradually, part of the masses who
have partaken of the power with their use of the elites’ linguistic code, may come to interpret or
define the codes of the masses and the subjugated groups as “dialects,” which are apparently
under the overarching “language” of the elites. People in general (incl., linguists) may come to
develop a “common sense” or a dominant “experiential-practical interpretation” that the former
are dialects of the latter. There may emerges a “descriptive” perspective to verify the
“prescribed” linguistic relationship and a dominant linguistic paradigm to justify the perspective,
invalidating a counter-paradigm. This is a hypothetical process of the generation of a dominant
linguistic paradigm, i.e., a hypothetical process by which scientific truths evolve around the
power ideology and politics of a dominant ethnic or racial group to control others.
The attempts of those language scholars who belong to or conform to the dominant racial or

17

ethnic group to define or describe their own linguistic code or the code of an oppressed group
may not look so politically loaded that they may appear detached from the nationalist ambitions
of the dominant group. Even if the dominant group does not clamor for the promotion of its code
and explicitly argue that its code is distinct from others, from the beginning, the prevailing
political, economic, and social status of the group has already ensured the spread and dominance
of their code as a distinct language mainly through the media and the school. In the case of those
scholars from an oppressed group who (have no choice but to) conform to the dominant group’s
paradigm might have to give some rationale to emphasize the objectivity of their scientific acts
as follows:

The present discussion [on Black English Vernacular (BEV)], although rooted in a
socially important topic, will stress linguistic concerns. This is not to suggest that the
social aspects of BEV are being dismissed as unimportant, merely that they are not of
primary concern here. (Baugh 1980: 83)

Therefore, they can argue that their research is “non-political,” “objective,” “ideologically free,”
and so forth.11
On the other hand, those language scholars who belong to an oppressed minority group and
never conform to the ideas or acts of the scholars of the dominant group may act disclosing their
political position more visibly, that their scientific attempts to define or examine their
endangered linguistic code may appear ideologically-politically loaded, and, thus, be rejected by
the scientific community of mainstream linguists. As physicist, mathematician, and philosopher
Philipp G. Frank (1956) puts it: “Every influence of moral, religious, or political considerations
upon the acceptance of a theory is regarded as ‘illegitimate’ by the so-called ‘community of

18

scientists’” (3). However, if the subjugated counter-elites do not clamor for the promotion of
their code and the differentiation of their code from the oppressor’s code with any scientific
weapon at hand, their subjugated political, economic, and social status may allow easier
assimilation of their code into the code of the oppressor. Therefore, in the case of the
comparative linguistic paradigm, some observers (e.g., Fasold 2005; McWhorter 1997a, b) may
evaluate that the counter-paradigm is “ideological,” “political,” “non-linguistic,” “not informed,”
or an “illusion,” even making no attempt to examine their own paradigm from the same
perspective. In fact , not only the public but also linguists across racial lines voiced their
opposition to the paradigm, probably because they shared one historical nationalist meaning that
English should be the principal or only language used across racial and ethnic lines and another
language nationalist but more experiential-practical meaning that black language is a dialect of
English because they put more emphasis on their experience of inter-intelligibility of black and
white codes.
I would conclude that every scientific idea on language by linguists reflects some
ideological-political position. Majority linguistics can claim its non-politicalness because their
majority languages are less visibly or more hegemonically promoted in every state institution of
power at the current moment, while minority linguistics may look more political because their
minority languages need to be promoted more visibly with little help from the state institutions
of power. Hence, action-oriented minority linguistics such as the comparative linguistic
paradigm may show a more explicit form of politicalness in the eyes of some, as French linguist
Louis-Jean Calvet (1974: postface, followed by my translation) aptly observes12:

D’un certain point de vue, la linguistique a été jusqu’a l’aube de notre siècle une
19

manière de nier la langue des autres peuples, cette negation, avec d’autres, constituent le
fondement idéologique de notre <<supériorité>>, de la supériorité de l’Occident
chrétien sur les peuples <<exotique>> que nous allions asservir joyeusement. . . . Une
linguistique consciente de ces implications politiques ne peut être que militante. C’est
aux linguists concernés, dans leurs pays respectifs, dans leurs regions, qu’il appartient
d’assumer cette prise en charge, ce combat pour la defense et l’épanouissement de leur
langue et de leur culture propres. (From a certain point of view, linguistics was since the
beginning of our century a way to deny the language of other peoples, this negation,
with others, constituting the ideological foundation of our “superiority,” the superiority
of Christian West over “exotic” peoples whom we have joyfully subjugated. . . . A
linguistics conscious of the political implications cannot but be militant. It is the
responsibility of the linguists concerned in their respective countries, in their regions to
assume the support, the battle for the defense and thriving of their language and their
distinct culture.)

Sociolinguistics, which has become the main discipline for black language research, has been
touted as a savior for minority, oppressed, or endangered linguistic codes around the world.
However, looking back at the repetitive nature of racism or ethnocentrism in science and other
institutions of power, where one oppressive system or discourse has been deftly replaced with
another as a result of interest convergence (Bell 1980, see the definition and detailed discussion
in Chapter 4), linguists, especially, sociolinguists should be alert to the workings of power and
ideology in linguistic knowledge formation and its implementation/application in state or quasiprivate institutions such as the administration, the judiciary, the media, the academy,
philanthropy, and the school.

1.2. Experiential-Practical Influences on Paradigms

Scientists attempt to transform their experiences into specialized narratives of science
(Lambert 1995: vi). Experience is an interactive process rather than a given, i.e., a product of the

20

interaction of our senses, our conceptual apparatus, and ‘the world out there’” (Longino 1990:
221). The senses and conceptual apparatus provided to constitute the meaning of experience are
molded in the actor’s social world, and they influence what to see of “the world out there,”
“giving coherence to our experience” (Ibid.). The social world provides, among others, the
ideological-political conceptual apparatus and the theoretical-scientific conceptual apparatus,
which then influence the constitution of experience. For example, in linguistics, a series of
coherent experiences which linguists constitute through their senses and conceptual apparatus in
various spheres of their lives may provide an epistemological foundation for the scientific
examination of a linguistic code toward which they act, as Thomas Kuhn notes of the
relationship between observation/experience and scientific belief (1996) and Lambert (1995),
between experience and knowledge. The experiences may determine how they interpret or define
the linguistic entity which they attempt to examine, e.g., as a language or a dialect, then
influencing what criteria they adopt to delineate it in the defined way and what linguistic features
they focus on to construct a linguistic system which they recognize and imagine the entity to be.
The foundational experiences by linguists may confer empirical legitimacy and authority on their
linguistic research, but, perhaps, only when they are compatible with the imagined linguistic
experiences or practices by most of the other linguists, by most of the elites, who execute their
power in other state or quasi-private institutions in collaboration with the academy, and by most
of the masses.
For the mainstream paradigms in black linguistics, the concepts “racial integration” and
“black language as an English dialect or creole,” and the sense “acceptance into the mainstream”
may influence the scholars to pay more attention to a coherent belief and value set of

21

intelligibility, understandability, Englishness of the black language phenomena, consequently, far
more similarities between black language and English, which establishes the coherence of their
linguistic experiences. In the African-centered paradigm, however, the concepts “national selfdetermination” and “black language as a national language or an African language” and the sense
“segregation in the nonmainstream” may influence the scholars to pay more attention to a
coherent belief and value set of non- or mis- intelligibility, non- or mis- understandability,
Africanness, wholeness of the black language phenomena, consequently, far more differences
between the two languages, which establishes the coherence of their linguistic experiences.
The experiential coherence of black language as mentioned above is practiced at the societal
level. In the legislature, judiciary, and executive, only standard “languages” with their own
writing systems, except for sign languages, are usually the media for official language services.
Linguistic codes which are officially and scientifically recognized as dialects are usually not
given overt official language status or services, perhaps, because people may experience far more
similarities between the linguistic codes concerned within mainstream contexts and through
societal language practices come to perceive and imagine that the dialect and the standard are
intelligible to each other without any interpreter. In mainstream businesses, the owners or
executives may be the influential guardians of their linguistic experience and practice. The
business to government pipeline may channel their linguistic practice into the government
language policy (Cooper 1989). Government and private foundations may offer funds to research
projects, probably, which support their linguistic experience, practice, and policy (Minamoto
2000). In whole, the linguistic experiences or practices by dominant elites in the public and
private institutions may influence the construction of a linguistic relationship in which the

22

linguistic code of the elites is the overarching “neutral” code called “language” and the linguistic
codes of the masses or minorities are the “dialects” of the overarching code, and then, the
construction of a scientific paradigm or discourse to legitimize the linguistic relationship.
This sequence of experiential-practical to theoretical-scientific is epitomized by the
relationship between white and black language in the United States. Historically, state and
private institutions conducted their businesses with enslaved Africans and their descendants in
white language, i.e., English, irrespective of whether many of them had a limited or no
proficiency of English or little or no literacy skills in English. Naturally, the elites, the masses
who saw the businesses between the elites and the slaves, or the masses who did the businesses
with the elites might have imagined the primary language of all the descendants of enslaved
Africans as English or some kind of English, perhaps, as blacks may have switched to a language
which whites understood, consequently, excluding from the beginning an epistemology that it
might be described as a language other than English. Today, the school, media, government, and
business communicate only in white language to every segment of blacks in every location,
except when a politician or a business attempts to attract black voters or customers.
The dominant sequence from experiential-practical to theoretical-scientific is manifested, for
example, in the school’s dealings with black children. Because the language of the black children
has been perceived or imagined as within the scale of English, when the children are outside of
the range of the linguistic or communicative norms of English, they have been evaluated lower in
their English proficiency or thrown into special education classes or diagnosed as having ADHD,
dyslexia, etc. These institutional acts are largely the interpretive, nationalist acts of some white
intelligentsia to construct scientific paradigms in psychological, educational, and medical

23

sciences to justify their covert White Supremacy. Better, white linguists in the 1960s and 70s
adjusted the pathology model to the culture model, although treating black code as a “deviation”
of the standard and calling it a “nonstandard” dialect (See details in Chapter 4). For the Africancentered paradigm such as the comparative linguistic paradigm, it is likely that some
experiential-practical meanings, e.g., the counter-elite’s own experiences with black code being
treated as a pathology in the school, which suggested that it was not a language, thus, not English
as well, or the code being largely misunderstood or un-understood by whites, might have
provided an epistemological foundation for ideologically-politically resisting the hegemony of
English, molding a counter-conceptual apparatus, and thus, theoretically-scientifically
interpreting black code as a language other than English within the conceptual framework.
In the experiential-practical area of language education, when black children are monolingual
speakers of black code, they have sometimes been provided with “bidialectal” education because
the primary linguistic code of the children is perceived to be within the scale of English.
However, many scholars (e.g., Baratz & Shuy 1969; Fasold & Shuy 1970; Stewart 1964) who
specialized in “non-standard Negro English” or “Black English” especially in the 1960s and
1970s experientially-practically suggested to apply the “bilingual” education method for black
children to gain literacy in white code, euphemistically called “standard dialect,” “standard
English,” or “school language.” The experiential-practical meaning of bilingualism assigned to
black code by the scholars may have been contradictory to their theoretical-scientific definition
of the relationship of the two codes as “dialectal” which those scholars adopted. Hence, they
devised another scientific definition of black code as a “different linguistic system,” which they
seem to have carefully chosen avoiding the use of the terms “dialect” and “language.”

24

In the case of the African-centered paradigm, it is likely that the innovators’ experientialpractical meanings, e.g., the counter-elite’s observation of linguistic interferences from black
code that may have affected the learning of literacy using the white code in the inner-city, may
have provided an epistemological basis for theoretically-scientifically interpreting black code as
a language other than English, and thus supporting “bilingual” education in Ebonics and English.
The experiential-practical meaning of bilingualism assigned to black code by the scholars was
compatible with the scientific definition of the relationship of the two codes as “bilingual” which
those scholars adopted and with another scientific definition of black code as a “different
linguistic system,” which can be interpreted as either language or dialect. With more recent
events, when the elites in other institutions of power located the counter-elitist experientialpractical meaning of Ebonics, which contradicted with their own experiential-practical meanings,
they soon acted toward the counter-elitist meaning of Ebonics, probably appropriating the
established knowledge in the mainstream black linguistics, e.g., a letter to Dr. Ernie A. Smith
from Commissioner of Education Ernest L. Boyer in 1977 (See details in Section 5.2.4),
Education Secretary Richard Riley’s words on Ebonics in 1996,13 and State of California,
Assembly Bill No. 1206 in 1997.14 For example, AB1206, in order to prohibit the use of
bilingual education or ESL funds for those students whose primary linguistic code is regarded as
a dialect of English, specifies that in order to receive bilingual education services the students’
primary code shall be neither dialect, idiom, nor language that has a syntax distinct from English,
yet can be traced linguistically as derived from English, for example, lexically. This definition
may have been appropriated from the existing dominant literature on black language but at the
same time, conferred official authority back on the existing dominant scientific conceptualization

25

and theorization of black language.
Another self-contradictory practice has been seen in the judiciary system. There seems to be
no judiciary system in the United States in which black language is a target “language” for
official interpretive services. However, there were a few precedents in which a researcher of
black language became an expert witness and interpreted the defendant in courts (Smith 1974,
2015; Smitherman 2000). Even some government agency admitted the need for official
interpretative services (See details on in Section 5.2.5). These incidences attested to the necessity
for such services in black language in judiciary cases, where accurate interpretations or
understandings determine the validity of legal proceedings.15 In fact, under the current law, such
services in black language shall be provided, but only if the defendant requests it.16 This
experiential-practical meaning attached to black language in the judiciary system may have
provided an epistemological foundation for the African-centered paradigm. However, that the
court case documents have been written for centuries only in white language for proceedings
involving black defendants may have given a historical rationale for the mainstream linguists to
draw on them as historical evidence to interpret black language within the scale of the English
language.
Lastly, I shall briefly discuss, probably, the most easily identifiable experiential-practical
factor: intelligibility and understandability. Many linguists argue that intelligibility and
understandability cannot be a criterion for classifying linguistic codes. However, there exist lots
of accounts by linguists and other language specialists who comment that this or that linguistic
code is a dialect of their language because they can understand it or this or that code is a
language other than their language because they cannot understand it. I believe intelligibility and

26

understandability provides an implicit but decisive criterion on which the construction of a
descriptive paradigm is predicated because the linguist would enter into their research to validate
or substantiate their intuitive proposition on a linguistic phenomenon. For example, Dr. Ernie
Smith comments that back in the 1970s he found white students “didn’t understand” what black
children said in fieldwork. Even today there are whites who state they “cannot understand” the
language of black youths.17 On the other hand, mainstream scholars may have had far more of
experiences where they “could understand” what black code users were saying before they
started their research.
A coherent set of linguistic experiences or practices which the earlier elites and their
followers had toward black and white people may have given them an empirical framework for
scientifically defining black code as a dialect of English, far less visibly, in a way effective for
the maintenance of the existing political and economic structure. On the other hand, another
coherent set of linguistic experiences or practices which the counter-elites and their followers
had toward black and white people may have given them a different empirical framework for
scientifically defining black code as a language other than English, more visibly, in a way
effective for the change of the existing political and economic structure. That said, a common
interest is found in these two groups: control or distribution of power in one way or another
through different theoretical-scientific meanings to which different experiential-practical
meanings are attached.

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1.3. Theoretical-Scientific Influences on Paradigms

The theoretical-scientific factor can be divided into three major subfactors: disciplines,
subjectivity, and methodological criteria and interpretations. The three may interact with each
other to produce paradigms in linguistics. Methodological criteria and interpretations may be
subsumed under the rubric of disciplines, which attempt to develop their own methodological
criteria and interpretations, however, since there are often cases where disciplines may employ
methods from other disciplines, disciplines and methodological criteria and interpretations are
treated separately.
Disciplines may be one of the strongest indicators for researchers to adopt particular
paradigms. Considering the rigid structure of traditional mono-disciplines such as linguistics and
sociology rather than so-called inter-disciplines such as sociolinguistics and Africology (even the
latter sometimes sound boundary-conscious when they discuss disciplines), and the stronger
tendency for the former to insulate themselves, disciplines may have an overarching influence on
researchers to assimilate into the dominant epistemology and method within themselves. Another
indicator for the well-nigh exclusive selection of the dominant epistemology and paradigm by
researchers may be arbitrariness inherent in science. The dominant may tend to emphasize what
they considered to be outside of their purview as subjective, political, or wrong, even if a tiny
possibility for counter-knowledge might exist, at least, as a hypothesis. However, this exclusivity
or selectivity itself is a result of subjectivity and arbitrariness inherent in science. The
subjectivity factors such as the scholars’ implicit ideology, their need to secure their monetary
rewards and status, and their senses of their empirical world may interact with the internal

28

arbitrariness to produce a set of methodological criteria and interpretations under a set of events
and situations.
In the ensuing sections, I shall present a hypothetical picture of how each of the three
categories, disciplines, subjectivity, and methodological criteria and interpretations, influence
one another to produce paradigms.

1.3.1. Disciplines

‘Authorities,’ ‘disciples,’ and ‘schools’ are the curse
of science; and do more to interfere with the work
of the scientific spirit than all its enemies.
―Bibby (1959)

Scientists (incl., social scientists) acquire “from education a set of standards, tools, and
techniques which they later deploy in their own creative work . . . scientific education remains a
relatively dogmatic initiation into a pre-established problem-solving tradition that the student is
neither invited nor equipped to evaluate” (Kuhn 1972: 83, 84-85). It is “a strenuous attempt to
and devoted attempt to force nature [incl., language], into the conceptual boxes supplied by
professional education” (Kuhn 1996: 5, brackets added). These critiques were obviously directed
against natural sciences, but Kuhn’s statements may be applicable to social sciences too. One
logical deduction from the critiques may be that the conventional departments of linguistics and
other relevant denominations may not lead to the creation or discovery of a new paradigm which
radically goes against the existing dominant paradigms.
In linguistics, with regard to the language of descendants of enslaved Africans in the United

29

States, it seems the Labovian and other cognate paradigms are still influential all over the United
States. Many prominent black linguists in the United States today seem to be under great
influence from the University of Pennsylvania school, where white linguist William Labov has
taught or the Stanford University school (Labov’s students such as John R. Rickford and John
Baugh teach or have taught). Most scholars in the dominant paradigms describe the black code as
a dialect or variety of English. There are others, such as Geneva Smitherman, who describe it
comparatively (Smitherman 1977) and differently from other mainstream scholars, treat it as a
language, i.e., African American Language, African American language, or African American,
although not to the extent that they call it African. Smitherman was trained under white linguists
at the linguistics department of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Rickford (2000) and
Salikoko Mufwene (2013, personal communication), the latter trained at the linguistics
department of the University of Chicago, call the way Smitherman describes the black code
Afrocentric, but it seems that her approach is still accepted in the mainstream academy, perhaps
since she draws on one of the mainstream paradigms to describe it.
Other newly developed interdisciplinary departments such as Africology might produce a
counter-paradigm which fundamentally challenges dominant paradigms. Particularly a central
perspective employed in Africology, i.e., Afrocentricity seems to permeate counter-paradigms
like the comparative linguistic paradigm in black linguistics. There are three such black linguists
who adopt a counter-paradigm. One is Robert D. Twiggs (1973), who adopted a paradigm which
regarded the linguistic code of descendants of enslaved Africans in the United States as part of an
African language family called Pan-African Language in the Western Hemisphere (PALWH) but
which described only the black code in the same conventional way as the dominant paradigms

30

did. Currently there is no access to information on what school he graduated from, what he
majored in, and what happened to him later. He was an assistant professor at Pan-African
Studies, California State University, Los Angeles in the early 1970s, but his whereabouts are
unknown thereafter.18 The second is Dr. Ernie A. Smith, who adopted another paradigm which
regarded it as part of an African language family called Ebonics and described it in a
comparative linguistic way, comparing Ebonics with several West African languages
phonologically, syntactically, morphologically, pragmatically, and paralinguistically (Smith 1974
& 1993). He graduated from an interdisciplinary department called “Comparative Culture” at the
University of California, Irvine, which had the division of “Black Culture,” equivalent to
Africology today. He was trained in linguistics under a white linguist who called the US
descendants’ primary linguistic code “Black English” and described it as such, but his
dissertation advisors except the linguistics professor were all Afrocentric to the extent that they
accepted his Ebonics thesis. Dr. Smith is now a professor in clinical linguistics at Charles R.
Drew University of Medicine and Science in Los Angeles, a historically black university. There
is another linguist, Dr. Carol Aisha Blackshire-Belay, who was trained in (creole) linguistics on
the linguistic codes of foreign workers in Germany at the Department of Germanic Linguistics,
Princeton University (Blackshire-Belay 1989). Later, it seems, especially after she moved to the
Black Studies program at Temple University, she might have adopted the comparative linguistic
or Africological paradigm to describe the linguistic codes of descendants of enslaved Africans in
the diaspora. She regards black language as part of an African language family called Ebonics
but seems not to have described it in a comparative linguistic way yet. She was an associate
professor at African American Studies, Temple University (1993-1996) and then the chairperson

31

of African American Studies, Indiana State University (1996-2002).
So far I have suggested that differences in departments, disciplines, or schools may be related
to paradigmatic differentiation on the linguistic code of descendants of enslaved Africans in the
United States. The entire picture of black linguistics may fit Knorr-Cetina’s proposition
“Whether a proposed knowledge claim is judged plausible, interesting, unbelievable, or
nonsensical, may depend on who proposed the result, where the work was done, and how it was
accomplished” (2005: 182). For example, white linguist Ralph W. Fasold’s (2005) authoritative
claim that he finds no other trained linguists than Dr. Blackshire-Belay in the Africological
school, shows “occasionally the negative aspect of specialization shows itself, and innovative
“outsiders” to a field of specialization are resisted by the “insiders” (Barber 1961: 600). It may
suggest he cannot accept, for example, Dr. Ernie A. Smith’s linguistic thesis because of his
academic credentials.

1.3.2. Subjectivity

As discussed earlier, language sciences or paradigm-making may be unintentionally or
implicitly predicated on language nationalism or political ideology, one area of subjectivity.
One’s inclination or ideology may be largely a product of one’s economic, educational,
linguistic, and other experiences in one’s empirical world. Ideology and experience may not be
easily separated. I suggest linguists pursue their scientific interest largely drawing on their own
experiential meanings, and this process may quite unconsciously contain ideological meanings
attached to the experiential meanings.

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Nonetheless, paradigms in language sciences favor ideologically or politically sterilized
discourse for fear that the scientists should be accused that their research is “distorted” by
ideological or political concerns (Lambert 1995). Attesting to this ideology-phobia is the
following resolution adopted by the Linguistic Society of America in 1997 after the Ebonics
Resolution in 1996, which obviously drew on the comparative linguistic paradigm by Dr. Ernie
A. Smith:

The distinction between “languages” and “dialects” is usually made more on social and
political grounds than on purely linguistic ones. . . . 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.
(Resolution on the Oakland “Ebonics” Issue Unanimously Adopted at the Annual
Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Chicago, Illinois, January 3, l997, italics
mine)

The claim made by the LSA may suggested that linguistics and education are not political and
the distinction between dialect and language is an irrelevant issue for linguistics and education.
However, there are an abundance of examples in which linguists inadvertently or sometimes
intentionally are involved in glottopolitics. The creator of the resolution, John R. Rickford seems
to have suggested that the comparative linguistic paradigm, which provided the basis for the
Ebonics Resolution, is political; on the other hand, he refers to Ebonics as African American
vernacular English (AAVE), i.e., a “dialect” of English for many years. Despite the phrasing of
the resolution, he always makes a political, subjective, arbitrary distinction of defining it as a
dialect of English or another language. John H. McWhorter called the comparative linguistic
paradigm an “illusion”; on the other hand, he clearly made a “political” statement that Ebonics is
a “dialect” of English (McWhorter 1997a, 1997b). Special editions of academic journals, The

33

Black Scholar 27 (1) and (2) and The Journal of Negro Education 67(1) treated Ebonics as a
“dialect” of English when they discussed the Ebonics Resolution in relation to education and
other societal institutions. After Rickford and Rickford’s (2000) Spoken Soul, it seems that the
mainstream literature has come to pay little attention to the comparative linguistic paradigm, e.g.,
a major encyclopedic work on black language by Lanehart (2015) presented Dr. Ernie A. Smith’s
idea in only a few sentences while it basically addressed the mainstream paradigms. All this
reminds readers that “science is a social enterprise, with an organized consensus of men
determining what is and is not to be warranted as knowledge” (Phillips 1974: 63). It is quite a
subjective enterprise of constructing a selective discourse on a “linguistic system” culled out of a
continuous and discontinuous mosaic of communicative means of various visibility. As a lesson
to every linguist, it should be remembered that “[t]o be scientific is [to be] openminded” (Kuhn
1972: 80).
As a result of such subjectivity-phobia that often surfaces when defining a linguistic code as
a language or a dialect in linguistics, there has emerged one apologetic discourse concerning the
treatment of dialects. The apologetic discourse is based on the following general idea in the
literature that, as suggested by the LSA statement, all linguistic codes have their own “linguistic
systems” and thus they are all equal, never superior or inferior judging from their internal
features. O'Grady, et al. (1993) states:

All languages and all varieties of a particular language have grammars that enable their
speakers to express any proposition that the human mind can produce. In terms of this allimportant criterion, then, all varieties of language are absolutely equal as instruments of
communication and thought. The goal of contemporary linguistic analysis is not to rank
languages on some imaginary scale of superiority. (5, emphasis added)

34

At a glance, this idea sounds valid since it is true that every linguistic code has its own
grammatical system. But, even if “all varieties of language are absolutely equal as instruments of
communication and thought,” the linguists’ categorization as seen in “all varieties of a particular
language” or their scientific authority may contribute to language policy-making in which
language, dialect, style, etc. are not equally treated as instruments of communication and
thought. They may need to reconsider why they follow the political, subjective dualism of
standard language and nonstandard dialect, implicitly or inadvertently endorsing the
government’s political, subjective behavior of ranking linguistic codes on some imaginary scale
of superiority. They may need to question their own arbitrariness in employing different
methodological criteria and interpretations to describe inter- and intra- language differences,
against their own claim that both linguistic differences equally have their own grammatical
systems. They may argue that they are just “descriptive” of the societal situations where the
linguistic codes which they examine are placed, while contending this or that linguistic code is
“linguistically” a dialect or a language based on that research, possibly because the power
structure in which the linguists are located may covertly enable them to pursue their scientific
endeavors without a visible posture of social and political advocacy and can maintain that they
are objective scientists whose research findings are politically neutral (White 1984: 19). They
may need to be aware or admit that their produced knowledge, a product from a particular set of
criteria and interpretations and its resultant scientific authority on which the knowledge is
predicated may be appropriated by state institutions so that the institutions can justify their
oppressive practices, and their current and future status financially and professionally hinges on
the state institutions. This points to the fact that a linguistic “description” has a “prescriptive”

35

function. Even after this line of thought, some may attempt to relativize the term “dialect” to
refer to the standard language as “standard dialect.” However, it still cannot release nonstandard
or nonmainstream dialects from the state-sanctioned hegemonic language system, or it still keeps
them in the hierarchical language and social structure, in which the standard language is
enshrined. Therefore, linguistics, especially as a social science, cannot detach a linguistic code
which linguists attempt to examine from those ideological-political and experiential-practical
meanings which constitute the linguistic code, and it is inevitably subject to arbitrary selection of
methodological criteria and interpretations to support those meanings.

1.3.3. Methodological Criteria and Interpretations

Method/ology grounds the researchers’ reading of present and future
research events, in ways that allow for/preclude possibilities
―Goodley, et al. (2004)

In her 2005 work, The Fabrication of Facts, Karin Knorr-Cetina starts with this statement:

[W]e will take all references to the ‘constitutive’ role of science seriously and regard
scientific inquiry as a process of production. Rather than consider scientific products as
somehow capturing what is, we will consider them as selectively carved out,
transformed and constructed from whatever is. (177)19

The pivotal point lies in her proclamation that science is a product of “fabrication,” in other
words, scientists play a subjective role in constructing science. They may find a similar
constitutive role of linguistics in capturing what a linguistic code is, as one white linguist admits
on black linguistics:

36

In reality, . . . facts, data, and evidence are socially constructed notions within
linguistics, as they are in other fields of scientific inquiry, and the appeal to facts and
data in the construction of a theory of language has been controversial for decades.
(Wolfram 2015: 338)

There comes hard linguistic data, first. The data are selected based on what linguistic code(s) to
examine or to compare, what patterns to focus on, and whether the linguistic code(s) is
considered as a language or a dialect, probably on the intuitive basis of intelligibility,
sociological variables, or other criteria on the basis of which a paradigmatic consistency is
pursued (cf., Errington 2008: 10). Various scientific methods may give particular defining names
to the linguistic code(s). Linguists may deal with the same set of linguistic data, but when they
employ different descriptive paradigms, it may create different interpretations or definitions of
the linguistic code(s) they describe. They may attempt to establish some apparently consistent
logics or criteria in their own scientific paradigms. However, seen between paradigms, they may
reveal some inconsistencies in their logics. This problem emerges when some of those who are in
traditional programs, counter-programs, or non-linguistic disciplines, analyze, for example, the
Creolist Paradigm, more specifically, the creole linguistic paradigm per se.
Creole linguistics deployed whatever non-linguistic and linguistic rationalizations or criteria,
such as sociohistorical and linguistic ruptures and hybridization of several “languages,” as if
absolute rather than relative, available for distinguishing a newly born African linguistic code
with a predominant lexicon of a European linguistic code from a newly born or developing
European linguistic code with a predominant lexicon of a European linguistic code. Errington
(2008) points out that “[s]trategies of selection, as linguists devised and used them, played
indirectly but sometimes crucially into constructions of colonial power and authority” (10). The

37

central perspective of creole linguistics is lexicocentric because it started from how Europeans
experienced and perceived, for example, those “African” linguistic phenomena, “hybridized”
codes which were born from the “contact” between European and African linguistic codes in the
African diaspora. European linguistics seems to still hold on to the purist thesis that languages in
Europe may have developed in a monogenetic manner, however, if we deconstruct the relative
difference between language and dialect and integrate them back into the concept “linguistic
code,” we may be able to view the sociohistorical development of any linguistic code as a result
of “contact” between two or more codes, polygenesis. Creole linguistics suggests that the newly
born African codes have European roots, probably based on the conspicuousness of lexicon and
seeming intelligibility, although nowadays most of the linguists would state they have “new” or
“creole” roots or structure, neither European nor African, even if some of them find African
grammars in their substrata. Most of the scholars seem to primarily or merely see the European
components of the new codes and do not compare the codes to non-European features which are
seen especially in the grammars, only making passing reference to Africanisms in them.20 This
dominant practice, widely seen among those language scientists whose primary languages are
major state or world languages, fits the description of normal science by Thomas Kuhn. Kuhn
(1996) points out, “No part of the aim of normal science is to call forth new sorts of phenomena;
indeed those that will not fit the box are often not seen at all” (24).
One of the original intents of creole linguistics was to demystify the purist, essentialist notion
of the linguistic genealogy of European languages that had been established by comparative
linguistics. However, European linguists took no further action in that direction, instead
deploying both linguistic and non-linguistic criteria to justify the differentiation of method to

38

capture human and linguistic diversity between Europe and non-Europe.21 This arbitrary,
inconsistent practice, which the Creolist Paradigm accepts for explaining the genesis of the
primary linguistic codes of most descendants of enslaved Africans in the United States and
beyond is under criticism from the comparative linguistic paradigm.
The comparative linguistic paradigm resonates well with today’s mainstream perspective of
Africology, i.e., Afrocentricity (cf. Asante 2006), although the clear perspective of Afrocentricity
was not spelled out at the embryonic stage of the paradigm. According to Molefi Kete Asante
(1980), Dr. Ernie A. Smith’s dissertation advisor from the University of California, Afrocentricity
is a theory to give an African-centered position of scientific understanding on the experiences of
Africans for social change. This idea might be rephrased as follows: Afrocentric sciences are
founded on experiences of African people for the implementation of political programs to change
societies. In this respect, my view of a linguistic paradigm as a product of the interaction of
ideological-political, experiential-practical, and theoretical-scientific meanings fits the
Afrocentric theory. The perspective of Afrocentricity offers not only a revolutionary perspective
to research on things African but also one situated analysis of the essence of sciences as being
political from the side of some black scholars, rather than from the traditional white domain of
the sociology of knowledge or science. Afrocentricity locates the African phenomenon in Africa
and in the diaspora as an organic whole. This Pan-African way of describing the phenomenon
allows scholars to see African continuity and distinctness. The Pan-African methodology aims at
establishing the African roots of various black phenomena in the United States―in the 1970s,
West African roots and, in the 1980s, Egyptian roots. This African-centered framework of
reference informed the comparative linguistic paradigm, although the concept “Afrocentricity”

39

was not directly attached to the paradigm. In order to establish the African-centered meaning that
black language is an African language, the Ebonics paradigm adopted a modified version of
comparative linguistics, which was Europe-centered in its origin, so that the genetic relationship
of black language can be determined on the criterion of grammar. However, mainstream linguists
and non-linguists have been indifferent or intolerant or circumscriptive toward the theory, which
has repeatedly emerged in the history of black linguistics, as “[t]he methodological conceptions
scientists entertain at any given time constitute a . . . cultural source of resistance to scientific
discovery (Barber 1961: 598).

1.4. Tripartite Formation of Paradigms

It may be postulated that both the dominant paradigm and the counter-paradigm in black
linguistics are a product of the interpretive social interaction between ideological-political,
experiential-practical, and theoretical-scientific meanings of particular groups (cf., Errington
2008: 5). Though scientific discourse would avoid associating science with the ideologicalpolitical meanings, every paradigm in black linguistics may be implicitly influenced by those
ideological-political meanings. It may not be intentional, but the mere adoption or adaptation by
black scholars of a dominant paradigm which white predecessors have established to encompass
white and black language under the same overarching language may implicitly lend itself to or
give acquiescence to the ideological-political interests of the United States, i.e., the white nation
and integrationist black elites. The adoption of a counter-paradigm, on the other, may be more
explicitly influenced by the ideological-political interests of the black nation due to their

40

oppressed status.
There may be experiential-practical bases for the adoption of each paradigm to describe the
linguistic code of descendants of enslaved Africans in the United States. For example, whether
the oppressed linguistic code that linguists describe appears to function as a separate language or
a dialect of English in particular settings such as the court and the school may give them a reason
to claim that the code is a separate language or a dialect of English. To leave the status of an
oppressed linguistic code as a dialect of an oppressing linguistic code would serve the social,
political, and economic interests of the dominant linguistic community who primarily uses the
latter. Hence, to elevate the status of the oppressed code from dialect to language in those
controlling domains in which the dominant code is the only medium may help fulfill some social,
political, and economic goals of the subjugated linguistic community. Not only the counterparadigm but also the dominant paradigm may have their own experiential-practical meanings or
concerns based on which the target linguistic code of description is interpreted as a language or a
dialect of another language.
Lastly, there is a scientific issue of choosing which methodological criteria and
interpretations to describe black language. Those scholars in the Creolist paradigm are likely to
have been trained in black linguistics at the linguistics or education departments in which the
innovators or followers of the dominant paradigm teach. Even if there might be a theoretical
problem in their paradigm, they may still hold on to the paradigm and add up particular criteria
and interpretations to justify it because denial of it means destabilizing the foundation of their
research.22 They may attempt to maintain their current mainstream position and not want to be
ostracized in the academic mainstream. Their paradigmatic position may implicitly reinforce and

41

be reinforced by their own ideological-political and experiential-practical meanings. This
disciplinary structure may prompt some scholars, trained in interdisciplinary or traditional
departments where they don’t study under influential linguists who specialize in black language,
to adopt a counter-paradigm, which may more explicitly reinforce and be reinforced by their own
ideological-political and experiential-practical meanings.
The moment that a particular set of ideological-political needs and experiential-practical
concerns coincide with a particular set of theoretical-scientific criteria may be when a particular
scientific paradigm emerges. This process of linguistic knowledge/paradigm formation may have
been behind the birth of the comparative linguistic paradigm as well as the mainstream
paradigms. One of the foundations for the comparative linguistic paradigm may be the
innovators’ cultural nationalist pursuit to attain independence from or parity with Eurocentric
disciplines, ultimately to attain political, economic, educational, and/or other independence from
or parity with White Supremacist institutions. Another foundation may have been an
experiential-practical claim that the innovators saw black language functioning as a language
rather than a dialect of English in some particular contexts such as the school, the court, and
daily lives, which then may reinforce the ideological-political meanings which they hold on to.
Therefore, both ideology-politics and experience-practice may have provided some foundations
for the selection of a particular set of scientific criteria and interpretations for the comparative
linguistic paradigm as well as the mainstream paradigms. In other words, theoretical-scientific
meanings may be negotiated among the three constitutive factors to reach a particular paradigm.
The relationship may be represented as follows:

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Ideological
-Political
Meanings

Experiential
-Practical
Meanings

Theoretical-Scientific Meanings

Linguistic Paradigm
Interpretive Social Act
Figure 1. Tripartite Formation of Linguistic Paradigm.

The “procedures and conclusions of science are . . . the contingent outcome of interpretative
social acts” (Mulkay 2005: 95), which I have hypothetically divided into three components for
the purpose of my dissertation research. This social constructionist analysis might hopefully
show that not only the comparative linguistic paradigm is a product of human subjectivity in
power relationships of language by linguistic and non-linguistic counter-elites but the
mainstream paradigms are also products of subjectivity in such relationships by linguistic and
non-linguistic elites. I do not argue that human subjectivity makes those paradigms invalidated as
a non-science, but that they are valid human sciences because I suggest it is subjectivity that may
be one of the guiding factors for science, particularly, linguistics.

1.5. Life Story Study on Dr. Ernie Adolphus Smith

Linguistics or linguistic paradigms cannot be purely scientific in that they develop as a

43

product of the interaction of ideological-political, experiential-practical, and theoretical-scientific
meanings. If researchers attempt to grasp the interpretive, constitutive, additive nature of each
descriptive paradigm in linguistics, they should investigate the interpretive, constitutive social
act of constructing each paradigm, in which politics such as racism and nationalism plays a part.
In this sense, the sociological investigation of one of the descriptive paradigms in black
linguistics, e.g., a counter-paradigm, sometimes called the comparative linguistic paradigm or the
Africological paradigm, in relation to the mainstream paradigms may contribute to understanding
such a constitutive process usually elided in scientific discourse. The selection of this paradigm,
especially the one developed by Dr. Ernie A. Smith comes from my own interest in the paradigm
and my own hope to place it in the healthy paradigmatic competition with the mainstream
paradigms. If this kind of research is realized, scholars might gain important insight on how to
crack open the obdurate practice and discourse of linguistics (armored with objectivist and
descriptivist ideology) and find a new venue for developing a new paradigm for describing
linguistic codes called “pidgin,” “creole,” or “dialect.”
However, there is only a scant amount of research on the social construction of black
linguistics from the perspective of the sociology of knowledge: a theoretical-scientific
constitution of the mainstream black linguistics (Wolfram 2015), a politico-ideological nature of
black linguistics (Fasold 2005), and a comprehensive, social constructionist nature of black
linguistics (DeBose 2005). The last one presents a comprehensive view of black linguistics as a
social constructionist, in this work, language planning endeavor. His book, as the title shows,
takes an unconventional approach to viewing linguistics not only as a descriptive act but as a
prescriptive act. Linguistics socially―academically―constructs a linguistic reality. It is involved

44

in the description and development of form and function of a language variety. Therefore, black
linguistics is defined as a site of status and corpus planning for African American language (See
details in Chapter 2). However, the three social constructionist works are highly theoretical and
present no case study of the construction process of either of the paradigms.
There has been no case study on the construction of the comparative linguistic paradigm
from the perspective of the sociology of knowledge. To be sure, there are some autobiographical
essays (Smith 1974, 1975, & 2002), one such presentation (Smith 2015) delves into the life story
of Dr. Ernie A. Smith at various stages of his life. The first three provide some personal
information on Dr. Smith’s position on the use of Ebonics in the black community and the larger
society. It gives some implicit clues to understanding why he arrived at his Afrocentric linguistic
theory. However, it offers only part of the background information for understanding the
interpretive, constitutive process of the formation of his paradigm. The most recent work is a
presentation on his scholarly life at the University of California, Irvine and gives us important
information on how he chose linguistics after he considered becoming an Egyptologist or
Kemetologist and particular academic careers fulfilled. Therefore, in order to understand the
formation process of the paradigm, I shall reinforce the contents with the following foci:

(1) What ideological-political concerns existed before and during the formation of the counterparadigm;
(2) What experiential-practical concerns, in addition to the problems of some black children
being diagnosed as verbally crippled and teaching English literacy to black males in the
inner-city, may have contributed to the formation of the paradigm;

45

(3) What theoretical-scientific process the paradigm went through, addressing the existing
dominant discourse in black linguistics; and
(4) How all these three components may have interacted.

If linguists attempt to understand the interpretive, constitutive process comprehensively by
which the comparative linguistic paradigm emerged in the interaction of ideological-political,
experiential-practical, and theoretical-scientific meanings, they may need to further examine
various aspects of one of the advocates’ life, in this case, Dr. Smith’s life, drawing on the existing
literature. Therefore, in this dissertation, I shall focus on Dr. Ernie Adolphus Smith (1938-) as an
important figure in the history of black linguistics, when necessary, incorporating the life stories
of other linguists, who embraced or embrace the paradigm or a near-Africological paradigm, so
as to further understand the comprehensive formation process of the paradigm. I shall reconstruct
the formation process by which Dr. Ernie A. Smith came up with, developed, and applied the
comparative linguistic paradigm in response to the racialized social, political, and economic
contexts in and beyond Los Angeles particularly from the 1940s through the 1970s. The study is
intended to get a glimpse of an integrative structure of meanings, experienced and internalized
by an individual, which produced the paradigm. I hope that this work will establish that the
counter-paradigm is one of the legitimate scientific methods in black linguistics and may be a
viable alternative to fulfill the ideological-political and experiential-practical needs of many
descendants of enslaved Africans, esp., their underclass in the United States.

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1.6. Scientific, Practical, and Political Significance of the Study

There are only a few studies that examine an ideological-political and/or experientialpractical formation of linguistic paradigms from the perspective of the sociology of knowledge
in linguistics and beyond. They deal with comparative linguistics (e.g., Gauger 2010; Poliakov
1971), creole linguistics (e.g., DeGraff 2001; Maroldt 2010; Meijer & Muysken 1977), structural
linguistics to generative grammar (e.g., Newmeyer 1986), and black linguistics (e.g., DeBose
2005; Fasold 2005). In the area of black linguistics, however, there seems to be no case study
with the breadth and depth of this dissertation research within the framework of the sociology of
knowledge. Therefore, my dissertation on one of the paradigms in black linguistics―the
comparative linguistic paradigm or the Africological paradigm―might successfully open a new
venue in this respect, i.e., help develop a close and reasonably full familiarity with the
ideological-political, experiential-practical, and theoretical-scientific formation of a descriptive
paradigm in black linguistics. I hope it will provoke, suggest, anticipate a proposition such as my
own preliminary hypothesis that a paradigm in linguistics is a product of the inextricable
interaction of ideology-politics, experience-practice, and theory-science. I also hope it will
present a clearer picture of what the Ebonics paradigm is and how different it is among the
supporters of Ebonics to complement some inadequate understandings seen in the literature (e.g.,
Baugh 2000). Ultimately, this endeavor is expected to relativize all the existing paradigms that
are contesting to claim their absolute legitimacy, encourage and facilitate paradigmatic
competition (Horn 2007[1997]: 416), and, as Foucault (1980) suggests, ascertain “the possibility
of constituting a new politics of truth . . .” and detach “the power of truth from the forms of

47

hegemony, social, economic and cultural, within which it operates at the present time” (133).
Beyond the confines of linguistics, currently, there exist some educational programs in which
the language of descendants of enslaved Africans in the United States is treated as a legitimate
“dialect” of English (e.g., Los Angeles County, CA and DeKalb County, GA). On the other hand,
to the best of my knowledge, no program seems to exist in which the language is treated as a
legitimate “language” other than English. Certainly, there once was a language learning class
conducted by a public school teacher, Ms. Carrie Secret in Oakland, CA, in which the language
of the US descendants was treated as an independent language and outstanding academic
achievements were reported. Yet it was discontinued soon after the 1996 Ebonics Resolution
adopted by the Oakland School Board, which largely drew on the success of Ms. Secret’s class
and, probably, the linguistic hypothesis of Dr. Smith. Therefore, it is a deeper understanding of
the comparative linguistic paradigm, especially, the integrative relationship between ideologicalpolitical, experiential-practical, and theoretical-scientific meanings in the paradigm through my
life history study that might offer some valid reasons for reviving a program similar to Oakland’s
and improving the still dismal academic results of especially black male students.
Lastly, an entity called “language,” such as English, Japanese, Spanish, and Swahili,
implicitly refers to the linguistic code of the dominant group and class, not the linguistic code of
the subjugated group and class. Only the code of the former group and class is granted the status
of language in public or official settings while other codes “related” to the language are relegated
to the status of “dialects” of the language. In this way, our “language” policy and planning
implicitly and explicitly oppresses the stigmatized “dialects,” many of which may have the right
to be called “language” theoretically-scientifically, experientially-practically, and ideologically-

48

politically. It is this prevalent glottopolitics that may explain the white-black linguistic
relationship in the United States. Therefore, I hope that my life history project might offer
positive steps toward realizing the very basic human right of a truly democratic society that a
person, a group, or a subgroup of the group can possess their own language that they can define
and describe by and for themselves, not a dialect of another language that the guardian elite of
the language imposes a definition and description of by and for themselves. This self-defining
right should be indispensable as a first step for realization of linguistic and other human rights, as
dominant European nations have imaginatively established and still arduously attempted to
protect them, and as even a German scholar, Janheinz Jahn made a strong statement in this
direction about a neo-African culture, incl., black language in the incipient stage of the civil
rights movement (Section 5.3.4.2).

1.7. Structure of the Dissertation

The main narrative structure and flow, i.e., the temporal and causal structure, of this
dissertation is primarily based on Smith (1974, 1975, 2002). The categories or concepts
employed are designed to reflect the ways in which language intersected with other aspects of
Dr. Smith’s life story: family background; schooling; higher education; work; community efforts.
They are arranged considering temporal and causal organization of events considered significant.
As explicated in the present chapter, “A Hypothetical Introduction to the Construction of
Black Linguistics,” this dissertation is arranged to explain a wider social construction process of
one of the descriptive paradigms in black linguistics, the comparative linguistic paradigm or the

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Africological paradigm, focusing on how white racism, black nationalism, and other meanings
interacted with the development of black linguistics. Chapter 2, “Social Constructionist Research
on Black Linguistics,” gives a detailed account of the dimensions of the social construction
process of black linguistics upon which social constructionist studies have been focused. A few
autobiographical works are included here because they imply the existence of the three
constitutive dimensions, which this doctoral research considers for analyzing linguistic
knowledge/paradigm formation. Chapter 3, “Life Story and Sociology of Knowledge,” explains
the perspective and method I used and why the perspective and method are appropriate for
examining the social construction process by which descriptive paradigms in black linguistics
emerged. Chapter 4, “Politics of Truths in Black Linguistics,” presents a general picture of how
racism/racialization and black linguistics have shifted in terms of interest convergence and
divergence, leading up to the comparative linguistic or Africological paradigm. Chapter 5,
“Formation of the Comparative Linguistic Paradigm,” describes the comprehensive formation
process of the paradigm from the three dimensions: the ideological-political, experientialpractical, and theoretical-scientific factor. Section 5.1, “Ideological-Political Factor,” delves into
how language consciousness/ideology and nationalist ideology developed and influenced each
other. Section 5.2, “Experiential-Practical Factor,” examines in what ways black language was
treated in real-life settings such as the school and the court. Section 5.3, “Theoretical-Scientific
Factor,” offers a detailed account of how an epistemological revolution like Afrocentricity may
have provided another perspective which selected another set of scientific criteria or
interpretations to define black language. Chapter 6, “Ideology-Politics, Experience-Practice, and
Theory-Science in Interaction,” attempts to construct an integrative understanding on the

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interpretive process by which ideology-politics, experience-practice, and theory-science
interacted with each other, leading up to the emergence of the comparative linguistic paradigm
and, analogously, other paradigms. Chapter 7, “Concluding Suggestions,” emphasizes the
importance of a holistic and an action-oriented approach to understanding a linguistic system to
move from the current hegemonic subjugation toward the self-determination or the full
realization of the human rights of a linguistic community.

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2. SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONIST RESEARCH ON BLACK LINGUISTICS

DeBose (2005), Fasold (2005), Wolfram (2015), yet not Smith (1974, 1975, 2002), clarify
their take that linguistics is a social construction as are other sciences. In this regard, it is
possible to exclude the three works of Smith from the literature review, yet as he intended or not,
his life story works provide a lot of information on his personal and professional experiences
until the time an ethnolinguist/comparative linguistic paradigm was born, i.e., a whole
ideological-political, experiential-practical, and theoretical-scientific formation process of the
paradigm. Therefore, I decided to include Smith’s works as part of the social constructionist
research on black linguistics. This chapter is divided into the following four conceptual foci,
which represent each of the existing literature in this area: (1) implication, (2) ideology-politics,
(3) theory-science, and (4) triangular interaction of ideology-politics, experience-practice, and
theory-science. I shall discuss each of the four authors under the four conceptual headings in
view of what they aim for and what the existing literature might suggest for future research on
the sociology of black linguistics.

2.1. Implicational

The three factors―ideological-political, experiential-practical, and theoreticalscientific―that I identified to constitute the body of the dissertation were isolated out of the
three life story works (Smith 1974, 1975, 2002), because they may be the significant integral
factors in the life experiences Smith finds leading up to the Ebonics paradigm. This tripartite

52

division of the factors is completely my own interpretive act from the perspective through which
I hope to investigate the social construction process of the comparative linguistic paradigm.
Smith’s autobiographical work, brief and condensed, started with a chapter in his dissertation
(1974). Smith (1975) is an extended version of the dissertation chapter with some details
removed. Smith (2002) is a revised version of Smith (1975). They show how his consciousness
of the difference between black and white language was built through excruciating racism and
discrimination from his childhood and his street businesses in his adolescence and how the event
in 1970 finally resulted in his lifelong scientific endeavor to study black language. Spending
years in colleges from 1959 through 1967, he honed his proficiencies in white language, while he
identified with various black nationalist causes and became a renowned black nationalist. This
language awareness process can be defined as not only ideological-political but also experientialpractical because language use allocated different racial or class groups into different life
courses. He experienced a nationalist process by which he developed an antagonism toward
white language and leaned toward black language, while embracing black nationalist thoughts.
One experiential-practical event happened in 1968: he noticed many black males had an issue of
illiteracy in English possibly due to the interference of their mother tongue. This turned into a
scientific interest in literacy especially when he entered the graduate program in Comparative
Culture, University of California, Irvine. Here he met a linguist who studied black language and
the linguist helped him to be acquitted of a misdemeanor charge with her linguistic testimony.
Impressed by the scientific power of linguistics to explain the legitimacy of his language, he
decided to enter the field. It is emphasized throughout the three works that language always
played a pivotal role from his early childhood through the beginning of his linguistic study at UC

53

Irvine. It seems to me that certain ideological-political, experiential-practical, and theoreticalscientific meanings may have interacted to produce the particular meaning of black language,
viz., Ebonics in Dr. Smith’s scientific efforts.

2.2. Ideological-Political

Ralph W. Fasold (2005) discusses the ideological nature of the entire black linguistics. The
crux of this study is that it views linguistics as a social construction. The author finds some
ideological-political rationales behind social constructions of black language by both linguists
and non-linguists and presents the following classification:

Table 1. Ideology and Social Constructions of “Ebonics.”
Social group

Ideology

Construction of “Ebonics”

Non-linguist European
Americans and African
Americans

African American inferiority or lack
of opportunity, due either to poverty
or to race

Broken English

Present-day mainstream U. S. society as a mosaic of more or
American linguists
less distinct ethnicities
Mid 20th-century
American
dialectologists

Integrationist, assimilationist,
egalitarian

Afrocentric scholars

Unity of the African Diaspora,
opposition to Europeans (in the
broad sense)

AA(V)E as an orderly,
grammatical dialect of
English
So-called “Black English”
as a dialect of disadvantaged
southern Americans of both
races
Ebonics as a separate
language (or perhaps
language family) of abstand

This may be a tentative categorization and characterization, but it provides a comparative device
for categorizing and elaborating the relationships between political ideologies and scientific
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constructions of black linguistics in the dissertation (esp., Chapter 4). It might be one way of
elaboration if the category of ideology particularly for the present-day mainstream American
linguists is bifurcated into overt and covert ideology: “U. S. society as a mosaic of more or less
distinct ethnicities” and “integrationist, assimilationist, egalitarian,” it may explain the linguists’
relative lack of activity in promoting rather than just recognizing the use of black language.
The author sounds critical only of the African-centered paradigm. If the writer attempts to
develop a social constructionist argument in a fair manner, he needs to be aware that the
mainstream construction of linguistic science is as social constructionist as the Afrocentric
counterpart. Viewed from the vantage point of the Afrocentric school, the mainstream paradigms
should also be critiqued as much. However, he directs criticism exclusively against the
Afrocentric paradigm. Moreover, there are some misunderstandings or flaws in his arguments.
First of all, the author argues that most advocates of the Afrocentric paradigm are not trained
linguists. He is right in that most of the advocates are non-linguists such as psychologists,
historians, speech specialists, or education scientists. However, if he limits the advocates to
linguists, he can find only a few people such as Carol A. Blackshire-Belay and Ernie A. Smith.
As far as I read their dissertations and others, they all may be called trained linguists or may not
be brainwashed in European linguistics. Second, the author argues, “it is my contention that
linguistic science, since there are no principled criteria by which such a notion as “language” can
be defined, cannot claim authority in constructing what is or is not a language” (700). I suggest a
caveat against this repeated liberalist, Eurocentric argument. The Afrocentric school argues
Ebonics is not a dialect of English but a language other than English not by linguistically
defining the distinction between dialect and language but, as European predecessors did on their

55

developed and imagined national languages, based on their finding that not only Ebonics in the
United States but also a variety of Ebonics in other parts of the African diaspora share a
grammatical continuation to West and Niger-Congo African languages, the newly born African
languages in the diaspora comparative-linguistically belong to an African language family, not
the West-Germanic language family. That’s why US Ebonics is not a dialect of English. Third,
the author believes the meaning of grammar the Afrocentric school refers to is restricted to
syntax, but it’s not. What they mean is a whole grammatical complex of morphosyntax,
phonology, phonetics, and semantics (e.g., Nehusi 2001; Smith 1974). Fourth, the author
critiques the paradigm by stating that linguistics traditionally does not include discourse styles
and “paralinguistic” features. It is worth mentioning a historical fact that such a narrow
definition of a linguistic code that Fasold touts as the standard is a Eurocentric social
construction of a communicative code called language. Fifth, he treats Ebonics as a case of an
Abstand language. But the fact is, even an Abstand language is a product of social construction.
The binary opposition of Ausbau and Abstand (Kloss 1967) is an arbitrary matter of degree of
difference and timing. Linguists should be advised to understand all languages are products of
both Abstand and Ausbau processes (cf. Cooper 1989).

2.3. Theoretical-Scientific

Wolfram (2015) views sociolinguists as “ideologues.” He observes, “sociolinguists . . . justify
their ideologies on the basis of rigorous, specialized expertise in the analysis of language as a
kind of scientific inquiry” (339). He focuses on the theoretical-scientific procedure of the

56

mainstream black linguistics and critiques it in the following four respects: (1) too much focus
on morphosyntax and phonology, (2) inadequate attention to a whole complex of variation
factors such as basilect-acrolect continuum, regionality, social stratification, setting, age, other
sociopsychological factors, and (3) inadequate attention to diverse trajectories of change.
The constructive nature of the mainstream black linguistics in terms of linguistic structure is
extensively discussed in this work, but it does not address the scholars’ well-nigh exclusive focus
on the English part of the data, which would be a point of controversy for the Ebonics school.
This work may be a good starting point in the area of theory-science. I hope this line of argument
will be extended to the history of black linguistics, its disciplinary structure and training in
higher education, professional networks, etc., drawing more on the established literature of the
sociology of science.

2.4. Ideological-Political, Experiential-Practical, and Theoretical-Scientific

DeBose (2005), as the title The Sociology of African American Language: A Language
Planning Perspective shows, takes an unconventional approach to view linguistics not only as a
descriptive but prescriptive act. Linguistics socially, scientifically constructs a linguistic reality.
It is involved in the description and development of form and function of a linguistic code. In
this vein the author defines black linguistics as a site of status and corpus planning for African
American language. Black linguistics is defined as an act of social construction of linguistic
knowledge and reality, which places the work within the sociology of knowledge. The language
planning for African American language which DeBose discusses may be summarized as:

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Overarching Policy Options:
1.

Standard English hegemony

2.

Acquiescence to Standard English hegemony

3.

Full recognition of African American language/resistance to the hegemony of Standard
English/cultural revitalization

Status Planning:
1.

Allocation of African American language to a rule-governed variety

2.

Allocation of African American language to a language or a dialect

3.

Labeling for African American language

4.

Allocation of African American language to a medium of education, a school subject, an
official language, etc.

Corpus Planning:
1.

Decision on whether or not African American language has the same system of rules as other
varieties of American English

2.

Selection of linguistic features for inclusion in the system of African American language

3.

Selection of particular names for features selected for inclusion in the grammar of African
American language

4.

Selection of an orthography for African American language

In view of the tripartite division of ideological-political, experiential-practical, and theoretical-

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scientific meanings, all the overarching policy options and options 1 to 3 in status planning may
be defined as ideological-political interests, because they are relevant to asserting a national selfdetermination and constructing a collective symbol or identity around which to mobilize a nation
for the attainment of collective human rights. Option 4 in status planning would rather be
concerned with experiential-practical meanings because functional allocation of a language
influences the spread of it in societal domains where members of a nation can achieve political,
economic, and other ends through their national language. Those ideological-political and
experiential-practical decisions influence scientific interpretations or decisions as listed in corpus
planning. Therefore, the policy decisions discussed in the work are closely related to the tripartite
division of the social construction process of a linguistic paradigm in my research.
The ultimate goal of the language planning objectives that DeBose presents is to elevate the
status of African American language to the extent that the general public recognizes the
legitimacy of African American language and views it as a language in its own right as some
linguists do. The most appealing in his language planning perspective is that linguists standardize
African American language, extending the functional allocation of the language into public
domains and increasing the distinctiveness of the language with a distinct orthography. Other
than specifying “what” black linguistics does, the author specifies “who” does it, i.e., casts
linguists as “visionaries” who construct a linguistic narrative on African American language.
What differentiates those visionaries, i.e., what “can affect the manner in which an issue is
experienced, perceived or handled” is “the social location of a scholar” (DeBose 2005: 41). This
perspective provides the basis for my research, which attempts to differentiate the social
construction processes of the comparative linguistic paradigm and the mainstream paradigms

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based on the social locations of scholars. It is his recognition of the subjects’ agency and
engagement in linguistics beyond the dominant “description” ideology in science that is
compatible with my own definition of what minority as well as majority linguistics as an
interpretive social act is supposed to be or is actually doing.
Similar to the comparative linguistic paradigm, DeBose supports a language as right
orientation and a policy of resistance to the hegemony of Standard English. He suggests that the
linguist attempts to describe African American language not as a list of distinctive features but as
an autonomous system “seeks to make explicit the distinctiveness of [African American
language] at all levels of linguistic analysis” (DeBose 2005: 210). He finds the nomenclature
“creole” stigmatizing, as do other creole linguists in the Caribbean including Mervyn C. Alleyne
(personal communication, August 3, 2016). However, the author contends that a labeling which
people give to their language should be determined by the people and “English” would be the
likeliest candidate. On the other hand, it might be an alternative to deconstruct the existing
hegemonic belief on African American language in the African American communities and
beyond. This pioneering theoretical work may give a rationale for redefining black linguistics
and a clue to a scientific revolution therein. It informs us that black linguistics can be
prescriptive as well as descriptive, i.e., what linguists actually engage in is constructing a
linguistic reality.

Thus far, I have presented the existing literature on the social construction of black
linguistics. It may be said that among the works discussed here, DeBose (2005) presents the most
comprehensive account of the language planning process by which black linguistics has been

60

constructed, giving a critical clue to understanding what linguistics is and what the linguist is.
The work is not so inclusive as directly discussing the Ebonics paradigm or the comparative
linguistic paradigm; however, most importantly, DeBose provides a future process by which
black language and black linguistics may be constructed both as a scientific and practical
endeavor. It is in this regard that I, a future scholar in linguistics and language planning studies,
find a venue, where black linguists and others may be able to have legitimate agency to redefine
“language” and “linguistics” and set paradigmatic competition in motion for their own collective
interests, which is accompanied with scientific rigor, and black linguistics and the black
community may become integral to each other ideologically-politically, experientiallypractically, and theoretically-scientifically.

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3. LIFE STORY AND SOCIOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE

Since the beginning of my research, I have been interested in why and how the Ebonics
paradigm which Dr. Ernie A. Smith supports today was born. I read every work on the paradigm
I found at the library and got from Dr. Smith, but I found no definite answer to my question. I
found linguists and other scientists usually do not disclose personal meanings by themselves
such as why and how their researches started. As my coursework progressed, I came to be aware
that without more structured and in-depth interview with Dr. Smith, I would not be able to get
into the heart of the why and how, and, fortunately enough, the method which I learned at
Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo, again came to my attention as a viable strategy to tackle with my
research question. I also needed to conduct a critical, deconstructing review of the existing
literature in black linguistics so that I could gain an understanding of part of the why and how. It
was the methodological combination of life story and the sociology of knowledge that may allow
me to get some scholarly familiarity with the why and how. In the ensuing sections, I shall
explain how the entire methodology may be combined to answer the question.

3.1. Perspective and Methodology

Critics will always be able to dispute whether I have presented the
‘real story’, but arguably this does not actually matter. For me, the
hallmark of life story research is that it should prompt positive social
change. . . . Arguably it is vital that life story researchers make no
attempt to tidy their theoretical baggage out of their writing. We cannot
erase our personal commitments from life story research, nor can we
feign objectivity. Nevertheless we can offer life story research as
offering a way in to different ways of ‘making the familiar strange’ and
―Goodley, et al. (2004)
contesting normative assumptions.
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I employed a microsociological method called life story interview, conducted semistructured, in-depth, and multi-shot interviews with Dr. Ernie Adolphus Smith (Charles R. Drew
University of Medicine and Science), and reconstructed his life story, while examining some life
stories of other linguists and incorporating the latter’s life stories for a theoretical purpose. This
dissertation research falls within two major established methods of data collection: sociology and
historiography. It is sociological in that it produces an informed knowledge on the social
constructionist nature of linguistic paradigms, in this study, the comparative linguistic paradigm
and thus contributes to a sociological generalization of an exploratory nature in the sociology of
knowledge, especially, the sociology of linguistics. It is historiographic too in that it can be
interpreted as a synthetic account to exemplify a historical hypothesis that the comparative
linguistic paradigm was a product of various factors during the modern black nationalist era from
the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s,1 which very few in academia have attempted to record as an
important development in the history of black linguistics, Black Studies, and black nationalism
(cf. Wieviorka 1992).
The major reason for selecting life story method is that “[r]ather than being a problem,
subjectivity, the manner in which the respondent perceives his/her situation and activities in
social structures and networks, is the very stuff of analysis” (Miller 2000: 129). Whatever
objectivist mantra researchers may deploy, especially the social sciences (incl., linguistics) exist
largely within the realm of subjectivity (Delgado & Stefancic 2012: 104). Hence, this research
positioned the subjective meanings of the social construction process of the comparative
linguistic paradigm as significant, i.e., it explored and inspected the interpretive life experiences
of Dr. Ernie A. Smith and other Africological linguists in their own empirical, historical settings.

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Life story interview allowed me to dig up, especially, an implicit or inherent ideological-political
component of a scientific theory in the empirical world (McCall & Wittner 1990: 46). It more
accurately captures those ideological-political, experiential-practical, and theoretical-scientific
meanings, concepts, or categories that Dr. Smith and others adopted to understand and address
linguistic phenomena and issues around them. It also allowed me to employ those meanings,
concepts or categories over those of the dominant discourse or mine in the dissertation. Finally, I
hope my life story research might help Dr. Smith and similar others order, sort, and explain, i.e.,
render consistent their long lives despite ruptures and shifts.
The life story method that I have adopted herein, which initially draws on the existing written
works of the storytellers (i.e., Dr. Smith and other linguists), could give a sociologically more
informed account of the social construction process by which the comparative linguistic
paradigm or the Africological paradigm came into being in relation to the larger racialized social
structure and social change. It delves into and reconstructs the interpretive, social constructionist
process by which acting individuals such as Dr. Smith encountered and interpreted the dominant
ideological-political, experiential-practical, and theoretical-scientific meanings which the larger
society adopted to deal with the language of descendants of enslaved Africans in the United
States and by which they reconstructed the existing meanings and put into action the
reconstructed meanings in their scientific endeavors. Therefore, this study does not only take into
account socio-structural factors but also interpretive processes of particular situations that trigger
particular behaviors, in that “structural features, such as ‘culture,’ ‘social systems,’ ‘social
stratification,’ or ‘social roles,’ set conditions for their action but do not determine their action.
People―that is, acting units―do not act toward culture, social structure or the like; they act

64

toward situations” (Blumer: 87-88).
Lastly, it must be noted that there exist several constraints, which may sometimes be found to
be flexibilities or even consistencies, in the life story interview approach. First, “[m]emory recall
is malleable; the past is being constantly rewritten by the subject as some events fade and others
grow in significance” (Miller 2000: 133). In fact, Dr. Smith’s accounts sometimes shifted. For
example, he recognized the existence of a black nationalist linguistic ideology that the language
of descendants of enslaved Africans in the United States is an African language before he entered
the doctoral program of the University of California, Irvine, but he also stated that the linguistic
idea was formed after entering the program. This might be a memory fluctuation. Second, “[t]he
respondent . . . may choose to omit material that they do not wish the interviewer to know about
or choose to lie deliberately” (Ibid.: 140). Indeed, the storytellers suggested that there were
things that could not be shared easily. It is justifiable because of their privacy and protection
issues. Third, “[n]arratives select the elements of the telling to confer meaning on prior
events―events that may not have had such meaning at the time” (Ibid.: 141-142). Therefore, it
should be remembered that all life stories are given coherent meanings ex post facto.

3.2. Storytellers

The storytellers were chosen on the major criteria that: they experienced or engaged in black
nationalist movements in the 1960s and 1970s, were trained in linguistics, and developed an
Afrocentric linguistic paradigm in which the primary languages of descendants of enslaved
Africans in the United States and other parts of the world are described as a grammatical

65

continuation of West and Niger-Congo African languages or West African languages. These
people acted toward Ebonics or newly born African languages as languages other than European
languages as a scientific concern and relate the languages to political, economic, and/or
educational concerns in diasporic African communities.
The dissertation focuses on the life story of Dr. Ernie A. Smith, a linguist who developed the
comparative linguistic paradigm, which views the language of descendants of enslaved Africans
in the US as an African language. I chose Dr. Smith as a principal figure in the history of the
comparative linguistic paradigm, thus, the main storyteller, because he is the only linguist who
actively presents a comprehensive and comprehensible account of Ebonics within the
comparative linguistic paradigm in the United States; he was the linguist who gave a linguistic
definition of Ebonics when the term “Ebonics” was coined by a black psychologist in 1973 in St.
Louis; and he was an influential person in the nationally known 1996 “Ebonics Resolution” by
the Oakland School Board. The data from other storytellers were inserted in a way that their life
story data enrich, i.e., either affirm or contradict Dr. Smith’s life story and contribute to a finer
theorization of the formative process of linguistic paradigms.
I admit that saturation may not have occurred in this research, since I conducted multiple indepth interviews only with Dr. Smith. In-depth life story interviews with others and their analysis
remain to be done, employing the developed tool applied in the present case with Dr. Smith.
Moreover, for the purpose of generating a theory more comprehensively on how a linguistic
paradigm is constructed in linguistics, the social constructionist process by which the mainstream
paradigms were constructed needs to be examined; however, since the main purpose of my
dissertation attempts to give a comprehensive and comprehensible account of the process by

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which the comparative linguistic paradigm was born in US black linguistics, the data from the
mainstream linguists will be collected, analyzed, and incorporated into the data from the
Africological linguists for refining my current tentative theory after completing this dissertation.

3.3. Data Construction and Protection

I employed implied consent for Dr. Ernie A. Smith. When I first interviewed Dr. Smith in
December 2010, I had contacted him via e-mail from Nippon, explained why I hoped to
interview him and questions I planned to ask him, and told him that I would visit him from
Nippon. At that time, because I had no idea or information of an Institutional Review Board
(IRB) nor of informed consent as shown Appendix A, I did not explain anything about the
confidentiality and anonymity of the data which I gained from the interview. I basically recorded
that interview and used the data for my MA thesis at Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo. Since then,
Dr. Smith and I have come to know each other through e-mail correspondences, conferences,
interviews, an internship, and private visits. Under those circumstances, implied consent was
appropriate. But it has to be noted that the implied “consent” did not meet informed consent
sufficiently. I may have made Dr. Smith uneasy or uncomfortable over my research purpose or
“intention,” because while I interviewed him, I started to learn from scratch the information and
ideas in Africology, qualitative methods, sociology of knowledge, and linguistics, except for
basic knowledge on black linguistics. Consequently, the structure and contents of the dissertation
research underwent drastic changes in the course of interview, particularly because I didn’t
explain those changes in an appropriate manner and at appropriate timings.

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Data gathering was conducted from December 2010 through November 2016 mainly in Los
Angeles. An estimate of the number of hours we spent recording our sessions is over a hundred.
Interviews were mostly conducted at the storyteller’s home because diaries, photos, letters,
documents, and other memorabilia tied to life story interview questions were expected to be at
his home. The interview questions were semi-structured (See Appendix A). For I had already
developed some categories or concepts due to my prior study of the existing literature by the
linguists and my prior interviews with Dr. Smith―e.g., racism (incl., linguicism) and
nationalism―stemming from a broad question, yet not a refined hypothesis: how a comparative
linguistic paradigm was born in the 1970s under the influence of black nationalism.1 The
interviews became more-structured as they proceeded, because the initial exploratory questions
produced unexpected answers and further questions and presented insights or clues for changing
the predetermined categories or concepts, thus creating more on-target questions. Concerning the
storytellers other than Dr. Smith, I compared the life story data of Dr. Smith to those of the other
storytellers to generate additional material relevant to the concepts or categories and the structure
developed for Dr. Smith’s life story. The interview data were gathered and organized around the
categories or concepts of racism and linguistic discrimination, race and social structure,
nationalism, community ombudsperson efforts (often called “activism”), and language sciences
(See Appendix C), to show how the comparative linguistic paradigm was ideologicallypolitically, experientially-practically, and theoretically-scientifically mobilized to challenge the
White Supremacist social and linguistic status quo. The diaries, photos, letters, documents, and
other memorabilia were collected and used to support the interview data, i.e., “help provide
structures and sites for reclaiming the past” (Plummer 2001: 241). Since this method requires

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greater firsthand immersion in the social worlds of those storytellers. I established an intensive,
three-week-long non-participatory observation as an intern at an ombudsperson organization in
South Central Los Angeles, in which Dr. Smith is a member. Lastly, in this exploratory research,
anecdotal data (e.g., Jackson, Williams, & Smitherman 2011; Troutman, personal
communication, date unrecorded) were also used when I started it and developed core categories.
During data-collection, the developing categories and the relationships between the
categories were constantly adjusted or changed to ground them to the data. What kinds of data
were to be collected were not strictly determined at first but constantly changed and narrowed as
I acquired more information and better understanding on the phenomenon. The grounding
changes were also made based on other data such as Dr. Smith’s personal essays and poems, an
observation of his ombudsman efforts (See my observation report in Appendix B), and my e-mail
correspondences with him (See the list of categories or concepts I inducted from the
correspondences in Appendix C). By the spring of 2016, I developed a tripartite gestalt, which
informed the formation of the comparative linguistic paradigm: nationalist (later, ideologicalpolitical), practical (later, experiential-practical), and scientific (later, theoretical-scientific), and
thus, refined the preexisting sets of categories and rearranged them in that order as seen in the
structure of the present dissertation. I stopped the data-collection at the moment that “the
collection of new empirical material does not add significantly to the process of concept
generation” (Miller 2000: 120); however, this research may not have reached such a saturation
since I didn’t conduct in-depth interviews with others. Finally, I have to admit that the whole
data-gathering process was often difficult and demanding mainly due to my own unpreparedness.
Most of the data are raw interview data recorded using an IC-recorder in the MP3 format,

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which were soon downloaded in encrypted digitized form onto my computer and, as back-up, an
external drive stored in my study, and a networked computer at my parents’ home in Nippon. The
transcribed and edited data from the IC-recording are in Word format. The data are arranged
using headers in the Word format by theme/category, date of recording, and place of recording
for current and future research use.

3.4. Analytical Tools for Linguistic Knowledge Formation

The principal goal of this research is to attempt to understand one particular case, one
particular process of knowledge formation or scientific paradigm formation by which one
particular individual, Dr. Ernie A. Smith came up with his linguistic paradigm, while at
appropriate points of the dissertation paying attention to some similarities and differences and
some influences between Dr. Smith and other Africological linguists. As another important goal
of this research, some tentative theory might be made for the sociology of linguistics,
understanding linguistic knowledge formation process. However, this research does not attain
reliability. It is not certain if similar findings would be obtained when other researchers
interrogate the life story of Dr. Smith. For instance, a black journalist who interviewed Dr. Smith
constructed a completely different story from mine on one question which I also asked him (cf.
Section 5.1.2 and Our Weekly, February 26 – March 4, 2015, page 13). In short, the relationship
between the interviewee and the interviewers and the difference in the descriptive and analytical
perspectives of the interviewers may largely change the nature of a story which the interviewee
tells and the interviewer reconstructs. That said, life story would be valid for this study since its

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aim is to explore the subjective meanings and the relationships between those meanings of the
storyteller and grasp the often invisible, intricate workings of the formation of a scientific
paradigm. The verification may be strengthened after comparing the reconstructed story with
other forms of records. The verification is also justifiable because the primary purpose of this
research is to develop one plausible account of the development of the Africological paradigm by
one individual from one vantage point “as if it were utterly novel; as if its connections with other
events were as yet undemonstrated; and as if its developments were as yet uncharted” (Rock
1982: 41). At the same time, it takes life story “as a way of building up some wider sense of
theory” (Plummer 2001: 159) for linguistic knowledge formation.
There is one principal analytical device employed in the present dissertation: sociology of
knowledge. The aim of the dissertation through this analytic tool is to attempt to reconstruct and
understand the comprehensive process of scientific knowledge construction, i.e., linguistic
paradigm formation and the workings of linguistic knowledge in state power structure. My
understanding of the relationship between linguistic knowledge and state power largely draws on
the following excerpt from Michael Foucault (1980):

We should not be content to say that power has a need for such-and-such a discovery,
such-and-such a form of knowledge, but we should add that the exercise of power itself
creates and causes to emerge new objects of knowledge and accumulates new bodies of
information. . . . Knowledge and power are integrated with one another, and there is no
point in dreaming a time when knowledge will cease to depend on power. . . . It is not
possible for power to be exercised without knowledge, it is impossible for knowledge
not to engender power. (51-52)

The ultimate aim of my dissertation is to provide discursive tools for deconstructing the existing
scientific paradigms and placing a counter-paradigm in sound paradigmatic competition to

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contribute to any social change in the obdurate power structure. For a scientific knowledge is a
specialized discourse. Therefore, in the course of analysis, the method of discourse analysis is
employed as another tool as specified in the following excerpt:

Discourse analysis deals with conflicting, subjugating and institutionally founded
discourses that posit particular versions of self, personhood and subjectivity. Discourse
analysis may allow us to make sense of the ways in which human beings are shaped and
moulded, via the power of discourses, in given social and cultural backgrounds. . . .
Discourse analysis is a resistant approach to analysis: resisting static, structuralist and
immovable views of discourse while embracing resistant performative acts of human
subjects. (Goodley, et al. 2004: 114, 116).

The analytical tool is not merely to demonopolize the dominant governing discourses, i.e., the
Ebonics-as-a-dialect-of-English discourse but understand the subjugated discourse, i.e., the
Ebonics-as-a-language-other-than-English discourse in black linguistics. It also relativizes those
competing scientific discourses as subjective which inevitably contain an arbitrary element,
because they do, explores a venue for resistance to the subjugating discourses, and seeks any
change in the insurmountable state power structure in which Ebonics is currently situated.
Thomas S. Kuhn (1996) presents a succinct definition of the social construction process by
which scientific discourses emerges, which I attempt to elucidate in this study:

The early developmental stages of most sciences have been characterized by continual
competition between a number of distinct views of nature, each partially derived from,
and all roughly compatible with, the dictates of scientific observation and method. What
differentiated these various schools was not one or another failure of method―they
were all “scientific”―but what we shall come to call their incommensurable ways of
seeing the world and of practicing science in it. Observation and experience can and
must drastically restrict the range of admissible scientific belief, else there would be no
science. But they cannot alone determine a particular body of such belief. An apparently
arbitrary element, compounded of personal and historical accident, is always a
formative ingredient of the beliefs espoused by a given scientific community at a given
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time. . . . Normal science . . . often suppresses fundamental novelties because they are
necessarily subversive of its basic commitments. Nevertheless, so long as those
commitments retain an element of the arbitrary, the very nature of normal research
ensures that novelty shall not be suppressed for very long. Sometimes a normal
problem, one that ought to be solvable by known rules and procedures, resists the
reiterated onslaught of the ablest members of the group within whose competence it
falls. . . . Competition between segments of the scientific community is the only
historical process that ever actually results in the rejection of one previously accepted
theory or in the adoption of another. (3-5)

The arbitrariness or interpretivity of a scientific paradigm may derive from, as I postulate in
Chapter 1, the interpretive social act of negotiating ideological-political, experiential-practical,
and theoretical-scientific meanings. It is because of the very arbitrary or interpretive nature that
paradigmatic competition, one of the tenets of Afrocentricity, between paradigms which give
different interpretations of and solutions to a problem may occur. I suggest that this phenomenon
of interpretive nature has been happening in black linguistics since an all-out pursuit for
paradigmatic formation and problem-solving for much of the black community began in the
1960s and 1970s. To be sure, the paradigmatic competition seems to have subsided since then
and the late 1990s; however, a higher awareness of the inevitable arbitrariness or interpretivity of
the existing paradigms in black linguistics through this social constructionist work of mine might
help secure some legitimate place for the comparative linguistic paradigm in linguistic circles
and, hopefully, attain more self-determination on the part of blacks for defining and solving a
phenomenon or problem even in the racialized power structure of the United States. Therefore, it
is imperative that the tripartite nature of linguistic knowledge formation process be understood
from the microscopic analysis of the interaction of meanings at the individual level and that
theory become more congruent with practice in black linguistics so that the former could better
serve the black underclass. I wish future research of my own or others will add to and correct my

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doctoral research.

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4. POLITICS OF TRUTHS IN BLACK LINGUISTICS

Predators can and do use dialect differences to exploit and
oppress, because ordinary people can be made to doubt their own
value and to accept subservience if they can be made to despise
the speech of their fathers. ―James Sledd (1969)

This study explores, reconstructs, and reinterprets the social construction process by which
Dr. Ernie A. Smith faced and negotiated the meanings surrounding his mother tongue in the
black community and beyond, and arrived at his comparative linguistic paradigm. Before
entering into discussion, I shall trace the history of black linguistics as the scientific contexts
leading up to the formation of the Ebonics paradigm.
In popular discourse, the primary language of most of the descendants of enslaved Africans
(known as African American English, African American vernacular English, African American
Language, or Ebonics) has been very often a target of mockery or denigration for centuries.
Indeed, it is one of the most stigmatized languages in the United States today (Milroy 1999).
Even in the academic discourse of linguistics, denigrating remarks of a biological nature were
leveled at it from the late 19th to the early 20th century in the aftermath of the de facto abolition
of slavery. Into the latter half of the 20th century, the former irrational, unscientific narrative on
black language was replaced with a rational, scientific narrative reflecting the political
atmosphere then. Psychologists and sociologists tried to explain the linguistic distinctiveness of
black language as a mental deficit or a cultural deprivation (e.g., Bereiter & Englemann 1966;
Bereiter, et al. 1966; Bloom, Davis, & Hess 1965; Carson & Rabin 1960; Deutsch 1963, 1965,
1966; Hess & Shipman 1965; Jensen 1968; Shuey 1966). The primary language of most blacks

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was (occasionally, it is still so) measured as an anomaly against the reference of standard
(mainly, white upper- and middle- class) English.
However, the rapid growth of linguistic research on the language from the mid-1960s and
early 1970s apparently heightened awareness in academic circles that it is not a deficient but
rather a different dialect of English or a deviation from standard English. Linguists demonstrated
the systematicity of black language as a counterargument against the deficit hypothesis deployed
mainly in psychology and sociology (e.g., Baratz & Shuy 1969; Brooks 1964; Dillard 1972;
Fasold 1969; Fasold & Shuy 1970; Goodman 1965; Labov 1967, 1969; Labov et al. 1968;
Leaverton 1971; McDavid, Jr. 1964; Pederson 1964; Piestrup 1973; Stewart 1964; Williamson
1961; Wolfram 1969). However, despite the efforts by the linguists, most of whom were white,
“the character of the discussion [of African languages, including Ebonics in the United States]
has been dictated by those who had political and economic control over the lives of African
people [in continental Africa and the diaspora]” (Blackshire-Belay 1996: 16). The legitimacy and
rights of black language was (and are) established vis-à-vis standard English or white language
within the ideological or hegemonic framework of English monolingualism. Language rights
were (and are) inequitably allocated to black language users and white language users in the
state-sponsored dialectal structure, which is a case of linguicism1 (Skutnabb-Kangas 1988, 1998).
As an illustration of such uneven distribution of power through linguistic difference, it is often
said that black language is an equal dialect to white language but is inappropriate for formal
purposes. This self-contradictory, hegemonic discourse of bidialectalism seems to have worked
way better for state institutions than the often counter-hegemonic discourse of bilingualism.
I postulate that the historical shifts in the dominant linguistic discourse on black language has

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long been a function of “interest convergence” (Bell 1980) between whites and blacks. Interest
convergence postulates that “[t]he interest of blacks in achieving racial equality will be
accommodated only when it converges with the interests of whites,” on condition that the interest
of blacks does not threaten “the superior societal status of middle and upper class whites” (Ibid.:
523). At almost the same time that white institutions demand additional labor force for which
only whites cannot fill, blacks are allowed a certain quantity and quality of freedom or human
rights. A limited number of blacks are linguistically, psychologically, educationally, etc. screened
to get into the limited number of political and economic positions in which whites have to rely
on minority groups to attain their goals or maintain the status quo. This is, I suspect, a system of
interest convergence achieved through negotiating the meanings of, among others, linguistic
codes.
This chapter will briefly review the entire literature through one common thread: how racism
and linguistic paradigms have intersected to construct different, more specifically, additive
scientific discourses on black language with superficial changes, while maintaining the basic
structure of black linguistics. It will discuss how the dominant linguistic paradigms on black
language today may have been a result of, as Bell’s interest convergence theory (1980) suggests,
convergence of blacks’ interests with the interests of whites, who have political and economic
control over the lives of the former. Critical Race Theory (CRT) (Delgado & Stefancic 2012)
encapsulates this position on black linguistics as follows: “objective truth . . . does not exist, at
least in social science and politics. In these realms, truth is a social construct created to suit the
purposes of the dominant group” (104). Based on Bell’s interest convergence theory as part of
CRT, I shall discuss how neo-racist the successive dominant scientific discourses on the black

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and white linguistic relationship may have become as a result of interest convergence between
the two linguistic groups, and, lastly, how counter-racist the comparative linguistic or
Africological paradigm has become as a result of interest divergence.

4.1. Historical Trends

4.1.1. First Phase

The configurations of racism in linguistic research on black language may have corresponded to
changing political and economic climates of different phases in history. According to
Smitherman (1988), scientific interests in African slaves’ behaviors emerged when the North and
the South vied for political and economic dominance in the mid-nineteenth century. Especially
the South, facing the liberation of enslaved Africans and a threat to their established lavish slave
economy, attempted to establish the cultural “deviancy” or “inferiority” of African people
premised on biological determinism. The known earliest example of scientific racism against
black language appeared in the late nineteenth century.

4.1.2. Second Phase

Such biological racism seems to have subsided in the early 1940s, when “[t]he educated classes
subscribed to ethnocentric theories that proclaimed the biological inferiority of those Europeans
whose origins were not in Northern Europe” (Gold 2010: 67) and the US army started to enlist

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Africans in increasing numbers in the later phase of World War II (Delgado & Stefancic 2012;
Murray 1971). When the Second World War ended, the government needed to provide returned
black soldiers with some tangible “rewards.” I suppose the legitimacy of black language was one
of them. It appears that outright racism disappeared from the literature around the mid-1950s.
For another example of “reward,” many of them entered college, and “joined” white institutions,
but in a “separate but equal” way. As long as the white establishment had to accept some blacks
in their institutions, at the same time, they may have needed to establish a system to segregate
most or all of the blacks outside of the white boundaries. One notable example was the housing
segregation which private and public interests both overtly and covertly enforced through
comprehensive tactics especially after the end of WWII (Delgado & Stefancic 2012: 120-121).
Very interestingly, the housing “policy” to cleanse blacks from white neighborhood resonated
with the school “policy” to segregate blacks from whites by means of separate schools and
classes. For the latter, a disproportionate number of blacks were tracked into special classes for
low IQ or psychological reasons (incl., linguistic).

4.1.3. Third Phase

It seems especially from the Korean War, then, the Vietnam War came an era when a scientific
form of racism and a racist form of science could not be tolerated and thus a more scientifically
justifiable rationale was deployed for more covertly continuing to place Africans in a lowersocioeconomic class or the underclass (Wilson 1987). For example, during the civil rights
movement (at around the Korean War) and the modern black nationalism era (at around the

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Vietnam War):

social scientists attempting to account more generally for problems endemic to
African American communities . . . as grounded in social pathology or cultural
deprivation . . . line[d] up against proponents of a distinctive African American culture
in which differences from general American culture may be accounted for in part by
retentions from the ancestral cultures of African slaves. (DeBose 2005: 44)

In the next sections of this chapter, I shall discuss some biological/evolutionist arguments against
black language as the beginning of scientific racism against blacks. For a second phase, I shall
delve into the status of black language in American dialectology, which I suppose was developed
for the long-term purpose of examining how far the English language spread throughout the
United States and denying and rectifying any unacceptable linguistic variation or aberration
assumedly within the English language. We will see a third phase where two strands of research
on black language derived from the second phase and another diverted from one of them.

4.2. Racist Scholarship by White Scholars

The earliest denigration of black language in the academia dates back to the late nineteenth
century and continued to the early 1940s (e.g., Bennett 1909; Crum 1940; Gonzales 1922;
Harrison 1884; Krapp 1924). It was after the de jure abolition of slavery was announced in the
United States but still outright racism against Africans was prevalent. The racist way that black
language, which is supposed to have been far more different from white language, was described,
was perhaps inherited from the creole linguistic way that pidgin or creole languages, close in
visibility to European languages, had been described by typical European linguists in other parts

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of the African diaspora since the late 19th century and earlier (cf. Hancock 1980: ix). “The
scholar who accepts the theory of Negro inferiority tend[ed] to explain any apparent differences
between Negro and white speech on the basis of the Negro’s childlike mind or imperfectly
developed speech organs” (McDavid & McDavid 1951: 5). For example, in the late nineteenth
century, linguist James A. Harrison (1884) asserted that:

much of his [= an African’s] talk is baby-talk . . . the slang which is an ingrained
part of his being deep-dyed as his skin . . . the African, from the absence of books
and teaching, had no principle of analepsy in his intellectual furnishing by which a
word, once become <sic.> obscure from a real or supposed loss of parts or meaning,
can be repaired, amended, or restored to its original form. (233, italics in original)

The author attributed the production of black language to the physical character of Africans and
the psychological or intellectual inferiority. He claimed that the African are too intellectually
inferior to reproduce white language. His description of the language was full of exoticization,
mystification, and beastification done to non-European worlds. Into the early twentieth century,
Latino journalist Ambrose Gonzales (1922) believed Africans’ technical inadequacies and
physical features (e.g., Africans’ lips) caused the reduction in their ability to speak English.2
Then, another linguist George Phillip Krapp (1924), a professor at Columbia University
developed a less overt yet nuanced argument as follows:

In one very important respect . . . the Negro is not a foreigner and an outcast: his
language is finally and completely English. . . . The Negroes, indeed . . . have retained
not a trace of any native African speech. . . . The native African dialects have been
completely lost . . . it [= an archaic pronunciation of American English] has lingered in
the Negro speech simply because the Negro, being socially backward, he held on to
many habits which the white world has left behind. . . . In one group of Negroes [=
Gullahs], probably the most primitive alive today in their cultural development, clear
traces of it [= infantile English] still survive . . . the only Negro speech that had any
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literary tradition in Irving’s day was the barbarous dialect that survives now in
Gullah. . . . Negro English [is] no longer a grotesque mutilation of the English language.
(190-195, italics added)

The author made an unfounded claim that the current language of Africans in the United States
“retained not a trace of any native African speech,” probably because linguists back then (surely
today’s linguists too) did not learn African languages and did not look at the African components
of the linguistic repertoire of the slave community and/or because they did not have a concept of
code-switching, which the African community should have done depending on settings or
interlocutors. The writer’s usage of the concept “dialect” as seen in other writings on the
languages of Africans by Europeans (e.g., UNESCO 1953: 25) may show his condescending or
denigrating attitudes toward African languages and African varieties of English, because he shifts
from “dialect” to “English” when he refers to a “Negro” dialect of English in the mainland,
which had become “finally and completely English.” Moreover, he placed Africans on a
Darwinist evolutionary scale, equating social backwardness or primitiveness to a “barbarous
dialect” or a “grotesque mutilation” of English.
In the 1940s, theologian Mason Crum (1940: 113) made a similar racist claim that Africans
produced degenerated English because of their cultural and linguistic primitiveness. In the 50s
and 60s these race-inferiority narratives on the language of enslaved Africans and their
descendants seems to have transformed into more sophisticated ones, which allowed scientists to
more easily evade charges of racism. The earlier discourse did not completely disappear
(Clement & Johnson 1973: 1-2).

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4.3. Conservative Scholarship by White Scholars

The linguistic arguments on black language in the 50s started to avoid prior judgmental
comments. Already in the 1950s, dialectological linguist Raven I. McDavid, Jr. (1950) and
Raven I. McDavid, Jr. and Virginia Glenn McDavid (1951) examined in detail the racist
narratives on black language made by mostly southern white scholars who were mostly nonlinguists. They made a balanced argument on the origins of black language. However, the former
inadvertently made a myopic and ethnocentric criticism when the author said, “The arrangement
[of Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect] suggests that its purpose is not primarily linguistic”
(McDavid 1950: 326). The statement suggests that black linguist Lorenzo Dow Turner’s work
(1949) is less linguistic and thus cannot establish a linguistically valid argument to support any
linguistic paradigm which draws on the work. The argument that Turner’s work did not follow
the expected order of the author’s or his fellow linguists’ disciplinary practice may be
ethnocentric. Turner’s work was justifiably designed and arranged to demystify the racist notions
surrounding Gullah and deconstruct Eurocentric linguistics (incl., McDavid’s) which looked (still
looks) at only structures which they could easily identify without little or no knowledge of West
and Niger-Congo African languages. Turner did this work by himself with an unprecedentedly
extensive knowledge of West African languages. His work may be worth hundreds of linguists’
work. If McDavid had expected a comprehensive grammar book, it would have been other future
linguists’ collective work drawing on Turner rather than imposing such an onerous task on him
alone. Or it would not be possible forever without colonialists,’ imperialists,’ or statenationalists’ organized, abundant, extensive support, to which their economic, political, and

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religious interests have allowed other languages access. By saying “linguists want to know what
Gullah is like as a language” (332), McDavid indirectly or inadvertently undervalued the
comprehensiveness of Turner’s work. It might have been generous if he had delineated what
linguistic criteria and data are necessary for a linguistic code to be viewed as a language.
McDavid’s way of discussing prior racist remarks on black language was just a description rather
than a criticism. Then, his linguistic criticism was turned to refuting the Africanness of Gullah,
unfortunately, without his own counter-evidence. Therefore, even those linguists who attempted
to be neutral interpreted Turner’s work Anglocentrically and construct an Anglocentric meaning
of the work and Gullah. Concerning other varieties of black language, McDavid suggests they
are full of errors. Black language was allowed no “autonomy which structuralism so freely
accorded to exotic languages and dialects in other parts of the world” (Bailey 1965: 171,
commenting on Mencken 1963: 475). He viewed it as a “broken” English, peeling off just one
layer from the multiple semantic layers of black language, which associated it with the physical
or biological nature of Africans. It seems that he did not view it as a structural entity called
“dialect” or “language.”
Another dialectologist Hans Kurath (1949) commented, “By and large the Southern Negro
speaks the language of the white man of his locality or area and of his level of education. But in
some respects, his speech is more archaic or old-fashioned; not un-English, but retarded because
of less schooling” (6, emphasis added). This might be a precursor for the notion that black
language is basically a continuation of British dialects in old days. Kurath referred to the
“Negro” part of English as “retarded,” a developmental notion, which was to appear as the
dominant interpretation of black language in psychology and sociology concentrated in the

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1960s. The author may have thought African languages or linguistic features were erased in the
speech of the majority of blacks except in Gullah.
A similar line of argument was developed by linguists Donald J. Lloyd and Harry R. Warfel,
who claimed, “Negro speech in America is not a distinct entity,” although they recognized the
scant existence of African words (1956: 17-18). As the former two studies discussed above did
not, neither did the authors recognize black language as a dialect of English or another language.
It is worth pointing out that the linguists’ arguments leaned toward making sure whether African
linguistic patterns “disappeared” from black language rather than whether such linguistic
patterns “continued” in the language.

4.4. Neo-Racist Scholarship by White Scholars

Against the historical trends in the 1960s, most sensitive to the civil or human rights of
blacks, there emerged a tendency “to treat African American students as affected by speech
pathologies and learning disorders that inhibit their academic performance” (DeBose 2005: 162).
The dominant paradigm in psychology, sociology, and health largely contributed to a
disproportionate placement of black students in speech therapy classes (Taylor 1969: 11). “The
deficit-pathology orientation . . . as a dominant theme of academic study of peoples of African
descent throughout the twentieth century continues to influence state and federal policies” 3
(DeBose 2005: 160-161).
A more liberal (Taylor 1969), scientific, sophisticated narrative in the civil rights and black
nationalism era, i.e., the cognitive or cultural deficit arguments on black children were widely

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accepted among speech pathologists, educational sociologists, and educational psychologists4
(e.g., Bereiter & Englemann 1966; Bereiter, et al. 1966; Bloom, Davis, & Hess 1965; Carson &
Rabin 1960; Deutsch 1963, 1965, 1966; Hess & Shipman 1965; Jensen 1968; Shuey 1966). As a
most often-quoted example, educational psychologists Bereiter, et al. (1966) claimed concerning
the language of black children that:

[o]ur estimation of the language of culturally deprived children agrees . . . with that
of Bernstein5, who maintains that this language is not merely an underdeveloped
version of standard English, but is a basically non-logical mode of expressive
behavior which lacks the formal properties necessary for the organization of
thought. (112-113, italics added)

The language of most blacks was “underdeveloped” and “non-logical,” suggesting that the
language of most whites is developed and logical, as the aforementioned scholars claimed. The
black-white language binary was placed on a developmental scale. As already mentioned, this
developmental argument, quite interestingly, was preceded by dialectologist Kurath (1949).
Black language became a psychological or medical issue due to certain sociological conditions.
During this period, much of the research was focused on IQ and other standardized test results of
black children, and those tests were based on the cultural values and norms of, mainly, middleclass whites and phrased in their language, which, analogously, was developed under certain
sociological conditions (cf. White 1984). In that sociohistorical environment and atmosphere
many scholars discussed the language deficits of the culturally deprived child from lower-class
homes. Reflecting the liberalist trend that just avoiding referring to the concept “race” justified
their underlying racist thoughts and behaviors, much of the research relied on the non-racial
terms. The arguments were obviously based on class, but since most descendants of enslaved

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Africans lived in lower- or under- class areas, it can be reasonably suggested that the color-blind
discussions were designed to avoid the accusation of racism. This scientific racism, the deficit
thesis appeared to have died out after sociolinguistic research on black language reached its first
apogee in the mid-1960s through the 1970s.
Yet in 1983, a few years after the 1980 presidential election of Ronald Reagan, education
specialist Thomas J. Farrell presented the cognitive deficiency thesis with an example of the way
the verb “to be” is used in the black community:

The non-standard forms of the verb “to be” in. . . . Black English may affect the
thinking of the users. . . . Black ghetto children do not use the standard forms of the
verb “to be.” . . . Many of those same black ghetto children have difficulty learning
to read, and they do not score highly on measures of abstract thinking. . . . I am
hypothesizing that learning the full standard deployment of the verb “to be” is
integral to developing Level II thinking because the deployment of that verb played
a part in the development of abstract thinking in ancient Greece.
(477, 479, italics added)

First of all, this argument is a repetition of one of the most quoted claims by Bereiter et al.
(1966). The author seems to have accepted the dominant paradigm in linguistics since the mid1960s which argues black language is a “dialect of English,” which is a linguistic systematicity
thesis. Dividing language and thought and bringing the contradicting paradigms in linguistics
and sociology/psychology up to a complementary relationship, he suggested that the
“nonstandard” (a euphemism for black or African in this context) way of using the verb “to be”
obstructs abstract thinking, which is a cognitive deficit thesis. But such a linguistic difference has
nothing to do with whether abstract thinking exists or not because the abstract thinking is merely
one type of such thinking, representing a certain set of meanings associated with the white

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middle-class use of the verb “to be.” The usage of to be in black language, on the other, follows a
distinct system of morphosyntactic and semantic rules, realizing another type of abstract thinking
(See a comprehensive description in DeBose 2015; Green 1998).
Since then, there seems to have been no deficit discourse on black language, at least in
written form.6 Today most informed intellectuals would say African American English or
“nonstandard” English is equal to any other dialect (incl., standard) spoken around the United
States. It is indeed remarkable progress looking back at those outright racist remarks in the late
nineteenth and the early twentieth century. We may be tempted to conclude that linguistic racism
has been gone at least among the intelligentsia, but the former outright racism and then the latter
scientific racism have just turned into a more invisible, sophisticated, scientific one, retaining one
conceptualization of black language: a deviation of standard English, with an additional meaning
of being to be covertly eradicated. The new discourse may have contributed to maintenance of
the status quo in which black language was still interpreted within the state-sponsored nationalist
language ideology. Language sciences helped deny the language access to public areas such as
the mass media (except hip hop or literature, i.e., domains of the humanities rather than social
sciences), politics, nonracial business, and education.

4.5. Liberalist Scholarship by White Scholars

In the 1960s, the low achievement level in literacy among black students was a pressing
concern for some linguists because the students’ problems had been addressed as deficits such as
dyslexia (Baratz & Shuy 1969). White scholars may have been supposed to express their

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opinions on blacks in a non-racist/racialized way, for example, use of “non-standard dialect” and
“standard English” to refer to “black dialect” and “white dialect” respectively, and criticize racist
remarks or, sometimes, color-blind ones after the enactment of various anti-discrimination
decisions and laws, e.g., Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in 1954, Civil Rights Act of
1964, Equal Educational Opportunities Act of 1974, under particular political, diplomatic, and
military circumstances. This series of events occurred especially after the Korean War (1950-53),
although the connection between the events and the war is not clear at this stage. This second
stage was characterized by attempts to rectify or alleviate the deficit status of black language
propagated mainly by white linguists, psychologists, and sociologists in earlier years.
Under the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson, which launched the War on
Poverty in 1964 (practically, a war on black poverty), when US involvement in the Vietnam War
(1955-1975) peaked, federal funds started to be distributed for research on black language
(Jackson, Williams, & Smitherman 2011: 106).7 This financial factor may have been an
important impetus for the establishment and domination of the paradigms adopted or developed
by white language scientists (e.g., Baratz & Shuy 1969; Brooks 1964; Dillard 1972; Fasold 1969;
Fasold & Shuy 1970; Goodman 1965; Labov 1967, 1969; Labov et al. 1968; Leaverton 1971;
McDavid, Jr. 1964; Pederson 1964; Piestrup 1973; Stewart 1964; Williamson 1961; Wolfram
1969).8 One of the earliest federal government-sponsored linguistic research projects, which
examined the language of black youths in the inner-city of New York, was conducted in 1965 by
Labov et al. (1968). What it emphasized was the systematicity of black language. The system
argument attempted to demystify the deficit hypothesis widely accepted in psychology, speech,
and sociology. However, this linguistic systematicity for black language was placed not within

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the concept of language but dialect, i.e., “an integral part of the larger sociolinguistic structure of
the English language” (Labov 1969: 1). This structural demarcation of black language as a
dialect of English was based on the transformational-generative argument that white and black
language “are both based upon the same deep structures and used to convey the same underlying
logical propositions” (Labov 1969: 46-47; Smith 1974: 18).
It has been one of the several attempts to linguistically/scientifically distinguish between
language and dialect, although linguistics usually denies any interest or involvement in the act of
distinguishing between language and dialect as a non-linguistic or socio-political concern. The
systematic dialect discourse, however, did not give black language any substantive shift in the
linguistic, political, economic, and educational status of the language: the applied concerns of
these linguists were based on the premise that “the fundamental role of the school is to teach the
reading and writing of standard English” (Ibid.: 1, italics added). In this argument, black
language was still placed in a nonstandard position relative to standard English, using one close
sociolinguistic conceptualization, a low-high diglossic dichotomy. The term “nonstandard” had
(and has) a stigmatizing effect deriving from popular use. The argument was a typical
submersion-type or subtractive type of the code-switching narrative. Those predominantly white
linguists who studied the language of slave descendants in the 1960s and 1970s recognized it as a
different linguistic system (Smith 1974: 23-24) or attempted to address the issue in an English as
a second language manner, which suggested black language is the first language and English, a
second language. However, all of them treated the black language as “urban Negro dialect,”
“non-standard Negro dialect,” “Negro non-standard English,” “non-standard Negro speech,”
“Negro dialect,” or “Black English.” Their linguistic labeling still may still have implied the

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deficit model to varying degrees in that these labelings mean a marked aberration from white
language called just “English,” which is unmarked. It may be said that the research by
predominantly white linguists contributed to the upliftment of black language as a systematic
nonstandard dialect rather than a deficit dialect. However, the deficit model and the difference
model were common in the following respect: the former promoted the eradication of black
language by action while the latter did so by silence, i.e., they didn’t make any recommendation
to protect or even promote black language (See Section 5.2.4 for detailed discussion). They may
have implicitly acted within the framework of whites’ language nationalism, which posited that
“American” citizens would strive to have the (elite) white language, what they call, “standard
English” as their primary (target) language in the English-speaking state of the United States.
At this third stage of liberalist scholarship, we saw a new evolution or concession from the
former approach: the theoretical or scientific exchange of primitiveness or illogicality for
systematicity within the scale of the English language, while the ideological-political and
experiential-practical maintenance of the users of black language at the lowest stratum of the
society. All the linguistic features of black language were compared and contrasted against
standard English or just English, which was obviously meant to be white language (e.g., Labov
1969). The white linguists from the 1950s onward would deny this, but among what might have
been foundational to their scientific endeavors is a nationalist, imperialistic, or hegemonic
ideology that any language which sounds or looks similar to their language should be
incorporated into the greater English complex whether the former is judged to be close or distant,
in addition to their intuitive, experiential belief that it sounds and looks like part of their
language. They interpreted the linguistic situation in the United States monolinguistically as

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“English-speaking North America” (McDavid & McDavid 1951) and have constructed the
Linguistic Atlas since the 1930s, as many nation-states have done.
I suspect that the same white language nationalism may have been directed at creole in
relation to dialect. Creoles were considered somewhat distant from both lexical and grammatical
source languages (e.g., Holm 2000) and, sometimes, considered to have an African substratum,
i.e., be close to grammatical source languages in Africa (e.g., Alleyne 1971, 19809; Taylor 1971);
however, black language varieties were considered part of the English language on a creole–
dialect–standard continuum. Therefore, interestingly enough, creolistics, dialectology and
traditional linguistics, inadvertently or covertly, may have conspired to construct a greater
language area, i.e., “English-speaking” and “English-based” (e.g., Bailey & Shuy 1973). In the
embryonic stage of black linguistics and US sociolinguistics in general, in the 1970s, these three
areas merged into sociolinguistics interpreting the black varieties with their lexicon
predominantly English as the “gradience” or “variation” in the English language. They liberated
those linguistic codes in a certain liberalist way as the following excerpt shows:

It was clear that ‘gradience’ had to be described and that models based on the
omnipresence of discrete oppositions were inadequate for the job . . . it was also clear
that linguistic variation was closely associated with the social context and topic of
conversation. . . . Uneasiness with strictly homogeneous monolectal grammars was
being voiced . . . and steps were being taken toward polylectal or polysystematic
formulations. . . . I am happy to be rid of static, homogeneous models and to be rid of
the fudges represented by ‘my dialect.’ (Bailey 1973: xi, xiii-xiv)

They gave stigmatized linguistic codes like black language some freedom (“lectal” freedom, but
not “lingual” freedom), indeed, but they were always bound to the English-speaking national and
international power system and the prevailing monolingual nationalism. With the gradience or

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variation theory, many may assume that both black and white language may be deconstructed
into polysystematic formulations and placed on an equal foot, but it needs to be noted that while
whites’ language is deconstructed but still allowed to remain in their own overarching linguistic
boundary called “standard English” or “English,” blacks’ language is deconstructed but not
allowed to have their own overarching linguistic boundary called, e.g., “Ebonics.” In this way
white linguists and their beneficiaries in state institutions could covertly place blacks who used
an English dialect or an English Creole on an evolutionary scale of creole-dialect–standard in
that order. On the other hand, during this period, black linguists were not prominent, but it is
notable that already in the pre-sociolinguist stage, Juanita Virginia Williamson (1961) attempted
to outline possibly as a distinct variety some linguistic features characteristic of blacks in an area
other than the Sea Islands, i.e., a transition from her dialectologist predecessors to future
sociolinguists.
During this period and earlier, some considered the genesis of black language as from British
dialects―Anglicist Paradigm (e.g., Krapp 1924, Labov et al. 1968). This had been a paradigm
embraced among predominantly white scholars since the late 19th century. Most works in this
camp were tied to the variationist tradition. One of the criteria adopted by this method is to look
at “shared underlying grammars in the communities in question” to draw a linguistic boundary.
Another criterion was to focus on “morphosyntactic variables rather than phonology or
discourse” (Herk 2015: 25). Comparison of black language was made with dialects of English
and creoles, but hardly ever with West and Niger-Congo African languages. Later, a modified
paradigm emerged, whose research procedures were similar to the Anglicist Paradigm, but it was
adopted by an increasing number of scholars in the second half of the twentieth century,10 who

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considered black language as wholly or partly a decreolized variety of a former English Creole―
Creolist Paradigm (e.g., Bailey 1965; Dillard 1972; Smitherman 1977; Stewart 1967). The
Creolist Paradigm looks at shared distinctive grammatical features of black language and creole
languages across African diaspora communities and focuses on morphology and syntax rather
than phonology (Herk 2015: 24). The Creolist Paradigm may have been another concession from
the earlier dominant paradigm because it allowed black language historical distinctiveness or
stronger Africanness as a former creole English or, in the case of Gullah, a non-canonical African
continuity in the substratum within the framework of creole linguistic criteria and interpretations
but still did not allow it an African canonical belongingness within the framework of comparative
linguistic criteria and interpretations, creolistically keeping it in the greater English area.11

4.6. Interest Convergence by Black Scholars

At the fourth stage, especially since the black nationalist era from the late 1960s to the early
1970s, black and Caribbean scholars (e.g., Bailey 1965; Baugh 1979; Rickford 1974; Smith
1974; Smitherman 1977; Spears 1978; Taylor 1969; Twiggs 1973) started to join black
linguistics. Most of them found some possible connection of black language to West African
languages, whatever paradigm they employed to describe it. It is important to point out that the
study of black language by the African scholars may have strongly been tied to the black
nationalist movement, “which asserts that black people have a legitimate culture and history and
that these factors should play an important role in the development of black control of black
communities” (Taylor 1969: 1).

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John Baugh, John R. Rickford, Orlando L. Taylor, and others appear to have basically
followed the conceptualization and theorization of black language by white predecessors. They
mostly adopted or adjusted the terms which their predecessors like William Labov adopted, such
as “Black English Vernacular or Black Vernacular English,” “African American Vernacular
English,” and “African American English” (e.g., Baugh 1980; Rickford 1999; Spears 1982).
They, probably as most laypersons would do, might have seen their own language experiences
and meanings in the black and Caribbean communities as a given in the nature of the empirical
world, not as a product of processes and interaction. It may have been the way they viewed black
language as a dialect of English from the beginning or possibly they didn’t question whether it is
a dialect of English or not before they started their research, and they just used language
labelings which denote a dialect of English. Especially, John Baugh and John Rickford probably
extended their mentor’s, i.e., Labov’s Anglicist position, reflecting the black nationalist climate
to include a possibility that some of the grammatical features of black language derived from
former English creoles, which is the Creolist Paradigm. They may have searched for something
different from English and, perhaps, closer to West African languages, which may make black
language look more distinctive or autonomous than does the Anglicist Paradigm, in which the
predominant grammar is of English-origin. The Creolist thesis may have been more acceptable to
those black scholars with a higher awareness of the racist nature of the United States who were
the descendants of enslaved Africans in the United States and other parts of the diaspora and
searched for something that fulfilled part of their nationalist needs, while adopting their white
predecessors’ methodology and seeking to be accepted in the academic whitestream. This may
have been another concession of additive nature from the earlier period.

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On the other hand, there were other Creolist language scientists who diverged from their
Creolist counterparts mentioned above, that is, Lorenzo Dow Turner (1949), Beryl Loftman
Baily (1965), Geneva Smitherman (1977), and Molefi Kete Asante (1990). Lorenzo Dow Turner
(1949) attempted to debunk earlier myths on Gullah and other varieties of black language. While
he described Gullah as “a creolized variety of English,” he might have, as his method was indeed
comparative linguistic rather than creole linguistic, indirectly pointed to the possibility that
Gullah may belong to an African language family seen from a grammatical perspective. Beryl
Loftman Bailey (1965), a Jamaican native, suggested that “Negro English” be examined as a
system in no comparison with standard English and even that “the Southern Negro ‘dialect’
differs from other Southern speech because its deep structure is different, having its origins as it
undoubtedly does in some Proto-Creole grammatical structure” (172). Bailey pushed one step
ahead and contend the deep structure of black language is different from that of English and
grammatically dates back to a creole. While employing various names which directly or
indirectly referred to black language as a dialect of English, Geneva Smitherman (1977)
presented an extensive comparative account of black language and West African languages,
taking on a more Afrocentric and comparative linguistic flavor. Especially Molefi Kete Asante is
an interesting case because while he currently adopts Afrocentricity (Asante 1980) as a
framework of reference for examining the history and behavior of the descendants of enslaved
Africans in the United States, he employed the term “African American English” in the title of
his 1990 work, found Ebonics more appropriate for the name, and adopted the Creolist
Paradigm.12 As one noticeable intersection of Afrocentric epistemology and the Creolist
Paradigm, Smitherman and Asante suggest that a holistic approach be taken to the study of black

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language, i.e., to describe it as a whole of verbal and nonverbal behaviors (Asante 1990;
Smitherman 1977).13 The neo-creolists started to interpret those linguistic features, which prior
linguists had taken as deficiencies or differences, as African or more than American, as well as
American.
Smitherman later shifted from the traditional approach of treating black language as a variety
of English to describing it as African American Language. She and others attempt to “bypass
some of the problematic implications of ‘English’ within the socioculture and history of African
slave descendants in the United States and the contested connections of their language variety to
the motherland and colonization and encompass rhetorical and pragmatic strategies that might
not be associated with English” (Lanehart 2015: 3). This rationale is understandable because the
term “African American Language” seems to have started to catch on a few years after the
Ebonics controversy in 1996.14 The concept “language” refers to both language and dialect, and
thus may cause less stigma attached to the latter and be oriented toward self-determination,
compared with the concept “dialect.” A little away from the traditional Creolist camp or with a
more Afrocentric flavor or taking a more neutral stand, they and some others (e.g., Alim &
Smitherman 2012; Lanehart 2009; Pandey 2000) including white scholars (e.g., Wolfram 2015)
employ the naming “African American Language.”
The explicit physical and biological narrative and the more sophisticated sociological and
psychological narrative against black language seems to have subsided today. Even the media
seem not to subscribe to such arguments. However, it may not prelude the advent of a post-racist
discourse on black language; rather it might have entered into another phase of scientific
discourse, which might be unintended and inadvertent. The ensuing sections discuss two major

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liberalist narratives on black language prevailing today. I shall critical race theoretically discuss
how today’s dominant paradigms in black linguistics may be a result of interest convergence
between whites and blacks.

4.6.1. Dialect Equality Discourse

Soon after the decision of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (347 U.S. 483) in 1954 a
lot of issues around the way blacks were to be integrated into the white society started to surface.
On the educational front emerged a covert strategy to re-segregate a majority of blacks by taking
their behavioral patterns (incl., linguistic) as pathologies to be eradicated, which are defined
against a wider range of white behaviors as normalcy. At almost the same time, sociolinguistic
research on black language gathered momentum in the mid-1960s, implicitly or inadvertently
subscribing to the former educational strategy, when the government launched a war on poverty
(primarily, black poverty) in 1964: taking the linguistic patterns of most blacks as systematic
deviations to be changed, which were defined against a wider range of white varieties as
standard. The third layer of sociological or psychological nature was just given some superficial
modification of shifting pathological underdevelopment into systematicity, with the core of the
eradication of black culture and identity narrative maintained.
At that time, the government and non-profit organizations or foundations made massive
investments in social science research (incl., linguistics) not only in its own territory but also in
newly-independent West-bloc state-nations in Africa and Asia, apparently in an attempt to define
and address social issues for people of color in a White Supremacist way. Domestically, the

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government started to make huge investments in the study of black language and the application
of the research results in “educating” black children. Internationally, in the West-bloc countries
and regions as anti-communist bastions, the United States government attempted to spread a US
system of politics, economy, and education, accompanying the spread of English (Minamoto
2000). For, perhaps, facing the expected economic “turmoil” for the white society to incorporate
millions of former slaves into the white economy, the United States government may have had
no choice but to further expand the capitalist structure outside of the domestic economy.
President Lyndon B. Johnson approved on June 11, 1965, a US government policy on English
language teaching services abroad as shown below:

English has become one of the most important world languages. The rapidly
growing interest in English cuts across political and ideological lines because of the
convenience of a lingua franca increasingly used as a second language in important
areas of the world. Demands for help in learning English are, therefore, widespread.
The United States ought to respond to these demands. English is a key which opens
doors to scientific and technical knowledge indispensable to the economic and
political development of vast areas of the world. (USAID 1967: 3)

The phrasing of the passage sounds politically neutral or ideologically free, but the United States
may have attempted to ensure further spread and institutionalization of one of the infrastructural
components of Anglocentric capitalism, i.e., English, tied to aid activities, particularly, in former
UK and US colonies, and for the very purpose of, perhaps, needing to accept the inevitable
diversification of English, i.e., Englishes, not as an aberration of English but rather as an “equal
dialect or creole” to the standard at the rhetorical level, while at the practical level promoting
Anglo-American English, i.e., mainly the language of white elites, perhaps as a strategy for
confining emerging “nonnative” dialects overseas to low-prestige functions. Under this

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circumstance, at this incipient stage of sociolinguistics or the sociology of language as a
discipline in the United States, many dualistic concepts characteristic of those societies, e.g.,
diglossia (Ferguson 1959 & Fishman 1967) emerged. In formerly US and UK possessions such
as Nigeria, India, and the Philippines, there were local and expatriate specialists who argued for
the legitimacy of their own educated varieties of English (e.g., Kachru 1992). Prator (1966)
points out:

Advocates of the doctrine [= the belief that second-language varieties of English can
legitimately be equated with mother-tongue varieties] appear to agree in expecting
that, if a local variety of English gains acceptance as the instructional model in a
given country, the chances that the language [= English] will continue to play a
significant role in the life of the country will thereby be considerably increased. (462)

In this international climate, the US government might have attempted to recognize black
language as a native but nonstandard dialect equal to the language of white elites at the
rhetorical level, while at the practical level maintaining the status of the elite language as a
model dialect that is given precedence over the nonstandard dialect in public or formal spaces.
The government might have attempted to secure the interests of “whites in policymaking
positions able to see the economic and political advances [tied to the spread of English] at home
and abroad that would follow the abandonment of” (Bell 1980: 524), at least, their psychological
public oppositions to the dialect of blacks as well as the nonnative dialects or creoles of peoples
in the Third World. It must be noted that the linguistic equality discourse is an oxymoron in that
it employs the hierarchical, dualistic conceptual relationships “dialect-language” and “standardnonstandard.” The equality discourse does not act alone but is always in tandem with the dialect
discourse and the diglossic or code-switching discourse in sociolinguistics from the outset. In

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other words, without the dialect discourse and the code-switching discourse, the interests of the
dominant group would be compromised because the adoption of the language equality discourse,
instead of the dialect equality discourse theoretically equals the social, political, economic, and
educational equalization of those minority groups, an unacceptable situation in which the
minorities are allowed to use their marginalized languages in the majority institutions of power.

4.6.2. Dialect Discourse

In scientific terms, there may be no need for the concept “dialect” or “(non)standard” in
linguistics and even in applied linguistics. All linguistic codes are just “languages,” e.g.,
American language, black language, Appalachian language, English language, or Cockney
language, whether or not they are mutually intelligible and sound/look similar. Linguists don’t
have to subcategorize a language into dialects because they necessarily get involved in the
political and ideological act of determining the boundaries between linguistic codes (certainly,
even calling a linguistic code “language” involves a politico-ideological decision). The term
“dialect” has been historically used alongside “vernacular” and “patois” to refer to stigmatized
linguistic codes in general society (Haugen 1966: 68; Weinstein 1980: 61). It is so politicallycharged that it ethically or justifiably without racism may have been able to place those who use
the “distinctive” dialects under the subjugation of a dominant group who use the standard
language. For it is assumed with little or no doubt that nonstandard (which connotes “incorrect”)
is a priori placed below standard (which connotes “correct”), which sounds racially neutral.
Remember there are lots of comments by black parents who refer to the language of their

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children as “incorrect.”
To be sure, most linguists would assert that African American “dialect” (i.e., African
American English) or African American “standard English” (i.e., one of standard Englishes) is
equal to the standard “language” or, apologetically, the standard “dialect.” The questions remain:
whether they need to use the inanimate term “standard” vis-à-vis the animate term “African
American” despite the fact that the definition of every linguistic code is predicated on human
collectivity; whether linguistics needs to take the trouble to appropriate the term “dialect” that
has spread in the general public as derogatory and argue that it is a “neutral” term in linguistics
(cf. Wolfram 2015: 342). The Linguistic Society of America (LSA), one of the most authoritative
linguistics bodies in the United States, issued the following statement in 1997, immediately after
the Oakland School Board adopted the Ebonics Resolution in 1996 (which states that Ebonics is
a language other than English):

The distinction between “languages” and “dialects” is usually made more on social
and political grounds than on purely linguistic ones. . . . 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.
(Resolution on the Oakland “Ebonics” Issue Unanimously Adopted at the Annual
Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Chicago, Illinois, January 3, l997,
italics mine)

In this LSA statement, the linguist who prepared the resolution employs the term AAVE (=
African American vernacular English). He does not use the term “dialect” here but AAVE
denotes an African American dialect of English. Almost all the scholars including this author
clarify their position on the status of black language either as a dialect or a language by simply
using a particular labeling, thus engaging in the political and ideological act of distinguishing

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language from dialect. They basically take over their white predecessors’ paradigms in the 1960s
and 1970s, and seem to still believe they can justify their sociopolitical act of unequal status
allocation to related linguistic codes by means of emphasizing the equal systematicity of related
linguistic codes. However the author of the statement argues that the difference between
language and dialect is linguistically and educationally unimportant. Moreover, the author and
others may attempt to make recognized both the systematicity and African American
distinctiveness of black language (a central concern of black linguists) in exchange for
abandoning the black nationalists’ right to define their own language as a language, i.e., leaving
it a dialect of English (mainly, a white nationalist interest). It may be because of their perception
that most blacks in general do not accept the idea that their language is a language other than
English or their elided fear that they would lose their job or status. Nevertheless, if the author of
the LSA statement makes such an argument, he should not use AAVE but a neutral labeling like
“the linguistic code of African Americans.”
One problem with this contradictory use of the concept “dialect” arises from the undeniable
fact that a linguistic code is largely a sociopolitical entity from the beginning. Since the author of
the statement is a sociolinguist, he could take into account that a linguistic code which linguists
examine is not such an objectified structural entity but a social complex of structure and function
(incl., nationalism and ideology). There should be no purely linguistic criteria for defining a
linguistic code as dialect or language, as Fasold (2005: 697) argues. In this vein, there should be
no purely educational importance attached to defining a linguistic code. Education is one of the
most controlling sociopolitical instruments of the state, in which interracial or interethnic power
relations are negotiated through linguistic differences and in which the definition of a linguistic

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code as a language or a dialect largely influences the destiny of many students of color.
Therefore, the distinction between language and dialect even in the science of linguistics may
have important political, economic, social, and educational consequences for African Americans
or other minority groups. Once a linguistic code is counted as a dialect, the users are often
stigmatized and usually provided no official linguistic services. But if it is counted as a language
in a governmental survey or a law, it may be respected as being on par with English, Spanish,
Chinese, or Swahili, and provided official linguistic services.
Second, the concomitant descriptivist discourse in linguistics implicitly or inadvertently
accommodates a state language ideology promoted by the dominant white group (some black
elites are included here), i.e., that dialect users naturally strive to be standard language users to
participate or succeed in the mainstream institutions, one of the meritocracy arguments. Many
African American parents argue that their children should learn correct or proper language,
implying that their mother tongue is an incorrect or improper dialect. This self-denigrating
interest by some users of black language may converge with the dominant group’s interest in
placing black language on the English scale and marginalizing it in the English language
hierarchy―covertly marginalizing the black language users in the social, political, and economic
structure and insidiously denying their human rights which are tied to their linguistic rights.
Therefore, the white community are able to enforce their political and economic power against
the black community through state institutions, where the hegemonic linguistic relationship is
embedded, without any visible, at least, linguistic form of racism. Some of the elite may
patronizingly concede that black dialect is equal to standard English but such a narrative leaves
white privileges tied to the use of standard English intact. Again it should be noted that the

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attempt to equalize the stigmatized concept “dialect” with its binary opposite “standard” is an
oxymoron.
In counter-moves to deconstruct the dominant discourse on black language in linguistics and
beyond, we have witnessed emergence since the early 1970s of some scholars who attempt to
deploy a counter-paradigm which adopts Afrocentricity or their own African-centeredness as
their framework of reference against the liberalist dialect equality discourse, which is embedded
in the larger modernist dualistic discourse. It should be remembered that a number of
dichotomies in sociolinguistics or linguistics generated from the dualistic thinking have
inadvertently reinforced the judgmental binary of superiority-inferiority or better-worse in
practice. To be sure, the opponent scientists are not completely out of the Euro-American
dualistic world view15; however, they are different from those mainstream scholars who
uncritically accept the dualist interpretations of the Eurocentric world. They deploy a counterparadigm which selects another set of scientific criteria and interpretations to describe not only
the language of descendants of enslaved Africans in the United States but also other newly born
African languages in other parts of the African diaspora, as African languages which belong to a
Pan-African language family. The African-centered paradigm may fulfill the ideological-political
and experiential-practical needs of the black nation or nationalists in general. In what follows, I
shall present a brief account of each of the scholars/practitioners from various fields of inquiry,
who adopt the counter-paradigm.

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4.7. Interest Divergence by Black Scholars

From the early 1970s a group or some individuals from various fields of inquiry have joined
the Africological school and provided a theoretical framework against the Creolist Paradigm and
the Anglicist Paradigm, namely, the Africological Paradigm. They are psychologists, historians,
linguists, and other language scientists. They attempt unapologetically and fundamentally to
rectify the deficit status of black language both in terminological and methodological senses.
Back in 1973, Robert L. Williams, a black psychologist and currently professor emeritus at
Washington University in St. Louis, and other black scholars renamed the then prevalent
appellation for black language, such as “substandard speech,” “restrictive speech,” “deviant
speech,” “deficient speech,” “non-standard English,” or “Black English,” to “Ebonics” (Ebony +
Phonics). They adopted a Pan-Africanist definition, locating Ebonics within an African language
family, which stated that Ebonics consists of:

the linguistic and paralinguistic features which on a concentric continuum represents the
communicative competence of the West African, Caribbean, and United States slave
descendants of African origin.
(Williams 1975: vi, originally provided by Ernie A. Smith).

They did not discuss any further details that allowed them to explicitly interpret Ebonics as an
African language, which is understandable because they were mostly non-linguists. Later in the
2000s, Williams, not so explicit about whether Ebonics is grammatically an African language,
expressed an idea that “Africanisms represent the deep structure of Ebonics. Many West African
languages such as Ibo, Twi, Fon, Yoruba, Wolof, Fante, Mandinka, and others are relatives of

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Ebonics or Black Language” (2004).
In the same year Ebonics made a debut in St. Louis, Missouri, Robert D. Twiggs, an assistant
professor of Pan-African Studies, California State University, Los Angeles16 coined another PanAfricanist term called “PALWH” [Pan African Language in the Western Hemisphere]. PALWH
encompasses the same range of languages in the African diaspora as the earliest Ebonics.
PALWH was intended, as was the Ebonics, to “eradicate the negatively-connoted, stigmatized
so-called ‘negro-dialect’” (Twiggs 1973: 11). Twiggs clarified his own stand on the origin of
PALWH, expressing that “[i]n reply to George P. Krapp and those who would take the position
that PALWH is of British origin (Anglicist Paradigm), everything human that is Black, having its
roots in Africa, is of African origin” (Ibid.: 26). He argued that PALWH is a “residual (often
conscious) language and culture of African origins . . . consisting of a unique structure of
grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation and life styles” (Ibid.: 11). Different from other scholars
cited here, Twiggs avoided discussing the relationship of PALWH to African languages for fear
that he would become entangled in a confused controversy of the historical linguistic origin of
PALWH (Ibid.: 26), but rather attempted to synchronically look at the distinct features of the US
variety of PALWH, not comparing it to African linguistic structures.
Clinical and cognitive linguist Ernie A. Smith, professor at Charles R. Drew University of
Medicine and Science, sometimes uses the term “Nigritian” over Ebonics, since the meaning of
the latter has been confounded with that of African American English or African American
Vernacular English. Nigritian accentuates the (mainly) West African origin of the descendants of
enslaved Africans in the diaspora. Nigritian was originally proposed by Smith at the St. Louis
meeting in 1973 where Ernie Smith, Ann Covington, Grace Holt, and Robert Williams discussed

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the status of black language, but not agreed upon because it reminded others of negative
meanings associated with the term “Negro” (Smith, personal communication, August 19, 2011).
Since the early 1970s Smith has seen the linguistic affiliation of Ebonics in comparative
linguistic and comprehensive terms: comparing the phonetic, phonological, morphosyntactic, and
semantic structures of Ebonics and several West African languages. According to Smith (1974,
1996, 2011), the mutual intelligibility between the primary language of U.S. descendants of
enslaved Africans and English does not attest to the affiliation of Ebonics to English, a WestGermanic language. Ebonics, a relexified hybrid language, retains a dominant grammatical mix
of African languages. Ebonics is a relexified linguistic and paralinguistic (i.e., nonverbal sounds,
cues, and gestures) continuation of West and Niger-Congo African languages, partly traced back
to Egyptian in Kemet (ancient Egypt).
The late Anita P. DeFrantz, perhaps an applied linguist (FYI: mother of Olympic medallist
Anita L. DeFrantz) adopted the term “Pan-African Language” or “Africanized Language.” The
African-centered terms referred to the linguistic, cultural behaviors of Africans “in the United
States, the Caribbean, South America, Central America, Canada, and other geographic sites
where persons of African ancestry reside” (DeFrantz 1995: 62, emphasis added). The geographic
boundaries may not be limited to the Western hemisphere, on which Williams’, Twiggs’, and
Smith’s arguments are predicated. She argued that Ebonics does not belong to Indo-European
language families and is a linguistic and paralinguistic continuation of African languages as the
languages of Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and European Americans
are continuations of their respective ancestral languages. The rationale of her argument resided in
the position that phonology and syntax are most resistant to change and thus, Ebonics retains the

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phonology and syntax of African languages.
Linguist Carol Aisha Blackshire-Belay, a former associate professor at African American
Studies, Temple University and a former professor and chair at African and African American
Studies, Indiana State University, employs the name “Ebonics” but the definition is
geographically wider. The family tree of Ebonics languages is a collection of African languages
alongside Yoruba, Fanti, Hausa, Ewe, Akan, and so on. It is branched into North America, South
America, The Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. She focuses on the grammar of Ebonics as the
criterion for its linguistic affiliation to West and Central African Hamito-Bantu and Niger-Congo
languages. She contends that the lexicon of Ebonics is overwhelmingly English, French, or
Spanish but a structural and communicative continuation of many of the African languages of the
Niger-Congo family such as Twi, Igbo, Ewe, and Efik. Her epistemological starting point for
these arguments, as was Twiggs’, is that “Ebonics is a creation by Africans in response to their
environmental situations, “rooted in the African tradition just as all other African languages are,
and it also demonstrates continuity” (Blackshire-Belay 1996: 22, n. 11).
Molefi Kete Asante, professor of communication and Africology and chair at African
American Studies, Temple University, argues that Ebonics is a language other than English
(Asante 1997 & 2016: 2). He bases his argument upon the criterion that not vocabulary but
structural elements determine linguistic groupings, including the affiliation of Ebonics. The
criteria are meant to be “the structure, the sound, and the philosophy of the language [=
Ebonics]” (Asante 1997). As Smith does, Asante brings up the history of English in England
when comparatively classifying English and Ebonics. He explains that if vocabulary is set as the
criterion for classifying English, what he speaks, Ebonics is French and English is a Romance

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language, but if grammar is set as the criterion, English is a Germanic language. He suggests
Ebonics be classified on the criterion of grammar as European languages have long been in
linguistics (Asante 1997). Asante (2016: 2) proclaims that “the national language of African
Americans is Ebonics.”
Historian Kimani S. K. Nehusi, associate professor at African American Studies, Temple
University, shares with others a Pan-Africanist definition of Ebonics, albeit limited to the
Western hemisphere: “Ebonics in all its varieties is primarily the language of Afrikans descended
from enslaved Africans in the West” (Nehusi 2001: 112). Nehusi adopts a comparative linguistic
approach in that he argues that grammatical (syntactic, morphological, semantic, phonetic),
communicative (including non-verbal communication), and cosmological similarities suggest
continuities and connections between Ebonics and its proto-language Medew Netjer (the earliest
known Afrikan and the world’s first written language in Kemet). His structural scope of Ebonics
is as widest as Smith’s (1974) because it includes even “certain sounds not normally recognized
as words” (Ibid.: 62).
Historian Clinton Crawford, professor and chair at Mass Communications, Creative &
Performing Arts & Speech, Medgar Evers College, City University of New York, broadens the
definitional scope within Africa, adding that “accepting the Niger-Congo family of languages as
the sole origin of Ebonics obscures the fact that forced migration occurred over the entire
continent of Africa and, therefore, Ebonics reflects the linguistic heritage of the entire continent”
(Crawford 2001a: 3). He argues that “[t]here is no real structural linguistic similarity between
English and Ebonics; both languages are branches from a distinct family of languages and
developed in contestation with the languages of invading forces” (Crawford 2001b: 43). He

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emphasizes not only that Ebonics is a grammatical continuation of African languages on the
entire continent with dominant lexicons of European languages, but also that it is separate,
distinct, and apart from any European language. This understanding of Ebonics is probably based
on his own belief as a historian that the history of Ebonics did not begin in the European and
American enslavement period as suggested in the Creolist Paradigm but in the African past
(Ibid.: 32-33).
Certified school psychologist and Pan-Africanist, Umar Abdullah Johnson adopts the term
“Ebonics.” He considers Ebonics as a continuation of African linguistic patterns. He states,
“African-American children are a subset of African children, whose cultural DNA is alive and
well within their religious, social and linguistic patterns” (Johnson 2013: 59-60). He posits that
black children do not speak English or a dialect of English even though they use English
vocabulary, but their language is primarily a continuation of syntactic and pragmatic patterns of
African languages, i.e., an “African language being spoken through the medium of English
vocabulary” (Ibid.: 62). He does not clarify the geographical distribution of Ebonics. As a school
psychologist his linguistic understanding of Ebonics is probably integral to his practical finding
that the diagnosis “Specific Learning Disability (SLD),” largely a language-based disability,
results from the lack of black students’ cultural and linguistic familiarity with English (Ibid.: 6364).
Theologian Karen Crozier, associate professor of Practical Theology, Fresno Pacific
University, states that Ebonics is an African language system. She defines it as “[t]he linguistic
and paralinguistic features which on a concentric continuum represent the communicative
competence of the West African, Caribbean, and United States slave descendant of African

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origin” (Williams 1975: VI). The surface structure of Ebonics is vocabulary while the deep
structure is grammar. The grammar determines the parent language of Ebonics, which is of West
African origin (Niger Congo, Nilo Saharan, Afro-Asiatic, and Semitic). As Smith, BlackshireBelay, and Lo (in the next paragraph) do, she gives some syntactic and semantic examples of
Ebonics to substantiate her argument (Crozier 2013).
Most recently, Sheba A. Lo adopts and substantively demonstrates the paradigm, as Smith
does. She is an assistant professor of Africana Studies, California State University, Northridge,
and specializes in West African, South African, and African American literature. Lo (2014)
demonstrates, from her morphosyntactical comparison of Wolof, “Nigerian Pidgin English”, and
African American Language/Ebonics, that Ebonics is a continuation of West and Niger-Congo
African linguistic traditions. She does not discuss other linguistic and paralinguistic continuity of
Ebonics to those African languages and the geographic distribution of Ebonics.
Ebonics, PALWH, Pan-African Language, Nigritian, and so on are all meant to destigmatize
the newly-born African languages in the African diaspora and arm them with a common device
often found in linguistic nationalisms the world over: pursuit of linguistic continuity of one’s
language to an ancestral language of their great past and linguistic distance from the language of
their oppressor. For Eurocentric terms such as African American Vernacular English and
Jamaican Creole English and Eurocentric paradigms such as the Anglicist Paradigm and the
Creolist Paradigm give “European” or white belongingness and authenticity to black language
and other newly born African languages. This methodological approach to black language and
others attempts to reconstruct a concentric continuum of Pan-African language systems in the
Western Hemisphere or beyond, drawing mainly on one of the epistemological starting points for

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determining linguistic affiliation which that Eurocentric linguistics established in the previous
few centuries: grammatical continuity. They argue that the grammar of black language
demonstrates a continuity to mainly West African languages. Especially, Smith and Nehusi
attempt to establish its continuity ultimately to the proto-language “Ancient Egyptian” in Kemet.
Consequently, the comparative linguistic paradigm or the Africological paradigm establishes the
two widely seen nationalist desiderata through a methodological shift from lexicon to grammar:
continuity to the great African past and African distinctness from the languages of the oppressors.
As the African-centered epistemology allows us to see the arbitrariness of some of the
scientific criteria of the dominant paradigms, it draws on the very subjective malleability or
flexibility of linguistics to establish its own science. The comparative linguistic paradigm or the
Africological paradigm challenges the covert attempt of the dominant white groups and their
black followers or captives to establish the dominance of European languages in the African
diaspora and deprive the descendants of enslaved Africans of the following rights: to attain the
two nationalist desiderata which are often found in the ancient one nation-one language
formula17 that white groups have lavishly executed in various parts of the world, and to reinforce
their national solidarity through active linguistic identity formation.

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5. FORMATION OF THE COMPARATIVE LINGUISTIC PARADIGM

I postulate that ideological-political and experiential-practical concerns which linguists have
formed through their life experiences are interwoven with the enactment of a first tentative
proposition in linguistics before establishing it based on disciplinary criteria/interpretations and
selection of data, and that this interpretive interaction of the ideological-political, experientialpractical, and theoretical-scientific factors may be found in the formation of the comparative
linguistic paradigm. In this chapter, I shall explore Dr. Ernie A. Smith’s life from his childhood
in Tulsa, Oklahoma through to his education at the University of California, Irvine, to show how
the three identified factors may have interacted prior to and during the formation of the
comparative linguistic paradigm as an example of the interpretive social act of linguistic
knowledge/paradigm formation.

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5.1. Ideological-Political Factor1

Since the first peak of “classical black nationalism” (Moses 1996)2 from 1850 onward, black
nationalism has been characterized by not so much an appeal to language as one to state-making
or economy-making functions, however, many scholars and writers have expressed various
thoughts on the language of descendants of enslaved Africans in the United States in relation to
the notion of the black community or nation.
Alexander Crummell viewed the language just as English and a gift from God (Appiah 1992:
2), and in this vein, may have seen their community language as English, possibly, prioritizing
“standard” English. Elijah Muhammad viewed it as a language other than English and the latter
as a bastard language (See Section 5.1.3). Carter G. Woodson viewed it as a broken-down
African language (Woodson 1933: 18). W. E. B. DuBois viewed it as a dialect of English as may
be used as medium of instruction (DuBois 1933: 128). Robert D. Twiggs viewed it as a PanAfrican language system in the Western hemisphere (Twiggs 1973). In fact, it is a prevalent
nationalist phenomenon that:

the concept of nation―has attracted considerable numbers of influential
intellectuals―writers, artists, composers, historians, philologists, educators―who have
devoted their energies to discovering and representing the identities and images of their
respective nations.
(A. D. Smith 2010: 2, italics added; also consult Errington 2005; Fishman 1972;
Kazemzadeh 1968).

In black linguistics this part of nationalism may have been expressed most explicitly through the
comparative linguistic paradigm, which Dr. Ernie A. Smith adopted in 1974.

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This chapter examines an ideological-political factor toward or in the formation of the
comparative linguistic paradigm. I reconstruct a life story of the interactive and interpretive
process by which Dr. Ernie A. Smith developed a nationalist language ideology and started to
pursue a scientific paradigm on the language of the descendants of enslaved Africans in the
United States in the intersection of these factors: the scholar’s experience of linguistic racism, his
anti-Establishment linguistic behavior and loyalty to his mother tongue, his black nationalist
efforts, and his encounter with linguistics in his struggle against racism on campus. This chapter
explores how Dr. Smith encountered, interpreted, and acted toward the dominant group’s
interpretations of black language; how his definition of black and white language interacted with
his black nationalist thoughts to reinterpret the meaning of black language and produce his black
nationalist language ideology; and how his black nationalist meaning of black language
interacted with his scientific conceptualization of it, thus feeding into Ebonics.

5.1.1. Sociohistorical Background for Language Awareness and Loyalty

From the mid-1940s through the 1970s, Los Angeles saw an exponential growth of black
populations due to the booming economy in the West and incoming black migrants from the
South, e.g., Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Georgia, Alabama, Missouri, Tennessee in
that order,3 especially metropolitan areas in the region (Sides 2003: 38). However, blacks became
socially and economically segregated again in Los Angeles.4 They settled almost exclusively in
South Central Los Angeles, already a highly segregated black community (Ibid.: see maps 3-5).
The residential re-segregation against blacks was witnessed around the country because white

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residents employed various techniques to prevent blacks from entering their neighborhoods, such
as restricted covenants, payoffs by neighbors to discourage home sales to prospective black
buyers, vandalism, cross burnings, bombings, death threats, silent retreats to other white
neighborhoods, and discriminatory tactics by real estate agents, private developers, and private
lenders (Ibid.: 101-108). Even government agencies, the Federal Housing Administration and the
former Veterans Administration played a role in preventing blacks from living outside already
predominantly black neighborhoods (Gregory 2005). Segregation was and is a major indicator
for the production and reproduction of the language of descendants of enslaved Africans in the
United States, as Smith (2010) observes:

I maintain that if there has been a single most contributing factor that has served to
reinforce, preserve and perpetuate the West and Niger Congo African morphology and
syntax in the substratum of African American speech today, that factor has been the
legacy of social “de jure” and “de facto” segregation or “apartheid” in the USA in
linguistic environments that are different. (38)

There was another African-centered scholar who taught in Pan-African Studies, California State
University, Los Angeles and who presented his own thesis in 1973, a year before Smith
developed his own African-centered linguistic thesis. He suggested that black language is “Pan
African Language in the Western Hemisphere” (PALWH /pælwh/). His name was Robert D.
Twiggs, who told a similar story about the influence of segregation on the maintenance of a
separate language in the black community. Twiggs (1973 maintained:

I take the point of view that everything human that is Black, having its roots in Africa, is
of African origin. The European-Western system of Black slavery and institutionalized
racism, which has―by law and social custom―locked Black people in Black ghettoes
ever since they arrived in this hemisphere has consecrated this postulation and preserved
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it. Language is by no means any exception. (26-27)

The pursuit to identify an ethnic continuity/unity and authenticity in the urban area and the lower
class which may have been maintained as a result of social, economic, and political segregation,
in this case, the continuity/unity and authenticity of the national language of the black nation
from the past in Africa to the present in the African diaspora, was an essential phenomenon seen
in nationalist movements the world over (Fishman 1972: 8, 20). It was in that segregated
linguistic environment, South Central Los Angeles that Dr. Smith lived and negotiated the
meanings of a series of linguistic and other behaviors, events, and ideas in academic
environments and in the street until he entered the University of California, Irvine. Taking into
account the sociohistorical background of his neighborhood, in what follows, I will describe how
his awareness of the difference between his mother tongue and white language and his loyalty to
his mother tongue emerged.

5.1.2. Language Awareness and Loyalty Formation in “Ghetto”

Ernie Adolphus Smith was born September 7, 1938 in Haskel, Oklahoma, a northwestern
edge of the Cotton Belt and reared in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a major oil capital. The wide-open
Oklahoma territory was seen as the California of its day by blacks from the southern states
(Johnson 1998: 3). Tulsa was known as “The Negro Wall Street” and a racially charged location,
where the 1921 race riots saw many blacks killed at the hands of white mob violence and the
district destroyed by whites. In the southern black community, he acquired a southern, midland
variety of black language under the influence of his extended family and playmates. In the

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legally segregated school system, there were only black teachers and children with some
indigenous Indian children; as a result, Ernie experienced no linguistic discrimination that was to
come later (See details below).5
In 1948, Mr. (truck driver & custodian) and Mrs. Smith and Ernie A. Smith, the oldest of
their twelve children, moved to the heart of South Central Los Angeles to live in his
grandmother’s (maid) house (E 35th St & McKinley Ave), where his grandmother and aunt
(shipyard worker) had already lived. Later his parents moved to 405 E Vernon and then to 71st St
and S. San Pedro St. The “ghetto” was his living space until 1970, where he formed his language
awareness and ideology.
His grandmother and aunt were deeply Christian, while his mother was also, but not a “Jesusfreak” like them. His grandmother, who did a lot of parenting for Ernie as did his aunt, would
admonish him on his use of obscenities and profanities, but not use of his mother tongue. He
recalls:

She [= his grandmother] was not herself an ideally competent English speaker. So
speaking any kind of way didn’t matter to her. She was more concerned with using
obscene, profane language. Because she considered the use of words, that blaspheme
as speaking against the holy spirit, swearing was not biblical. You understand? She was
trying to teach me to be a good Christian person. Christian people don’t go around
swearing. So using obscene and profane words was always something that she would
castigate me for . . . my aunt and my mom, people like that, would never stop rebuking
me for inappropriate language. . . . So when you asked me about Ebonics, what are you
talking about, obscenities, or you talking it’s about not talking like a white person? . . .
They did make no attempt to have me talk like a honky. Why would my family who
know that the way I talk is the way I always talk all my life start to try to tell me, “Don’t
talk like us. Talk like the people over there”? Why would I want to come to my parents,
talk to like those people over there? They wasn’t feeding and clothing me. So why
would I come in the house, trying to talk to them in a language that was basically
foreign? (Smith, personal communication, December 8, 2014)

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Different from typical middle-class families, his family was not dismissive of the community
language. In his neighborhood, he saw no professional blacks who could become role models for
him but “numerous bookmakers, gamblers, hustlers, pimps, gangsters, and players with whom I
could identify” (Smith 1974: 10). Therefore, his main interpersonal relationships were built with
the latter groups, and naturally, the predominant language he used was street life black language,
whereas he learned some of the dialect of wider communication through school education. He
didn’t like the language of bourgeois black professionals, i.e. “Anglo speech forms” (Smith
1974: 6).
Ernie’s elementary school education began at Paul Lawrence Dunbar Elementary School in
Tulsa, Oklahoma. It was a predominantly black school with a few Native Americans and an allblack staff in the legally segregated South. At the Oklahoma school his language was treated in a
respectful manner as he remembered:

If I was corrected in Oklahoma, the teacher knew English and she knew my mother
tongue and they were able to transition me without making me feel that what I was
doing was damaging my opportunity in the future. The method of teaching English as a
second language was already being used in the South.
(Smith, personal communication, June 3, 2015)

It was ironically because the whole school system was strictly segregated that the language of
blacks was not denigrated. And it was the maximized linguistic dislocation from the traditional
sociolinguistic structure in the South to the urban one in the West that may have given a special
meaning or interpretation to the mother tongue of blacks for young Smith.6
After his family migrated to South Central Los Angeles, Ernie transferred to a predominantly
black school again, called Wadsworth Elementary School, which he attended from 1948-1951.

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De facto segregation existed in Los Angeles, where blacks, Mexicans, and Asians attended a
school different from the one which whites did (Sides 2006: 32); but the school had a
predominantly white workforce with few black teachers. It is here that he was confronted with
“official” linguicism. His mother tongue was diagnosed by both white and the few black teachers
as a deficient speech which needed to be eradicated. The language of Ernie and many of his
peers was described as “linguistically handicapped, verbal cripple, aphasia, dyslexia, or
cognitively deficient” (Smith 1974: 2). Indeed, language issues for a disproportionate number of
black students throughout the United States were addressed with this deficit model (Baratz &
Shuy 1969). He and his peers were placed in special classes and became targets of ridicule and
teasing from other black children. What’s worse, many urbanized blacks and whites attributed
the lowest level of intelligence to speakers of a “deep South” variety of the language of
descendants of enslaved Africans (Smith 1974: 7). It was not simply treated as a dialect of
English but rather a degenerate version of English, in other words, it was not regarded as a
language.
In Thomas Alva Edison Middle School (1951-1954) and John C. Fremont High School
(1954-1957) of South Central Los Angeles Ernie was assigned to remediation language classes
and special sections of most other academic courses. His tracking into those classes was based on
his problematic language behavior rather than standardized tests. His disruptive language would
become a ground for temporary expulsion from the high school and assignment to a quasivocational-educational, behavior management institution called Jacob A. Riis High School. In
this school he was tracked into shop courses. Even in this all-boys normal school, a series of
vocational aptitude tests showed he had a “low” proficiency of English, even though he must

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have been highly proficient in his mother tongue. The larger society assumed that the mother
tongue of black people was English; however, from another viewpoint, the test results might
have suggested that he has as his primary language a language other than English.
In school education, Ernie experienced linguistic discrimination from teachers, psychologists,
administrators, i.e., a powerful state institution of indoctrination and stratification, and
concomitantly, schoolmates (See details in Section 5.2.2). The sociologically and linguistically
legitimate language of Ernie and his peers was denied in the inhumane way and he was to
continue to feel insecure about what his language was without being able to construct a plausible
and persuasive counter-account of his mother tongue. In the name of medical, psychological, or
speech sciences they were tracked through the public education system into lower strata of US
society. It seems to have been a rampant practice in school throughout the United States (cf.
Baratz & Shuy 1969; White 1984). On the other hand, the more rejections from schools and
mainstream institutions black language endured, the more persistence in the use of or the more
loyalty to the mother tongue the black community showed (Smith 1974: xv, 5).
Smith graduated from high school in 1957 with honors.7 He got the Rotary Craftsmanship
Award and the Bullocks Scholastic Art Scholarship in 1957. Smith started a business to earn a
living in his neighborhood. Because the system directed black students to take a different path
from white children, he had no aspiration for post-secondary education. He was a street peddler
of costume jewelry, i.e., slum hustler or “stuff player.”8 As a slum hustler, he recalls how he
capitalized on whites’ attitudes toward his mother tongue when he interacted with them:

When I would go out in the streets selling costume jewelry, I knew that white people
associate Ebonics, wasn’t called Ebonics, but the speech of black people with
intelligence. The less proficiency in English, the less intelligence. The more proficiency
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in English, the more intelligence. That’s in the minds of white people. When you are
selling something to white people, you don’t go to them sounding intelligent. . . .
[Interviewer: You have to characterize yourself as an ignorant character] . . . you want
them to believe that you are an unlearned person. And the way you showed them that
you’re unlearned is by using as much unlearned grammar of English as you can.
(Smith, personal communication, December 8, 2014)

His language, used for the street business, was characterized by an “unlearned grammar of
English” for the ears of white customers. He may have capitalized on the larger society’s
perception of black language as an anomaly or broken English. As a result, he was very much
aware of his tactical use of his primary language to convey an ignorant personality to white
customers. On the other hand, he knew how to speak English for the purpose of “sweetmouthin,”
“rappin,” and “mackin.”9 His awareness of a large difference between his mother tongue and
“standard English” and his counter-English ideology were formed, first, through the interdefining activities of school staff, a state institution of power and stratification, and him at school
and, later, through the inter-defining activities of Smith and his white (and some black)
customers on the street. Merely his awareness of the large difference may not have been
sufficient for him to interpret his mother tongue as a language other than English, but an
interpretation given from other discriminatory and nationalist experiences, i.e., intergroup
conflict, to the experience of linguistic difference may have contributed to the formation of his
nationalist language ideology.10
Although Smith showed strong resistance to white language and strong allegiance to his
mother tongue, in this street life, one close friend encouraged him to take a post-secondary
education to master standard English and finally he entered into a city college. The reason Smith
used the term “standard” to refer to white language may be a reflection of the then perception of

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his own in a society whose hegemonic discourse was characterized by binary oppositional
conceptualization, that his community language is a “nonstandard” or “broken” English. He
recalls the incident in the following way:

I had people who were gamblers encouraging me to gain more fluency in reading and
writing English. Not so much speaking it. But at least understanding it when it’s spoken
and being able to decode and encode graphic representations of English. Because they
knew the disadvantages that they had suffered for the lack of that skill. To . . . decoding
and encoding graphic representations of ideally competent English, what they called,
standard English is a skill and I’d been encouraged by a whole lot of people all my life
to master that skill. But it was only as a survival technique that it came to me as
something valuable. It was not as a way to get economically and socially accepted
upward mobility. . . . And I had no intention of emulating that form of speech as my way
of gaining social acceptance. I was perfectly happy to be an ignorant fool if I had to talk
like [a white person] to be considered acceptable. Okay? So to whatever extent the idea
of being lettered in English became important to me, it was because I didn’t wanna get
cheated by people who had that skill. And I didn’t. I was at a disadvantage.
(Smith, personal communication, December 8, 2014)

The reason he used the term “standard” to refer to white language may be a reflection of the then
perception of his own in a society whose hegemonic discourse was characterized by binary
oppositional conceptualization, that his community language is a “nonstandard” or “broken”
English. The early (and later) experiences of linguistic annihilation and the formation of his
language awareness came to have a connection to his black identity and, possibly, nationalism, as
Smith (1974) stated:

Ebonics is the manifestation of Black self-esteem. It has resisted and endured
generations of speech clinics, speech therapy, remediation, special training,
communication skills, voice and diction, and other such pedagogically prescriptive
attempts at its destruction. (42)

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Ernie’s awareness of a large difference between his mother tongue and standard English and his
counter-English ideology were formed, first, through the inter-defining acts of him and school
staff at school, a state institution of power and stratification, and, later, through the inter-defining
acts of him and white (incl., some black) customers on the street. This series of linguistic
experiences was accountable for the production and reproduction of black language and the
connection of it to “Black self-esteem” (Smith 1974: 42).
However, merely his awareness of the large difference may not have been sufficient for him
to interpret his mother tongue as a language other than English, but an interpretation given from
other discriminatory and nationalist experiences, i.e., intergroup conflict, to the experience of
linguistic difference may have contributed to the formation of his nationalist language ideology
(Fishman 1972: n. 49, 104). In the ensuing sections, how his prior language awareness and
loyalty was reinforced in black nationalist contexts and finally validated in academic contexts
will be explored.

5.1.3. Nation of Islam and Language

The Cold War, domestic and international economic expansion, and government policy
changes provided unprecedented opportunities for the civil rights movement and black
nationalist movement to rectify social, economic, and political injustices especially from the
mid-1950s through the mid-1970s. The external events and the ostensible internal realignments
of group relations encouraged new understandings of existing cultural elements (incl., language).
The continued de facto racial segregation or apartheid and discrimination in metropolitan cities
also lent strong impetus to those movements.
Smith entered Los Angeles Metropolitan College of Business in 1959 <Associate Degree>
(1959-1962).11 He was placed again in a language correction class.12 In the summer of 1962, he
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met with Malcolm X. when he wandered into an auditorium of the College. Smith recollects:

Malcolm X. was there to debate Ed Warren, head of the Watts chapter of the NAACP on
the subject ‘Should we integrate or should we separate.’ . . . Malcolm X became a
regular visitor to the newly established mosque at Jefferson Boulevard and Normandie
Avenue. . . . During these trips, Malcolm often took his meals at a Muslim restaurant at
51st and Main streets. There he proved to be an apt mentor to young Smith [and many
other college students]. (Our Weekly, p. 13, parentheses added)

Inspired by his minister Malcolm, he became a registered member of the Nation of Islam in the
same year (See Figure 2). As a registered Muslim member of Mosque number 27, Ernie X. Smith

Figure 2. Ernie X. Smith. Courtesy of Ernie A.
Smith.

was eager to spread his faith. Smith’s path to his future career began on the day when he was
informed that “English wasn’t our original language” (Ibid.). Perhaps, Malcolm X. regarded their
current primary language as English. He might have had an interest in his ancestral language in
Africa or have disliked English.
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Because of this incident with the Nation of Islam, Smith started other black nationalist
efforts, for example, becoming a member of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and the Freedom
Now Committee. He came to be known as a community “activist”13 and militant black
nationalist.14 For example, reflecting his black nationalist position, he had (and has) never voted
in governmental elections and others. The following passage explains the practice:

I maintain that my African enslaved African ancestors, antecedents and forebears have
never at any time by free will choice, voluntary consent or any other democratic process
ever accepted or agreed to become citizens of the United States or in and of allegiance
to the government of the USA and its sovereign class of white slave holding people . . .
to this very day the so-called rights of citizenship granted all descendants of enslaved
Africans are at all times subject to white supremacists’ enforcement, white supremacists’
interpretation and white supremacists’ repeal . . . being born in the USA does not make
descendants of enslaved Africans citizens of the USA . . . as an enslaved descendant of
enslaved African ancestors, antecedents and forbears, I do not regard myself to be a
citizen of the USA and I have declared that I am at all times alien to, an enemy of, and
rebellious to the government of the USA and its sovereign class of white slave holding
people except when I am restrained by force, violence and genocide. . . . I do not vote
because the citizen’s right to vote does not apply to me. (Smith 2011a: 7-9)

It should be noted that as an expression of his defiance toward the United States he does not
employ the term “American” but “African” to refer to black people.15
Then, Smith encountered a clearer black nationalist language ideology in the Nation of Islam.
Elijah Muhammad, the teacher of Malcolm X. voiced a more detailed version of the black
nationalist language ideology:

In the new world you will not even be able to speak the English language. The speaking
of the English language by us will be stopped. No language of the wicked should be
spoken by the righteous, as there are some in Islam, in the Orthodox Muslim world,
whom I have met myself, and who refuse to speak English; for it is an infidel language.
This is the truth. English is a bastard language, for it is a language that is made up of
other languages. It is a dependent language. So we see here why it is necessary for us to
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have a new language. (Muhammad 1974: 124-125)

This idea was introduced to Smith in the early 1960s. The passage suggests that Elijah
Muhammad may have thought their primary or second language was English. As for “a new
language,” in this Islamic context, Elijah Mohammad probably meant that it would be Arabic.
However, according to the teachings of the Messenger Elijah Muhammad the nature of the
Asiatic Black Man is different from the nature of the Caucasian or white man. The thought
process of the Asiatic Black Man is different from that of the Caucasian or white man. The
grammar (or “thought process,” an equivalent term which the Nation of Islam used to mean
“grammar”) of the language of the Asiatic Black Man is Arabic. Therefore, it can be said that the
primary language of the Asiatic Black Man is grammatically classified as a language other than
English and belongs to the Arabic family, not the English language or the West-Germanic family.
Smith recalls that Elijah Muhammad knew what he spoke is not English. Back then, he shared a
similar feeling during his enrollment in a writing course at Los Angeles Metropolitan College of
Business. He perceived his primary language as a language other than English in the following
way:

To me, as a black nationalist, I was already consciously aware that English is not my
language. I know that the attitude of the people [who taught at the course] was that my
language is broken, sloppy, sloven, corrupt, mutilated English. That’s their attitude. You
asked me about my feeling of the attitude of the people in this . . . universities or
colleges. That still exists to this day. So you asked me about stigma. What do you mean?
Am I feeling stigmatized because my language isn’t English? No, I feel no stigma.
(Smith, personal communication, April 7, 2015)

Smith’ experiences of the black and white language difference and his encounter with Nation
of Islam’s ideas might have been mediated by a factor of conflict as Fishman (1972, n. 49, p.
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104) points out, i.e., an insurmountable conflict between Smith and the white world, which
might have given a particular interpretation to those experiences and ideas, i.e., his mother
tongue as a language other than English.

5.1.4. Struggle for Self-Determination and Liberation of Black Nation and Language

The mid-1950s through the mid-1970s was a time when twentieth-century black nationalist
movements reached their second apogee. Graduating from the city college with honors, in
September of 1962, Smith transferred to California State College, Los Angeles, receiving a B.A.
in 196716 and began a double major in Speech and Fine Arts. The means of payment for tuition
and books were his businesses in his neighborhood. At CAL State, he honed his skills in

Figure 3. Vietnam War Teach-in. Smith’s sign in the center left reads,
“Get Negroes out of Viet Nam; Leave Whitey” in an anti-Vietnam War
teach-in. (CAL State L.A. College Times, Friday Oct 22, 1965)

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argumentation and debate. He was on the debating team for the college. He became quite a
public figure, having traveled throughout California speaking on college campuses primarily and
having made hundreds of radio and television appearances on different talk shows often during
political campaigns to community and civic groups (See Figure 3).
Smith was the leader of the Afro-American Citizens Council (AACC, an antithesis to the
White Supremacist “White Citizens Councils,” the first of which was organized in Susanville,
California soon after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision). Smith, chair of
the AACC, Ron Karenga, chair of The Organization Us, and Lennie Eggleston, a Panther of the
Los Angeles chapter of the Black Panther Party joined a vigilante alliance of civil rights activists,
black nationalists, business, professional, religious, and other groups (Alliance of Local

Figure 4. Vigilante Meeting after the Watts Rebellion. Smith,
Karenga, and Sanford from the Left. (“Watts alert patrol,” 1966, pp. 49.)

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Organizations) in Los Angeles after the Watts Rebellion in 1965. They aimed to protect Watts
and other ghetto-bound blacks from abusive police officers (See Figure 4). He also belonged to
the Self Determination Committee Inc., formally called “Self Determination, Reparations,
Repatriation and United States of America Citizenship Committee for United States of America
Slaves’ Descendants Incorporated,” as its state chairman for California. The organization was
established by Robert L. Brock and originally located in Los Angeles. The goal of the committee
was for the descendants of enslaved Africans in the United States to obtain the status of non-selfgoverning nation and to obtain self-determination and independence through the United Nations.
They filed lawsuits seeking reparations, tax exemptions, and so on, on behalf of black people,
and assisted black businesses and community groups. As another black nationalist action, the
Committee demanded that the black nation, as a non-self-governing nation under the Charter of
the United Nations, Chapter XI, Article 73, have political, economic, social, and educational selfgovernment and self-determination as much as whites. Smith’s role on the committee was
primarily to educate people by making public speeches or lectures.
In 1965 Robert L. Brock, National President of the organization filed a civil lawsuit (No. 651760-5) with a U.S. District Court, Southern District of California against Dean Rusk, Secretary
of State of the United States, Arthur Goldberg, Ambassador to the United Nations for the United
States, and the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. The plaintiff argued, based on the United
Nations Charter, which the United States had ratified:

Black people as a non-self-governing people or nation have been legally deprived of
rights including voting rights and cultural heritages such as language and discriminated
against on the basis of race, color, language, religion, national origin, and so on.
(italics added)

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The status of the language deprived of or discriminated against was not articulated either as a
dialect of English or another independent language. No mention was made of what kind of
linguistic discrimination existed, but it was obvious that at that time many black children were
deprived of their educational rights based on their language use in school and, consequently,
political, economic, and social rights. Smith had no specific thoughts on the term “language” in
the lawsuit, although it was true that around then he was aware that the language of the black
nation was a language other than English. He now has a clearer idea on the relationship between
nation and language. Smith (2010) states that:

I maintain that since by definition a nation is a historically evolved stable community of
people, formed on the basis of a common language, a common territory, and a common
psychological make-up, manifested in a common culture and a common economic life,
the descendants of enslaved Niger-Congo Africans, having historically evolved as a
stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, a common
territory, and a common psychological make-up, manifested in a common culture and a
common economic life, are indeed a nation. (25)

This reminds readers of an earlier quotation from Stalin (See Section 1.1). What Smith means by
saying “a common territory” is the southern part of the United States (See Figure 5), where black
communities evolved as a stable people for centuries, led a common economic life, and
developed a common culture including language. He interpreted the segregation of blacks as a
proof of the formation of a new black nation in the United States. In fact, territoriality here might
be such a defining characteristic of nation as Fishman (1972) points out, i.e., an “independent
political-territorial unit which is largely or increasingly under the control of a particular
nationality” (5).
His black nationalist language ideology was indirectly expressed in the venue of art, too,

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Figure 5. Concentration of Black People in the South in 1970.
Source: Nelson Peery, The Negro National Colonial Question,
Chicago: Workers Press, 1972, p. 64.

albeit implicit. In the section that follows, I will explain his black nationalist artistic expressions,
which reflected a consciousness of the “bilingual” relationship of the languages of blacks and
whites.

5.1.5. Anti-White Supremacist Art and Language

Smith’s black nationalist efforts in Los Angeles were sometimes impeded by, as other
community efforts in other black metropolises were, abuse or violence by the police. After he
graduated from the LA Metropolitan College, he started to sell jewelry and artistic drawings
which he painted in class at CAL State, at his “Sheikh Shop” at 243 East Florence, San Pedro,
Los Angeles (See Figure 6). It was one of the businesses in his community to earn for tuition,
books, etc.

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Figure 6. Ernie A. Smith at the Entrance of his Gallery
“Sheikh Shop” at 243 East Florence, San Pedro, Los
Angeles. Courtesy of Ernie A. Smith.

On July 12, 1962, he was arrested by the police on the charge of putting “nude” pictures on
display to the public (People [of the State of California] vs. Smith – No. 166245, Los Angeles
Judicial District Municipal Court). This was one of the police oppressions of blacks, which still
continue to this day―if white artists did the same thing, they would not have been arrested. The
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) helped him to be acquitted. One of the drawings
confiscated by the police depicted a black man and a white woman snuggled against each other
(See Figure 7). This was clearly an incendiary theme for white police officers because this
“nude” picture and others were of white women and because historically whites had lynched
blacks when they saw a black man interacting with a white woman or sentenced them to death
for alleged rapes of white women (e.g., Chicago Defender, Feb 11, 1967, p. 7). In this picture,
the caption contains a black language line, “I don’t CEH WHAT Muhammy say; dis here ain’t
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Figure 7. Black Man with Attempted Straightened
Hair Holds White Woman. Courtesy of Ernie A. Smith.

NO DEVIL.”17 It suggested that this white woman is not a devil though Honorable Elijah
Muhammad taught the white man is a devil. Another drawing was a scene where a white district
attorney, dressed in KKK cloth (See Figure 8), made a statement against the Honorable Elijah
Muhammad before a jury (incl., a black priest dressed in Christian cloth). A southern variety of
English caption is presented here with the caption, “This Heh Mooslum been teachin our niggras
Hate.” These were examples in which Dr. Smith’s anti-White Supremacist thoughts or the
teachings of the Nation of Islam were expressed through his drawings and the code-switching

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Figure 8. White Supremacist Christianity Against Black
Islam. Courtesy of Ernie A. Smith.

between the language of the black nation and that of the white nation. It may be an illustration of
how he was aware of the distinction between black and white language in religious, political, and
artistic contexts. It might be suggested that his incipient language awareness of “their own kind
of English” metamorphosed into a language ideology of “their own language other than English”
in the course of negotiating stigmatizing and enlightening meanings attached to black language,
although the changing process is not clear and reconstructed post facto.

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5.1.6. English Literacy for the Descendants of Enslaved Africans in Self-Determined Way

In the 1960s, low achievement levels in literacy of black students18 had already become a
pressing concern for some sociolinguists because the students’ problems had been addressed as
deficits such as dyslexia. Some of these predominantly white scholars (e.g., Baratz & Shuy 1969;
Brooks 1964; Dillard 1972; Fasold 1969; Fasold & Shuy 1970; Goodman 1965; Labov 1967,
1969; Labov et al. 1968; Leaverton 1971; McDavid, Jr. 1964; Pederson 1964; Piestrup 1973;
Stewart 1964; Williamson 1961; Wolfram 1969) who studied black language recognized it as a
different linguistic system and attempted to address the issue in an English as a second language
manner. However, all of them treated the black language as a dialect of English (See details in
Section 4.5).
During this period, when the former outright deficit status of black language was being
redressed with that scientific but self-contradictory conceptual framework, still not so
incompatible with the perspective of the larger society, literacy skills and linguistic competence
became one of Smith’s conscious concerns, which later gave an experiential-practical motivation
for his study at the University of California, Irvine. In 1968, he determined to use his education
to help young black male high school dropouts and graduates who were unable to read and write
English in South Central Los Angeles (See details in Section 5.2.4). The community effort
stimulated formation of a clearer black nationalist linguistic view that the language of the
descendants of enslaved Africans is not English but more specifically, an African language, as
shown in the following excerpt:

When I first became concerned about the literacy of black people was as the Minister of
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Education, because even when I was selling Muhammad’s Speaks, I was not aware of
the extent to which there was a high illiteracy rate amongst my people. I knew I could
read and write. But I didn’t know the degree to which a lot of people who were
descendants of enslaved Africans were functionally illiterate or unlettered. That’s what
kind of motivated a lot of my studies in UC Irvine. . . . And that’s when I began to view
it from a scientific or comparative linguistic point of view as a “broken-down” African
tongue, as Carter G. Woodson said in his book The Mis-Education of the Negro.
(E. A. Smith, personal communication, April 7, 2015)

This conceptualization of black language was not exactly scientific or based on hard data, but his
black nationalist language ideology became African-centered a few years before entering the
University of California, Irvine. It was of utmost significance to this event that he encountered
Woodson’s linguistic view. In the next section, the final step toward scientific substantiation of
his nationalist view of the relationship between black language and English will be explored.

5.1.7. Nationalist Embodiment of the Descendants’ Language in Science

The 1960s and 70s was a time when the black power movement and the black campus
movement were at their apogee. It was not until then that sporadic Afrocentric attempts thus far
to reconstruct from the perspective of black people the European-centered social sciences and
humanities which had been constructed for centuries turned into an organized, formal effort to
found a Black Studies program. “In the wake of the civil rights movement, ideas that valorized
Blackness and Africanity,” i.e., the search for the African origins of the traits of the US African
descendants, “blossomed as never before” (Price 2010: 54). It was in the 1970s that Africancentered views of black language, e.g., an Ebonics paradigm emerged in the academic circles.
Interestingly enough, another paradigm similar to Smith’s Ebonics paradigm, which viewed

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black language as “Pan African Language in the Western Hemisphere (PALWH),” was presented
in 1973 by Robert D. Twiggs in Los Angeles. Smith didn’t know Twiggs and his 1973 work at
the time of writing his dissertation. However, the dominant trend back then was that many black
scholars attempted to find some African or black features in “English,” in other words, they
treated black language as a decreolized variety of English―the Creolist Paradigm (e.g., Baugh
1980; Rickford 1974; Taylor 1969; Smitherman 1977).
In 1967, Smith completed a BA degree at the then California State College, Los Angeles and
landed a job as an associate producer for the Joe Pyne Show with Television Station KTTV
(1967-1969). The producer of the TV show wrote a strong recommendation letter to the
University of California, Irvine (UCI). UCI psychologist Joseph L. White, who “was influential
in establishing the SF [San Francisco] State University's Black Studies Program” (SF State News
2008), the country’s first such program and who was Afrocentric enough to later accept Smith’s
position on Ebonics, recruited him to the department. Smith enrolled in the Ph.D. program in
Comparative Culture, UCI (1970-1974).19
At first, Smith talked to Dr. White about his interest in the literacy issue of the black
community and thus, Dr. White recommended him to take a few courses in linguistics and social
sciences. On the other hand, Smith hoped to study Egyptology, but he found no proper faculty
member who could advise in Egyptology. Then, one event on campus completely guided his
academic course. In May of 1970, he delivered an anti-Vietnam War speech in Gateway Plaza on
the Irvine campus (See Figure 9). He talked about capitalism and the imperialistic oppression of
Afro-Asian and Latin American peoples. Because of the language which he used at the podium
allegedly within the presence or hearing of women and children, he was indicted on the ground

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Figure 9. Anti-Vietnam War Speech in Gateway Plaza, UCI.
(Source unknown)

of violation of the Penal Code (See Figure 10; read Section 5.2.5 for more details). Interestingly
enough, despite dozens of other speeches made during the previous two months by him and
others, who used similar languages, nobody but he was prosecuted. In the ensuing trial, Dr. Mary
Ritchie Key, a white assistant professor in Linguistics (Black English) at UCI, testified in his
behalf (See details in Section 5.2.5). Her testimony established that the language he used in the
speech was inherently free from “vulgarity, profanity, or indecency,” and he was acquitted. The

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Figure 10. Court Trial Against Smith. (Los Angeles Times, Sunday, October 18, 1970)

scientific authority of linguistics in conferring legitimacy on his language in the criminal judicial
proceeding led him finally to major in linguistics. It is also worth mentioning that there was
another factor for his pursuing a linguistic study, i.e., “to keep out of the penitentiary and get
some intelligence enough to buy a place to sleep every night.” He said further, “That was more
of a trigger for me, studying linguistics as a science than black nationalism” (Smith, personal
communication, April 7, 2015).
Smith determined to study under Dr. Mary Key, an expert in “Black English,” and the expert
witness at his trial. Dr. Key, Smith, and other students examined the language of black children
in fieldwork and found some interesting grammatical patterns in their linguistic behavior (See
details in Section 5.3.5). In sharp contrast to Dr. Key, who viewed it as a continuation of old

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British dialects, he interpreted the linguistic data as proving the black language to be a
grammatical continuation of West African languages, and finally, his black nationalist language
ideology gained scientific endorsement in linguistics. In 1973, he adopted the term “Ebonics” in
replacement for “Black English” (See details in Section 5.3.8). Dr. Key disagreed with the term
“Ebonics,” possibly the conceptualization and theorization of Ebonics, so he replaced her with
then Dr. Arthur L. Smith (later, Molefi Kete Asante) at UCLA as his non-UCI dissertation
committee member. Now his entire dissertation committee members including psychologist
Joseph L. White, sociologist George O. Roberts, and economist O. L. E. Mbatia, all black or
African scholars, understood and accepted his Ebonics thesis (See detailed discussions in
Sections 5.3.1 and 5.3.2).
When the new term “Ebonics” was coined, Smith expressed his nationalist thought on the
relationship between the black nation and the black language. He declared:

Let me tell you something, if you notice, every language in the world represents a
nation or a nationality. What we are speaking has continuity not only in the United
States, but outside of the United States and all the way to the mother country. We need
to get the term completely off the English scale and start calling it what it really
represents. . . . Ebonics may be defined as the linguistic and paralinguistic features
which on a concentric continuum represent the communicative competence of the West
African, Caribbean and United States slave descendent of African origin. It includes the
various idioms, patois, argots, idiolects and social dialects of black people. Ebonics,
also, includes nonverbal sounds, cues and gestures which are systematically and
predictably utilized in the process of communication by Afro-Americans.
(Williams 1997: 210, italics added)

Ebonics represents a broader continuum or family of languages resulting from contact between
African languages and European languages. It does not only refer individually to the language of
the descendants of enslaved Africans in the United States, especially in the lower stratum, or

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either of the other African diaspora languages, but collectively to all the newly born languages in
the African diaspora. It symbolizes a national unity for the US descendants of enslaved Africans.
The view that language is an important factor in delimiting a nation or nationality is a prevalent
one seen across the globe (Kedourie 1960: 58 & ff.; Rosenblatt 1964: 137) and among linguists.
For example, in Europe, to classify European languages and human collectivities was a strong
factor in nationalism (e.g., for German, cf. Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835), cited by Rocker
1937: 228, and other comparative linguists (Fishman 1971: 128)); in the United States, one
formalization of this view was the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (Fishman 1960); in the Caribbean, to
officially establish an indigenous or a national language is a recently established case (e.g.,
Kreyòl [Haitian Creole], cf. DeGraff 2013 & 2017) or still a pressing concern among some
linguists (cf., e.g., Devonish 2016 and Joseph-Haynes & Rivera Castillo 2016 for Jamaican and
Limonese, respectively). It also symbolizes a Pan-African broader unity connecting diasporic
Africans way back to continental Africa. Ebonics is both a black national symbol and a PanAfrican symbol to express the black nation’s distinctness and identity, i.e., represents African
authenticity and an independence from English. All this illustrates the pursuit of ethnocultural
broader unity and authenticity as widely seen in language nationalist movements (Fishman 1972:
8) and may fulfill the three broad nationalist goals of autonomy, unity, and identity (A. D. Smith
2010: 9).

5.1.8. Language Awareness and Loyalty to Nationalist Language Ideology to Ebonics

So far three phases of the ideological-political factor for the formation of the comparative

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linguistic paradigm have been identified: the language awareness and loyalty phase, the
nationalist language ideology phase, and the nationalist ideology and science intersection phase.
Each of the stages acted toward political, economic, educational, and academic conditions and
events of the time. The comparative linguistic paradigm, probably as did the mainstream
paradigms, emerged as a scientific paradigm, interacting with a certain set of ideologicalpolitical meanings of the time.20
I simplistically assumed that Dr. Smith’s black nationalist language ideology “motivated”
him to pursue his linguistic research at the University of California, Irvine. However, the
reconstructed picture of the sequence from the ideological-political factor to the Ebonics
paradigm is not so straightforward. At the microsociological level of his life story, my tentative
presupposition of cause and effect, i.e., that a scientific paradigm is influenced by attempts to
define and address some political, economic, and educational needs of a group, does not neatly
fit into the story. I’ve found that, though it may be said that his black nationalist ideology
stimulated part of his academic interests, Dr. Key’s expert witness testimony at the 1970 trial
rather than his black nationalist language ideology may have been a key factor for his pursuing a
linguistic study at UCI. I’ve also learned that the matter of survival on the street was salient as a
factor for his pursuing a doctoral degree (cf. Knorr-Cetina 1981), as the following dialogue
between Dr. Smith and me [KM] reveals:

Dr. Smith: “That [= focus of keeping out of the penitentiary and getting some
intelligence enough to buy a place to sleep every night] was more of a trigger
for me, studying linguistics as a science than black nationalism. The science
that I learned supported the black nationalism . . .”
KM: “In that sense, black nationalism has influenced . . .”

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Dr. Smith: “Yeah, that influenced [my linguistics]. I allow that much influence. I came to
UC Irvine with the history of being involved in the Nation of Islam and
being . . . [in] the black nationalist struggle for independence from imperial
America as a non-self-governing people, as a chairman of the SelfDetermination Committee . . .”
KM: “So I should have used ‘influence’ rather than ‘motivation’ [in reference to the
black nationalist factor].”
Dr. Smith: “I said those are ‘foundational’.”21
(Smith, personal communication, June 3, 2015)

The factors were more concrete and “down to earth” than I first hypothesized―he admits his
black nationalist language ideology provided a foundation for his Ebonics paradigm. However, it
appears to be the linguistic evidence he found in the language of black children in Los Angeles
that germinated his African-centered thesis that black language is a grammatical continuation of
Niger-Congo and West African languages. This event gave scientific credence back to his black
nationalist language ideology. Therefore, I might suggest that his black nationalist language
ideology may have opened another way for black linguistics to interpret the meaning of the
language of descendants of enslaved Africans in the United States.

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5.2. Experiential-Practical Factor

In this section, I explore how and why Dr. Ernie A. Smith reached the induction that black
language is so different from white language in symbolic interaction with state institutions of
power in his everyday life, that is, I aim to interrogate the experiential-practical factor for the
formation of his comparative linguistic paradigm. In regard to an earlier section, I found that Dr.
Smith encountered pathologizing and dehumanizing meanings attached to his own community
language especially in state-sponsored education and in the judiciary. It may be suggested that he
may have attempted to experientially reconstruct those meanings of his mother tongue to the
extent that black language may be defined as an African language on a path to elaborating on his
ideological-political and/or experiential-practical view of his mother tongue scientifically in an
emerging field of inquiry at the University of California, Irvine.
Blacks or black linguists like Dr. Smith who had excruciating experiences as a result of their
language use may share a dissenting view of their mother tongue.1 On the other hand, blacks or
black linguists who seem to have had a relatively stable childhood and adolescence and/or came
from outside of the United States may have a dominant perspective as held by those in the
mainstream. In short, the degree of difference which blacks or black linguists feel exists between
black and white language may depend on the social locations and manners they have been
“educated” in the United States, as DeBose (2005) observes. Therefore, the location and manner
Dr. Smith was socialized or desocialized in his community and the wider society may be a
critical differentiating factor for his linguistic view. In this section, I shall explore the
experiential-practical factor which might have contributed to the formation of the Afrocentric

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linguistic view for him. The factor is bifurcated into: (1) an experiential-practical factor which
might have led him to perceive black language as a language other than English and (2) an
experiential-practical factor which might have led him to recognize the need to establish the
scientific legitimacy of black language. The ensuing five situations of black language, I suppose,
constitute both factors (1) and (2), or either of them: (a) significant difference between black and
white language, (b) black language as a pathology in school, (c) black language as a factor in IQ
tests, (d) bilingual education in black language and English, and (e) black language in the
judiciary system.

5.2.1. Significant Difference between Black and White Language

As explicated in Section 5.1.2, as a child, Ernie A. Smith acquired and spoke Ebonics as the
primary language of his black community, Tulsa, Oklahoma as a child because his parents and
playmates spoke it. The school environment in the South was strictly segregated and all the
teachers were African [-descended]. Once migrating into South Central Los Angeles, a
predominantly black neighborhood back then, he encountered a different linguistic experience, a
large difference between his everyday language, on the one hand, and the language of urbanized
blacks and teachers which was expected to be used in LA schools, where the teachers were
predominantly white, on the other hand. At another experiential-practical level of intelligibility,
when Smith, his instructor, and white students conducted field research on the language of black
school children in the vicinity of UCI in 1970, they found some differences between the
interpretations of black language users’ verbal productions, which white graduate students made

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of the language and those which Smith made of it. He remembers:

I was asked to transcribe. And I had very limited skills in phonetics at that time. My
limited skills in phonetics as a science of describing speech was limited, very limited.
Okay? So in my transcriptions of the tape the professor of my class at the seminar
noticed that I did not have phonetics as a science, but I was exhibiting some differences
in the interpretations whites have made in their transcriptions and my transcriptions.
Okay? She attributed those differences to my lack of phonetics as a science, but it did
make them aware that what they were missing was some stuff that, if I had better skills
in phonetics, that would not change the misinterpretations whites have made of what
was said or what was heard. . . . Speaker intuitions to verify any transcriptions made of
our language other than the language that you speak. You cannot rely on your
interpretations as a non-native speaker. So she validated the use of native speaker
intuitions. Being a native speaker of the language that the children were speaking, she
said, my interpretation was an interpretation of native speaker intuitions, which is much
more valid than nonnative speaker intuitions about what somebody is saying. That’s in
the science of linguistics. Native speaker intuitions are valid, okay? more than nonnative
speaker intuitions or interpretations. That’s another thing that she pointed out. She relied
on my native speaker intuitions for what was on the transcriptions.
(Smith, personal communication, November 8, 2016)

Smith found white students misinterpreted what black children said. There are three possible
explanations for this misunderstanding: semantics, phonology, other grammatical elements, and
mistranscriptions. I suppose semantics may have been a prevailing difference between black and
white language, which was partly a result of the other grammatical components. Phonology, in
conjunction with other grammatical factors, may have led the white students to mistranscribe and
then misinterpret. All this points to the possibility that the white students may have had a
language as their primary language other than the language that the black school children
brought from their home and community, and relied on their own native intuitions, not the
native-user intuitions of the black children. The instructor and her white students may have
assumed that as native users of English they could correctly interpret the language of those

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school children whose primary language was, they assumed, another dialect of English, which
meant for them that both the investigators and the children shared the same native-user
intuitions, in other words, the deep structure of the English language. But what happened was
misinterpretations on the part of whites and the absolute reliance on Smith’s linguistic intuitions
for valid interpretations of the language data. The discovery of two different native-user
intuitions in the fieldwork may have partly scientifically validated his black nationalist belief that
black language is a language other than English.
Even creolist black linguists since the 1970s point out that white language users
overwhelmingly misinterpret utterances containing black grammatical features such as the
stressed been and the modal semi-auxiliary come (e.g., Rickford 1975: 172-174; Spears 1982:
871, cited in Morgan 1996: 412).2 Although avoiding the explicit politically dichotomized
interpretation of whether it is a dialect of language X or constitutes language Y, i.e., avoiding one
scientific responsibility to protect individual and collective human rights and squarely face the
power politics in which the linguist is inevitably (and comfortably) involved, white linguist
William Labov revealed his honest dilemma in demarcating black and white language. He
substituted another discursive tactic for the usual binary discourse:

The uniform Black English vernacular is separated from . . . all . . . white
vernaculars . . . by both categorical and variable rules specific to Black English with
accompanying norms of interpretation; by differences in underlying forms; and by a
large section of the lexicon with associated semantic interpretations and cultural
knowledge. . . . We then find two kinds of relations between white and black speech
communities: integration of the various rules, with a high level of potential recognition
and common semantic interpretations, and absolute barriers that seem to demand
separate grammatical description. (1980: 374, 376, cited in Spears 1982: 870).

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Another white linguist William Stewart (1967) perceived “Negros . . . include within their group
speakers of the most radically non-standard dialects of natively-spoken English in the entire
country” (22, italics added). It is not clear what “most radically non-standard” meant, but it
suggested this line of scholars may have sensed some limitations when they talked about black
language as a dialect of English. All these arguments suggest the interpretivity, arbitrariness, and
subjectivity of linguistics, which against the intentions of mainstream scholars justifies more
inclusive paradigmatic competition, including the comparative linguistic paradigm, in black
linguistics.
If white teachers still feel the difference is to the effect that they cannot correctly understand
what black students say due to morphosyntactic, semantic, phonological, phonetic, and
pragmatic features, then it suggests that at least in terms of intelligibility, which largely derives
from grammatical patterns, black language may have a different linguistic and communicative
system from English; especially, back in the early 1970s, black language may have been more
differentiated than now to the extent that people may have more confidently said it is a language
other than English. Back then, whites had greater difficulty comprehending black children’s
speech especially at the phonological level from a low socio-economic urban environment (e.g.,
Baran & Seymour 1976; Nober & Seymour 1979).3 Even recently, we witness such an incidence
at school, as partly attested by recent studies (e.g., Robinson 2006, Robinson & Stockman 2009).
In 1997, one white female teacher from Illinois exchanged her opinions with a black educator on
the unintelligibility of Ebonics in a CNN live program on the 1996 Ebonics Resolution. The part
of the dialogue went:

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The teacher: “At the current time I have students talking Ebonics as a means of
deception. I don’t know what they’re saying in my classroom. As an
English teacher I wanna teach them Standard English, but I also wanna
understand them. I’m confused. I don’t know what to do.”
A black female commentator from Los Angeles: “I tell you what to do. You teach them
Standard English. That’s the job of the teacher, to teach correct grammar.”
The teacher: “But I don’t understand . . . .”
A black female commentator from Los Angeles: “Then you ask them what they mean. If
they say something to you, that’s things out of the ordinary, I’ll ask them to
explain and then tell them correct ways to express themselves and use those
same sentences but the correct way. That’s the way to do it.”
The teacher: “But I’m afraid of going to turn off my students . . . .”
(“CNN and ABC shows on Ebonics” at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
3Z2te_r3FYI, especially 29:08-30:29, emphasis added)

The teacher insists she can’t understand what her black students say, but she frames the incidence
within the dialect-to-dialect relationship because her use of the term “Standard English” suggests
a dichotomy between “standard” and “nonstandard” (the latter means a nonstandard kind of
English that black students speak). However, we see the most problematic in the comments from
the black commentator concerning the black language the students use: “tell them correct ways
to express themselves.” So the comment suggests that black language is incorrect, although it
correctly and appropriately communicates their ideas and emotions.
It is obvious in the literature that most linguists base their decision on whether they use the
term “language” or “dialect” or “creole” or categorize a target linguistic code that they attempt to
describe into a “language,” a “dialect,” or a “creole,” partly on the general intelligibility or
understandability of the linguistic code to their and others’ ears (e.g., Spears 1982: 871). For
example, higher unintelligibility between, assumedly, two dialects of the same language may

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make linguists suspect there exists a great difference in the two grammatical structures of a
linguistic code which they attempt to describe and another linguistic code that they know as their
primary medium of communication (e.g., Stewart 1962: 44). However, most linguists seem to
elide any linguistic arguments on why they describe and analyze a linguistic code as a dialect of
Language A or B. Considering they may know or can soon understand their academic discourses
are tied to, whether they hope or not, the state and inter-state power structure, they appear to
avoid their political responsibility as scientists, while some liberal linguists believe their science
can be justified by merely citing white linguist Max Weinreich, who said, “A language is a
dialect with an army and navy.” The problematic nature of the experiential-practical factor of
intelligibility, which some claim to be an unscientific criterion, may have made many linguists
reluctant to admit that the experiential-practical factor predetermined their scientific
methodology, afraid that they may be labeled unscientific; however, I would argue that, as
predecessors in various sciences have made important discoveries in or based on their
experiences, the experiential-practical factor should be an important, legitimate constitutive
element of a scientific paradigm, in other words, it is scientific.

5.2.2. Black Language as a Pathology in School

Black language was long perceived as a pathology or a deficiency. Teachers and school
officials suggested that Ernie Smith’s mother tongue features were deficiencies that were related
to physical and/or mental abnormalities. They suggested to some parents that their children be
assigned to the school speech clinic for speech therapy or to the school psychologist for a

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diagnostic examination, and treatment for possible congenital mental disorders. This was indeed
a widespread practice against black children in school, as illustrated by the following case of the
late “Jesse” Owens, who was born to a sharecropper in Oakville, Alabama and migrated from the
South to metropolis Cleveland, Ohio:

After moving to Ohio from the deep South as an elementary school pupil, he was afraid
to speak in school because of problems with stammering. The name Jesse comes from
an aborted attempt on the part of Owens as a shy child to tell the teacher his name was J.
C., which came out sounding like Jesse. Other children sometimes make fun of the
stammering and stuttering caused by interference modification, which makes the
withdrawn child even more hesitant to speak. Extremely withdrawn children, who
stammer and stutter when they speak, run the risk of being classified as either autistic or
nonverbal cripples, classifications that suggest the presence of a serious psychological
disorder. (White 1984: 127)

The example cited above will most likely remind readers of his own experience of linguistic
discriminations at school in South Central Los Angeles (See Section 5.1.2). His later
reinterpretation and higher awareness of the childhood experiences in his immediate empirical
world may have partly guided him to pursue a scientific, plausible explanation of the difference
between black and white language or what his language is, and destigmatize the black tongue
away from the white tongue. Smith’s argument below, partly coming from his own childhood
experience in the inner-city, may justify my suggestion:

It is this writer’s contention that because the speech and linguistic codes of the inner city
Black culture differs significantly from the speech and linguistic codes of the dominant
culture, when many inner city children become pupils in the urban or inner city school
system, untold numbers of these children have the awesome experience of being
diagnosed by teachers as having a corrupt, broken, disordered, and deficit speech, and
being labeled as verbal cripples and linguistically deprived. Often labeled “slow
learners” and considered as being cognitively deficient, many of these children are
continually assigned to an array of remediation type courses which are ostensibly
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designed to cure their language defects. As a consequence of having been assigned to
these remediation courses and dumbbell sections of their classes, many of these children
have the common experience of being teased, mocked, and taunted by their so-called
“normal” schoolmates. Because some of these children react to this harassment by
engaging in verbal duels (“woofin sessions”) and fist fights to protect their self respect,
they soon find themselves suspended or expelled from school and labeled as being
incorrigible and uneducable. Perhaps it is here we find the emergence of a pattering
among Black people. (Smith 1974: 32)

Despite an increasing number of sociolinguistic works from the mid-1960s (See Chapter 4), there
still continued to emerge such works as to frame the language of some black children as a deficit
in the area of speech pathology or communicative disorders (e.g., Norton & Hodgson 1973).
However, from an ethnolinguistic perspective, the “acting out” and “incorrigible” verbal
expressive styles were part of the legitimate black language (Smith 1974: 49). This institutional
injustice against the legitimate language, unjustly, made untold numbers of inner city children
suspended or expelled from school, parents frequently intimidated and threatened with having to
face civil action suits or juvenile court hearings for their alleged failure to properly rear a
disruptive or incorrigible child, or schools resorting to behavioral corrections or penalties.
Smith (1974) concludes:

To the inner city school system, Black verbal arts and oral expressive styles are lewd,
indecent, and profane, and totally unsuitable for educational purposes . . . the inner city
schools have tried to empty-out Ebonics by employing prescriptive grammars, pedantic
teachers, corrective, suppressive, and negative teaching techniques. The inner city
schools have attempted to pour in good grammar (SAE) by the speech pathology,
clinical therapy, and language laboratory approach. (50)

From the perspective of the mainstream/white educational institution, the language of many
black children was not a language but a pathology, by implication, it was not English, although

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most interpreted it as a degenerated or underdeveloped dialect of English. It was one of the
dominant scientific interpretations on black language (e.g., Bereiter & Englemann 1966; Bereiter,
et al. 1966; Bloom, Davis, & Hess 1965; Carson & Rabin 1960; Deutsch 1963, 1965, 1966; Hess
& Shipman 1965; Jensen 1968; Shuey 1966). It is very interesting to note one coincidence that
learning disabilities became formally recognized as a medical condition and discipline in the
1960s and 1970s (Hallahan & Sayeski 2010), when the civil rights movement and the black
nationalist movement clamored for civil rights and independent black institutions. The scientific
community, an entity to authorize the various discourses of, primarily, the dominant group, might
have constructed various segregating categories such as learning disorders to maintain or
distribute power relations between the dominant group and the subjugated group(s).

5.2.3. Black Language as a Factor in IQ Tests

IQ tests served two devastating functions for the black community: one was to track and lock
many blacks into the lower strata of the society and the other, to negate the mother tongue of the
community. In those tests,

[i]ntelligence is usually assessed in tests of factual knowledge, reasoning, memory, word
knowledge, arithmetic, spatial visualization, and knowledge of social conventions.
Some intelligence tests call for verbal responses, whereas others require the
manipulation of concrete materials. . . . These tests are based on verbal behavior which
develops along different lines in poor black children than in white children.
(Haskins & Butts 1973: 8, emphasis added)

The verbal responses mean two things: grammatical and pragmatic. For the former, the use of

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black linguistic features would tell white examiners that the students had a pathological or
underdeveloped form of English. The pragmatic features of black language would show the
examiners that they had an illogical formation of their thoughts. For Ernie Smith, the problem
occurring between black language and IQ tests came to his attention at UCI:

Jo White, Joseph White was Professor, Social Sciences at UC Irvine. That’s who
recruited me to the graduate program in the School of Social Sciences at UC Irvine. It
was from Joseph White, in the seminar that I had taken from Joseph White, that I
understood the whole concept of testing, validity in testing, the invalidity of testing. So
if there was one person who influenced my better understanding of that phenomenon, it
would be Joseph White . . . My understanding of the bias in testing all that came from
primarily Joseph White. I had met Asa Hilliard and a lot number of black psychologists,
who belonged to the Association of Black Psychologists, who were all very
Afrocentric, . . . very Afrocentric. He testified at the Larry P. vs. Riles case in San
Francisco. . . . That [= the relationship between black language and the IQ tests] was
what their whole issue was. That’s, the test was linguistically and culturally biased. The
items on the test were items about things that black children would not be expected to
know. If I gave you a test today in Russian and you don’t know anything about Russia,
you don’t know the Russian language, you don’t know the Russian culture, then I label
you mentally retarded because you don’t know the questions on the test, they are all in
Russian, your language is not Russian, then I label you mentally retarded because you
don’t understand the Russian language and the Russian culture. How can I label you
mentally retarded because you don’t know another language? All these tests are
language-based. They are all in English.
(Smith, personal communication, November 8, 2016)

For Joseph Whites, at the root of black psychology, in relation to the language behavior of
Africans in America, lay “an identifiable African cultural influence that has persisted despite the
continuing exposure of the Black American psyche to the Euro-American culture during the past
350 and more years of geographical and temporal separation from Africa” (White 1984: 3). In
the late 1960s and early 1970s, predicated on the thesis that the so-called standardized tests being
used to place disproportionate numbers of black pupils in classes for the educable mentally

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retarded (EMR) were culturally and linguistically biased, the San Francisco Association of Black
Psychologists filed a lawsuit known as “Larry P. v. Riles” in 1972 against the San Francisco
Unified School District (Smith 2015; White 1984). For example, in 1971, in the school district,
whose 28.5 percent was constituted by black students, 60 percent of the EMR students were
black. The semantics of black language was a key evidential factor for delegitimizing the current
IQ tests used in the school system, but the semantics was often interwoven with the
morphosyntax. For example, when Dr. White asked one of the six plaintiffs who had been
labeled as retarded on the basis of IQ tests administered by the district about the following
hypothetical situation:

The interviewer: “What should you do if a child much smaller than you tries to start a
fight with you?”
The nine-year-old black male: “I would hit him back, I don’t be buyin’ no woof (wolf)
tickets and I don’t be sellin’ no woof tickets, buyin’ woof tickets ain’t nothin’
but trouble.”
(White 1984: 111)

When the retest was administered with culturally and linguistically modified scoring criteria by
black psychologists, the plaintiffs tested above 75, the cutoff scores by the school district for
placement in classes for the mentally retarded. One of the black culture specific tests created
against the IQ tests which were culturally and linguistically biased toward the white middle class
was the Black Intelligence Test of Cultural Homogeneity (BITCH)4. Compared to the cultural
biases, “[l]ittle consideration has been thus far given to the problems which dialect differences
pose in test construction” (Williams 1975: 117). Therefore, BITCH was predicated on the

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rationale that “a combination of dialect specific and culture specific tests would certainly
enhance the possibility of measuring accurately what is inside the Black child's head” (Williams
1972: 7). Black psychologist Robert L. Williams, who were to coin the term “Ebonics” with
Ernie Smith in 1973, created the BITCH test. The black culturally-specific test may have been
based on his understanding that:

a federal judge has recently ordered that California school children be given intelligence
tests in their own language. While this decision has specifically been directed at
correcting some of the inequities suffered by Spanish surnamed children, it has
implications for Black children who also speak non-standard English.
(Williams 1975: 120)

Williams’ attempt to relate the Spanish language to black language is reminiscent of the attempt
of Smith to equate the former to the latter in bilingual education (See Section 5.2.4 for details).
The following examples from the BITCH test attest to the suggested connection between the two
scholars:

1. Blood
a. tire
b. worthless
c. An injured person
d. A brother of color

2. Jet
is:
a. an East Oakland motorcycle club
b. one of the gangs in "West Side Story"
c. a news and gossip magazine
d. a way of life for the very rich
3. Many people say that "Juneteenth" (June 19) should be made a legal holiday because
this was the day when:
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a. the slaves were freed in the USA
b. the slaves were freed in Texas
c. the slaves were freed in Jamaica
d. the slaves were freed in California
e. Martin Luther King was born
f. Booker T. Washington died
(Sources: Williams 1975; SusanOhanian.Org 2011)

All the questions are both cultural and linguistic (largely semantic), and black language plays a
large role. The results of the test when administered to white students showed a similar tendency
to those of the traditional IQ tests administered to black students: “many whites would score ten
to fifteen points below Blacks on the BITCH test” (White 1984: 112).
Black psychology and linguistics were in a collaborative position to rectify the entrenched
tracking system of blacks into a lower stratum of state institutions based on the IQ tests which
drew on white cultural psychology and language. Smith’s argument that the semantics of
polysemy is a key factor in the intersection between black psychology and language (2016) may
attest to the close relationship between his linguistic expertise and the psychological perspective
of the BITCH test. The result of the BITCH experiment suggested black language may need to
be treated off the scale of English, especially, for Smith. It is of great significance to note that the
intersection of linguistics and psychology provided the major impetus for renaming and
redefining black language in the small black caucus meeting in 1973 (See Section 5.3.8) and
might have offered another experiential-practical and theoretical-scientific (inter-disciplinary)
factor in Smith’s linguistic research at UCI.

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5.2.4. Bilingual Education in Black Language and English

It might be said that Dr. Smith’s concern with bilingual education for black children dates
back to the late 1960s, when he founded the United Front Against Imperialism (UFAI) in South
Central Los Angeles. As Minister of Education, UFAI, he helped young black male high school
dropouts and graduates to learn literacy in English with his self-made teaching materials (but
found it failed possibly due to the youth’s “ghetto” language). He describes the materials in the
following way:

The point that I was making was that the materials that I had developed were just like a
test in English. If you write a leaflet and you want to get people who speak a language
other than English involved, you can’t write it at a level that they don’t understand.
Okay? I hadn’t even come to that understanding in sixty-eight. I didn’t even understand
anything in sixty-eight other than that was White Supremacy and that was imperialism
going on. The war in Vietnam hadn’t ended. So the United Front Against Imperialism
was based on the belief that we should form alliances with other groups, even white
groups who opposed to imperialism by the United States against the African and Asian
world. That’s what United Front Against Imperialism is about. It had nothing to do with
linguistics. I discovered in the process of trying to issue information that the people
didn’t understand the information because it was in a language they didn’t understand. I
reached that conclusion way after I had done what I had done. I said, “Oh, this is, this is,
I was doing the same thing, trying to educate people to the problem of imperialism. I
wasn’t getting to them, I was only getting to people who speak English.”
(Smith, personal communication, November 8, 2016)

As in the IQ test, his materials were written in white language, a language which the students
couldn’t properly understand. This was what he came to understand way after 1968. I suppose
that it was partly because of the surface-level similarities that may have caused more confusions
to the extent that they couldn’t properly understand the actual differences which existed between
black and white language. Smith recalls the black youths perfectly memorized the grammar rules

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(of English) but they could not decode and encode the graphic representations of speech. This
point overlaps with and thus reinforces the argument in Section 5.2.1 on the “significant”
difference between black and white language. Remember Smith noticed in field research his
white colleagues could not understand what black language users said, while the white students
should have been confident that they could correctly understand what they must have thought
was “English” particularly at the lexical level. There was another he noticed in his community
literacy program: the possible influence of the “ghetto” language in learning literacy in English,
i.e., the language may have interfered with learning literacy skills in English, though “dialects”
of English, I suppose, would not have done so.
It was a time that bilingual education especially for Spanish-using children became an issue
in California and other parts of the United States, of which Smith was aware (The Federal
Bilingual Education Act was enacted in 1968 and the provision of instructions in English and
Spanish, Chinese, or other second languages was mandated in public schools). Two years later, at
UCI, he formed his idea on bilingual education in Ebonics and English, partly based on relevant
works at the time, which were written by some people close to him in his linguisticscommunication-psychology network, i.e., Brock (1972), Holt (1970), and Taylor (1969). Dr.
Grace Holt and Dr. Orlando Taylor as well as Smith attended the conference on “Cognitive and
Language Development of the Black Child” in St. Louis in 1973. Dr. Holt was in a small
conference with Smith and others to coin the term “Ebonics” and define it (See details in Section
5.3.8). Robert Brock was a black nationalist leader who managed an organization in California,
where Smith was a member, and demanded the United States Government grant selfdetermination to the descendants of enslaved Africans in its territory (See details in Section

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5.1.4).
At UCI, Smith encountered three different views on the language education of black children
in school. They were the deficit view, the difference view, and the dissident view (Brock 1972;
Holt 1970; Smith 1974; Taylor 1969). The deficit view contended that “[s]ubstandard Negro
English . . . is an ‘illiterate’, ‘corrupt’, and ‘error’ filled vernacular that is a barrier to cognitive
operations and intellectual growth”; it posited “an ‘environmental deprivation’ or ‘cultural
deficiency’ model”, and proposed “the cultural enrichment program” (Ibid.: 36). On the other
hand, the difference view and the dissident view supported the linguistic position that black
language is:

a well ordered, highly structured and rule governed language. Whereas the proponents
of the Difference position accuse the teachers in the inner city of unpreparedness and
advocate the Bi-lingual or English As a Second Language approach to literacy, . . . the
proponents of the Dissident position denounce the institutionalized destruction of the
children and propose that reading and all other subjects be taught in the child’s
vernacular - the Ethnolinguistic approach. (Ibid.: 37-38, underlining in the original)

The difference view was exemplified by William Stewart (1973), who was a supporter of a
contrastive approach to teaching standard English, a second “dialect,” to the users of black
language, a first “dialect,” as the contrastive approach, widely promoted among linguists then,
was associated with bilingual education. The mainstream white researchers including Stewart as
listed in Section 4.5, however, did not mention any suggestion to protect or promote black
language. It may have shown their covert position on the language or their implicit agreement to
the government’s “hidden” policy to level out or segregate undesirable linguistic differences. In
fact, at the “unofficial,” viz., implementation level, the omnipresence of remedial language

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programs from elementary to tertiary level was noticeable.
Quite contrary to the difference model’s attitudes toward the maintenance of black language,
the dissident model argued, “The teaching of Standard English as a tool language is a tenable
goal for American education, so long as it does not preclude instruction in Black English”
(Taylor 1969: 17), or that the use of Black English should be allowed in language lessons, a
weaker version (Holt 1970). One difference from Smith is, they regarded black language as a
dialect of English. Their position was additive “bidialectal” education. Therefore, Smith adopted
the pedagogic element of the dissident position and adjusted the dissident position from
“bidialectal” to “bilingual” education. He observes that:

it would seem to follow that if Black youths who drop out of school are more closely
associated with Black oral expressive styles, education programs should be geared
toward incorporating these styles in both teaching and learning strategies. . . . Moreover,
if . . . learning is more meaningful, if it is additive in nature, educators should continue
to develop programs which build upon the Black child’s linguistic strengths, that is,
their stylistic oral expressiveness. This applies not only to the teaching of Standard
Anglo English but other subjects as well. (Smith 1974: 144, italics added)

The idea “additive” in his bilingual education is to promote or maintain both students’ primary
and second language, in sharp contrast to the “subtractive” model promoted by the liberal white
scholars since the mid-1960s, where black students were supposed to subtract black language in
their existing linguistic repertoire. It is worth a note that Smith’s argument for bilingual
education partly drew on the UNESCO’s position on the use of “vernacular” languages in
education as first expressed in 1953. It states:

It is axiomatic that the best medium for teaching a child is his mother tongue.
Psychologically, it is the system of meaningful signs that in his mind works
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automatically for expression and understanding. Sociologically, it is a means of
identification among the members of the community to which he belongs.
Educationally, he learns more quickly through it than through an unfamiliar linguistic
medium. (UNESCO 1953: 11)

The UNESCO statement seems to cater to only linguistic codes deemed relatively far from their
cognate linguistic codes in linguistics, containing no discussions on black language varieties in
the African diaspora. However, since the idea by UNESCO was applicable to any linguistic code
or mother tongue, he adopted the essence of that sociolinguistic principle. We find another
paragraph which may support his suggestion to employ Ebonics as a medium of instruction. The
paragraph read:

Every child is born into a cultural environment; the language is both a part of, and an
expression of, that environment. Thus the acquiring of this language (his ‘mother
tongue’) is a part of the process by which a child absorbs the cultural environment; it
can, then, be said that this language plays an important part in moulding the child’s early
concepts. He will, therefore, find it difficult to grasp any new concept which is so alien
to his cultural environment that it cannot readily find expression in his mother tongue.
(Ibid.: 47)

As Smith points out (See Section 5.1.1), the de facto geographical, social, economic, and cultural
segregation of most blacks in the United States has been a determinant factor for the
reproduction of black language. Concepts tied to the segregated cultural environment make it
difficult for most black children to grasp any new concepts embedded in the white cultural
environment, which are so alien. Today, he explains his position back then as follows:

To the extent that the United Nations, UNESCO position on teaching children . . .
United Nations UNESCO report in 1954 said that the best medium for teaching a child
is his mother tongue. If you don’t accept that premise, then everything else you think
you know is absurd. I accept the United Nations’ finding. . . . If I’m gonna learn
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Japanese and the teacher’s only speaking in Japanese, I don’t understand Japanese, I
don’t speak Japanese, how will I learn Japanese? The teacher doesn’t speak to me in my
language, or any language I understand, it’s all in Japanese. Now, tell me how I’m going
to learn Japanese, just by hearing Japanese. I can turn the radio on to Japanese radio
station, turn the television on to Japanese station. ‘m I gonna learn Japanese soon,
listening to Japanese? (Smith, personal communication, November 8, 2016)

He expressed his support for the dissident position, which recommended that black children be
taught in black and white language for different subject matters. In this bilingual policy black
teachers who are Ebonics users should teach subject matters including language (i.e., English)
arts in Ebonics and English. It was not a matter of teachers’ unpreparedness.
The strong tie between his own view of black language as a language other than English and
bilingual education was best articulated in a later incident involving the US Department of
Education and him. He sent the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare a paper entitled
“A Case for Bilingual and Bicultural Education for United States Slave Descendants of African
Origin” (Smith 1976-1977, see Figure 11). He summarized it in the following way:

[A]s a consequence of: 1) their being descendants of African forbearers whose native
languages were African languages, and not English, and 2) as a consequence of their
having historically been born into, reared in, and compelled to live lifestyles in socially
isolated linguistic environments that are different from that of the majority AngloEnglish speaking population, by all linguistic evidence and historical fact, AfroAmericans are: a) not native speakers of English, b) have retained an African linguistic
substratum in their speech, and c) because of this have limited-English-speaking
abilities within the meaning of “limited-English-speaking” as defined in Public Law 93380 -- the Federal Bilingual Education Act. It is further posited that given that oral
linguistic behavior is determined by the extent to which a person is exposed to a given
linguistic environment and given that the African-American child has not been reared in
a linguistic environment in which English is the dominant language any more than
Asian-American, Hispanic-American, or Native American children who are presently
considered to be of limited-English-speaking ability under the law, the AfricanAmerican child is equally entitled to be given instruction in English As a Second
Language by only those individuals who have a native competence in Ebonics or who
have been trained in the nuances of the Ebonics bilingual and bicultural contrastive
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linguistic approach. (underlines original, italics added)

We witness how the practical relationship between Ebonics as a language other than English and
bilingual education was given a scientific edge. One interesting suggestion, as in the statement
by Dr. Smith, i.e., use of contrastive approach, a reduced version of the greater use of Ebonics as
a co-medium of instruction with English that he proposed earlier in his dissertation, has been
found to be an effective strategy to bring Ebonics-using students to a working bilingualism in

Figure 11. A Case for Bilingual and Bicultural Education for United States
Slave Descendants of African Origin. Courtesy of Ernie A. Smith.

Ebonics and English (cf. Pandey 2000). In response to the paper, on May 13, 1977, Boyer, Ernest
L., US Commissioner of Education countered in the following two respects:
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1) The native language of black Americans is English
2) The United States slave descendants of African origin are not “limited English-speaking”

Interestingly, Boyer stated Gullah may be eligible for the Bilingual Education Act, suggesting
Gullah may not be a dialect of English, a creolized form of English like Hawaiian Pidgin.
Perhaps, this is a telling illustration of practical application or appropriation of the dominant
scientific knowledge, i.e., the Creolist Paradigm in a way to suit the interests of the United
States, i.e., mostly white elites. The Paradigm admits Gullah and other varieties of black
language may constitute a continuum (e.g., Rickford 1974), but tends to differentiate them either
as a creole or a post-creole, i.e., dialect respectively.
Even today, an African-born linguist of South Asian ancestry, Anita Pandey, who examined
the linguistic competence of “monodialectal” black language users by using the paper-based
TOEFL test, found compelling evidence that is in favor of bilingual education, and, albeit against
the author’s intention, offers a possibility of defining black language as a language other than
English. The test results showed the lowest points for the grammar and listening comprehension.
The results were comparable to those of the low-level or low-intermediate-level ESL/EFL
students who use a language other than English as their primary language. Though Pandey
emphasized black language as a dialect of English, she recommends the black users learn
English by means of the very contrastive approach that Dr. Smith recommended back in the late
1970s. The example points to a contradictory reality that bilingual education usually addresses
only those linguistic codes which are widely recognized as “languages” other than English;
whereas one scientific study suggests the legitimacy of using some method of bilingual

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education in teaching English to black language users and, by implication or extension, black
language might be viewed as a language other than English as are German and Spanish, whose
primary users are entitled to be enrolled in bilingual education or ESL programs under the
federal law. The last point is supported by the following results. Though the denominator was
very small (Focus group A consisted of 11 inner-city black students aged 18-19 who were
enrolled in an intensive six-week summer Bridge Transition program at the University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign), their test results showed 477/1st→519/2nd→545/3rd (513/Ave.). According
to the ETS statistics taken in 2000-2001 (ETS 2001-2002), the denominators are not large
enough, but, for example, the German users (n of German users: 274) and the Spanish users (n of
Spanish users: 1601) took average scores of 596 and 564 respectively. The statistics may present
one contradiction and one implication. One contradiction is, the German and Spanish users,
whose primary linguistic codes are scientifically said to be close grammatically or lexically to
English and scientifically and officially defined as “language,” are still entitled to the bilingual
education services in the United States, but the black language users, whose primary linguistic
code is scientifically said to be close lexically to English and scientifically and officially defined
as a “dialect” of English, are not. One implication is, most linguists would contend black
language is a dialect of English based on their observation of a certain area of grammar, lexicon,
and orthographic conventions, but if they are scientists and advisors for the larger society, they
may need to look at a holistic gamut of language including semantics and pragmatics as the
defining features of black language. Consistency between linguistics and applied linguistics
might have been an important scientific criterion for Smith to determine the validity and integrity
of his comparative linguistic argument on the relationship between black and white language.

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5.2.5. Black Language in the Judiciary System5

According to the National Congress of Parents and Teachers (1962: 10, cited in Smith 1974:
54), the statutes for juvenile delinquency frequently prohibit using “profane” language. In fact,
various acts, characteristic of many innercity black children and families and adolescents, were
interpreted as acts of delinquency in the juvenile justice system by using color-blind discourse. It
was part of a trend in the historical development of social and scientific discourses against
blacks. Smith observes, “In the juvenile detention centers of America the language of the
innercity child presents a problem because it is perceived as being uppity, vulgar, indecent, and
profane” (1974: 52). He attributed the reason why whites and others who adopted the white
(para)linguistic standard took black language as profanity to a sociolinguistic fact that the black
linguistic and oral expressive styles of the urban youth do not differentiate but rather equate the
styles of adults with children (Smith 1974: 56). The use of black language in the larger society,
as in the school system, then, played another role in stratifying many blacks into the underclass.
In May of 1970, Smith delivered an anti-Vietnam War speech in Gateway Plaza at the Irvine
campus (See Section 5.1.7 for additional details). Because of the “vulgar, profane, and indecent”
language which he used at the podium allegedly within the presence or hearing of women and
children, he was indicted on the 26th of the same month on the ground of violation of Sections
415.5 and 311.6 of the Penal Code, misdemeanors by the Orange County’s district attorney’s
office (The People of the State of California vs. Ernie Adolphus Smith – Orange County Harbor
District Municipal Court) (See Figure 12). It was filed by the Campus Chief of Police at the
behest of Vice Chancellor L. E. on behalf of two elderly female secretaries in his office. In this

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Figure 12. The People of the State of California vs. Ernie Adolphus Smith – Orange County
Harbor District Municipal Court. Courtesy of Ernie A. Smith.

trial, three sociolinguists and one biologist made expert witnesses for him. He recollects about
the court discussion that:

Those four <sic.> linguists that testified in my trial, and they told the court, “these are
not bad words. These are words that annoyed people. He didn’t disturb the peace. He
was at a rally. Everybody there enjoyed what he said. He was talking against the war
and that upset a lot of people, the war, expanding the war in Vietnam, over in Cambodia.
The people at the rally didn’t object.” [Dr. Mary Key said that] there were no bad words
used. There were some words that annoyed some people who were not participants in

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the rally, that I was on the microphone that I could be heard it annoyed those people. But
the law says that I have to use bad words. There’re no bad words. . . . [The other three
were] Harvey Sacks, David Sudnow, and Sam Shacks. . . . Sam Shacks is a bioethicist.
His PhD is in molecular biology. And he was explaining to them that the science says
that these are not bad words. There’s no such thing as a bad word coming from human
voice, vocal apparatus. . . . The other ones testifying were sociolinguists. [They said
that] even music has these kinds of words, I mean, you don’t like these words, don’t buy
the record. . . . You had these words. Rap music nowadays is a derivative of that whole
attitude against black music. (Smith, personal communication, November 8, 2016)

Dr. Key’s and others’ expert witness testimonies established that the language Smith used in the
speech was free from “vulgarity, profanity, or indecency,” and he was acquitted. The scientific
discourse of linguistics in conferring legitimacy on language in the court led him finally to major
in linguistics. The court case addressed some “indecent” words and phrases, like motherf**cker,
which he used in the campus rally. Therefore, it was not against “broken English,” “nonstandard
English,” or “Black English.” There were no specifications made about what other linguistic and
paralinguistic features the accused part of his language was. Interestingly enough, though, no
other speakers who made speeches using similar expressions during the previous two months
were prosecuted. What this seems to suggest is that the linguistic and paralinguistic way he
talked that identified him as black might have been the hidden basis on which the white
administrators upstairs placed their charge against him. Therefore, in order to test this claim, I
analyzed one of his black nationalist speeches, Is the White Liberal a Racist? Is the Blackman
Insane? (Smith, year of publication unknown), and found that the most prominent feature of his
speech style was his oratory style, very similar to the African oratory style, as he points out:

The oral expressive style of the diasporic African orator and preacher is very much like
that of autochthonous African announcer, notably in that there is much more reliance on
gestures and voice quality in rendering an oration or sermon than in any other genre of
Afro-American oral literature. (Smith 1974: 116)
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The audience on the campus was predominantly white (See Figure 8 in Section 5.1.7; according
to Dr. Smith, there were only five black students at UCI back then). Hence, it might be assumed
from conventional sociolinguistic wisdom that he would have used less of his black linguistic
features and expressive styles or brought his language closer to the language of whites when he
talked to such a student body. That said, based on my analysis of the speech, which may be
targeted at both whites and blacks, I still identified many of the Afro-American linguistic features
and expressive styles even in the “formal,” i.e., mixed-race, setting. Looking at the literature on
Ebonics back then, Smith observed “the Black verbal arts and oral expressive styles have been
made to appear in one body of literature as a lewd, obscene, and deviant verbal behavior” (Smith
1974: 26). Quite speculative as this observation may be, it might partly explain the attitudes of
the white female administrators who indirectly filed a complaint against him, even though they
did not say so in public record.
Today Dr. Smith does not regard the court case as linguistic. A possible influence of the court
case on the formation of Smith’s view of black language as a language other than English may be
difficult to establish. On the other hand, a possible influence of the case on Smith to attempt to
reach a scientific account of the linguistic and paralinguistic features of his mother tongue might
be inducted from a series of events in his life story that his language became a target of
accusation by a combination of white institutions: education and psychology, later, a combination
of white education and law. In fact, the profanity and indecency which the white institutions
found in the language of blacks was one of the paralinguistic patterns of the black community
which Smith (1974) discussed. Therefore, the case might be interpreted as linguistic in a wider
sense.

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There were some later incidents which happened after Dr. Smith graduated from UCI that
were clearly linguistic issues different from the 1970 court case. They pointed to the need for
official recognition of black language as a language other than English in the court as Chinese,
Spanish, etc. were recognized. One was a court case for pimping or pandering in 1977. On
August 1, 1977, the Los Angeles County Public Defender asked CSU Fullerton Professor, Dr.
Ernie A. Smith to interpret a black defendant in a trial (See Figure 13). Dr. Smith recollects his
role as an expert witness in the trial as follows:

I was sent a transcript of a tape recording that had been made of a man by the name of
[anonymous]. . . . He was talking to the undercover police woman. He was accused of
pimping and pandering. Okay? And I was asked to come as an expert witness to refute
the interpretations that the police were making on what was said. He was acquitted. . . .
The whole issue was linguistics. He said something. She said something. They listened
to the tape, and they construed what he was saying to be what they wanted it to be. . . . I
wrote my interpretation of what he meant and the jury accepted my interpretation as
more valid than the interpretations made by the police. [The interviewer: So it’s mainly
about semantics.] Yeah. . . . In fact the district attorney tried to challenge my credentials
by pointing out my license plate that said, “BADMF.” [The interviewer: What is
BADMF?] Motherfucker. He was trying to poison the mind of the jury. . . . My attorney
said, you know, “I didn’t know about this, but he is citing something that said, ‘This
man is a part of the culture of these people who engaged in pimping and pandering, so if
he is not an expert, he sure has a lot of credentials in that area’.” So he took the very
thing to try to use to invalidate my abilities as a linguist and said, ‘He is reinforcing the
fact that this man is a linguist and, you see, because he knows about pimping because
everything that he has just cited proves this guy not only knows linguistics, he knows
the culture as well. He is very familiar with the culture. And he seems to be very proud
of it, has MF on his license plate.” (Smith, personal communication, November 8, 2016)

The main area that the white group had extreme difficulty in understanding was the
semantics of Ebonics. This case established (may still establish) the fact that many black
defendants need to have an Ebonics interpreter so that their human rights could be protected
in the court. And similarly interesting is the fact that the district attorney attempted to

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Figure 13. A Letter from LA Deputy Public Defender. Courtesy of Ernie A. Smith.

discredit Dr. Smith as a linguist with the jury, although his background knowledge on the
language and culture of most blacks in the inner city as a professor of linguistics at an
accredited university qualified him as a reliable expert witness. The elided motive of the
district attorney, who had to be in an unbiased position toward both parties, may as well be
because he was a black person.
Much later, there appeared a DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) hiring motion where
they attempted to hire some linguists who are versed in black language to translate their wiretaps.
It suggests that they officially recognize black language is an independent language other than
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English (Austin, Williams, & Smitherman 2011: 114). There was another recent attempt to
recognize Ebonics as a language worthy of interpretive services in the court from the side of the
lawyer. One black lawyer, Alton Maddox strongly recommended that those young blacks who
are not versed in English grammar and cannot speak standard English be provided court
interpretation services especially concerning stylistics and semantics and Ebonics be recognized
as a language among the court designated languages.6

5.2.6. Experiential-Practical “Connections” to Ebonics

The experiential-practical influences on the formation or adoption of a linguistic paradigm
seems to often remain or be made implicit, perhaps because linguists would posit scientific
interpretations of linguistic data must be given priority over experiential interpretations.
Therefore, when such linguists talk about whether a linguistic code is language or dialect,
linguists often seem to draw on syntactic or morphosyntactic data rather than semantic,
phonological, and pragmatic data, particularly avoiding an intuitive notion of intelligibility and
understandability. But considering a simple historical fact that much scientific research began
after the scientists make intuitive, layperson findings in their own empirical world, it may be
reasonable to assume that they determine to examine the phenomena because they simply find
them interesting or to be addressed immediately in their empirical world. Therefore, there are
highly likely to exist some experiential-practical foundations for the scientists’ arguments.
It might be suggested that the experiential-practical factor A, such as what linguistic
difference or what degree of understandability Smith felt existed between black and white

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language and how strong his collective loyalty to his mother tongue became as a result of its
being oppressed by state institutions such as education, psychology, and law, may have led Smith
to perceive black language is a language other than English. Particularly, the language
consciousness and loyalty deriving from Smith’s experience of white racism may have been tied
to a nationalist desire to establish his collective identity around, among others, his mother tongue
and differentiate between black and white language. As for the experiential-practical factor B
which may have led Smith to recognize the need to scientifically validate his mother tongue, the
language problems his community faced in the state institutions such as education, psychology,
and law may have given a motivation to pursue linguistic research on black language. All in all,
factors A and B may have interacted to stimulate Smith, first, to pursue linguistics to prove the
scientific legitimacy of his mother tongue, and second, to interpret his mother tongue as a
language other than English.
In the case of the Ebonics paradigm, it sounds plausible that Smith may have attempted to
integrate the experiential-practical meanings he attached to the relationship between black and
white language in his empirical world with the theoretical-scientific meanings of black language.
Different from traditional disciplines whose knowledges are applied in real-life situations (e.g.,
applied linguistics), in the African-centered program in Comparative Culture, UCI (See details in
Section 5.3.2), Smith may have attempted to connect theory to practice or treats them as the
inextricable whole of the discipline, as seen in the current Africology (cf. Nelson, 2007[1997];
Okafor, 2013). Therefore, his experiential-practical meanings of black language may have
provided an important foundation for selection of a particular descriptive and analytical
method/criteria and selection of particular language data to establish what black language is and

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to solve those social and linguistic problems that may not be solved if black language was
interpreted as a dialect of white language.

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5.3. Theoretical-Scientific Factor

So far, I have explored the ideological-political and experiential-practical factors for or
toward the formation of the comparative linguistic paradigm. The accounts in earlier sections
may have given the appearance that the paradigm is merely or largely ideologically-politically
and experientially-practically driven. Indeed, the ideological-political and experiential-practical
factors may have provided some foundation and flexibility for Ernie A. Smith to conduct his
scientific endeavor; however, as I pointed out in Chapter 1, what made it a science was
ultimately the scientist’s observance of disciplinary criteria and interpretations (remember
scientific criteria and interpretations are socially constructed through symbolic interaction of the
tripartite factors).
In this section, I will reconstruct the life story of how Dr. Smith built his comparative
linguistic paradigm in his years (1970-1974) in the doctoral program of Comparative Culture,
University of California, Irvine. I will delve into the theoretical-scientific factor, i.e., what
disciplinary circumstances, what paradigms, what scholarly thoughts, and what linguistic
evidence interacted to produce his paradigm. It was obvious that he investigated the language of
United States descendants of enslaved Africans under the influence of African-centered ideas
(incl., Egyptology or Kemetology) on black language. His “provocative” choice of a comparative
linguistic approach against mainstream paradigms, i.e., the Transformationalist (See a definition
in Section 5.3.7.1) and the Creolist Paradigm, made it possible for him to scientifically and
Afrocentrically interpret as an African language the linguistic data of black children that he and
his mentor collected in a Los Angeles elementary school. It is scientifically intriguing that the

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very paradigm that he chose for the description of black language has been widely used for
determining what families languages all over the world belong to, but particularly not for
determining the genealogy of newly born languages in the African diaspora, where other criteria
were deployed to justify the paradigmatic shift. It was also revealed that both his comparative
linguistic paradigm and Europe-born comparative linguistics shared some interests as seen in
nationalist movements the world over.
In the ensuing sections, I shall reconstruct a life story of the scientific exploration of black
language by Smith at the University of California, Irvine from 1970 through 1974.

5.3.1. Enrollment in Comparative Culture

From 1968, a local black nationalist, Ernie A. Smith participated as a part-time community
resource volunteer in one of the black-white relating sessions run by the Operation Bootstrap
(OB, hereafter1; see Figure 14). OB was established (incorporated) on October 24, 1965 at the
corner of 42nd Street and Central Avenue in South Central Los Angeles. It was two months after
the Watts Rebellion. It was designed to lay the potential for poor blacks to enter the occupational
world, and for the ghetto to enter the national economy. It was specifically designed not to be a
typical middle-class-oriented program as seen in the influential national network organizations
like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). It emerged as
an offshoot of the black nationalist component of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE,
hereafter). In its embryonic stage, Louis S. Smith, a.k.a., Lou Smith, then, the Western Regional
Director of CORE, played a central role in putting a new CORE agenda into practice, and was

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Figure 14. Ernie A. Smith in Operation Bootstrap. Smith made a
counter-argument against a comment by a white guest. (Source: a
private video on OB, Courtesy of Ernie A. Smith)

the founder of OB (Ellis 1987). He was a lecturer teaching an undergraduate course on problems
in the black community (e.g., 100 ABC Contemporary Problems2) at the Black (a black studies
component) and Comparative Culture section of a newly founded program, Comparative
Culture, University of California, Irvine (UCI PCC F 1973). At this Lou-led organization, Dr.
Joseph L. White recommended Ernie Smith to enter the doctoral program in Comparative
Culture. Dr. Smith remembers:

My choosing UC Irvine was not to go to Comparative Culture. I was recruited to Irvine
by Dr. Joseph White. I was working at the Operation Bootstrap. The person who
directed the Operation Bootstrap was Lou Smith. Lou Smith was a professor at Irvine.
He was teaching quite a time. (Smith, personal communication, September 6, 2016)

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It was not Dr. Smith that chose the department. Fortuitously, his engagement in OB and his
acquaintance with Lou Smith therein, who was oriented toward black nationalism, and Lou
Smith’s UCI connection to Dr. White, who was also oriented toward black nationalism,
converged to bring Ernie Smith into the African-centered program.

5.3.2. “Black Studies” in Comparative Culture: Cultural Nationalist Project

Before entering into discussion on Smith’s education and research in the Afrocentric
environment, a brief explanation on how the Comparative Culture Department was related to
Black Studies, an incipient cultural nationalist project (Karenga 2009) should be beneficial for
understanding how and why such a “provocative” paradigm as Ebonics was born on the UCI
campus.
It was not until the Black Power Movement and the Black Campus Movement in the 1960s
that earlier sporadic African-centered thoughts or attempts turned into an organized, formal effort
to found a Black Studies or a Black Studies program. It was in 1968, at the height of black
nationalism that the San Francisco State College established a first Black Studies program in the
United States, in which Dr. Joseph L. White, Smith’s future advisor at UCI, was one of the
founders. Earlier, the lives of black and other peoples of color had been underserved and
distorted by the academic mainstream or Eurocentrism. Various disciplines or sub-disciplines had
been allocated to describing particular groups in particular ways. The behaviors, including
language, of black people had been described first as biological and physical, and, later,
psychological and sociological anomalies on the criterion of mainstream white behaviors. The
established disciplines had not paid enough attention to the histories and cultures of black

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people. Consequently, those disciplines had contributed to maintenance of the established social
order―slavery and, then, segregation of blacks. It was against this historical backdrop and in the
1960s that some black scholars and students stood up to rectify the scientific racism and
proceeded to establish a discipline centered on black or African experiences and perspectives and
dedicated to serving the African community in the United States (Bunzel 1968; Okafor 2013;
Rojas 2007).
Most young black intellectuals in the 1960s, among whom was Ernie A. Smith, were seeking
an African or Pan-African perspective which transcended generations, continents, and places of
origin (Asante 2009; Austin 2006). Back then, there was still no clear discipline as Africology.
However, there seems to have already been the same strands of thought that define 21st-century
Africology. It was an embryonic field of inquiry which examined an African phenomenon from
an African perspective. It located the African phenomenon in Africa and in the diaspora as an
organic whole. The Pan-African way of describing and analyzing the phenomenon allowed them
to reconstruct African continuity and distinctness spanning from the African diaspora to
continental Africa. The Pan-African methodology aimed at establishing the African roots of
various black phenomena in the United States, especially, West African roots from the 1970s
(e.g., Smith 1974, 1978c, Smitherman 1977) and Egyptian roots from the 1980s (e.g., Smith
2011a, Smith & Shabaka 2003). All this may fit the profile of the Department of Comparative
Culture, UCI, where the Black Culture component and the African Culture component meet. The
two components in comparison and integration might as well have been equivalent to what
Karenga calls cultural nationalist project, i.e., Black Studies, Africology.
When Smith entered the doctoral program in Comparative Culture, UCI, he told Dr. White

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about his interest in the literacy problem of the black community. He was interested in
Egyptology too. His education in the Nation of Islam motivated him to verify what was taught in
the Nation in Egyptology scientifically. However, he couldn’t find any researcher who could deal
with that particular field of inquiry. Then, the life-changing event happened on campus in 1970,
and it led him to specialize in linguistics, which was partly related to literacy. This change was
partly explained by his long frustration with his inability to explain the legitimacy of black
language with technical concepts.
In Comparative Culture, “[i]n addition to the general core designed for all Comparative
Culture majors the student concentrating in Black Culture should elect to take courses which
would strengthen his background in literature, philosophy, social sciences and fine arts . . . as an
introduction to the Black Culture area he should complete the Black America I and II series and
one course in creative or expository writing. . . . The student should plan his program to include
at least one course offering field study in the Black community, one course in Black Literature,
and one course in either Black Politics, Black Psychology or Community Problems” (UCI
CCPP). For example, at the undergraduate level, Black America I examined the role of civic,
political, economic, religious, and other institutions and organizations in the black community,
and Black America II analyzed the styles and major themes of black spokespersons including
Douglas, DuBois, Washington, King, Malcolm X, and Carmichael. Comparative Culture also
offered courses entitled “Race and Racism in the Modern World” or “Sociology of Black
Nationalism.” The selection and structure of the courses may have reflected the African-centered
ideas of Smith’ advisors. The courses, at the early stage of the development of Black Studies, did
not contain such theoretical or disciplinary works as gave the backbone for the new discipline.

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However, considering the career history of Dr. White, the Black Culture section was equivalent
to the burgeoning Black Studies or such programs throughout the United States back then.
Therefore, Smith was placed in the interdisciplinary, innovative, cultural nationalist, Africancentered field of inquiry, characteristic of Black Studies against “caucasio-centric” (Smith 1974)
disciplines. In that academic environment, he majored in Comparative Culture with a research
area of concentration in comparative linguistics. In Comparative Culture, he compared black
culture with African culture, i.e., black language with African languages. He took courses in
linguistics, advanced conversation, statistics, sociology, independent studies, psychology, and so
on.
Lastly, I will briefly talk about Dr. Smith’s original major concern, Egyptology, which still
appears pertinent to his research (See Figure 15). It can be said that his two research concerns,

Figure 15. Dr. Smith’s Office at Lillian Mobley Multipurpose Center, 7813
South Central Avenue, Los Angeles.
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Egyptology and linguistics looks different but may have been interrelated fields of inquiry for
his dissertation. The Egyptology, Kemetology, or Niggerology which he envisioned and defined
in 1970 (Smith 2015) was:

Niggerology: [ngr + ology] 1. The study of, Neggurs, Niggahs and Niggers. The study
of the people of ancient Khemit or Kemit (Egypt) who worshiped the god Negrs and
goddess Neggur; 2. The study of incorrigible and recalcitrant Nigritians, especially
descendants of enslaved Nigritians that openly defy the system of Racism White
Supremacy

The study of Kemet, Nigritians (West Africans), and diasporic Nigritians under this field of
inquiry suggests an African-centered perspective from which we study things African, which was
to be elaborated and established as a discipline later. Dr. Molefi Kete Asante, who may have
largely influenced Smith in his dissertation, provides a definition of the perspective on which
Africology should be centered in the following way:

Afrocentricity is . . . an intellectual quality of thought, practice, and perspective where
the scholar perceives Africans as subjects and willful agents of phenomena who act
from their own historical and cultural image for human interest (Asante 2006: 648). [It
is] a frame of reference wherein phenomena are viewed from the perspective of the
African person (Asante 1991: 171). The Afrocentric analysis reestablishes the centrality
of the ancient Kemetic civilization and the Nile Valley cultural complex as points of
reference for an African perspective. (Asante 1998: 11).

Considering the two definitions above of relevant fields by the two individuals who were both
situated in Los Angeles, E. A. Smith and Asante (A. L. Smith, back in the early 1970s) both may
have attempted to rectify the “discontinuous history and . . . uncertain future” (Asante 1998: 11)
for African cultures, which had been promulgated by white sciences, for the descendants of

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enslaved Africans in the United States and other diasporic regions. As a telling example much
later, in Nigger: A Divine Origin (2003), Dr. Smith substantiated the divine origin of the term
“nigger” in Ebonics to Ancient Egyptian,

┆ (Medew Netjer) in Kemet (See Figure 16).

Figure 16. Nigger: A Divine Origin.

Later in 1970, after Smith was acquitted of the linguistic misdemeanor charge filed by a
university administrator and impressed by the scientific persuasiveness of linguistics by the

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expert witness in the court―Dr. Mary Key, he determined to pursue a scientific explanation of
black language in the discipline of linguistics. At the surface level, Egyptology and linguistics
constitute two fields of inquiry, but a main theme in Egyptology, i.e., pursuit of African
continuity and distinctness/identity, was later to resonate with what he found in a linguistic field
study on black school children in Los Angeles in 1970 and 1971. However, more direct
influences in this regard were to come from some of the readings in various disciplines with
which he became familiar in the late 1960s and the early 1970s.

5.3.3. Guidance Committee Members

As mentioned in the previous section, the Comparative Culture Department was an ethnic
studies program and had, among others, a black studies component. Thus, it was necessarily
interdisciplinary as is today’s Africology. Comparative Culture was:

an independent program designed to study specific cultures cross-culturally and draw
upon multiple disciplines. Its aim was to "shed light on the forces and processes which
have shaped the culture of America" by comparing systematically the dominant and
minority cultures of the United States and Third World. . . . Each student could design
his or her own program. In 1969 students could study African, American, Asian, Black,
and Chicano cultures, or with other areas by special arrangement.
(OAC 2016: Background)3

There was a lot of flexibility to design a much more innovative research project than in
conventional departments. Ernie A. Smith recalls that the academic atmosphere was liberal and
receptive to various perspectives.
In Comparative Culture, Smith majored in Comparative Culture with a concentration in

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linguistics. The faculty members were mostly in psychology and sociology, including one
linguistics professor, as shown below:

Joseph L. White, Ph.D. Professor of Psychology and Black and Comparative Culture
George O. Roberts, Ph.D. Professor of Sociology and American/African and
Comparative Culture
Oliver L. E. Mbatia, Ph.D. Acting Assistant Professor of Economics and Black/African
and Comparative Culture
Pete E. Clecak, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Culture
Mary R. Key, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of English and Social Science (Linguistics)
David Sudnow, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Sociology
Harvey Sacks, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Anthropology and Sociology
Henry Fagin, Ph.D. Professor of Administration, Research Administrator in the Public
Policy Research Organization
John Wallace, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Administration and Psychology
Gordon G. Globus, M.D. Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior
(Source: Smith 2015; University of California, Irvine 1970-1971)

In this environment, there may have been little departmental or disciplinary constraints on
him to follow the established paradigms in conventional linguistics departments strictly. His
original dissertation committee members were Dr. Joseph L. White (Professor of
Psychology & Comparative Culture), the late Sierra Leonean Dr. George O. Roberts
(Professor of Sociology, African and Comparative Culture), Kenyan Dr. O. L. E. Mbatia
(Assistant Professor of Economics & African and Comparative Culture), and Dr. Mary R.
Key (Assistant Professor of English and Social Science).
Dr. Joseph L. White (Ph.D., Michigan State University) specialized in the psychology of
blacks from an Afrocentric perspective (cf. White 1970, 1984). He was one of the founding
members of the Black Studies program at San Francisco State College (SFSC) in 1968, a
first such program in the United States. On February 26, 1969, as Dean of Undergraduate

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Affairs, SFSC, he advised a faculty Ad Hoc Committee at the University of California,
Irvine, which considered founding a black studies program within American Studies, on the
development of the SFSC Black Studies program.4 He moved to UCI in the fall of 1969 and
became Director of the Program of Black and Comparative Culture.5 He was interested in,
among others, the linguistic and communicative behavior of blacks, which connected him to
another black psychologist Robert L. Williams, a professor at Washington University in St.
Louis. Dr. White interpreted the relationship between black language and psychology
considering the general orality of their culture as follows:

[I]n black idioms―what we call black English or whatever―we do things that are
unique in terms of syntax. I think this might have had its roots in an oral
existence which still has some Africanisms, but also in our social need to use
language to reveal and to conceal simultaneously. Black language is very deep in
subtle meaning and nuances. (White 1970: 56)

Dr. White viewed the language of blacks as a necessary part of their linguistic repertoire. He
saw it as a dialect of English6 while he was receptive to Ernie Smith’s view that Ebonics is
an African language. He noted the dismaying situation that white researchers or educational
psychologists “listening to black speech assume that our use of non-standard oral English is
an example of bad grammar without recognizing the possibility that we have a valid,
legitimate, alternate dialect” (White 1970: 45). In Comparative Culture, Dr. White taught
“Black Psychology” with an emphasis on school education, black power, or mental health,
and “Political Process in the Black Community” (undergraduate courses).
Dr. Mary Ritchie Key (Ph.D., University of Texas), the only white on the committee,
specialized in “Black English.” Because Smith had known Dr. Key’s expertise, he
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beseeched her to testify at his trial in 1970. Dr. Key’s successful expert witness testimony
was the very determinant for his decision to specialize in linguistics and invite her on his
guidance committee. She taught linguistics, bringing him to a fieldwork on the language of
black children in the vicinity of Orange County.
Dr. George O. Roberts (Ph.D., Catholic University of America, deceased) was a Sierra
Leonean sociologist. He taught sociological methods, and in the undergraduate division, for
example, “Social Structure and Change in Sub-Saharan Africa,” and “History of Western
Africa.” Dr. O. L. E. Mbatia (Ph.D., Oregon State University) was a Kenyan expert in
statistics, and taught quantitative methods. In the undergraduate division, he taught
“Economics of Discrimination,” “Urban Problems,” and “Economic Development of Ghetto
and Barrio” for undergraduates. Dr. Roberts and Dr. Mbatia played an important role in
linguistically verifying Smith’s comparative linguistic analysis of black language and NigerCongo and West African languages. They were receptive to his comparative linguistic view
of black language.
However, there was a risk about the composition of the faculty members in the department:
only one linguistics professor, who espoused one of the dominant paradigms, the “Anglicist
Paradigm” (Smith 1974: 93), served there. His first linguistics mentor, Dr. Mary Key left his
dissertation committee for the following reason:

She disagreed over the use of the term “Ebonics.” . . . That’s what the issue was. She
didn’t support the term “Ebonics.” . . . She did not believe it would be accepted in the
linguistic community. To this day it has not. . . . So she was right. The term hasn’t been
accepted in the White Supremacist linguistic community. That didn’t validate what
I’m saying because white people don’t accept it. . . . She examined what she saw,
described what she saw from the tape recordings. She wasn’t taking a position. She
was describing what she saw based on the transcription of the tape recordings that were
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made of black children. She described, she didn’t prescribe, she described what she
heard and what was translated to her. . . . She attested that the canonical form of syllable
structure in Black English has a CV vocalic pattern. Okay? That’s what she said. I
said that the origin of the CV pattern is Africa. . . . I said that the origin of the CVCV
pattern is attested in articles by the Africanist who are authority on the African
languages. I cited Ladefoged, Welmers, any number of scholars on autochthonous
African languages, who attest that the absence of consonants at the end of words is
related to the fact that there are no consonant blends for homogenous consonants in
African languages. I cited my authorities about African language, continental African
languages. So I explained that the CVCV pattern is related to those patterns in the
autochthonous African languages. . . . [The interviewer: So she didn’t express anything
about your Afrocentric thesis?] No, not to me, she didn’t.
(Smith, personal communication, November 8, 2016)

The reason Smith chose not to keep Dr. Key in his committee was her disagreement over the
naming of black language. She was receptive to his linguistic arguments when they analyzed the
language of black children in 1970 and 1971, and did not express any opinion or opposition on
his thesis that black language is an African language, an African-centered approach that
fundamentally challenged the legitimacy of the accepted paradigms in black linguistics. She
might have considered Smith’s arguments to constitute merely part of the entire Black English
complex, in other words, his arguments might not have denied her Anglicist position. Or she
might have indirectly shown her opposition to his thesis by focusing her opposition on the
naming, because in a sense Dr. Key had already taken her position when she labeled black
language “Black English.”
Finally, the UCI committee members became three: Dr. Joseph L. White, Dr. George O.
Roberts, and Dr. O. L. E. Mbatia, who were all African (incl., of African descent). In replacement
for Dr. Key, Smith asked Dr. Arthur L. Smith (later, Molefi Kete Asante) at UCLA onto his
guidance committee. Now the committee were all Afrocentric enough to accept his thesis on
Ebonics. This shift from Dr. Key (linguistics) to Dr. A. L. Smith (communication) may have

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brought about a very interesting structure and focus in his dissertation (See Section 5.3.9).

5.3.4. African-Centered Ideas on Black Language

There were several important works which gave Smith foundational ideas on Ebonics. In this
section, I shall arrange and discuss in chronological order the African-centered ideas on black
language in various disciplines, which influenced his dissertation thesis (Smith 1974).

5.3.4.1. Carter G. Woodson (1875-1950)

There already appeared in the early 1930s a search for authentic continuity and distinctness
of black language outside of the scale of the English language. It was expressed as part of the
educational thoughts presented by historian Carter G. Woodson. Discussing the discriminatory
treatment of Africans in the United States, Woodson developed his own view on black language
and language education:

In the study of language in school pupils were made to scoff at the Negro dialect as
some peculiar possession of the Negro which they should despise rather than
directed to study the background of this language as a broken-down African
tongue―in short to understand their own linguistic history, which is certainly more
important for them than the French phonetics or Historical Spanish Grammar. To
the African language as such no attention was given except in case of the
preparation of traders, missionaries and public functionaries to exploit the natives.
(Woodson 1933: 18, emphasis added)

At this point it is not clear whether Woodson was aware of the negative meanings

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surrounding the term “dialect.” He might have merely intended to show the oppressor’s
perception of black language. It deserves a special mention that at this stage of the history of
linguistics in the United States, a historian showed a deconstructing insight on the usually
demeaned language of enslaved Africans and their descendants in the United States. It is
sociologically interesting to note that he saw black language as parallel to French and
Spanish. It may suggest he might have drawn on the one nation-one language
conceptualization, a prevailing nationalist ideology, by identifying “Negro” people with a
distinct language. Reflecting the historical phase of linguistics in the United States, though,
as a non-linguist, Woodson made quite an unlinguistic wording “broken-down.”
Dr. Smith found Woodson’s linguistic view a comparative linguistic argument, probably
because Woodson regarded black language not as a dialect of English but as an African
language and the existing linguistic paradigm which could embody this argument was the
genealogical method of comparative linguistics. To be sure, Woodson’s argument appeared
well before Smith got engaged in the academia in the 1970s; however, Woodson’s influence
on his proposition on black language had to wait until the black nationalist movement from
the mid-60s. In fact, Smith encountered Woodson’s African-centered linguistic thesis during
his enrollment at California State College, Los Angeles (1962-1967), possibly, in 1967.
Woodson’s argument was more linguistic vis-à-vis the sociolinguistic nature of Smith’s
doctoral research on black oral expressive styles, so that he decided not to quote Woodson
(1933) in his dissertation. That said, Woodson’s idea had left an imprint on his comparative
linguistic interpretation of black language as an African language.

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5.3.4.2. Janheinz Jahn (1918-1973)

Janheinz Jahn was a German white scholar of African literature. Smith’s dissertation
referred to Jahn (1961) because in order to understand black language Smith needed to
situate and understand it as integral to the whole black or African culture. Albeit a European,
Jahn presented not solely an African-centered epistemology to interpret the data of African
culture in a self-determined way but a social constructionist understanding of what science is
(cf. Jahn 1961: 17). He emphasized one principal perspective that African histories in the
diaspora began in Africa (191). As a manifestation of his African-centered epistemology, he
observed the “Baptist and Methodist Christianities” widely accepted in the black community
in North America and aptly suggested that they might be African rather than Christian (217218), which may provide quite analogous a suggestion to the status of the language of
descendants of enslaved Africans in the United States. Jahn had a wider perspective of what
language is than conventional linguists. On the traditional level, he made the distinction
between vocabulary and grammar, usually made in linguistics. On the other hand, he offered
a wider definition of what constitutes language possibly because it encompassed not solely
the conventional categories of linguistics such as lexicon and grammar but also pragmatic
categories such as style and discourse, as he emphasized, “It is not the vocabulary, but the
way of using speech that is his [i.e., Muntu, ‘human being’] real language” (194). While
pioneers such as Melville J. Herskovits and Frances S. Herskovits (1936)7, Melville J.
Herskovits (1941), Lorenzo D. Turner (1949)8, and Arthur L. Smith (1972) recognized the
existence of African elements in black language (Smith 1974: 60) within the framework of

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creole linguistics, Jahn (1961) was more Afrocentric and comparative linguistic, stating:

In the Afro-American world some hybrid languages have arisen: Creole, Surinaams,
Papiamento and others, which are generally designated as dialects. Creole counts
as spoiled French, Surinaams is also called Negro-English. The vocabulary
consists predominantly of European words, but the syntax and word formation
follow the rules of African grammar. It is wrong therefore to call these languages
‘spoiled’ English or ‘spoiled’ French. If one considers the essence of a language to
be its vocabulary, Creole and Papiamento must be called the youngest of the
Romance languages, Surinaams must be called the youngest of the Germanic
languages. But if one considers the grammatical structure of a language more
important than its vocabulary, then the three languages mentioned do not belong to
the Indo-European group. In the light of African culture, which places function
ahead of object, for which Kuntu is more important in concrete life than Kintu [i.e.,
a thing], Creole, Surinaams and Papiamento must be described as neo-African
languages. (194)

The author based his rationale for describing those newly born languages in the African
diaspora as neo-African languages, not belonging to the Indo-European language family,
upon the grammatical continuation of African languages. It seems this cultural epistemology
was most persuasive or acceptable for Dr. Smith because he repeatedly cites the same
paragraph (e.g., Smith 2015). On the other hand, Jahn may have meant to refer to only
“more” African languages called creole or pidgin, not the US varieties of black language
spoken outside the Sea Islands. That said, he should be given credit where it was due: he
was, perhaps, the first white scholar ever that explicitly provided a comparative linguistic
paradigm for description of black language, the citadel of creole linguistics and
dialectological sociolinguistics. This work, however, was not directly quoted in the
dissertation perhaps because it was written by a non-linguist, a scholar of literature.

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5.3.4.3. Mervyn C. Alleyne (1933-)

Smith read “Linguistic Continuity of Africa in the Caribbean” (Alleyne 1971) soon after
he entered UCI. Caribbean linguist Mervyn C. Alleyne (See Figure 17), who provided a
linguistic foundation for his comparative linguistic paradigm in his doctoral research, made
the following interesting observation on the cultural nationalist atmosphere of Afro-America
in the latter half of the 20th century:

In North America and in the Caribbean, there is a growing feeling that Black people
must finally take control over of their own political and economic lives. In the
Caribbean, the reevaluation and regeneration of non-European-derived forms of
behavior is seen as a necessary factor in the development of the area. The need to
break away from external economic domination and develop the area by internal
dynamics and internal resources, both intellectual and material, implies that the
West Indian has to create a new image, a new self-reliance, a new cultural security.
In the United States, the Black cultural awakening is not seen in terms of nationbuilding as it is Caribbean, since Afro-Americans there constitute a minority group
within a preexisting nation. But for them, too, cultural renaissance is also
functional, whether seen in terms of strengthening the United States by more
significant participation of Blacks in all aspects of national life, or in other terms,
undefined at present. (Alleyne 1980: 1)

The passage might have shown his own underlying political ideology, although he did not
explicitly say so. It is no wonder, though, if he had such an inclination as a linguist, as many
other linguists in the past did all over the world, which never invalidated his work.
As a black Caribbean linguist Alleyne’s observation of the political and academic atmosphere
in Afro-America sounds valid. The United States witnessed the emergence of cultural black
nationalism or Afrocentrism since the late 1960s. It functioned as a framework of reference for
African-centered scholarship on black cultural phenomena, especially which gathered

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Figure 17. Dr. Mervyn C. Alleyne at his Home in Jamaica.

momentum amidst the heightened black nationalism from the late 1960s and, again, the late
1980s. This African-centered scholarship, viz., Black Studies was a cultural nationalist project. In
this vein, Smith’s African-centered concerns with Egyptology and black language as a legitimate
language, which might be connected to African languages, at UCI, may be categorized as

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cultural nationalist projects. To be sure, the statement above by Alleyne was made in 1980 and
thus did not influence Smith when his dissertation was in progress; however, there was one
cultural nationalist, i.e., African-centered linguistic statement on Afro-American “dialects” made
by Alleyne nine years before he observed the cultural nationalist phenomena in Afro-America in
1980, which Smith admits influenced his linguistic research on black language. Alleyne (1971)
argued on the newly born languages of the African diaspora that:

[i]f we find an almost total absence of Indo-European morphology in AfroAmerican dialects, but instead find that the morphosyntax of West African
languages, we can reasonably conclude that there is morphosyntactical continuity
from West African languages to Afro-American dialects. But . . . the way in which
the genesis of Creole languages has been presented in much of the current work
implies a break in any linguistic continuity with Africa. The implication is that
Africans and African slaves gave up African languages, that is, broke with the
African linguistic tradition and accepted a pidgin i.e. primarily European invention,
a simplified version of a European language. To relate non-Standard dialects of
Black American urban communities to a pidgin would lead to the inference that
there has been discontinuity, as far as the transmission of an African cultural item is
concerned, and would in fact support the deficiency hypothesis. (126)

The linguistic criterion of morphosyntactical continuity for determining linguistic genealogy was
the very criterion of comparative linguistics. This idea gave Smith the linguistic backbone for
pursuing the grammatical and, extensively, pragmatic continuity of black language to NigerCongo and West African languages, i.e., treating it as an African language, not a West-Germanic
language. Alleyne’s criterion added a traditional linguistic, i.e., morphosyntactic rationale to
Smith’s holistic―structural, stylistic, and paralinguistic―rationale for the continuation of
African language traditions. An inextricable connection between structure and style was
postulated by Smith when he said:

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Since historians have already established the fact that prior to the existence of any
American institutions, the ancestors and antecedents of Black Americans were Africans
who were brought to America as captives and slaves, and since recent comparative and
historical linguistic studies have produced much evidence of a plausible African
substratum in the phonological, morphosyntactical, and semantic features of African and
Afro-American speech, there is no reason why it cannot reasonably be inferred that
there exists an African substratum in the Afro-American verbal arts and oral expressive
styles. (Smith 1974: 59)

It must be noted, as in the case of Jahn, that Alleyne’s article discussed the linguistic status of
newly born languages in the Caribbean, perhaps, not including those in the United States.
Therefore, Smith may have drawn on Alleyne’s thesis because Gullah, a language of the Sea
Islands, was regarded as a creole, in that sense, comparable to the Caribbean counterparts, and
Gullah was often considered to constitute a continuum with mainland US varieties of black
language (Rickford 1974).

5.3.4.4. James Haskins (1941-2005) and Hugh F. Butts (unknown)

The linguistic continuity and distinctness arguments so far were complemented by the
ensuing psychological argument for the continuity and distinctness of oral expressive styles in
Smith’s dissertation. Smith cited The Psychology of Black Language published by Haskins and
Butts in 1973 as the “Continuity in the African Substratum Position” in search of another verbal
perspective, i.e., psychological perspective to interpret black language as an African
phenomenon, against “The Severance and the Discontinuity Position,” represented by E.
Franklin Frazier (1966). The late James Haskins9 was a Professor Emeritus in the Department of
English, University of Florida, Gainesville, a prolific writer of nonfictions, and a social

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psychologist. As a former special education teacher in the New York City public school system,
he had first-hand experience of some issues black children had in school (cf. Haskins 1969).
Hugh F. Butts was, at that time, and still is a psychiatrist. practices now in New York.
Their work may have provided Smith with a functional perspective for examining the
production and reproduction process of black oral expressive styles. Haskins and Butts argued
that a sort of universal black language was produced through continuation and adaptation as a
result of a common series of sufferings (1973: 29), from slavery, segregation, pathologization,
and criminalization. They said:

All Blacks can trace their heritage to some part of Africa. It was only as a result of the
slave trade that they were dispersed throughout America and the islands of the
Caribbean. But once dispersed and forced to accommodate to different alien
environments, each group of blacks developed a specific language, folklore, music, and
religion. These in turn influenced each group’s characteristics which in turn influenced
its thinking. Each retained certain aspects of the African heritage and incorporated
them with certain aspects of the new dominant culture. (Haskins & Butts 1973: 28)

In this vein, Smith argued that due to the long sufferings, “there has been much more
reinforcement of the original African cultural behavioral patterns than there has been
Americanization” (Smith 1974: 64).
Drawing on this psychological work, Smith may have attempted to relate the grammatical
structure of black language to the thought process of blacks because he equated the term “deep
structure” or “substratum” to both “grammar” and “thought process.” In fact, Haskins and Butts
attempted to establish the continuity of black language to African languages in continental
Africa, and then, equalize the partly African language with the partly African thought process of
blacks. Syntactics (relation of signs to signs), semantics (relation of signs to their meanings), and

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pragmatics (relation of signs to the people who use them) are the scheme to learn about the
psychological or thought process involved in linguistic knowledge and behavior (Haskins &
Butts 1973: 7, citing Miller 1964: 91). Thus, “thought process” came to be equated with
“grammar” and this idea sounds similar to Dr. Smith’s argument that African thought processcum-grammar continues in black thought process-cum-grammar, as he explains:

The grammar is the thought process. They are synonymous terms. The grammar is
the thought process. That’s the mental system that linguists are attempting to describe.
There is a thought process that he uses the term “mental system.” . . . It connects to
psychology because psychology is the study of mind from a different point of view,
from a non-linguistic point of view. Okay? Psychologists are interested in behavior
that exhibits itself in a myriad of ways including linguistic.
(Smith, personal communication, November 8, 2016)

Lastly, it must be pointed out that the authors viewed black language as “black English.”
What the work provided for Smith’s African-centered argument on black language, therefore,
may be rephrased as follows: the psychological production and reproduction process of distinct
black language as a result of African continuity and American adaptation under the oppressive
systems of the United States. This last point probably reflects the statement that:

[t]o the extent to which there has been positive or negative reinforcement, certain
aspects and features of the oral tradition of Africa have been retained and currently exist
in the verbal arts and oral expressive styles of Black America. (Smith 1974: 94-95)

5.3.5. Fieldwork on the Language of Black Children

Conversations on some topics by black children, 9 to 12 years old, at the Monte Vista

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Elementary School in Santa Ana, California were recorded in collaboration with the teachers of
the Language Development Center of the school. The interviewers, transcribers, and interpreters
were presented in Key et al. (1977) as in the aggregate but not identified. Dr. Smith discloses the
fact that the interviewer, not the interviewers, and the transcriber, not the transcribers, was
himself; he was the only black in the research group, and the other investigators did not
understand those utterances the black children spoke.
The results of the fieldwork and research were presented at the Conference on Child
Language, Chicago, Illinois, November 22-24, 1971. There was a panel presentation by Dr. Mary
Ritchie Key, Assistant Professor of Linguistics, Laila Fiege-Kollmann, a graduate student, and
Smith, a graduate student, from the University of California, Irvine, entitled "Some Linguistic
and Stylistic Features of Child Black English.” The research group mentioned the multiple
origins of “Black English”: (1) old British dialects such as Early Modern English, (2) West
African languages, (3) developmental, (4) malapropisms, (5) baby talk/pidgin English, and so on.
It was Smith that proposed the West African origin hypothesis and inserted the comments or
analyses, to which “Dr. Key was receptive” (Smith, personal communication, September 5,
2016). In his comparative analysis of black language and West African languages, he drew on
several works (Abraham 1959; Ladefoged 1964; Spencer 1971; Taylor 1969) on West African
languages and West African “English.” He provided the following examples:

Example 1. Syllable-timed (consonant-vowel or CV pattern)
e.g., down there /dau.ner/; trying to /trai.na/
Example 2. /l/ and /r/

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e.g., rather /waðǝ/; playing /prejǝn/
Example 3. Double subject
e.g., “The chief he came.”
Example 4. Repetition of a clause connector
e.g., “Then…,” “And then…”

For Example 1, a phonetic feature, he said, “The English of Nigerian speakers [is] described as
syllable-timed” (Key, Fiege-Kollman, & Smith 1977: 195, n. 7, citing Spencer 1971: 42 & 109).
He explains Example 2, a phonological feature, by saying, “/l/ and /r/ are a common source of
interference from language where a phonological distinction is not made, as for example in West
African Ewe” (Ibid.: 189, citing Spencer 1971: 158). Example 3 was a syntactic feature seen in
Hausa, a West African language (Ibid.: 189, citing Spencer 1971: 132). Example 4 was a stylistic
or discourse feature, different from the traditional grammatical features. He compared black
language to West African Hausa and noted, “in a narrative there is often a long sequence of ‘then’
clauses: ‘they asked us and then we said we agreed: so they replied that . . . then they . . .’”
(Ibid.: 196, n. 15, citing Abraham 1959). He gave other interesting examples possibly deriving
from the enslaved Africans’ and their descendants’ experiences in the New World. The use of jug
as in the clause “cause dat gran’father got jugged in his heart” was a semantic example possibly
coming from Jamaican English (Ibid.: 186 & 195, n. 4).

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5.3.6. Conception of an Ethnolinguist’s/Comparative Linguistic Paradigm

In order to rectify the Eurocentric trend in linguistics, the ethnolinguistic view or a
comparative linguistic paradigm adopted the genealogical criterion of grammar and an additional
genealogical criterion of pragmatics for the language of descendants of enslaved Africans in the
United States and beyond. The comparative linguistic approach, which had been reserved for
certain languages thus far, provided Ebonics with an African linguistic continuity, “authentically
distinct” to African values and “continuous” to African pasts. The newly adopted paradigm
focused on the grammar (phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics)―a “hybrid”
of the grammars of West African languages (not such one pure, continuing grammar as IndoEuropean linguistics attempted in the 19th century)―of black language and described it as a new
“hybrid” African language. It may have been an effective paradigm which provides an Africancentered epistemology and which could liberate black linguistics from the entrenched racist or
racialized scientific discourse.
Against the mainstream paradigms, the Transformationalist view (an equivalent to the
Anglicist Paradigm) and the Creolist view, in 1971, Smith conceived a scientific idea that black
language is a grammatical continuation of West African languages. It was a proposition he
reached, when he and Dr. Key collected and analyzed the language data of school-aged black
children in Los Angeles. He studied the data by himself and made a comparative study of black
language and ancestral West African languages. He recalls:

What she [= Dr. Key] gleaned from that was that as a phenomenon of African
languages, the canonical form or shape of the syllable structure of Ebonics, black
language, she was calling it Black English, was very strongly a CVCV [consonant
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vowel consonant vowel] pattern. . . . I was already of the belief that our language was
related to the African languages’ substratum. I went to the African languages. And I
found several articles that attested to the fact that the shape of the syllable structure in
African languages was CV-structured. . . . Recognizing that phonetics is only one aspect
of the grammar of languages, . . . phonetics, phonology, morphology, . . . syntax, and
semantics, . . . separating those aspects of grammar.
(Smith, personal communication, November 8, 2016)

At this stage of research, Smith just mentioned the CVCV pattern as a predominant linguistic
continuation of West African languages, with several “minor” patterns. He might have had more
to say about the relationship between those languages across the Atlantic, but he did not go
further in this, his first mentor’s research project. That said, highly hypothetical as it might have
been back then, Smith (2015) concluded from the fieldwork that:

[i]t was in 1970 and 1971 as a graduate student at UCI, that, on the basis of my research
and studies of the grammar of the Nigritian (Niger-Congo and West African) languages,
I concluded that the native language of descendants of enslaved Niger-Congo and West
Africans has a Niger-Congo and West African or Nigritian grammar with European
words superimposed (most of which are not even native English words).

The African source languages were chosen drawing on Lorenzo D. Turner (1949). In his
dissertation, Smith began with his comparative linguistic hypothesis on the historical
development of Ebonics in opposition to the two mainstream paradigms, the Transformationalist
and the Creolist, drawing mainly on Mervyn C. Alleyne (1971). He developed a general
comparative analysis of linguistic and paralinguistic features, especially, a more detailed
comparative analysis of the pragmatic features of black language and Niger-Congo and West
African languages. Therefore, his ethnolinguistic view or comparative linguistic paradigm with
respect to traditional structural features may have been of a highly theoretical or hypothetical

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nature at this stage (See Section 5.3.9 for further detail). The information below may be
illustrative of his conception of an ethnolinguistic/comparative linguistic paradigm back then: for
the summer semester of 1971, he taught a course on “Black Oral Expressive Styles” under the
general theme of “Educational Strategies for Tutoring the Bilingual Child XI 100A(4)” at UCI
(UC Irvine 1971). Though the course information did not contain any known linguistic labelings
such as Black English, he taught the course as a “bilingual” issue, thus indirectly treating black
language as a language, not a dialect of English.

5.3.7. Two Dominant Paradigms within the Scale of the English Language

In this section, I will briefly explain the two dominant paradigms in black linguistics in the
early 1970s, against which Smith deployed his African-centered paradigm: the
Transformationalist and the Creolist. For, within the theoretical-scientific factor, it was not only
the language data obtained from the black children in fieldwork but also the mainstream black
linguistics that influenced Smith to construct an African-centered paradigm.
Smith identified in the literature review of his dissertation these three different paradigms on
the historical development of Ebonics: Creolist (Stewart 1971), Transformationalist (Pfaff 1971),
and Ethnolinguist (Alleyne 1971). He found the first two linguistic views were dominant in black
linguistics. The Creolist viewed black language as a decreolized dialect of English for much of
black language and an English creole for the Gullah part of black language. The
Transformationalist viewed it as a dialect of English from the beginning. In this section, I shall
briefly discuss on what grounds Smith refuted the mainstream paradigms so that his

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ethnolinguistic or comparative linguistic paradigm could be validated.

5.3.7.1. Transformationalist View

According to Ernie A. Smith (1974), the Transformationalist view claimed that:

in the ‘deep structure’ the linguistic patterns of Black and White Americans are basically
the same, and . . . by careful and systematic comparison of morphosyntactical
constructions, employing transformational rules, one can derive the identical underlying
grammatical structure of Black and Anglo American English . . . the differences in Black
Anglo American linguistic behavior are superficial and mainly in the surface structure.
(18)

The view argued that “Black English” and standard Anglo English have different structures at the
surface level but the same structure at the deep level. However, Smith countered, “the question
of linguistic genesis can not be explained by merely using phrase structure rules, tree diagrams,
and transformational manipulation of contemporary linguistic events” (Ibid.: 21). He suggested
the Transformationalist view did not see the deep structures of African languages but those of
English varieties. He pointed out that it had no diachronic validity.

5.3.7.2. Creolist View

In creole linguistics, there was a group (e.g., Lucien Adam) who saw the existence of African
language grammars in the substratum of the “creoles.”10 These “substratists” inadvertently
suggested that “comparative-linguistically” speaking, newly born languages in the African

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diaspora are African languages. The last criterion and interpretation was a position which Ernie
A. Smith took on Ebonics in his dissertation (Smith placed the black language in the mainland
United States, widely defined as a dialect of English, and the black language in the Sea Islands,
widely defined as a creole of English, onto the same terrain: language, neither dialect nor
variety). However, the substratist position clung to one principal creolistic criterion and still
interpreted it as a European language-based “creole.” It was true that some of the creolists
officially adopted the criterion of lexicon for determining linguistic genealogy. This was the
major point of contention for Smith. On the other hand, some renowned linguists, e.g., Dell
Hymes (1971) and Suzanne Romaine (2001), emphasize the genealogical criterion in creolistics
is grammar, not lexicon. However, even the latter position employs the linguistic labeling
“English-based-” or “-English.” It seems they “officially” pronounce grammar as the criterion,
while “unofficially” employ lexicon as the criterion.
Smith pointed out a few serious drawbacks in the Creolist approach to black language. He
refuted the fact that the approach viewed the newly born languages as kinds of English as
manifested in the wording “creolized English” (Smith 1974: 20). The Creolist scholars did not
apply a sufficient knowledge of Niger-Congo and West African languages, as Herskovits (1941:
276, cited by Asante 1990: 19) admonished more than seven decades ago. Moreover, “until
recently research into the linguistic systems of autochthonous African languages has been
negligible” (Smith 1974: 24). Therefore, the Creolists could not compare the structure of newly
born languages in the African diaspora with the ancestral languages in the continent, except
Lorenzo Dow Turner (1949).
Smith (1974) did not develop his argument on the other part of the Creolist view that black

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language, especially, outside of the Sea Islands was a decreolized variety of English, i.e., not a
creole but a dialect of English. However, Smith should have refuted the genealogical argument
that the mainland variety of black language was a creole in the past but currently is a dialect of
English.

5.3.8. A Small Conference among Black Scholars in St. Louis

In St. Louis, Missouri, in January 1973, there was a conference on the “Cognitive and
Language Development of the Black Child.” In one of the hospitality rooms at Rodeway Inn at
Jefferson Avenue and Market Street, on the 23rd of January, a small caucus of black scholars
gathered to self-determine, that is, rename and redefine black language away from caucasiocentrism. They attempted to redress its deficit status as implicitly promoted in the use of the term
“non-standard English” or “Black English” which they themselves had used to refer to black
language. This feeling was shared not merely by those who attended the meeting but also by
others who later continued to view it as a dialect of English in the discipline of linguistics (e.g.,
Smitherman 1972). One intersection was seen in the disciplines of the caucus, black psychology
and black linguistics. Both fields of inquiry were eager amidst the modern black nationalist
movement to find a common conceptual framework designed to organize, explain, and
understand black psychology and language in education and the wider society.
The small black caucus was composed of Dr. Robert L. Williams (psychologist, Washington
University), Dr. Grace Holt (speech & communication, University of Illinois, Chicago), Dr. Ann
Covington (speech & audiology, City College), and doctoral student Ernie A. Smith (linguist).

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Dr. Smith thinks back on what brought them together:

The conference was funded by a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health.
The title of the conference was “The Cognitive and Linguistic Development of the
African American Child.” There were many other scholars invited who had also been
funded by the NIMH to do research on the cognitive, mental development of the black
child. Okay? These scholars came and presented papers. After the first two papers
were presented, . . . [it] became evident that there were scholars using the term “Black
English” to describe what others in the audience disagreed with. [One question asked
was], “What are you classifying as English? Are you basing your classification of
English on vocabulary or are you basing your classification on grammar?” People who
claimed it was English didn’t have a clue as to what my questions were. Because they
hadn’t delved into what the definition of English is. Okay? They hadn’t delved into
the issue of what constitutes English. You gonna claim this is a dialect of English, but
you haven’t established what’s your criteria for classifying English. [The interviewer:
Are they linguists or psychologists?] They were people in education, they were
sociologists. I don’t recall other than Mary Key, she was there, she was presenting her
paper. Mary Key was more of an anthropologist than a linguist. But she was teaching
courses in linguistics. That’s what helped me understand the importance of
describing as opposed to prescribing language behavior. The papers that were presented
at the conference resulted in the black scholars who were there, who understood what I
was saying. They want to hear me explain more. That’s what the small group meeting
was about. And they all agreed that I gave it more fully. But I hadn’t presented my paper
yet. They understood where I was coming from. Then I posed the question I pose. Okay.
Robert Williams understood because he had heard me speak at Harvard University a
year before. He was more interested in the African substratum in black speech because
he was not a linguist. This whole notion of deep structure, surface structure that existed
thanks to Noam Chomsky in human language was something that he felt is very useful.
The Black Intelligence Test of Homogeneity was presented around the meaning of
words. There were a hundred of questions on the BITCH test.
(Smith, personal communication, November 8, 2016)

Dr. Williams had been intrigued by Smith’s African-centered thesis since they met in Boston a
year before. Then, Dr. Ann Covington and Dr. Grace Holt became interested in his thesis too.
Therefore, his African-centered paradigm was the gravity for the small black caucus to gather in
the by-product but historic meeting. Dr. Williams was interested in the “deep structure” of the
semantics of black language, in other words, the relationship between the grammatical structure

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and the thought process of black people.
Dr. Williams was professor of psychology at Washington University in St. Louis and widely
known as the creator of the BITCH (Black Intelligence Test of Cultural Homogeneity) test.11 He
was the first full-time director of the Black Studies Program at Washington University in St.
Louis.12 He was one of the founders of the Association of Black Psychologists (ABP) and the
second national president.13 Dr. Grace Holt was professor of speech at the University of Illinois,
Chicago, and appointed to establish the Black Studies Program in 1971, for which she served as
director from 1974 through 1986.14 Her research focus was black non-verbal communication.15
Dr. Ann Covington was associate professor of speech and audiology at federal City College. Her
specialty was “Black English.”16 Their pressing practical concerns in psychology and speech
may partly explain the counter-Establishment epistemology which they were geared toward to
reconstruct the name and definition of black language. For its name and definition had affected a
large segment of the black community but they had not been adequately addressed in the
dominant linguistic paradigm in which black language was scientifically and institutionally
treated as a dialect of English. Their discussion on the relabeling and redefinition of black
language proceeded as shown below:

Dr. Robert Williams: “Ladies and gentlemen, we need to define what we speak. We
need to give a clear definition of our language.”
Dr. Ernie Smith: “Let me tell you something, if you notice, every language in the world
represents a nation or a nationality. What we are speaking has continuity not
only in the United States, but outside the United States and all the way back to
the mother country. We need to get the term completely off the English scale
and start calling it what it really represents.”
Dr. Williams: “Let me make a point here: Language is a process of communication.
But, we need to deal with the root of our language. What about Ebo? Ebo
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linguistics? Ebolingual? Ebo-Phonics? Ebonics? Let's define our language as
EBONICS.”
The Group: “That sounds real good.”
Dr. Williams: “I am talking about an ebony language. We know that ebony means black
and that phonics refers to speech sounds or the science of sounds.17 Thus, we
are really talking about the science of black speech sounds or language.”
Dr. Ann Covington: “That's beautiful.”
Dr. Williams: “With Ebonics, we mean black pronunciation, vocabulary, syntax,
structure and the whole ball of wax. . . . Ebonics, first of all, means a lexicon or
black vocabulary. Secondly, it refers to the basic structure of black speech.”
Dr. Grace Halt: “That’s beautiful. Now we can go to a new term and really define it and
say what our language really is.”
Dr. Smith: “Ebonics may be defined as the linguistic and paralinguistic features which
on a concentric continuum represents the communicative competence of the
West African, Caribbean and United States slave descendent of African origin.
It includes the various idioms, patois, argots, idiolects and social dialects of
black people. Ebonics, also, includes nonverbal sounds, cues and gestures
which are systematically and predictably utilized in the process of
communication by Afro-Americans.”
Dr. Williams: “Yes, that is our official definition of Ebonics.”
(Williams 1997: 210; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 28, 1997, italics added)

The then doctoral student of linguistics at UCI, Ernie A. Smith pronounced the black
language represents the black nation and thus it should be completely off the English scale.
The relabeling of black language was initiated by Dr. Williams, resulting in the coinage of a
term which symbolized their collective destiny and identity. The new definition of the new
term was provided by Smith. This Pan-African definition of newly-born languages in the
African diaspora was well resonant with the 1971 argument by Caribbean creole-cumcomparative linguist Mervyn C. Alleyne (See Section 5.3.4.3). It encompassed two levels of

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linguistic entity: a new African language within a geopolitical boundary and a new African
language family across such boundaries. All this process illustrated a cultural nationalist
project like Black Studies, as widely practiced in language nationalisms the world over,

5.3.9. Doctoral Dissertation

In the first year of his graduate studies, Smith decided to major in linguistics under Dr. Key.
But taught by Dr. White and others, his expertise ranged from linguistics to psychology to ethnic
studies and community advisorship. At the completion of the dissertation his interests covered 1)
sociolinguistics, linguistics, child development, and inner-city education, 2) political and cultural
history of minorities in America, and 3) trans-racial communications, urban race relations, and
urban crisis liaison. There are two points of special interest to me. One is, Smith attempted to
develop self-knowledge and directly channel it to the black community. Another is, though most
people may assume that linguists would interrogate their areas of interest as primarily related to
language, he juxtaposed linguistics, psychology, education, and law. Therefore, it may be
significant to see his research not purely as scientific but also as practical, i.e. the two are integral
to each other, which is one of the pivotal features of Black Studies or Africology.
Smith’s phrasing of his dissertation title “The Evolution and Continuing Presence of the
African Oral Tradition in Black America,” deserves a special mention. He employed the term
“Oral”, not a more specific term, “Linguistic,” because he was enrolled in Comparative Culture,
not Linguistics. It might have been partly because he invited Dr. Arthur L. Smith to his
committee, who specialized in black communication. In the first half of the dissertation, he

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attempted to establish a holistic argument that Ebonics is a formal and functional continuation of
African languages. The dissertation, considering my presupposition that the dissertation should
have attempted to establish the grammatical continuity of Ebonics to Niger-Congo and West
African languages, accomplished what he could do in the department: it briefly discussed the
traditional linguistic category of grammar, but the focus was on comparative analysis of the
sociolinguistic or stylistic aspects of Ebonics with those of African languages. I’ve found that it
was in 1978 that as an associate professor at California State University, Fullerton, Dr. Smith (he
called himself “Ernie Abdullah Smith” then) began linguistic field work in West African
countries (Cameroon, Niger, Sierra Leone, etc.) for a more substantive comparative linguistic
analysis of some West African languages and Ebonics (Smith 1977, 1978b, 1978c). Therefore, it
may be said that his ethnolinguistic/comparative linguistic paradigm in the dissertation was
highly hypothetical and theoretical, particularly in terms of the traditional grammatical domains
of phonetics, phonology, morphosyntax, and semantics.
Smith began his dissertation by stating, “Black people in America, owing to their
autochthonous African heritage―which is primarily an oral culture―have retained and
maintained a highly structured, rule governed, and systematized communication system in the
oral tradition” (Smith 1974: xvi). This thesis may have partly been influenced by his non-UCI
committee member, Dr. Smith, who said, “Black Americans are essentially an oral people much
like their African ancestors who found the expressive word to be the basis of society” (A. L.
Smith: 1972a: x). In fact, when Smith argued on the oral expressive styles of blacks, most of his
references overlapped with those found in A. L. Smith (1972b). The main concern in the doctoral
research was “the interpersonal and cultural context in which Black oral expressive styles

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occur . . . the extent to which the urban or inner city Black youths utilize, recognize, and
differentiate Afro-American oral expressive styles” (Smith 1974: 14), while recognizing the
current trend in black linguistics which was focused on the structural aspects and features of
Ebonics.
His African-centered ideas on black oral expressive styles were gained from various
linguistic themes: comparative linguistics (Fromkin & Rodman 1974), anthropological
ethnolinguistics (Kroeber 1969), and generative transformational theory (Chomsky 1965).
Different from the traditional comparative linguistics, which drew on written data to reconstruct
a common proto-language and/or classify languages, his linguistic and sociolinguistic analysis
had to be based on oral data because black language did not have an established orthography (in
fact, they were “written down” when they had to be incorporated into his dissertation). He
referred to the following source to accommodate the comparative linguistic perspective into
comparative analysis of unwritten languages:

For language families without any written history, the attempt to reconstruct an earlier
language from several modern languages shown to be related may be the only way of
gaining any information about the history of the speakers of those languages. This
method has proved modestly effective in the case of American Indian languages, though
we may never achieve any detailed knowledge. But we get a rough picture of where
peoples were at what point in time. Knowing that two languages are closely related,
but widely separated geographically, tells us that one or the other group of speakers
migrated (or they both migrated in opposite directions).
(Fromkin & Rodman 1974: 219)

It is significant that Fromkin and Rodman told Smith that even unwritten languages could be a
target of comparative linguistic analysis, different from conventional wisdom. The authors’ view
of comparative analysis of unwritten languages allows us to understand that Smith’s comparative

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linguistic analysis of Ebonics and West African languages achieved no detailed knowledge.
Knowing unwritten languages could be comparatively studied, Smith consulted an
anthropological-linguistic case study on American Indian languages, which survived thousands
of years, and learned the methodology for investigating the genetic relationships between
unwritten languages. He adopted the method to comparatively investigate the history of some
sociolinguistic styles of Ebonics and West African languages. It was innovative in that it adopted
a modified linguistic methodology for stylistic features, rather than traditional structural features.
The anthropological linguistic method employed in the case study viewed language change and
continuity in the following way:

Spoken language is in a sense always changing, since each speaker of his tongue
imprints on it his imperceptibly individual voice and accent and choice or rejection of
particular words and usages, but the changing is as drops of water on the stone of fixed
grammatical form. (Kroeber 1969: 16)

Based on the author’s view on the nature of the grammar of an unwritten language, Smith argued
since the grammatical structure remains relatively intact throughout history, the grammar of
African oral expressive styles also remains relatively stable in the deep structure of AfroAmerican oral expressive styles. Three years later, a similar idea was expressed by black linguist
Geneva Smitherman, who specialized in black language. Though Smitherman took a different
position from Smith, their concerns converged here:

[T]he one item of a language that remains relatively rigid and fixed over time is its
structure. . . . Black English’s main structural components are . . . the adaptations based
on African language rules. (Smitherman 1977: 6, 9; Smitherman 2001: 215, 220, 229)

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Smith appropriated some key concepts from other traditional subdisciplines for his
comparative linguistic study of Ebonics: transformational grammar and creole linguistics. He
adopted the notions “deep structure” and “surface structure” from Noam Chomsky (1965) for
analyzing Ebonics. The application of the terminology in his dissertation suggested “there are
underlying intracultural rules (deep structure) and inter-group linguistic functions (surface
structure) for the uses of Afro-American oral expressive styles and verbal arts” (Smith 1974: 66,
n. 23). In 1962, he brought in the process “relexification” from creole linguistics. William
Stewart theorized the process by which the original syntax of a “creole” language is left almost
intact (Stewart 1962: 46-47, cited in Bailey 1965: 172). It conferred legitimacy on Smith’s
argument that the grammars (incl., syntaxes) of West African languages constitute the
predominant grammars of Ebonics.
Smith’s research targeted blacks who acquired black language in the environment in which it
was spoken and heard. He argued that “the American elementary and secondary schools and the
Black interactions, therein, must be considered as plausible tributaries for the precipitation and/or
nutriment of the verbal arts or the oral expressive styles” (Smith 1974: 33-34). Starting from the
comparative linguistic understandings he had gained from his fieldwork with Dr. Key, he
determined to examine comparatively the form and function of African oral literature and those
of Afro-American oral literature.
The oral expressive styles on the African continent (particularly, Niger-Congo and West
African) and in the United States were compared with respect to (1) the audience (direct
involvement), (2) audience style (call and response), (3) genres (sacred or religious literature,
mythic recitals and stories, genealogies and historico-legendary recitations, riddles and

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proverbs), (4) styles (tone, phoneme, morpheme, syntax, prosody and rhythm, symbolism such as
metaphors, similes, and clichés), (5) the performer (narrators, reciters, announcers or orators,
preachers), and (6) gestures (phonographic, ocular). What made the elements of African oral
tradition comparable to the corresponding elements of the Afro-American oral tradition was this
reasoning:

Since it is an axiomatic historical fact that the slave forbearers of Black America were of
African origin, the hypothesis that there exists a genetic relationship between the
African oral tradition and the oral expressive styles of Black America, cannot be
considered as purely speculative conjecture. (Smith 1974: 87)

Based on the oral tradition of Africa which diasporic Africans brought for slavery, and the
pervasiveness of nommo, the spoken word as a result of the anti-literacy laws during slavery,
blacks in the United States produced and reproduced their distinct oral expressive styles, i.e., an
autochthonous continuation of African oral expressive styles. Considering both formal and
functional aspects, Smith maintained African deep structure continues in black oral literature,
saying:

No matter how drastically altered the form or how different the social function of oral
literature in America, the ravages of slavery did not decimate their deep structure. The
underlying forms and function of African oral literature has, like the morphosyntax of
African language, been resistant to change. (Smith 1974: 90)

The first two-thirds of the dissertation research was of theoretical nature with a few examples
dispersed into each category of the oral expressive styles in black America. Especially the
descriptive part of the African oral tradition was highly theoretical with inputs from various

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secondary sources. He did not conduct field research on this part of the comparative analysis.
The explanatory part of the Afro-American oral tradition was also highly theoretical but with
both primary and secondary data. Therefore, all the comparative analysis was basically
theoretical as he stated, “I have not reached any firm or final conclusions regarding the
theoretical issues of whether or not the structural linguistic features of Afro-American speech are
a continuation of African linguistic forms” (Smith 1974: 143).
In the second one-third, Smith conducted field research to examine how inner-city black
youths maintain the oral expressive styles of blacks in America, i.e., check his hypothesis that the
longer black students stay in school, the lower their proficiency in the styles becomes. The
sample was an in-school and out-of-school population of urban inner city youths in Los Angeles,
Santa Ana, and San Bernardino, paired by age, sex, years in school, family sizes, income levels,
parents’ educational levels, and places of birth, the respondent’s place of birth, and number of
years the respondent had resided in California. The findings supported his hypothesis. Against
the popular notion that females are more oriented toward a “high-status” code like a dominant
code, often called “standard,” black females scored a slightly higher than black males in the
maintenance of Afro-American oral expressive styles.

5.3.10. Courses on Ebonics

As mentioned earlier, Smith started to teach a course on black language or Ebonics and other
courses since the summer semester of 1971. He taught about black language as a language other
than English. In the winter of 1973, he had a course to teach named “Black Linguistics” (UCI

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PCC W 1973). Because the winter of 1973 brochure should have been produced well before the
semester began, at least before the semester began, like December 1972, Smith did not have a
specialized term to use for that course, considering particularly that the term “Ebonics” was
coined in late January of 1973; thus, there officially existed no new naming for black language.
This was evident in the course description which read:

In the Black community there are varieties of verbal patterns and non-verbal
communicative gestures which have historically evolved from the Black experience and
presently exist as an integral part of contemporary Black America’s life style. The
purpose of this course is to explore and explain the phonological, syntactic, and
semantic nuance of Black English and gestures and mannerisms on contemporary Black
America within the scope of the most recent language and communication theory, and
thereby increase effective communication between different racial and ethnic groups.
This approach will allow examination of language and communications in terms which
are familiar to students and scholars of human communications as well as to laymen
interested in broadening their social awareness and developing their communicative
skills through familiarization and comprehension of Black English. (emphasis added)

One possible reason why the course description contained the labelling “Black English” was that
he might have respected the Anglicist conceptualization and theorization of black language his
mentor linguist then held. Another reason might have been that Smith might have tried to let
students soon recognize what language the instruction was about. He also taught “Independent
Study” in the Black Culture section.
In the spring of 1973, he taught as part of the undergraduate courses in Black Culture a
course entitled “Black Oral Expressive Styles,” explaining “the parlance, jargon, and
mannerisms of contemporary Black America.”18 He had another course called “Sociolinguistic
Approach to Writing” (UCI PCC S 1973) with the following course description:

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A seminar on the sociolinguistic approach to the writing, reading and speech problems
peculiar to Black students, emphasizing the structural differences between ordinary
speech and the written “University Dialect.” Emphasis will be given to contrastive
linguistic and sociolinguistic features which distinguish Ebonics (Black English) and the
“University Dialect.” (emphasis added)

He promoted a contrastive teaching technique, widely used in bilingual education or ESL classes,
which he has continued to commend to this day. It must be noted that while it was
interchangeable with “Black English” in the description, the term “Ebonics” appeared here soon
after it was coined earlier in the same year in St. Louis. Perhaps because Dr. Key left his
committee for her disagreement over the use of the labeling “Ebonics,” Smith might have
adopted a middle position. Or he might have just attempted to let students soon understand what
Ebonics referred to until the new term became widely known.
In the fall, he opened in undergraduate Black Culture the course “Philosophy of Black
Radical Thought.”19 At the graduate level he taught “Individual Study” in the Comparative
Culture and the Black Culture division (UCI PCC F 1973). After graduation in 1974, he taught
“Black English ‘Ebonics’,” to undergraduates in the Black Culture section, discussing “varieties
of oral expressions and non-verbal communicative gestures” in the black community (UCI PCC
W 1974). He might have decided to continue to use “Black English” with an alternative
“Ebonics” for heightening potential students’ awareness of the newly coined term. At this point
the course description became holistic again, reflecting his dissertation, e.g., including nonverbal elements, but was nearly the same as the Winter 1973 description, as shown below:

In the Black community there are varieties of oral expressions and non-verbal
communicative gestures which have historically evolved from the Black experience and
exist as an integral part of contemporary Black America within the scope of the most
recent language and communication theory, and thereby increase effective
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communications between different racial and ethnic groups. This approach will allow
examination of language and communications as well as to laymen interested in
broadening their social awareness and developing their communicative skills through
familiarization and comprehension of Black English. No prerequisites.
(Ibid., italics added)

But it must be emphasized that different from the Winter 1973 semester, he changed from verbal
(which refers to both oral and written) to oral, and most importantly, employed the term
“Ebonics” in the title of the course, accompanying “Black English.” He taught another course
titled “The Philosophy of Black Radical Thought in Urban Society” in the Black Culture division
of the undergraduate program. He was also assigned to working with students individually in
“Independent Study” courses in Comparative and Black Culture at the undergraduate level and
“Individual Study” in Comparative and Black Culture at the graduate level.
In the spring of 1973, he offered an undergraduate course entitled “Black Semantics,”
employing only the term “Ebonics” in the course description. “A lecture/seminar course on the
phonological, morphosyntactical continuums of Ebonics with special emphasis on the nuances of
the lexicon and semantic constituents” (UCI PCC S 1974, emphasis added). Perhaps, having
reflected the fact that this course was conducted after he completed his dissertation, the
explanation more specified his own position in this regard. At the undergraduate and graduate
level he taught “Independent Study” and “Individual Study” courses respectively in their
Comparative Culture and the Black Culture divisions (UCI PCC S 1974). His courses were not
shown in the Fall 1974 semester.

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5.3.11. African-Centered Epistemology: Comparative and Holistic

European linguistics has set trends in linguistics to this day. Comparative linguistics, creole
linguistics, and dialectology complementary to each other in some sense, were products of such
early European linguistics in nationalism, colonialism, and imperialism. Comparative linguistics,
oriented toward essentialist, purist ideology (racial and ethnic purity), was closely related to selfdetermination for a nation and designed to establish both the pan-Aryan continuity of European
languages to the great ancestral languages and the national and pan-Aryan distinctness of the
languages, to the extent of excluding Semitic peoples and languages (Minamoto 2012). Creole
linguistics, oriented toward counter -essentialist, -purist ideology, was designed to demystify the
essentialist, purist notion of the comparative linguistic paradigm, but it didn’t do so unfortunately
and instead was applied almost exclusively to newly born languages in (post-/neo-) slavery or
(post-/neo-) colonial societies. Sometimes, dialectological or variationist sociolinguistics is
employed to describe some of the newly born languages which look or sound closer to the
European languages than the creole or pidgin counterparts. Today, the creole linguistic paradigm
attempts to interpret the languages―it concedes they are restructured languages and retain
African grammatical structures in their substrata―as derived from European languages and
discontinuous to and distinct from the original mother tongues of slaves and natives, i.e., the
autochthonous languages of their descendants in continental Africa. Or the dialectological or
variationist sociolinguistic paradigm a priori shuts out any interpretations or criteria which allow
them to be linguistic codes other than dialects of the European languages.
Perhaps taking the dominant trends in linguistics into account, to “descriptively” fulfill the

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two nationalist desiderata of the autochthonous lineage/continuity and uniqueness/distinctness,
i.e., the African authenticity, of the language(s) of the black/African nation(s)20 from the
linguistic data, the core criteria or interpretations of comparative linguistics may have been the
fittest for Smith, but he selectively appropriated categories and concepts characteristic of creole
linguistics, e.g., hybridity, relexification, substratum. Though away from the purpose of this
dissertation, it is very much worth pointing out that Smith accomplished what early European
predecessors could not: he rectified the fallacies in comparative linguistics with important
findings in creole linguistics. Moreover, his comparative linguistic approach underwent
additional modifications when he attempted to expand the traditional definition of what
constitutes the criteria for the genetic classification of a language, that is, morphosyntax further
to include phonetics, phonology, semantics, pragmatics, and paralinguistics: comparative
linguistics became holistic in his Ebonics paradigm.
In fact, the comparative linguistic paradigm was holistic in multiple ways: as part of the
cultural nationalist programs it fulfilled nationalist goals or necessities and became integral to
practical issues in the black community. The utilization of a mother tongue for nationalist
purposes as seen all over the world is succinctly summarized by sociologist and linguist Joshua
A. Fishman (1972), who aptly observed:

The functional dependence of new protoelites on the vernaculars21 was a reflection of
the need of these elite to communicate with, organize, and activate recently urbanized
but still predominantly illiterate populations. Less obvious is the fact that these
populations often had neither a single vernacular (but, rather, a socially, regionally, and
experientially differentiated continuum of vernaculars), not a vernacular that could
readily be put to the modern ideologizing and organizing purposes that new protoelites
had in mind. (41, emphasis added)

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It was true that (1), among his black nationalist efforts, Dr. Smith’s research on Ebonics
integrally addressed teaching literacy in Ebonics and English to predominantly illiterate
descendants of enslaved Africans and he attempted to reach his community with their mother
tongue; (2) that his definition of Ebonics was a concentric continuum of varieties of Ebonics
throughout the African diaspora; (3) that many blacks denied the legitimacy of their own
linguistic collective symbol, what he called Ebonics, around which they were expected to be
mobilized in the black nationalist movement. Therefore, he could have been called one of such
cultural protoelites, of course who always attended to the grass-roots.
Looking back through Chapter 5, it might be suggested for constructing a theory of linguistic
knowledge formation that the ideological-political meanings and the experiential-practical
meanings may have given some foundations for Dr. Smith’s linguistic research and both may
have been intricately interwoven with the theoretical-scientific meanings to select a certain set of
methodological criteria, interpretations, and language data, and construct his comparative
linguistic paradigm, while the scientific account was determined by linguistic evidence. As
Krajewski (1988: 177) notes, “The intellectual atmosphere and philosophical ideas may play a
considerable role in the context of the discovery but play no role in the context of justification.”

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6. IDEOLOGY-POLITICS, EXPERIENCE-PRACTICE, AND THEORY-SCIENCE IN
INTERACTION

Thus far, I have described and analyzed the life story of Dr. Ernie Adolphus Smith focusing
on the linguistic element. We have seen how his life from his early childhood to early adulthood
might have led to the formation of an ethnolinguistic/comparative linguistic paradigm at the
University of California, Irvine, as a result of the interaction of the ideological-political,
experiential-practical, and theoretical-scientific meanings which he encountered and negotiated
in in his empirical world. I have presented a process by which the meanings of his mother tongue
were negotiated with its meanings in the state institutions of power, finally, in an attempt to
deconstruct and reconstruct the existing meanings of his mother tongue in the scientific context
of linguistics. It should be noted that this tripartite division of the interpretive social act is mine
merely for an analytic purpose which I, not Dr. Smith, constructed by reinterpreting meanings
surrounding Dr. Smith’s language and other relevant events, occurrences, information pertinent
to his life. The three factors are too intricately interwoven in actual life to allow us to figure out a
linear cause-and-effect. Keeping that in mind, in what follows, I will delve more into the
interpretive workings of the three factors in interaction, and hopefully, a proposition might
emerge as to linguistic knowledge formation.

6.1. Ideological-Political

In Section 5.1, I described Dr. Smith’s life story focusing on the ideological-political factor

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from his elementary school in South Central Los Angeles to his graduate study at the University
of California, Irvine. As the very foundation for his black nationalist efforts, it should be
mentioned, first of all, that the immigration of people from a rural area into an urban area and the
maximized social and economic dislocation from the traditional social structure were a major
factor for the growth of nationalism (Fishman 1972: 18, 35). Therefore, this foundational
experience may have been an overarching force for moulding meanings attached to his mother
tongue. His early language awareness and loyalty emerged in his home and community,
particularly, school education. His switch between black and white linguistic codes became
conscious in his early adulthood. His language nationalism took form during his tertiary
education and black nationalist community work, when the tie between nation, territory, and
language became conscious for him. One of his arguments on the tie between language and
nation was made during the course of his doctoral study at UC Irvine. The demarcation between
language awareness, language loyalty, and language nationalism is not so straightforward and
thus overlaps to varying degrees particularly since their differences are a matter of degree.
Another significant factor, relevant to his language nationalism, might be his avoidance of the
term “American” when he referred to blacks or their mother tongue as shown in the categories or
concepts which I have employed throughout the life story.1 As he has always stated, he has never
accepted being a citizen of the United States and thus an American. Many other black linguists
who adopt the Creolist Paradigm have employed terms involving the category “American” when
they name the language of blacks and discuss things around them. This difference in political
attitudes might also have provided some foundation for his separatist linguistic thought.
Before entering deeper into the life story of Dr. Smith, it is important to note that I had

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erroneously presupposed that his black nationalist ideology influenced the formation of his
comparative linguistic paradigm in visible form, in which black language was described from the
outset as a newly born African language. I had supposed that the language nationalism that he
had constructed and internalized motivated him to enter the doctoral program in Comparative
Culture, UCI. Additionally, I had supposed that he targeted from the start to identify African
linguistic evidence to verify his Afrocentric hypothesis or give scientific endorsement to his
Afrocentric linguistic ideology. But I have found that my assumptions lacked three elements
between Dr. Smith’s nationalist language ideology and his scientific conceptualization and
theorization of Ebonics: the impetus for entrance to UCI, the original research plan, and a
discovery of scientific evidence in fieldwork. First, the direct impetus for his entrance into the
PhD program was not his own. Dr. Joseph White happened to find Smith in a community
organization in South Central Los Angeles and invited him to take the entrance exam into the
program. Second, Smith explained to Dr. White his interest in the literacy issue that the black
community faced, but he intended to do research in Egyptology at first. Then, the court case
against him in 1970 gave him an opportunity to learn about linguistics and decide to pursue
research on black language. Third, it is true that he had a nationalist language ideology that
partly shaped his position of his mother tongue as an African language, not English, before he
entered into the Department of Comparative Culture (Section 5.1.6); however, he also discovered
some linguistic and paralinguistic patterns in the language of black children which he and Dr.
Mary Key investigated near Los Angeles, features which were also seen in West African
languages. Therefore, I should say that Dr. Smith’s prior language ideology appears not to have
impacted his African-centered linguistic thesis straightforwardly, but rather, it was the scientific

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evidence that led him to pursue a scientific thesis that black language may be grammatically an
African language, which then finally gave scientific authority to his nationalist language
ideology.
As a manifestation of language nationalism, Smith mentioned some strong ties between
nation or nationality and language in the 1973 meeting (Section 5.3.8), as seen in Lenin’s (1967),
Lenin on the National and Colonial Question: Three Articles, which Dr. Smith sometimes quotes
to me. Scholars who are informed of the sociology of linguistics would see one historical
phenomenon of language nationalism, i.e., pursuing the origin of one’s group, in the formation of
the comparative linguistic paradigm. As sociologist A. D. Smith (2011) points out,
nationalism/imperialism in Europe stimulated the scientific reconstruction of a common ancestral
language in the Indo-European language family through comparative philology or grammar, i.e.,
comparative linguistics (Gauger 2010). It has been witnessed in politics and linguistics around
the world (cf., A. D. Smith 2011; Errington 2008; Poliakov 1971; Yasuda 1999, 2004).
Nationalist/imperialist movements gave an implicit or explicit foundation for linguistic research
and planning, one of which attempted to determine genetic classifications or boundaries between
linguistic codes (Cooper 1989; Weinstein 1979) in other parts of the world such as Central
America (e.g., Joseph-Haynes & Castillo 2016), Francophone Africa (e.g., Weinstein 1980),
Indonesia (e.g., Errington 2008), Japan (e.g., Yasuda 1999 & 2004), North America (e.g.,
Weinstein 1982), and Europe (e.g., Poliakov 1971). Therefore, what I could say about the
relationship between Dr. Smith’s comparative linguistic paradigm and language nationalism is
that he might have based his conceptualization of Ebonics on that of the black nation in the
United States and that of the Pan-African nation in the Western Hemisphere. He might have

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selected a certain set of linguistic criteria and data to describe or construct a linguistic system,
which (implicit though it may have been), was congruent with the nation and compatible with his
nationalist belief. (In this respect, mainstream scholars in black linguistics and linguistics in
general might do the same thing; cf. Anderson 2006 & Errington 2008.)
On the other hand, mainstream linguists of minority origin might as well find no need to
express their thoughts explicitly on the relationship between a linguistic code which they attempt
to “describe” and a nationality or nation, perhaps because their own language experiences might
not put them under such nationalist pressure; they may be under tighter disciplinary constraints
to follow their predecessors’ paradigms; or they may fear they may become a pariah in the
academic mainstream or the wider society, ultimately losing their job and status, which is a
serious issue for anybody under such a circumstance. That said, their paradigmatic positions may
not be separated from their own or other group’s nationalist goals. The breadth and depth of
minority nationalism that they adhere to may just be different from those that Dr. Smith adhered
to. They may show their acquiescence to the majority nationalism of the United States (i.e., white
nationalism).
There is another ideological-political element to be noted. Whether linguists have a far
stronger desire for ethno-racial self-determination and separation from the state sovereignty in
which they are situated might provide a foundation for selecting a particular set of criteria and
data from languages other than the language of the oppressor and choosing or constructing an
independent linguistic system based on the select data and the interpretations which the select
criteria allow them to glean from the data. As Dr. Smith’s life story showed, he had been long in
the mindset that he never agreed to and would never participate in the state sovereignty of the

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United States. As an illustration, he, in cooperation with an organization, sought to achieve the
right for the descendants of enslaved Africans, e.g., full self-determination like repatriation to
Africa or possession of an independent state out of the United States. It appears he was more
separatist than other black intelligentsia who were also engaged in some community efforts
which others would call nationalist. This factor is one possible foundation to the extent that the
linguist may become more receptive or open to various possible paradigms on a linguistic code,
in which it may be described as a dialect of the language of the oppressor or a creole of the
language or a language away from the oppressor’s language. In other words, the epistemology to
see black language as a language other than English may not exist from the beginning in most of
the linguists in black linguistics who have little or no separatist thoughts. For example, John H.
McWhorter seems to have no intention of exploring any possibility other than English from the
beginning and continuously produces a discourse on black language which satisfies the interests
of the dominant group and elites to the fullest extent that he squarely denies the
conceptualization of Ebonics.
Lastly, often tied to language nationalism is religion, e.g., Arabic for Muslims in general,
Malay for Malaysian Muslims, Hindi for Hindus, Urdu for Indian and Pakistani Muslims, Latin
for Catholics in general, Hebrew for Jews in general, among many others the world over (cf.
Cooper 1989; Fishman 1972). In the case of the Nation of Islam, in which Dr. Smith was
enrolled from 1962 (but disenrolled shortly after Malcolm X. was assassinated), the language
which played the most important role as a collective symbol was Arabic. On the other hand, he
learned from the Nation a separatist linguistic view that the language of the descendants of
enslaved Africans is a language other than English. Therefore, this view in the Nation of Islam

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may be an additive, sanctifying element to his whole black nationalist language ideology which
he reached around 1968, i.e., a view that black language is an African tongue, partly based on his
experiential-practical concern with literacy in English among inner-city black males.
Section 5.1, “Ideological-Political Factor,” described a life story of Dr. Smith from his early
childhood through his adolescence, inclusive of the events which were covered in Sections 5.2
and 5.3. As a result, there have been many instances of overlap, especially between Sections 5.1
and 5.2, on the one hand, and between Sections 5.1 and 5.3, on the other. In particular, I find it
difficult to clearly divide the ideological-political and experiential-practical factor because the
ideological-political goals are interrelated to people’s prior and future experiences in their
empirical world and the meanings and interpretations that they attach to the experiences may
influence the ideological-political goals. Therefore, the demarcation between ideologicalpolitical and experiential-practical is mainly for my own theorization of linguistic knowledge
formation, distinguishing the political thoughts and goals from the community or down-to-theearth experiences and problems, which provide foundational meanings for the thoughts and
goals. Therefore, ideological-political and experiential-practical concerns may provide
interrelated underlying meanings for linguistic research, which awaits further validation from
studying more cases of linguistic knowledge formation both in the dominant and marginalized
schools of thought.

6.2. Experiential-Practical

People encounter a wide range of social, political, and economic experiences (incl.,

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linguistic) through their lives and continuously interpret, negotiate, and construct the meanings
of the experiences so that they can address social, political, and economic problems (incl.,
linguistic). Linguistics becomes one of the weapons to rectify the situations, as many linguists
mention the significance of their works for their practical concerns. This is the way, I suppose,
linguists name a linguistic system and construct or adopt a particular linguistic paradigm to
describe and construct the linguistic system on the basis of their prior experiences and meanings
surrounding the hypothesized or imagined linguistic system. However, most of them hardly even
give any room for discussing scientific criteria supporting the deduced name, or find no need for
doing so. The widespread practice suggests there exist some experiential-practical meanings
which linguists have accepted or constructed through their life experiences and the meanings
implicitly provide the basis for the naming and paradigm selection. Naming often occurs as if the
existing a priori science had established the genetic relationship of the linguistic system to
others, or as if linguists are trying to avoid any discussion on the inevitable politics involved in
defining the linguistic system by saying the naming is just “descriptive,” reflecting the larger
society’s prevalent usage. They examine it as a dialect, a creole, or a language and often apply
their knowledge (even non-linguists apply their scientifically authorized knowledge) within their
empirical worlds such as education and other state/interstate institutions of power. Thus, the
linguistic meanings which linguists accept or construct in relation to their social, political, and
economic experiences from early on may influence the linguistic names and paradigms, which
they adopt.
Different from mainstream linguists in black linguistics, the comparative linguistic paradigm
makes explicit what scientific criteria and data on which the labeling and definition of Ebonics is

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predicated. However, it does not explicitly make an empirical statement, “the paradigm adopts
the concept and theory of Ebonics based on this linguistic experience at school or linguistic
practices in court.” It is probably because others may criticize such academic practice for being
“subjective” or “unscientific,” unless the scientist sees the linguistic code through the lens of
disciplinary criteria of this or that grammatical structure, whose holistic entity as a
communicative code has been dissolved into pieces to the extent that the original whole cannot
be recovered. Dr. Smith did not explicitly base the comparative linguistic paradigm on his
experiential-practical interpretations or meanings, e.g., the significant difference he felt existed
between black and white language systems (Section 5.2.1), the placement of disproportionate
numbers of black students in educable mentally retarded classes due to the cleavage between
their mother tongue and the language of the white middle and upper class as seen in the IQ tests
culturally biased toward those white groups (Section 5.2.3), and the need for a bilingual
education program in Ebonics and English because the languages bring different linguistic and
cultural frameworks on which students base their learning and understanding in school (Section
5.2.4). On the other hand, he emphatically related the experiential-practical concerns to his
linguistic finding that Ebonics is an African language with a grammatical substratum deriving
from, or a linguistic and paralinguistic continuation of, West and Niger-Congo African
languages. What I could suggest is that most language scientists may start to examine a
phenomenon after forming their interest in the phenomenon in their empirical world, that is, after
witnessing something intriguing or problematic to themselves, a local community, and/or a larger
society and decide to conduct scientific research on it. Therefore, whether linguists make it
explicit or not, most of them may start their scientific research through their experiential-

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practical interpretations of whether a linguistic code which they attempt to examine is a dialect, a
creole, or a language. In most cases, the experiential-practical factor may provide more down-toearth, persuasive foundations than the ideological-political factor for putting forward a linguistic
thesis, as many linguists emphasize the importance of theory to practice consistency.
Lastly, readers should attend to two subfactors of the experiential-practical factor: “Black
Language as a Pathology in School” (Section 5.2.2) and “Black Language in the Judiciary
System” (Section 5.2.5). The subfactor, “Black Language as a Pathology in School,” might be
interpreted as giving an experiential-practical meaning and reason for Dr. Smith to pursue
linguistic research to give a scientific explanation of what his mother tongue is rather than how it
is African. The larger society or white society saw Dr. Smith’s legitimate mother tongue as a
degenerate form of English or a linguistic anomaly, and, as a result, he adhered to using black
language as a medium of resistance to the Establishment or an expression of loyalty to the
language, which became one of his political actions or goals later. However, the pressing concern
for him as a graduate student in this regard may have been to confirm that his mother tongue is a
legitimate linguistic system. Therefore, the experience of Dr. Smith’s language being
pathologized in education might have been of secondary importance to the construction of the
comparative linguistic paradigm in the sense that his African-centered paradigm emerged after
he was informed that black language is a legitimate linguistic system. This experience may have
provided a foundation for his majoring in linguistics rather than pursuing a specific linguistic
paradigm. As regards the subfactor, “Black Language in the Judiciary System,” his knowledge
that the juvenile detention system interpreted the language of black youths as “uppity, vulgar,
indecent, and profane” (Smith 1974: 52) and their personalities as delinquent or insubordinate

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was possibly tied to his own experience that he was indicted by the university administrator in
1970 because of his “vulgar, profane, or indecent” language. Though he does not interpret the
1970 case as a linguistic one, at least the incident guided him to linguistics and, thus, it could be
considered a precondition for his decision to major in linguistics and his pursuit to validate the
legitimacy of black language. Therefore, it may be suggested that these two subfactors
constituted indirect influences on the formation of Dr. Smith’s ethnolinguistic/comparative
linguistic paradigm.

6.3. Theoretical-Scientific

Among the subheadings discussed in the “Theoretical-Scientific Factor,” Section 5.3.1,
“Program in Comparative Culture,” may be one of the most important factors for the formation
of the comparative linguistic paradigm. One of the salient things is that, to the best of my
knowledge, different from Dr. Smith’s experience, most black linguists graduated from the
department of linguistics, communication, or speech. The disciplines were the citadels for
conventional or conservative linguistic paradigms. Therefore, most of the major black linguists
may have adopted the paradigms of their white predecessors, whereas some dissident scholars in
the mainstream seem to have attempted to adjust the mainstream canons but still have been
accepted there (e.g., Dr. Geneva Smitherman). Among the major black linguists who adopt the
comparative linguistic paradigm, excluding Dr. Carol Aisha Blackshire-Belay, who graduated
from a linguistics department, only Dr. Smith is a graduate of a non-linguistics department, viz.,
Comparative Culture, whose “Black Culture” unit looked quite like today’s Black Studies

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program. The far less linguistic nature of Comparative Culture and the innovative, Africancentered nature of the Black Culture unit of the department may have been a strong element
which enabled Smith to pursue his Ebonics paradigm, even though his main advisor Dr. Joseph
White personally viewed black language as a dialect of English. In relation to the departmental
or disciplinary factor, the subfactor of “Guidance Committee Members” (Section 5.3.3) was an
ancillary but, probably, indispensable factor which allowed him to explore his Afrocentric theme.
All the guidance committee members (psychologist, sociologist, economist, communicationist),
including non-UCI committee member Dr. Arthur L. Smith (Molefi Kete Asante), were
Afrocentric enough to be receptive to Smith’s linguistic paradigm, after he decided not to include
Dr. Mary R. Key, the only white linguist.
Another disciplinary influence would be the interdisciplinary nature of Comparative Culture.
Smith had various influential sources of academic input: linguistics, psychology, history, and
literature. As a result, the background knowledge section of his dissertation was full of citations
and ideas from those fields. Among the most important for the formation of his paradigm was his
encounter with one work in Caribbean linguistics: black creole linguist Mervyn C. Alleyne
(1971) was the person who gave Smith a comparative linguistic perspective to describe or
interpret his mother tongue and other newly born languages in other parts of the African diaspora
as maintaining the grammatical patterns of West African languages. Possibly because of
Alleyne’s influence, many of the categories or concepts were adopted from creole linguistics,
which were incorporated into his comparative linguistic approach. The work of Janheinz Jahn
gave another comparative linguistic endorsement from the perspective of literature to Smith’s
thesis. James Haskins and Hugh Butts reinforced the African retention thesis of Smith’s from a

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psychological perspective, although the authors regarded black language as a dialect of English.
Another connection between their black psychology and Smith’s linguistic thesis can be found in
the former’s argument that blacks showed an underlying African thought process in black
language, which he equated with grammar, hence, an underlying African grammar. Lastly, other
important disciplinary factors deriving from this academic environment were the integration of
multi-disciplines, which would have made it possible for him to adopt a holistic interpretation of
black language as a whole system of linguistic and paralinguistic features, and the counterepistemology of “Black Studies,” which could have enabled him to pursue an African-centered,
i.e., comparative perspective to include African languages in his linguistic analysis.
First preceded and supported by the holistic and comparative epistemology, the second most
important factor may be Smith’s “Fieldwork on the Language of Black Children” (Section 5.3.5).
Without this incident in which he found some linguistic and paralinguistic patterns in the
language of black elementary school children in Santa Ana, California that were common to
some of the grammatical patterns seen across West African languages, he should not have
developed a specific idea that black language grammatically belongs to a family of West and
Niger-Congo African languages. Therefore, if he had not encountered the linguistic evidence,
what remained in his mind may have been an experiential-practical perception and a nationalist
language ideology simultaneously that his mother tongue is a language other than English or an
African language, as Carter G. Woodson (1933) put it. With the finding of the canonical syllable
pattern of West African languages and some other grammatical patterns, the adoption of a
linguistic paradigm he extended from Alleyne (1971), and the input from Lorenzo Dow Turner
(1949), who found West African languages were the main grammatical sources for black

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language, Smith reached his ethnolinguistic view, later what he calls, the comparative linguistic
view or paradigm. In this paradigm, a grammatical comparison between black language and West
African languages was made and the former was interpreted as a continuation of the grammatical
structures of the latter. Especially, the paradigm was placed against the mainstream paradigms:
the Transformationalist (similar to the Anglicist Paradigm) and the Pidgin-Creolist Paradigm, in
that the latter two examined only a linguistic portion recognizable as English.
Though it may not have been foundational or conditional to the formation of the comparative
linguistic paradigm, the small conference among black scholars in St. Louis (Section 5.3.8) may
have offered a wider venue (Williams 1975) for the Paradigm with an African-centered name and
definition of black language, to be publicized widely, in particular, in psychology and language
sciences. It may have been an effective setting for a widely acceptable name for black language
to be arrived at as an interdisciplinary consensus among psychologists and language scientists
rather than coined by an individual linguist.

6.4. Toward a Theory of Linguistic Knowledge Formation

The ideological-political factor, the experiential-practical factor, and the theoretical-scientific
factor have been divided for the purpose of, first, better understanding the comparative linguistic
paradigm; second, clarifying the multi- and inter- dimensional nature of linguistic knowledge
formation process, in other words, how the linguist could innovate a paradigm in linguistics
rather than becoming the follower of existing paradigms; and third, building a theory on
linguistic knowledge formation. In reality, the three factors overlap in inseparable ways.

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Therefore, I do not wish the reader to rush to isolate the theoretical-scientific factor to “purify”
science more than has ever been done before. My intention, probably against many scientists, is
to verify my tentative argument that a linguistic paradigm may derive from the interpretive social
negotiations of the three factors, i.e., linguistics is a science in the sense that it is ideologicalpolitical, experiential-practical, and theoretical-scientific at the same time. One’s political goals,
both symbolic and instrumental, both linguistic and non-linguistic, interact and negotiate with
their linguistic and non-linguistic experiences in their empirical world. The ideological-political
and experiential-practical meanings interact and negotiate with their theoretical-scientific
attempts to explain some of the experiences and define and address some problems in the
experiences. Some educated people’s attempts to do so at a particular discursive level may be
defined as language sciences. In the process of constructing a linguistic paradigm, the divided
three factors are inseparably interwoven. For example, linguist Geneva Smitherman, speech
scientist Orlando L. Taylor, and philosopher Maulana Karenga observe that the study of black
language can be viewed as part of the black nationalist movement of the late 1960s and 1970s.
As they are black scholars who shared a lot with Dr. Ernie Smith, Dr. Robert Williams, and their
colleagues in the same conference in 1973 in St. Louis, their interpretation of their own research
as a cultural nationalist project which ultimately aims to solve problems in their empirical world
may give some credence to my tripartite―ideological-political, experiential-practical,
theoretical-scientific―theorization on the formation of a linguistic paradigm. That said, looking
back at what I argued in this chapter, I cannot maintain that the relative importance I’ve given to
each of the three factors and each of the variables in each chapter remains more or less stable.
Manning (1982) gives one caveat about life story research that:

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the object . . . can never be explained with reference to past events or antecedents, for,
strictly speaking, any outcome is a product of innumerable instances, and the relative
importance of any given series of facts may vary from case to case. The precise effect of
any given one remains undetermined and changing. (284)

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7. CONCLUDING SUGGESTIONS

This study is not an attempt to delegitimize black linguistics and linguistics in general as well
as the comparative linguistic paradigm. I have attempted to explain the formative process of the
comparative linguistic paradigm in hope of knowing how a new, future paradigm in black
linguistics could be constructed to better serve the community or a segment of the community,
even if facing insurmountable resistance from both the academic mainstream and the larger
society. Through my description and analysis of the comparative linguistic paradigm, I have
developed my own argument on linguistic knowledge formation (See details in Chapter 1) and
suggested linguistics may be a flexible, malleable, and creative discursive practice. My sociology
of knowledge approach may encourage black linguists and linguists in general to have a healthy
and productive paradigmatic competition, as Africology recommends (Horn 2007[1997]).
Especially it is intended to give African-centered agency on the side of descendants of enslaved
Africans in the United States and in other parts of the African diaspora, going beyond the
confines of the existing impermeable frameworks which European scholars constructed and most
black scholars follow or have little choice but to follow. In concluding my doctoral research, I
would like to make a few suggestions for a possible future course of black linguistics.

7.1. Tripartite Analysis and Holistic Reconstruction of Black Linguistics

The present condition of the paradigms in black linguistics looks nearly fixed beginning in
the 1960s and 1970s, even if there may exist a possibility of exploring a well-nigh uncharted

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territory in the established black linguistics. Thomas Kuhn’s caveat directed toward natural
sciences may aptly fit the description of current black linguistics: “the scientist largely ceases to
be an explorer at all, or at least to be an explorer of the unknown” (1972: 96-97). The linguistics
almost seems to have quit exploring the connections between black language and its ancestral
languages outside of the established epistemology as well as within it. For a healthier and more
fruitful paradigmatic competition in black linguistics, i.e., for it to be opened-minded to
paradigmatic innovations which pose a fundamental challenge to the dominant paradigms, I
suggest three things which could be done by language scientists:

1) interject a microsociological analysis of linguistic knowledge formation in the mainstream
2) reconstruct the dominant definition of linguistic system in linguistics
3) reconsider the dominant practice to recruit only those students who conform to the accepting
linguists’ paradigms or thoughts

First, it would be crucial to know the workings or internal structure of the current dominant
black linguistics, the Dialectologist/Anglicist Paradigm and the Creolist Paradigm, through a
sociohistorical lens. The goal is to rectify the prevailing situation in which the primary users of
the newly born languages in the African diaspora, viz., varieties of Ebonics which are defined as
dialects or creoles by linguists and the larger society have been given little or no official
language services in those languages, such as public education and court interpretation services
through their mother tongues.1 Language scholars and other vested parties need to understand
that the definition of a linguistic code as language or dialect/creole largely determines the official

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allocation of resources to public services which the community of the linguistic code receives.
Many linguists’ color-blind attempt to call standard English “standard dialect” would hardly
provide any service to the ideological-political and experiential-practical needs of such linguistic
communities in dire need. Language scientists need to examine the ideological-political,
experiential-practical, and theoretical-scientific processes by which the Creolist and Anglicist
Paradigms were born and have been maintained thus far in relation to other actions and
discourses in state institutions of the United States; in other words, how the paradigms may have
been designed to produce and reproduce the system of White Supremacy.
In the course of figuring out the mechanism of the tripartite interpretive construction of the
two paradigms, the following three questions should be addressed: 1) how the definition of the
linguistic system in black linguistics has shifted in negotiations with the ideological-political,
experiential-practical, and theoretical-scientific meanings which the researchers embraced
toward the white world, 2) what scientific criteria and empirical data have been selected to reach
those theoretical-scientific interpretations which implicitly or invisibly or inadvertently fit the
ideological-political and experiential-practical meanings and interests of the researchers and the
white world, and 3) whether something exists in current linguistics which provides excessive
agency for whites to attain their politico-economic goals to the extent of oppressing other
peoples through linguistic means. Once recognizing the subjectivity, arbitrariness, and
malleability of linguistics in the process of linguistic knowledge formation, the researchers might
begin to explore an uncharted territory and select a different set of criteria and data, only if they
should have adequate motivation or determination to face the daunting challenges expected from
White Supremacist academic system and society. In my opinion, as long as a possibility for

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validating a least accepted interpretation remains, they must do so, if they claim they are “true”
scientists.
The next step may be to re-examine the current definition of linguistic system which is
provided for the fragmentary purpose of linguistics, and then, drawing on my hypothetical three
desiderata of the ideological-political, experiential-practical, and theoretical-scientific factor for
the formation of a linguistic paradigm, to recover such a holistic definition of linguistic system―
inclusive of linguistics and paralinguistics―as the comparative linguistic paradigm adopted for
the integral purpose of linguistics, praxis, and politics. Even with a holistic definition in hand,
language scientists still need to attempt to find other areas we haven’t explored yet for linguistic
analysis other than traditional linguistic and paralinguistic areas. For instance, we need to
reconsider the current Eurocentric binaries of grammar and pragmatics, linguistics and
paralinguistics, linguistics and speech communication, form and function, formal and informal,
language and dialect, speech and writing system, which partly results in overemphasis on spoken
data and a wrong view of spoken as a “true” or “natural” linguistic code, and so on. They may
expand the traditional domain of grammar, i.e., syntax, morphology, phonetics, phonology,
semantics, to a wider grammar which includes any systematic features in pragmatic and
paralinguistic areas. More importantly, although probably almost all linguists would not agree
with this, I would suggest the collective-symbolic or nationalist components of a linguistic code
need to be an integral part of linguistic system in linguistics. Language is more than such an
objectified tool of communication (Cooper 1989: 133), although, unfortunately, Cooper does not
attempt to include the symbolic or nationalist components as part of a linguistic system but
merely part of the functions for which the system or form serves. The collective-symbolic or

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nationalist components may be a group’s loyalty to their linguistic code or their labeling of the
code, which fulfills the nationalist or other collective needs of the group. These are what linguists
and even sociolinguists have put aside as outside of language sciences, i.e., as political,
ideological, or non-scientific. In reality, they are the very starting points for whether a linguistic
code is a language or a dialect and are inseparably interwoven with the traditional components of
linguistic system. What linguists can determine based on their analysis of grammatical or socalled “linguistic” features is merely fragmentary. Look at most linguistic codes around the
world. Except for the imperialistic cases in many post-colonial societies in which the naming of
linguistic codes has been determined by European colonizers’ practices rather than the nationalist
or other collective needs of oppressed peoples, they would soon notice the labeling of linguistic
codes is based on nationalist or other collective needs. Some would-be critiques like Fasold
(2005) would deploy a “democratic” argument that most blacks would not agree with such a
naming as Ebonics. (It is important to remember that the ideology of democracy is usually
effective only for a dominant majority group in a multiethnic and multiracial polity.) However,
since the black community has not had any self-determining moment in history in which a
majority of them could spend centuries in disseminating and standardizing nationalist thoughts
such as Ebonics and since they have been forced for centuries to negate their own mother tongue
in relation to white language, Fasold’s claiming “Most black people don’t like the idea of
Ebonics” is a simple neo-liberalist discourse. Black intelligentsia including black linguists should
be given an opportunity to lead their community under no oppressive influences of Eurocentric
media, scholarship, and education.
Summarizing the two suggestions for the purpose of recovering the meaning of what

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language is so far, I suggest linguists of color should be aware of the two daunting tasks to
liberate themselves out of the confines of “white logic, white methods”: 1) expansion of the
current narrowed set of linguistic categories on which linguists base their “linguistic” arguments
about language or dialect, which covertly work for European and other dominant languages, and
2) recovery of the collective-symbolic or nationalist into the components of linguistic system in
linguistics. The visible integration of the ideological-political, experiential-practical, and
theoretical-scientific factors in linguistics might create finer interconnection between theory and
practice as commended in that Afrocentricity which Asante (2006), Nelson (2007[1997]), Okafor
(2013), and others adopt, about which many linguists have deplored the current conditions.
Asante (2006) states: “Afrocentricity is characterized by its commitment to a political program in
conformity with the idea that theory is not disconnected from practice” (658). For example, Dr.
Ernie A. Smith attempted to cater to not only the traditional “applied” domain of linguistics, i.e.,
language education in school but extend it to a package of disciplinary and punitive institutions
such as the school and the court, in which language played a significant filtering role, within the
framework of Ebonics (Smith 1974, 1976-77, 1978a, 1993a). With a strategic negotiation of the
three factors (cf. Asante 19802), they might be able to select another set of criteria, data, and
interpretations, which help simultaneously attain ideological-political and experiential-practical
goals. Inevitably, they will shoulder an unfair burden of trying to be unperturbed and consistent
in the face of discursive, material, and psychological retaliations from the Establishment.
This may be ancillary to the former two agendas, but there is a third area, which would affect
the first two recommendations. If most mainstream linguists do not accept any researcher into
the academic mainstream or recruit any future scholar into their universities or colleges who

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supports a theory or paradigm which they deem to be unacceptable or wrong, they are not
genuine scientists, as my sociology-of-linguist mentor, Kasuya Keisuke (personal
communication, June 3, 2013), in Nippon commented a few years ago. Unfortunately, I’ve found
many linguists in black linguistics may fall under this category. The area of black linguistics
would remain in the cradle of Eurocentric discourse, though many would adamantly deny it in
one way or another. It seems that a small population of mainstream black linguists are struggling
for change both in theory and practice while a majority of them are aiming for change only in
practice, drawing on many or most of the Eurocentric categories and theories entrenched therein
(cf. Mazama 2009). It is problematic that linguists such as Dr. Ernie A. Smith and Dr. Carol
Aisha Blackshire-Belay, major proponents of the Ebonics paradigm, are now outside of the
linguistics department or the mainstream linguistics. If black linguistics honestly hopes to
change, it has to push itself forward both with the challenges which they set up and those which
others from outside of their institutions or paradigms set up.
These recommendations should be done collectively rather than sporadically, basically by
those linguists who are members of the oppressed groups of color around the world through their
cooperative and collaborative efforts. It is doubtful that those linguists from oppressor groups
who enjoy the benefits from the existing state and interstate power structures will take
substantive action in these areas. If they would do so, fear would hinder their efforts, including
the fear that they would lose their authority as scientists and their political, economic, and other
leverages in the local and global system of state institutions.

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7.2. Linguists as Language Planning Visionaries for Ebonics

[Writing is] merely a way of recording language by means of visible
marks ―Bloomfield (1933)

No one can deny the overwhelming importance for linguistic science of
the realization that writing is historically secondary to speech, as well
as in the learning and the life of an individual.3 ―Haugen (1966)

These ideas predominant in linguistics today, are reflected in the established use of the word
“reduce” among linguists, when they say, “someone “reduces” a linguistic code to writing.” The
idea that spoken data is the primary target of linguistic description (Fishman 1972: 71) is merely
one ideology, in this case, a Eurocentric conceptualization, possibly deriving from “Phono
Supremacy.” I reasonably assume the focus on sound may more accentuate “discontinuities” of
otherwise very close linguistic codes in Europe as if they constituted discontinuous or distinct
languages than when viewing them from their orthographies. It sometimes considers the
phonographic correspondence between a spoken code and a written code (usually called “writing
system”) superior to other writing systems such as ideographs, which are adopted in Chinese,
Nipponese, and so on, (cf. Joos 1960). 4 This situation may have partly derived from a hidden
agenda that European languages are able to permeate as many societies as possible all over the
world, while Romanizing both unwritten and written minority languages into “middle” domains
secondary to European languages and marginalizing the unwritten and minority languages into
“informal” functions. The problem of writing discussed above is very much relevant to the
maintenance and reinforcement of black language as an African language.
Dominant European languages are all written with their own differentiated, distinctive
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orthographies. The spoken or “living” codes are inseparably supported by the
standardizing/leveling, spreading, and authorizing forces of their written counterparts in the
media (incl., literature), education, business, and government. Therefore, those European
languages have historically maintained their linguistic systems only with minor modifications,
while the spoken parts of the languages have been a little less standardized and maintained. It is
possible conceptually to divide a linguistic code into spoken and written, but in the case of
written or documented linguistic codes, it is impossible to do so: in fact, the spoken and the
written have become part of the integral components of a linguistic code.
In retrospect, in Europe, many linguists both in governmental and non-governmental
institutions were mobilized or involved in the standardization, i.e., prescription process of their
linguistic codes. The linguists imagined, identified, and constructed certain sets of structural
features as linguistic systems, i.e., systematic linguistic boundaries between, often, linguistic
continuums, and later, called their work “describing a linguistic system,” focusing on their
spoken data, as if they were relatively stable and standardized, separate “languages,” not
“dialects” or “creoles” of their ancestral languages, with distinct orthographies which were
differentiated primarily on political grounds. Therefore, they can currently argue that their
linguistic work should not be “prescriptive” but “descriptive,” that the linguistic codes have this
or that genetic relationship to one proto-language or another and are independent languages.
Those linguistic codes, defined as “language” in state institutions and the general public and
given scientific authority and further confirmation by linguistics, continue to be targets of official
language services at least in their native territories.
On the other hand, most of the newly born African languages in the diaspora, which are

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related to European languages in many ways, are mostly unwritten (albeit documented), and
thus, with little help from writing systems, the diaspora languages have historically gone through
lots of changes and been far less standardized, although the grammars may have been relatively
stable. Having no established distinct orthographies which the native users create primarily on
their own political needs, having few autochthonous linguistic labelings which do not contain the
concept “dialect” or “creole,” and always compared to “standard” European languages in various
state institutions such as education and the media, the newly born languages have been relatively
unstable, far less standardized, and thus, recognized as closer to the European languages
(actually getting levelled out toward the “standard” European languages as the media develop
and as receiving or interactive devices spread among the masses). Linguists have identified,
imagined, and constructed certain sets of linguistic features as systems out of linguistic
continuums (yes, they would prefer to call it “describe a linguistic system”), selecting the
linguistic or grammatical data characteristic of “dialects” or “creoles,” which constitute
“continuums” with “standard” European languages, and employing the writings systems of the
lexifier European languages. Therefore, most of them argue that the languages have this or that
genetic relationship to one standard European language or another, or that they are severed from
both the lexifier source languages and the grammatical source languages. Those linguistic codes
defined as “dialects” or “creoles” in state institutions and the general public, given scientific
authority and further confirmation by linguistics, usually do not become targets of official
language services. As long as this status of unwritten languages and the constant levelling of
those “dialects” and “creoles” toward “standard” European languages continue, the number of
the users of the European languages will continue to increase all over the world and whites in

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Europe, North America, and other parts of the world will continue to secure political and
economic gains from people of color.
To be sure, I do not suggest unwritten linguistic codes are less prestigious or less developed
and I find important not only standardization and stability but also diversification and change;
however, unwritten codes may tend to be endangered under the threat of related European
languages, which covertly capitalize on the authoritative and levelling forces of their own written
codes and writing systems. Therefore, I would like to suggest an additional role for linguists in
black linguistics: language planners. Such persons attempt to influence, i.e., consciously or
honestly prescribe the corpus and status of the linguistic code(s) which they describe. They focus
on differences rather than similarities between black and white linguistic codes so that the former
might get recognized as independent, distinct “language(s)” in a distant future. This is what
many linguists have historically been involved in the world over, and indeed, as Charles DeBose
points out, what linguists are doing for “description” is equivalent to language planning, i.e.,
their descriptive behaviors have prescriptive functions. Language is not an object like a plant, so
it cannot be so objectified as can be comparable to natural sciences. The crux of my argument is
that linguists should not forget they are not only descriptors but also creators or modifiers of
languages. I believe they should attempt to describe as far as the purpose of their acts is
description, but the reality is that description simultaneously has a prescriptive dimension. They
can create distinctive features or expressions, which is prescriptive at its extreme. Therefore, my
concluding suggestion on the role of linguists is that they attempt to not only describe but also
prescribe. Ultimately, I dare to suggest Ebonics and other newly born languages in the African
diaspora might be given their own distinct, hopefully autochthonous, writing systems, and even

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distinct grammatical features, deliberately differentiated from their related European languages,
to ensure that the distinct features of the former become standardized and more permanent,
especially visibly away from European languages. Some day, when linguists “describe” them,
more of the linguists may be able to argue that they are distinct languages with an African
grammatical substratum, and they may become targets of official language services because they
are scientifically and widely recognized as “language,” not “dialect” or “creole.” Concisely put,
what I would suggest is, linguists may be “language planning visionaries” (DeBose 2005), who
may become strategically responsible for the political goal of integrating theory and practice,
linguistic description and prescription, which, surely, cannot be achieved without cooperation
from political, economic, educational, and other elites and masses of their communities.
That said, a liberalist opinion would sometimes be expressed on the “exotic,” hardly written
languages in the non-European or non-white world, claiming these languages need not be given
any writing system and can exist as they are: naturalist. I recently met a white researcher in
Jamaica, who made this naturalist argument that there may be no necessity to give Jamaican a
writing system in the face of a Jamaican researcher who proposed to the Ministry of Education
that Jamaican and English be the co-media of instruction in school.5 However, it must be noted
that the overemphasis on spoken code in European scholarship has contributed to the production
and reproduction of a White Supremacist linguistic hierarchy in which written European
languages are situated dominant and prestigious relative to unwritten or scarcely written
languages of color, which cannot be targets of official language services and are increasingly
endangered. Linguists need to notice that a writing system clearly has a political and economic
dimension which controls spread, standardization, maintenance, and respect of a linguistic code

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and thus, a critical politico-economic power to differentiate close linguistic codes and shift one
of them from the status of dialect to that of language (Cooper 1989: 139 & passim). However,
the dominant discourse in linguistics presently is that spoken data is real and description is the
condition for science, as a result of which linguistics rarely conducts any inclusive examination
of writing systems as part of linguistic systems.
It would be an important territory for linguists in black linguistics both as scientists and
visionaries to have yet to explore: development of an authentic and autochthonous writing
system for Ebonics for the maintenance of the existing distinctive features including African and,
furthermore, the production of the lost or new distinctive features including African, in its spoken
code as well as its written code. The development of a distinct writing system even with minor
linguistic differences may have far greater impact later in the development of nation and
nationalism (Fishman 1972: 61). If they do not attempt to do so in cooperation with other elites
―political and literary (cf. Fishman 1971 concerning the effects of literature on the relationship
between nation and language and on language planning), the status of Ebonics would continue to
be “low” to English, as the words of Brian Weinstein (1979) aptly capture the situation of the
black community today:

If most people are content to till the soil or to wander with their herds, and if they
remain relatively isolated from the centers of power and wealth, accept the existing
distribution of power and wealth, and agree with the conventional wisdom that their
own speech is not suitable for high-status activities, the linguistic issue is dormant.
No one challenges any of the symbols that define the group or the patterns of access to
power and wealth. (350)

History testifies that many European and other languages are now investigated

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“descriptively” without any due consideration of the historical process, in which many linguists
and other elites played active parts in “prescribing,” that is, differentiating and standardizing
those languages. Language scientists need to revisit the notion of description in linguistics and
demystify the Eurocentric ideology that the goal of language scientists is to describe a spoken
code.

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NOTES

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NOTES

ABSTRACT
1.

Historically, Japanese is a China-centered or Europe-centered proper noun and adjective
transcribed from indigenous languages in China to Portuguese, then other European
languages including English (Okamoto 1987). Hence, I’d like to substitute the rarely used
term Nipponese for the prevalent proper noun and adjective. The Nipponese Government
and, consequently, most Nipponese have taken it for granted that learning English and
expressing things in English is equal to learning British/American English and expressing
things in British/American English and culturally Euro-Americanized ways. As a result,
many culturally Nipponese things, especially many proper names, are still rendered in EuroAmericanized ways (e.g., when they express in English, most people reverse their names
from the autochthonous surname + given name order to the Euro-Americanized given name
+ surname order. cf. Chinese and Korean practices). Throughout the dissertation I employ
the surname + given name order to list Nipponese people, except myself, from the Nipponcentered perspective. The institutional constraint that my name has been formally registered
in the given name + surname order with the university obliges me to be consistent in that
regard.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
1.

See Note 1 in Abstract.

1. A HYPOTHETICAL INTRODUCTION TO THE CONSTRUCTION OF BLACK
LINGUISTICS
1. I prefer to use the term “users” to the term “speakers” when we refer to persons engaged in
acts of communication. The use of the latter is too entrenched in the discourses of
professional and amateur linguistics to critically examine the impact of the term on their
perspectives on communicative codes and the practical issues of the codes which they deal
with. I suggest the uncritical use of the term reproduces the Eurocentric phono-supremacy in
which writing systems or written codes always derive or are “reduced” from spoken codes,
i.e., spoken data are “true” rather than their written counterparts in linguistics. As a result,
some languages in which the written ideographic components play a significant role have
long been targets of cynical, subjective, ideological, and unscientific comments from
linguists, e.g., condescending comments on Chinese, claiming so-called “dialects” of Chinese
“spoken” around China are actually unintelligible to each other and should be called
“languages.” However, when we view Chinese in a fair manner from the perspective of its
written codes, the “languages” may be “dialects” of Chinese (cf. Fishman 1972: 134). I also
suggest, concerning the teaching and learning of English or other languages to “nonnative
speakers,” that the hegemonic use of the term “speakers” may contribute to the notion that
learners of foreign or second languages cannot be considered to have working commands of
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the languages until they “speak fluently” or “sound like native speakers,” even though they
have working abilities in reading and writing technical works or materials in those languages
for their professional purposes. The telling effect of this notion is seen in Nippon [= Japan],
where too many people complain that the English which they learnt at school “cannot be used
in actual society” simplistically because they cannot “speak” the language “fluently.”
Consequently, too many people including business people, government officials, scholars,
teachers, and various others rush to ask for the extended use (incl., learning) of the language,
to the imperialistic pleasure of political, economic, and educational elites and others in
“English-speaking” countries.
2. “In its established usage, a paradigm is an accepted model or pattern . . . is rarely an object
for replication . . . is an object for further articulation and specification under new or more
stringent conditions” (Kuhn 1996: 23). According to this definition, the comparative
linguistic paradigm may still have been in an early stage of its development in the 1970s
because the linguists and others who adopted the paradigm did not do as substantive research
as Smith (1974), who mainly examined black language in an inner-city, and as detailed works
as Lorenzo Turner (1949), who identified in Gullah massive amounts of linguistic features
deriving from West African languages, which may have enabled him to conduct an extensive
comparative linguistic analysis of the language. That said, it is an undeniable fact that
presently there are many followers of the comparative linguistic or Africological paradigm,
and it is an accepted model even among a small segment of the academic community.
Therefore, I will employ the term “paradigm” to refer to the linguistic thesis of Dr. Ernie A.
Smith and similar others (cf. Blackshire-Belay 1996).
3. The Anglicist Paradigm postulates that the distinctive features of the primary linguistic code
of descendants of enslaved Africans in the United States “were transmitted largely intact
from earlier nonstandard varieties of English . . . the English component of AAE [= African
American English] has become obscured over time . . .” (Van Herk 2015: 23). See main
discussions in Krapp (1924), Mufwene (2015), and Poplack (1999).
4. The Creolist Paradigm postulates that the black linguistic code is a decreolized variety of
creole English. Those scholars who adopt this paradigm often employ the labelling “African
American Vernacular English” or, sometimes, “African American Language.” See detailed
discussions in Rickford (2015), Smith (1996c), and Winford (1997 & 1998).
5. The comparative linguistic paradigm postulates that the linguistic codes of descendants of
enslaved Africans in the United States and other regions of the African diaspora are
languages other than Dutch, English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish, i.e., African
languages, called and fallen under the family of Ebonics. Consult Smith (1974, 1996b, 2001),
and Nehusi (2001). The term “comparative linguistic” is the terminology employed by Dr.
Ernie A. Smith. For others who choose to call their paradigm so, I will call theirs the
“Africological” paradigm, except where they propose to call it otherwise. The cognate term
“Africology” is a discipline in which the African-centered perspective “Afrocentricity” is an
analytical framework for examining African phenomena. For a definition of Afrocentricity,
refer to Asante (1992, 1998, 2006).
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6. See Section 1.3.1, “Disciplines.”
7. It must be noted that the experiential-practical factor overlaps with the ideological-political
factor because the latter includes not only ideologies but also actions, both of which derive
from those ideologies and everyday experiences/practices. But in order to accentuate
ideological from mundane, the two categories, conceptually separate but actually interwoven,
are constructed for the purpose of this research: ideological-political for being “more”
focused on power and ideology and experiential-practical for being “more” focused on
mundane businesses. In this vein, the experiential-practical cannot be separated from the
theoretical-scientific either. For most of the current sciences may attempt to present a
specialized account of a phenomenon which, usually, the scientists experience in their daily
lives or through experiments in the laboratory. In fact, some scientists view experiencepractice as part of theory-science. However, because experience-practice is not necessarily
compatible with theory-science, and because I want to analyze each of the three factors more
independently, my dissertation presents experience-practice and theory-science as
independent variables.
8. Krajewski (1988) points out “[t]he development of science is influenced not only by the
economic factors but also by the spiritual ones, such as the dominating philosophy or
religion . . . the Weltanschauung often has a direct influence on the development of science”
(173).
9. Many of my arguments here are largely compatible with the following phenomenological
view of science: “[t]he ‘immanence-transcendence’ principle in phenomenology establishes
that what has been called a scientific ‘truth’ (objective truth) so far is merely one
‘transcendence,’ in other words, one fiction that is explained on the ground of the human life
world’s needs, i.e., the general usability of things” (translated from Takeda 1989: 203).
10. Krajewski (1988: 177) explains how the power of the ruling stratum may be related to
conservative science.
11. What Mühlhäusler aptly observes about the linguistic ecology of the Pacific and Australian
area may be applied to the linguistic ecology of the descendant communities of enslaved
Africans in the United States. Mühlhäusler (1996) cautions, “Linguists hide behind the shield
of scholarly objectivity whilst the linguistic diversity that has been in existence for tens of
thousands of years is being eroded at an alarming rate. . . . In the case of much of linguistics,
the range of questions that has been addressed has been unduly narrow, ethnocentric and
insensitive to the plight of the languages and their speakers. Moral questions and questions of
the consequences of linguistic activity have been notoriously avoided in the mistaken belief
that it is possible to engage in an ideologically free linguistics. . . . What is needed now is a
new reformed linguistics that addresses some of the fundamental issues of the place of
language in human life, of the uses of intellectual and linguistic diversity and of the
responsibility linguistics has in helping to maintain and rescue a very fragile linguistic
ecology. These issues have barely begun to be addressed. One hopes that they will move
towards the centre of the discipline before it is too late . . .” (337-338).
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12. In another social science, psychology, black psychologist Joseph White (1984: 19) admits
that black psychologists adopt a posture of social and political advocacy.
13. “Education Secretary Richard Riley declared that it is not a foreign language and that no
bilingual education dollars will go to help students who speak the ‘nonstandard form of
English.’. . . Elevating black English to the status of a language is not the way to raise
standards of achievement in our schools and for our students. . . . It has been determined by
the United States Department of Education and the Clinton administration that the use of
federal bilingual education funds for what has been called black English or ebonics is not
permitted” (San Francisco Chronicle, 12/25/1997).
14. Assembly Bill No. 1206 CHAPTER 647: An act to add Section 30.5 to the Education Code,
relating to education. “30.5. (a) (1) Notwithstanding any other provision of law, bilingual
education shall be defined as a system of instruction which builds upon the language skills of
a pupil whose primary language is neither English nor derived from English. For purposes of
this paragraph:
(A) ‘‘Primary language’’ is a language, other than English or a language derived from
English, which is the language the pupil first learned.
(B) ‘‘Derived from English’’ means any dialect, idiom, or language derived from English.
Both of the following shall be construed as being derived from English:
(i) Any dialect, idiom, or language that has linguistic roots connected to English.
(ii) Any dialect, idiom, or language that has a syntax distinct from English, yet can be traced
linguistically as derived from English.
(2) A school district shall not utilize, as part of a bilingual education program, state funds or
resources for the purpose of recognition of, or instruction in, any dialect, idiom, or language
derived from English, as defined in paragraph (1)” (State of California 1997, emphasis added)
15. Watch the speech of black Attorney Alton H. Maddox, Jr. at https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=FCuPsiKF8sE.
16. According to a probation officer at a juvenile justice center, South Central Los Angeles, court
proceedings shall be conducted in English and Ebonics under the current law, if a request for
services in the latter should be placed by the defendant. However, another probation officer,
adds that such services, if any, would be provided to the parent, not defendants. Whether the
interpretation service is needed is addressed at the beginning of the court proceeding, not as a
request from the defendant but rather as a prompt to the parent from the officer. Another male
officer at the court says there have been no cases in which such services are provided to
Ebonics users.
17. See Section 5.2.1.
18. On 7 March 2016, I visited Pan-African Studies and the Human Resources Department,
California State University, Los Angeles. I found no information on him. Even if they may
have relevant information, they answered they cannot disclose his personal information
without his consent.
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19. Knorr-Cetina’s constructivist argument seems to derive from her analysis of the knowledge
production process in the “science laboratory,” in which the term “science” is restricted to
natural sciences. However, I quote her idea here because her analysis seems analogous to the
knowledge production process in social sciences.
20. The dominant practice, for example, among those language scientists who deal with newer
languages which historically and linguistically involve English, may be that they attempt to
see the newer languages only through the knowledge of English, sometimes, making a
certain interpretation that some features of indigenous African or Asian languages have been
incorporated into English, or “describing” the newly born languages principally in the
concepts, categories, and orthography of English (cf. Kachru 1992 & Mufwene, et al. 1998),
I highly suspect, in their covert attempt to hide their lack of diligence to study other
languages. This practice appears to be happening in applied linguistics too. For example,
many language practitioners or theorist-practitioners who are “native” users of English may
attempt to justify their elided indiligence in learning other languages through their
“scientific” or “objective” argument that the direct method of teaching English in English to
others whose primary languages are not English is more or most effective and their rampant
practice of “ESL” mainly in English-as-a-first-language countries and former UK and US
colonies. The literature proves that additive bilingual education is most effective in many
ways (cf. Riley-Bernal 2004).
21. Errington (2008) notes that “[i]t is worth emphasizing . . . that a European science of
language helped to legislate national difference in Europe as well as human inequality in an
imperial world” (15).
22. Kuhn (1972) points out, “The paradigm he [= the scientist] has acquired through prior
training provides him with the rules of the game, describes the pieces with which it must be
played, and indicates the nature of the required outcome. His task is to manipulate those
pieces within the rules in such a way that the required outcome is produced. If he fails, as
most scientists do in at least their first attacks upon any given problem, that failure speaks
only to his lack of skill. It cannot call into question the rules which his paradigm has
supplied, for without those rules there would have been no puzzle with which to wrestle in
the first place. No wonder, then, that the problems (or puzzles) which the practitioner of a
mature science normally undertakes presuppose a deep commitment to a paradigm. And how
fortunate it is that that commitment is not lightly given up. Experience shows that, in almost
all cases, the reiterated efforts, either of the individual or of the professional group, do at last
succeed in producing within the paradigm a solution to even the most stubborn problems.
That is one of the ways in which science advances. Under those circumstances can we be
surprised that scientists resist paradigm-change? What they are defending is, after all, neither
more nor less than the basis of their professional way of life” (96).
3. LIFE STORY AND SOCIOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE
1. Where language scientists and others locate the beginning of the paradigm may change
depending on what discipline they base their argument on. For example, if they include
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scholars from disciplines other than linguistics, they may argue the beginning may be the
early 1930s, in which Carter G. Woodson expressed an idea that the language of descendants
of enslaved African in the United States is an African language. But in this dissertation,
because I concentrate my analysis on the area of linguistics, I posit that the birth of a
comparative linguistic paradigm was in the 1970s.
4. POLITICS OF TRUTHS IN BLACK LINGUISTICS
1. “Linguicism can be defined as ideologies, structures and practices which are used to
legitimate, effectuate and reproduce an unequal division of power and (both material and
non-material) resources between groups which are defined on the basis of language (on the
basis of their mother tongues)” (Skutnabb-Kangas 1988: 13). It should be noted that when
Skutnabb-Kangas discusses linguicism, her discussions pay little or no attention to the
linguistic rights of the groups or individuals whose linguistic codes are recognized as dialects
by the state and the wider society; that her discussions include social and linguistic factors
surrounding the success or failure of L1 or L2 learning, but are not so inclusive to the extent
that they adequately address racial differentials and linguistic distances between the
languages discussed. Nonetheless, much of her analytical framework may be applicable to
protecting the rights of the “dialects,” and thus, I draw on part of her discussions, unless
specified otherwise.
2. Nearly three decades ago, French linguist René de Poyen-Bellisle stated, “L'absence de toute
action labiale pour les voyelles antérieures est le trait le plus frappant de la Phonologie
Créole. . . . La cause de ce phénomène est purement physiologique; et, afin de le comprendre,
il suffit de regarder les lèvres du nègre” (1894: 22, cited and concisely translated and
paraphrased by Smith (2016: 19) as “In order to understand the absence in French creole
dialects of the front rounded vowels of French, one merely had to look at the lips of the
Negro”). There are two things to be pointed out: one is, there may have existed an
intercontinental historical trend in which Africans were viewed by European and American
intelligentsia, and the other is, creoles were viewed as part of the dialectal continuum, which
points to my hypothetical argument that especially in the embryonic stage of the development
of dialectology and creolistics, they might have conspired to politically and scientifically
incorporate “sounds-or-looks-similar” linguistic codes within the scale of the language of the
dominant group. In fact, the concepts “dialect” and “creole” are often conflated and
confounded (cf. Stewart 1962).
3. When I talked with a special education teacher in a South Central Los Angeles school district
in the summer of 2013, she mentioned that two of the reasons that African American students
are placed in her special education class are “speech” and “academic attitudes.” She didn’t
elaborate further on those reasons but it seems that the two problem categories that DeBose
notes―speech pathologies and learning disorders―still seem to share something with the
speech and academic attitudes as mentioned today.
4. Black psychologist Joseph L. White (1984) aptly summarizes the dominant scholarly trend
back then: “Traditional scholars have been unwilling to recognize the presence of an African
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influence in Black life styles. According to this view, whatever existed in the way of African
culture was stamped out by the brutal effects of slavery and the subsequent economic, legal,
and political oppression. Afro-Americans are solely the product of American society. . . . To
the extent that differences between Euro-Americans and Afro-Americans exist, they represent
inferior approximations on the part of Black Americans, attempts to imitate Euro-Americans
rather than intrinsically different cultural and psychological styles. This type of thinking is at
the core of the pathology, deficit, deprivation models of Black inferiority” (8).
5. An English sociologist Basil Bernstein (1960) exerted a decisive impact on most of the
linguistic deficit theories cited in this article on culturally “deprived” black children from
lower socioeconomic homes.
6. The following is a case outside of the United States, but still relevant because the argument is
based on language differences. At the 21st Biennial Conference, Caribbean Languages 2 di
world: Caribbean Languages in a Globalizing world, August 2-5, 2016, University of the
West Indies, Mona, Jamaica, I personally saw a Caribbean speech therapist arguing that some
creole language speakers should be treated by speech therapists due to their linguistic
“deviations” from the standard. Soon a Jamaican linguist responded pointing out that her
argument puts those creole speakers into the linguistic deficit frame. On the other hand, when
I spoke with Linda Marie Redmond Taylor, M.A., a black speech pathologist from Tennessee,
at the 7th National African/Black Psychology Conference 2016, Honoring Dr. Robert
Williams, November 3-5, 2016, Florida A & M University, Tallahassee, Florida, she
commented she sees no speech pathologist around her who diagnoses those black students
who speak Ebonics as having a language deficit, and even her white colleagues recognize
their speech patterns as “Black English.” (personal communication, November 5, 2016)
7. According to Smitherman (1977: 1), the year 1959 was the time the first study was done to
change black language toward white language.
8. My argument here draws on an insight that “science develops successfully in the places
where it is generously sponsored, either by the state or private monopolies, foundation, etc.”
(Krajewski 1988: 173).
9. Alleyne (1971, 1980) states newly-born Afro-American languages in the African diaspora
cannot be categorized as pidgins or creoles. In these works the author examines the languages
outside of the pidgin-creole paradigm, and therefore, the works may not be taken for the
substratist view in creole linguistics.
10. Hancock (1980: x) notes that the first scholar who suggested a connection of black language
to Caribbean creoles was Clough (1876).
11. The following argument is not to be expanded in this dissertation, but for a future potential
area of inquiry, I will make some suggestions on the historical development of
sociolinguistics in the United States. The origins of dialectology and creole linguistics in
Europe may have been closely but implicitly intertwined with the nationalist and
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imperialistic interests of elite groups in each state-nation. The elites’ linguistic codes were
described and prescribed by part of the elite populations and then imagined by the elites and
masses as their common language. This linguistic imagining process reinforced each other
with the imagination of the elites and masses as nations, although other racial groups who
spoke newly born languages more distant from the European language may have been kept
out of the nations as, sort of, other nations without their own distinct languages. Then, the
white elite group in the United States and their linguists (certainly, some black linguists were
hegemonically absorbed into or had no choice but to conform to the white class) may have
appropriated from their European precedents and adjusted to their ends the two scientific
methods, i.e., creolistic and dialectological sets of criteria and interpretations to
hegemonically lock other linguistic groups in the English-speaking state sovereignty.
12. Molefi Kete Asante later seemed to have changed his linguistic position on Ebonics arguing
that it is a language other than English (cf. Asante 1997, 2016).
13. “Black Language is Euro-American speech with an Afro-American meaning, nuance, tone,
and gesture. . . . Think of black speech as having two dimensions: language and style.
Though we will separate the two for purposes of analysis, they are often overlapping. This is
an important point, frequently overlooked in discussions of Black English. . . . Black English,
then, is a language mixture, adapted to the conditions of slavery and discrimination, a
combination of language and style interwoven with and inextricable from Afro-American
culture” (Smitherman 1977: 2-3); “this sense of language in African Americans . . . is
uniquely more African than European” (Asante 1990: 21-22).
14. According to the database “Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts (LLBA),” the term
“African American Language” started to appear in 1991 and gather momentum in 1998 and
thereafter.
15. My arguments on Eurocentric dualism so far largely draw on Joseph White (1984), who
observes that: “[a]t the heart of the Euro-American world view is the problem of the mindbody dualism inherited from Descartes. This dualistic thinking has generated a number of
dichotomies along the lines of rational-irrational, ego-id, good-bad, affective-cognitive,
human-animal, primitive-civilized, and master-slave. These dichotomies in turn have led to
questions of inferiority-superiority, better-worse, and debate as to which side of the dualism
should control human behavior” (11).
16. No further detail on his background is available.
5. FORMATION OF THE COMPARATIVE LINGUISTIC PARADIGM
5.1. Ideological-Political Factor
1. Throughout this chapter, all life story data come from Smith 1974, 1975, 2002, and 2015, and
my interviews with him since 2010, except for other sources which are given full citations.
Only direct quotations from his works and the interviews with him are accompanied by
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complete citations. For further information, consult the references.
2. “Classical black nationalism is defined . . . as an ideology whose goal was the creation of an
autonomous black nation-state, with definite geographic boundaries―usually in Africa”
(Moses 1996: 1).
3. Some would say Oklahoma was not in the South. Indeed, it was largely a white state. But
others (e.g., Peery 1978; Sides 2003) include it in the South.
4. Joshua A. Fishman “analyzes nationalism as a response to both the problems and the
opportunities created by social change―to the heightened need for reestablishing group
identity in the face of rapid change and to the heightened awareness that group membership
can serve as a basis for exclusion from or inclusion in the benefits accompanying such
change” (Kelman 1972: viii).
5. As a similar case, Dr. Geneva Smitherman was born to sharecroppers in Tennessee and
moved to metropolitan cities, Chicago and Detroit. She was a monolingual speaker of the
Ebonics of her family, the black church, and her sharecropping community. Her only black
teacher in all her years of schooling understood and sometimes even spoke her language
(Smitherman 2000: 1).
6. As another telling case from Dr. Smitherman, once she moved to industrial metropolitan
areas, she started to experience a similar line of linguistic discriminations in state institutions
of power. She was ordered to repeat her grade in her elementary school because of her use of
black language in the hearing distance of a white teacher (Smitherman 2000: 1; 2001: 214).
7. See Appendix D.
8. It is “a verbal trick and device; a cunning, manipulative ruse used by con-artists and
swindlers to deceive a person for monetary gain. Stuff, i.e., worthless merchandise or nothing
at all, is given in exchange for money” (Smith 1974: n. 8, p. 7).
9. To mack(in) is “(3) to talk well, particularly to a female with the intention of impressing her.
(4) con-game, to swindle, after gaining one’s confidence” (Smith 1974: 172). Rappin is to
“(1) Originally rhapsodize; to fascinate or dazzle someone with conversation. Hence to flatter
and express deep, sincere devotion to a guy or girl. (2) To woo or flatter with praise,
accolades, and amorous expressions of desire” (Ibid.: 174). Sweetmouthin is “an encomium,
an enthusiastic sometimes high flown expression of praise. To flatter or express accolades,
and adulation (usually behind the person’s back) as opposed to rappin which is flattery to
someone in their presence” (Ibid.: 181).
10. Fishman (1972) stresses that “differences are not naturally ‘divisive’ (nor are similarities
unifying) until highlighted as such. It is not the experience of difference that is divisive but
the interpretation given to the experience. Thus, the ‘highly differentiated and clustered world
of settlements, nodes of transport, centers of culture, areas and centers of language, divisions
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of castes and class, barriers between markets, sharp regional differences in wealth and
interdependence’ (Deutsch 1953: 187) are only potentially divisive in the sense that they do
not further integration. These must first interact with conflict or competition in order to be
experienced as justifications for differentiation (Katz 1965: 566)” (n. 49, p. 104).
11. See Appendix E.
12. Dr. Smitherman was placed in a language remediation class in college too (Smitherman
2001: 215; Jackson, Williams, & Smitherman 2011: 102-103).
13. Dr. Ernie A. Smith does not accept the term “activist” or “activism” because according to
him, it frames such actions within the perspective of Eurocentrism. He provides an
alternative, “ombudsman,” for example.
14. Another similar case is that Dr. Smitherman went through the Black Power Movement in
graduate school, and that made her examine the functional and formal location of black
language in American linguistic imperialism (Smitherman 1977: 242).
15. Dr. Smitherman sometimes refers to the black community as “Africans in America”
(Smitherman 2000), but considering the fact that she refers to black language as “African
American Language” on most occasions, she appears to accept that she is a citizen of the
United States (Smitherman 2001: 230).
16. See Appendix F.
17. At that time he had no knowledge of phonetic and phonological description in linguistics.
18. The illiteracy rate for black males at 16 to 24 was 0.8% (1969), more than two and a half
times higher than that for white males, 0.3% (1969) (US Department of Commerce 1971).
Considering the methodological constraint that respondents replied concerning the literacy of
each household member, the severity of the literacy problems facing the black community
should have been much greater than the census data showed.
19. See Appendix G.
20. Nationalism in Europe stimulated the scientific reconstruction of a common ancestral
language in the Indo-European language family through comparative philology or grammar,
later called comparative linguistics (A. D. Smith 2010: 11); “comparative philologists spoke
as public intellectuals about questions of national culture, politics, and history, and . . . they
created the first academic discipline which had ‘evolution as its very core’” (Hobsbawm
1964: 337, cited in Errington 2008: 71).
21. Albeit a case of being somewhere between the Creolist Paradigm and the comparative
linguistic paradigm, Dr. Smitherman makes an interestingly similar remark: “I say it was
being in the Freedom Struggle, in the Black Movement that provided the foundation of my
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work” (Jackson, Williams, & Smitherman 2011: 96).
5.2. Experiential-Practical Factor
1. For example, Dr. Geneva Smitherman, who adopts the term “African American Language” to
refer to black language, once felt that black and white language is quite different
(Smitherman 1977: 242). Another testimony to the felt difference between black and white
speech was one comment made by some white scholars that “the language used in some
black communities is significantly different from any other American English dialect”
(Wolfram & Clarke 1971: x).
2. On the contrary, Van Keulen, Weddington, and DeBose (1998) observes black language has a
high similarity with white language.
3. I have recently obtained important experiential information on the intelligibility and
understandability of black language for whites. A white physicist, in his early 50s, recollects
his youth experience in the South. He confessed he understood nothing of the language his
black cohorts at the public school spoke. Inferring from his age today, it might have been in
the late 1970s.
4. Dr. Ernie A. Smith (personal communication, December 8 & 9, 2014) mentions that The
Dove Counterbalance Intelligence Test (Dove 1967) was the model for the BITCH test.
5. Dr. Smitherman saw a black lawyer put in a court trial because of his use of African
American Language and did an expert witness for him (Jackson, Williams, & Smitherman
2011: 97-98).
6. See “On Criminalization of Blacks and Why Ebonics Should Be Recognized as a Language”
Accessed 10/30/2016 at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCuPsiKF8sE.; In a recent move
for a “heavy dialect” or a “creole” of English in Canada, Jamaican speakers are officially
provided with court interpretative services in Peel, Ontario. There was also a language
movement for the implementation of an English creole heritage language program when the
fervor for human rights or language rights was raging in Canada. On the other hand, in the
Caribbean region, there is little discussion about the language rights for “creole” speakers
like in court. All police officers are bilingual in English and a creole but have considerable
control and power over the linguistic evidence they present to the court and their evidence is
highly variable.
5.3. Theoretical-Scientific Factor
1.

In the black-white relating session, Smith said in front of the white participants, “You're all a
bunch of motherfucking hunky liberals. Any questions?” (Ellis 1987: 97).

2.

“This course will deal with problems related to race and poverty and will involve field work
and participant observation in programs like Operation Bootstrap and CORE in Los Angeles
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and Orange Counties” (UCI PCC F 1973).
3.

In UCI, the Program in African American Studies was founded in 1993 and became the
Department of African American Studies in 2016.

4.

“Irvine Black Studies.” the new university, Vol. 1, No. 35, Tuesday, March 4, 1969.

5.

“learning beyond the classroom―an interview with joe white.” the new university, Vol. 3,
No. 2, Tuesday, October 7, 1970. Dr. White added, “[P]rior to 1968, there were only two
blacks in attendance at UCI.”

6.

White still viewed black language as a dialect of English in 1984 (cf. White 1984: 126).

7.

Herskovits and Herskovits (1936) reached from a linguistic viewpoint a conclusion on the
languages spoken from the Sea Islands of South Carolina to Suriname in South America to
West Africa that:
the peculiarities of Negro speech are primarily due to the fact that the Negroes have
been using words from European languages to render literally the underlying
morphological patterns of West African tongues. . . . not only taki-taki, but the speech of
the other regions of the New World . . . and the West African pidgin dialects, are all
languages exhibiting, in varying degrees of intensity, similar African constructions and
idioms, though employing vocabulary that is predominantly European. (131, 134, italics
in original)
It should be noted, however, that the Herskovitses’ discourse on the varieties of Ebonics was
tainted with Eurocentric conceptualization: they described the languages as “deviations” of
European languages. Their argument sounds similar to the substratist argument in creole
linguistics (See Section 5.3.7.2 for further information on the argument).

8.

Creole linguist Lorenzo Dow Turner (1890-1972) is frequently quoted as a starter of
black linguistics. Inspired by Melville J. Herskovits, who also adopted a creole linguistic
approach, Turner conducted a longitudinal research on the structure of Gullah “dialect”
and found continuity of Ebonics to West African languages on grammatical
(phonological, semantic, and morphosyntactical) and lexical levels. Though he
discovered West African continuity at the grammatical level, he referred to it as “a
creolized variety of English” and “Gullah dialect.” It is clear that he accepted the creole
linguistic paradigm and he interpreted Gullah as an African kind of English. This was
and is a typical way of interpreting newly born languages in the African diaspora in the
literature. If Turner’s findings were to be interpreted comparative linguistically, Gullah
is an African or, in Jahn’s terms, a neo-African language, which can be traced back to
West African languages. In fact, despite the fact that he adopted the creole linguistic
paradigm, his findings paved a way for comparative linguistically interpreting Ebonics
as genetically or genealogically continuous to West African languages.

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9.

See details in the Department of English, University of Florida, Gainesville and The
New York Times, July 11, 2005.

10. “[Cayenne Creole] grammar [ . . . ] is nothing but the grammar that is common to the
languages of Guinée. The latter we can call langues naturelles as opposed to langues
cultivées. For the botanist, plants that are naturelles are superior to plants that are cultivées to
the extent that the former are pristine products that are free of intentional adulteration.
Likewise, for the linguist, the speech of peoples considered primitive has primacy over the
speech of civilized peoples: the former is closer to the sort of grammatical instincts of which
children’s utterances reveal processes that are simple, logical and fast. [ . . . ] [Cayenne
Creole] grammar is more naturelle than that of Sanskrit, Latin, and French. But this
grammar did not spontaneously emerge in Guyana; it was imported from Africa” (Adam
1883: 4–5, translated by DeGraff 2001: 215-216).
11. The BITCH test drew on a test called the “Chitling Test of Intelligence,” developed in 1968
as the short form of a test known as “The Dove Counterbalance Intelligence Test.” The latter
was developed in 1967 by black sociologist Dr. Adrian Dove, former Chairman of the
Congress of Racial Equality of California (CORE-CA). See for further information on Dove
(1967) http://news.schoolsdo.org/2013/11/chitling-test-misused-badly-in-maryland-schools/
(accessed 09052016).
12. See the details at http://afas.wustl.edu/about (accessed 09042016).
13. Williams (ed.) (1975: 144).
14. See the details at https://aast.uic.edu/aast/graceholt (accessed 09042016).
15. Williams (ed.) (1975: 142).
16. Ibid.
17. Fasold (1999) critiques the ambiguity of the definition of Ebonics presented at the meeting
in St. Louis. However, it is clear from the verbatim record that the intention of the caucus
was to dually define the term, that is, as a language (black language) and a science (black
linguistics).
18. The course description was: “The purpose of this course is to explain the parlance, jargon,
and mannerisms of contemporary Black America within the scope of the most recent
language and communication theory, thereby increasing effective communication between
different racial and ethnic groups. Field trips and research paper.” (UCI PCC S 1973) The
more specific linguistic labeling “Black English” disappeared in this semester.
19. The course description was: “The philosophy of Black Radical Thought as it emerged from
the Black experience in America through slavery, Reconstruction, post-Reconstruction, preWorld War II and contemporary times; as it is expressed through music, sermons, literature,
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social movements, drama, and political action. Consideration will be given to geographical
time frames such as Northern urban, Southern rural differences and the like” (UCI PCC F
1973).
20. John Baugh (2000: 85) criticizes that it is problematic that the definition of Ebonics is solely
based on race. Linguists should notice that any collective category such as race, ethnicity,
nationality, and nation has an inherent inconsistency and arbitrariness. The science has
“described” a linguistic code with which the larger society has forcefully matched one of the
categories. Therefore, the concept “speech community,” which Baugh regards as a valid
“scientific” category, also has the same internal inconsistency and arbitrariness. Nonetheless,
the factor of race has become a fundamental collective factor to analysis of things African
due to the historical collective oppressions of Africans as a race throughout the world.
Bonilla-Silva and Zuberi (2008) develops a counter-argument in this regard: “The
methodologically inclined will say, ‘Methods are objective research tools beyond race,
gender, and class.’ They will argue that ‘social science methodology, like genetics, can be
applied impartially regardless of the racial background of the individual conducting the
investigation.’ . . . [White logic and White methods] blind (or severely limit) many social
scientists from truly appreciating the significance of ‘race’ (or, properly speaking, racial
stratification)” (4). It is important to understand the comparative linguistic paradigm was
born to rectify the Eurocentric subjectivity and racialization/colorization of the methods in
black linguistics, and thus, inevitably became pan-Africanist partly based on a racial element
of blackness.
21. Dr. Smith does not accept the use of the term “vernacular” because it has a Latin etymology
which is “a slave who was born in the master’s house.”
6. IDEOLOGY-POLITICS, EXPERIENCE-PRACTICE, AND THEORY-SCIENCE IN
INTERACTION
1.

As indicated earlier in Chapter 3, I attempted to reconstruct Dr. Smith’s life story from his
perspective by employing the categories or concepts which he employed in the interviews
with me.

7. CONCLUDING SUGGESTIONS
1. As a relevant case, I will briefly talk about a case for Caribbean immigrant students in New
York. When the home language survey was administered to parents, some parents wrote their
home language as Jamaican Creole or a language other than English. During the course of
counselling, some linguistically informed counsellors may have advised parents to write
Jamaican Creole or a language other than English as the home language. According to the
law, the school district must address the issue, but no action has been taken so far. (Darvin &
Grant 2016)
2. Asante (1980) emphasizes the importance of integrating culture, economics, and politics for
liberation. Sciences like linguistics would be under the category of culture. Of course, his
270

categories “economics” and “politics” may not be congruent with my own categorical
division of “ideological-political” and “experiential-practical,” but my own put together, they
may be able to cover Asante’s in entirety.
3. The anteriority of one communicative mode over another does not legitimate the superiority,
more authenticity, or more naturalness of the former over the latter. The ideological emphasis
on speech may have obviously contributed to discrimination against other modes of
communication such as sign language and the underestimation of the oppressive power of
writing systems, especially Roman alphabets which have been dominantly used for writing or
documenting so-called pidgins, creoles, or dialects, and other languages in post-colonial
regions. Additionally I suggest that the speech supremacy may have contributed to the fact
that even those who are as or far more proficient as or than “native speakers” who are white,
male, middleclass have been judged to have a linguistic or communicative problem based on
the phonetic and phonological differences that exist between the former and the latter (e.g.,
Smitherman 2001: 215). I witness this last phenomenon widely in Nipponese society.
4. In Western literature, this notion of the superiority of alphabetic orthographies may date back
to Herder (1966 [1787]), which largely influenced the embryonic stage of European
linguistics (Errington 2008).
5. I encountered this European or white linguist at the “Official Opening Public Lecture by
Hubert Devonish and Cocktails” at the Society for Caribbean Linguistics 21st Biennial
Conference, Caribbean Languages 2 di world: Caribbean Languages in a Globalizing world,
August 2-5, 2016, University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. Devonish only returned “a
smile” with no worded reply in response to the advice or comment from the European
participant.

271

APPENDICES

272

APPENDIX A. Research Participant Information and Consent Form.

1. EXPLANATION OF THE RESEARCH and WHAT YOU WILL DO:
So far, a huge amount of research has been done on the language of descendants of enslaved
Africans in the United States or African Americans. However, little research discusses an
Afrocentric linguistic theory which argues that the language of descendants of enslaved Africans
in the US or African Americans is a language other than English or an African language, except
in a few years after the passing of the Ebonics Resolution by the Oakland Unified School District
in 1996. Actually there still survive some voices in support of the theory in the academy and
beyond. I believe that the advocates of the theory have a basic human or collective right to such a
claim in public places without any discrimination or denigration from others in a true democratic
society. As a researcher and an activist I hope to contribute to normalization of this undemocratic
situation.

You are being asked to participate in a research study of the process by which the Afrocentric
linguistic theory, which describes the primary language of Blacks in the United States as a
language other than English or an African language has developed in response to the racist social
structure. If you agree to participate in this study, you will be asked a series of questions on your
life history concerning why and how you came up with or encountered with the Afrocentric
linguistic thought and, if applicable, how you have attempted to scientifically justify your
position on Ebonics as a language other than English or an African language. The questions are
centered around the following themes:

273

(1) what your ancestry is;
(2) where and how you grew up until adulthood in your neighborhood and school;
(3) what linguistic codes you used in particular settings in your childhood, adolescence, and
early adulthood;
(4) what racial discrimination you have experienced so far;
(5) what linguistic discrimination you have experienced in school and elsewhere;
(6) what community activities to address social problems you’ve been engaged in;
(7) what religious activities you’ve been engaged in;
(8) how you politically and linguistically view Ebonics;
(9) how you have come to realize that Ebonics is a language other than English or an African
language;
(10)

how you attempt to scientifically justify your position on Ebonics; and

(11)

how you attempt or hope to apply your Afrocentric linguistic theory to education and

other domains.

2. YOUR RIGHTS TO PARTICIPATE, SAY NO, OR WITHDRAW:
Participation in this research project is completely voluntary. You have the right to say no. You
may change your mind at any time and withdraw. You may choose not to answer specific
questions or to stop participating at any time.

3. CONFIDENTIALITY OF YOUR ANSWERS:
This research is close to a semi-autobiographical sketch of persons. Contents may be described

274

in a way that discloses your identity. If you agree to this condition, please sign your name below.
Otherwise, all of the information that you provide will be kept strictly confidential, so no one
except me will be able to identify your individual responses and connect them to you, except in
cases you permit me to let others identify you. Whenever I want to disclose your identity linked
to some of the data, I will consult you beforehand.

Consent to Disclosure of Identity

Participant’s Name (Printed)

Participant’s Signature

Date

4. COSTS AND COMPENSATION FOR BEING IN THE STUDY:
Participation in the study will not cost you anything, but may require a series of 2- to 3 hour
interviews dispersed over a certain period of time. At the end of the study, as a thank you, I will
be making a $50 to $200 donation to the community organization you are in or a gift card of that
amount to you.

5. CONTACT INFORMATION FOR QUESTIONS AND CONCERNS:
If you have concerns or questions about this study, such as scientific issues, or how to do any
part of it, please contact the researcher:
Kunihiko Minamoto
African American & African Studies

275

Michigan State University
A-631 Wells Hall
East Lansing, MI 48824
minamoto@msu.edu

If you have questions or concerns about your role and rights as a research participant, would like
to obtain information or offer input, or would like to register a complaint about this study, you
may contact, anonymously if you wish, the Michigan State University’s Human Research
Protection Program at 5173552180, Fax 5174324503, or email irb@msu.edu or regular mail at
408 W. Circle Drive, 207 Olds Hall, MSU, East Lansing, MI 48824.

6. DOCUMENTATION OF INFORMED CONSENT:
Please indicate your willingness to participate in this study by writing and signing your name
below:

Participant’s Name (Printed)

Interviewer’s Name (Printed)

Participant’s Signature

Interviewer’s Signature

B. INSTRUMENT
Biographic/Demographic Profile

276

Date

Date

1) When were you born?
2) Where were you born?
3) Where did you live in your childhood and adolescence?
4) What did racial or ethnic groups live in those communities where you have lived so far?
5) What did your parents or grandparents do for living?
6) What elementary, secondary, and tertiary schools did you attend?
7) What were the racial or ethnic makeups of the students and teachers at the schools?
8) What is your occupational history?
9) What religion did or do belong or adhere to?

Linguistic Behavior and Attitudes
1) What language, e.g., Ebonics or English, did you use to whom in what settings in early
childhood and adolescence? (e.g., birthplace, inner-city neighborhood, school)
2) What feelings did you have toward Ebonics in your childhood and adolescence?
3) What feelings did you have toward English in your childhood and adolescence?
4) When and where did you become aware of the difference between the language of Blacks
and the language of whites?
5) When and where did you become aware that Black language is a language other than
English, not a dialect of English?

Linguistic Discrimination (If yes, I will say “Could you tell me more about the incident?)
1) Did you have any experience that a teacher or an instructor admonished or corrected you for

277

the use of Ebonics in elementary school, secondary school, or college?
2) Did your schoolmates tease you for the use of Ebonics in elementary school, secondary
school, or college?
3) Did your school (elementary, secondary, or tertiary) place you in a special education class or
some language correction class because of the use of Ebonics?
4) Did you have any other discriminatory experiences in elementary school, secondary school,
or college?

Racial Discrimination (If yes, I will say “Could you tell me more about the incident?)
1) Did you experience any race-based discrimination or attack against you? (e.g., by law
enforcement or hate groups)
2) Did your family or your relative(s) experience any race-based discrimination or attack? (e.g.,
by law enforcement or hate groups)

Black Nationalism
1) What community activities did or do you engage in?
2) What needs or problems in the Black community do you think you should address?
3) How do you call yourself and your own people, for example, African Americans, Blacks, or
just Africans?
4) Do you think that Black people in the United States is a nation?
5) Do you think that Black people in the United States should have their own institutions in the
areas of economy, education, and/or politics?

278

6) Do you think that Black people in the United States should have their own state in the United
States or outside of it?
7) Do you think that Black people should have a language of their own?

Encounter with a Particular Scientific Idea on Black Language
1) Where and when did you start your scholarly activities on Ebonics?
2) In what discipline did you start your scholarly activities on Ebonics?
3) How did your discipline impact your perspective on Ebonics?
4) Who or whose ideas most impacted your perspective on Ebonics?
5) Could you tell me some academic profiles on your dissertation/thesis committee members?
6) Could you define Ebonics?
7) How do you attempt to scientifically legitimize your argument that Ebonics is a language
other than English?
8) In what ways is your argument beneficial for the Black community?
9) How is the dominant paradigm that views the language of Blacks as a dialect of English
unacceptable?

279

APPENDIX B. Report of Domestic Internship (Summer 2013).

Instructor: Dr. Rita Kiki Edozie, Director, African American & African Studies
Supervisor: Dr. Ernie A. Smith, Professor, Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science
Organizations: Black 1 Community Children’s Task Force, Black Community Education Task
Force, Black Community Health Task Force, Black Community Mental Health Task Force
Location: 7813 South Central Avenue Los Angeles CA 90001
Period: May 13, 2013 – August 15, 2013 (meetings and interviews in May and mentoring in June
through August)
Activity: To conduct 118 hours of preparations for Task Force meetings, participatory
observation, and interviews, and receive Dr. Smith’s mentoring

PURPOSE

Dr. Ernie A. Smith has tackled linguistic white supremacy as part of a wider array of white
supremacy against U.S. descendants of enslaved Africans. This domestic internship gains an
understanding of his entire human rights struggles—language issues are just among the many but
permeate them all—against the racist social arrangements of the US. He is an ombudsman in
various community and NGO efforts to abate ethnic discrimination and social injustice in
education, mental health, children’s welfare, and juvenile system. The human rights group he
participates in is, as it were, a think tank, consisting of the Black Community Children’s Task
Force (BCCTF), the Black Community Education Task Force (BCETF), the Black Community
1

In this report the category “Black” refers to US descendants of enslaved Africans.

280

Health Task Force (BCHTF), and the Black Community Mental Health Task Force (BCMHTF).
Below are brief accounts of each task force meeting and personal interview with presenters and a
concluding essay on Dr. Smith’s academy to community connection and NGO contributions.

TASK FORCE MEETINGS AND INTERVIEWS

05/13/2013
Presenter 1: Dr. Nicoline Ambe, Special Education Teacher, Compton Unified School District
(CUSD), CA
Topic: Black Students in Special Education in the CUSD
Summary: Most speech therapists and psychologists are not from Black communities. A
disproportionate number of Black students are in special education in her Compton school,
considering the fact that the Black community constitutes merely 6% of the LA population and
9% of the state population: four in nine students are Black in her class.

Presenter 2 & 3: Dr. Bita Amani, Assistant Professor, Urban Public Health, College of Science &
Health, Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science & A Female Student (Gullah
Speaker)
Topic: The South LA Juvenile Court System in Jeopardy
Summary: State government budget cuts are encroaching upon the LA juvenile justice system,
e.g., David V. Kenyon Juvenile Justice Center. If the center is closed, there might be some
repercussions to the south LA community: 1) young people will miss their court dates and run

281

from authorities and 2) pushing court proceedings out of the area forces them to visit other areas
where other gang members reside.

Presenter 4: Ama Amoafo-Yeboah, Executive Director, University of Southern California (USC)
Black Student Assembly, and Riliesha Pierce, USChange Movement
Topic: Racial Profiling of USC Students: LAPD and Black Students
Summary: A graduation party by Black USC students was raided by LAPD. There was another
going on across the street, which consists of White students. No action for the White was taken
but for the Black. Some Black students were behind bars due to “misdemeanors,” “didn’t
disperse as requested,” or “videotaped the police conducts.”

05/20/2013
Presenter: Dr. Ron Beavers, President, Greater Los Angeles Chapter, National African American
Drug Policy Coalition
Topic: The Foster Care Industry Complex
Summary: The social worker and the supervisor decide to put the child for adoption without
going through a required procedure from the outset. The industries and individuals that benefit
from the foster care system (e.g., a foster parent earns $5,000 per child) have produced an
exploitative structure of “children for cash.” What the system is doing is to encourage foster
children to jails or other institutions. The penal system and the adoption system tie their hands.

05/21/2013

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Interviewee: Dr. Nicoline Ambe, Special Education Teacher, Compton Unified School District
(CUSD), CA
Topic: Linguistic Issues in Special Education
Summary: There are no Black students who are placed in special education due to “linguistic”
reasons in her school. Instead Latino students are placed in that manner. But there are some
Black students in special education who have “communication” problems. Among them is a lack
of academic expressions in their language repertoire.

05/28/2013
A visit to Central Juvenile District, Edmund D. Edelman Children's Court
Topic: Linguistic Issues in the Children's Court System
Summary: Most interpretation services are provided to Spanish-using clients (parents). No
service has been provided to US descendants of enslaved Africans.

05/28/2013
A visit to the David V. Kenyon Juvenile Justice Center, interviews with: Mr. Kent Swift, Deputy
Probation Officer II, Probation Department; Mr. Robin Gregory, Supervising Deputy Probation
Officer, JJCPA School Based Supervision Program – Cluster 2; and an unknown male officer
Topic: Linguistic Issues in the Juvenile Court System
Summary: According to Mr. Swift court proceedings shall be conducted in English and Ebonics
under the current law, if a request for services in the latter should be placed by the defendant.
However Mr. Gregory adds that such services, if any, would be provided to the parent, not

283

defendants. Whether the interpretation service is needed is addressed at the beginning of the
court proceeding, not as a request from the defendant but rather as a prompt to the parent from
the officer. A third unknown male officer at the court says there have been no cases in which
such services are provided to Ebonics users.

05/28/2013
Presenter 1 & 2: Mr. John Thomas, Chief, University of Southern California (USC) Department
of Public Safety and Mr. Paul A. Snell, Captain, Commanding Officer, Los Angeles Police
Department
Topic: Arrest of USC Black Students in a Black Graduation Party
Summary: Two graduation parties were going on across the street: one for Black students and the
other for White students. According to the police the White party was dispersed soon after the
police cautioned them while the Black party continued after being cautioned. Six Black students
were arrested: one for felony and five for misdemeanors. Black students are constantly under the
threat of racial profiling by the police.

Presenter 3: President Rosalind Scarbrough, San Fernando Valley (Branch 1064), NAACP
Topic: Recent and Rampant Killings of Black Men by LAPD, Especially the Mentally Disabled
Summary: A mentally disabled Black male was killed in an encounter with the LAPD. He hadn’t
taken his medication, exhibited some aggressive behavior, and acted out in order to attract
attention with two kitchen knives. LAPD tasered and shot him simultaneously, causing his death,
according to his relatives.

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A CONCLUDING ESSAY

The report will be concluded with a summary of Dr. Smith’s whole community and NGO
efforts in relation to an underlying theme cutting through all his efforts. Particularly his linguistic
contributions to US descendants of enslaved Africans shall be discussed vis-à-vis that underlying
theme.

COMMUNITY CONTRIBUTIONS―EBONICS

Dr. Smith is a researcher on Ebonics or Nigritian languages as a mother tongue for Africans
in the United States. Anyone familiar with his linguistic works would naturally suppose that he
would be mainly engaged in uplifting the status of Black Language. What I’ve found in the
internship, though, is that while his main academic concern is with the provision to US
descendants of enslaved Africans of an ESL program grounded on a comparative linguistic
understanding of Ebonics, his interests encompass a whole gamut of human rights.
The Task Forces he devotes himself to focus on one common thread in Black people’s lives:
a life course susceptible to corporate and other forms of systemic exploitation (education/foster
care/incarceration). The four task forces (BCCTF, BCETF, BCHTF, and BCMHTF) mobilize
academic, legal, and pragmatic knowledge and insights to break the life chain. The think tank
shares a role with many organizations (incl., Black Studies programs) in enlightening Black
people but it is rather oriented toward problem-solving.
One exemplary attainment of their efforts, where one parent in the Task Forces has been

285

fighting for his child, is that: currently an LA public school provides an ESL―not a hegemonic
bidialectal―service to a Black student. It has not yet been in organized form but it is the greatest
step forward that has ever been achieved. As this application of the 1968 Bilingual Education Act
exemplifies, education is very often tied to linguistics and communication. Indeed most Black
Language studies are concerned with language or language planning “in education,” but Dr.
Smith’s linguistic concerns have a wider reach: foster care, incarceration, law enforcement, etc.
In each of these we find systemic linguistic barriers in their procedures. There are two legal
dimensions here. One is legalese. Many clients would find themselves expressing their responses
without understanding what has been said in the court. This is an issue everyone, be they Black
or White, faces in the legal system. However, the Black language would far more complicate the
issue than the White language because the former is far more critically different in syntactical,
phonological, morphological, and rhetorical aspects from the legal language than the latter. In
court every intricacy in language expressions would lead to grave consequences on the fate of
the defendant. It would be too unprofessional and devastating if the court system simplistically
identifies every Black defendant or witness in the US as a person who is fully proficient in
English. On many occasions their first languages might belong not to English but the Ebonics
family with varying degree of proficiencies in English. As the judiciary law stipulates, the
judiciary shall 1) conduct a language survey in the community, 2) conduct a needs analysis in the
court, and 3) provide services even in a language not designated. Therefore, those US Africans or
Blacks who need such help need to have an interpreter who is capable of appropriately and
maximally bridging the linguistic differences, i.e., who is bilingual in a variety of Ebonics and
English.

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LANGUAGE RIGHTS―CIVIL RIGHTS OR HUMAN RIGHTS?

One caveat is that because as an ombudsman of the Task Forces Dr. Smith attempts to
achieve a fuller potential within the current institutional framework never suggests his will to
participate in US citizenship. It must not be forgotten that “civil rights” are forced upon the
descendants of enslaved Africans in the United (White) States of America and have never been
agreed upon by them. Those rights have always been subject to white supremacist opportunism
and capricious interpretations. It seems that the ultimate aim of his grass-roots efforts is never to
adjust truths to white supremacist interpretations but to self-determine truths and realize full
“human rights” in the Black life course, even within the confines of white supremacist state
sovereignty.
Dr. Smith says:

since in the USA, whether local, state or federal, all public law is supposedly rooted in
the ‘social contract’ principle of government, i.e., the principle that governments derive
their just powers from the ‘consent’ of the governed, the 14th Amendment unilaterally,
by force and violence without free will choice, voluntary consent, or the benefit of
any plebiscite or democratic process, transferred the descendants of enslaved Africans
into the political community of the Euro-American English speaking people as
"citizens." (Smith 2011, emphasis added)

US descendants of enslaved Africans have been forced into the Euro-American English-using
citizenship. Although the Euro-American English settler has imposed their language on Africans
in their dominion, they have been geographically, economically, and socially segregated to the
extent that they retain their African linguistic heritages in varying degrees. Furthermore, they
have been stripped of the right to claim, examine, and determine what they use as a verbal

287

means.
What Black Nationalist Ernie A. Smith has attempted in his “human rights” struggle is to
help the Black community “fully” realize themselves in the forced-upon “civil rights” struggle.
As part of that struggle he has devoted himself to self-determining Ebonics and relevant issues
independently of a language of white citizenship, English.

REFERENCES

Smith, Ernie 2010. A. “Ebonics and Black Nationalism: An Essay in Response to America’s
Foster Care to Prison Pipeline, The Prison Industrial Complex and The New Jim Crow.”
04/05/2010. Unpublished.
―. 2011. “Why I Do Not Vote.” 08/08/2011. Unpublished.

288

APPENDIX C. List of Categories Produced Based on E-mail Correspondences.

OPEN CODING
1.

Black Nationalist

2.

Malcolm X

3.

Descendants of Enslaved Africans

4.

Pathologization of Black Culture

5.

Muslim

6.

Whiteness

7.

Racial Bias

8.

Global White Supremacy

9.

Eurocentric to Afrocentric History

10. Black vs. African American
11. Oriental Judicial Culture
12. Black Mental Health
13. Pseudo-Black Middle Class
14. White Media Agitation
15. Police Brutality
16. Self-Negation
17. White Idolization
18. Whitewashing
19. Muslim vs. Christianity
20. Anti-Global White Supremacy – Black Muslim – Black Nationalism – Law Enforcement

289

21. Possession of Black Institutions (Black Nationalism)
22. White Plagiarism of Black Culture
23. Educational Tracking (Standardized Tests)
24. White Exploitation of Black Resources
25. Mass Incarceration
26. White Supremacist Universalism
27. KKK
28. Judiciary
29. Black Genocide
30. Global White Supremacy
31. White Law
32. Black Nationalism

FOCUSED CODING

1.

Black Nationalism

2.

White Supremacy

3.

Legal Discrimination

4.

Cultural Discrimination

5.

Educational Discrimination

6.

Biomedical Discrimination

7.

Economic Discrimination

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8.

Psychiatry

9.

Foster Care

291

APPENDIX D. Certificate of Graduation for John C. Fremont High School.

292

APPENDIX E. Certificate of Graduation for Los Angeles Metropolitan College of Business.

293

APPENDIX F. Certificate of Graduation for California State College, Los Angeles.

294

APPENDIX G. Certificate of Graduation for the University of California, Irvine.

295

APPENDIX H. Boyer, Ernest L. US Commissioner of Education. May 13, 1977. A Letter to Ernie
A. Smith in Response to his Paper A Case for Bilingual and Bicultural Education
for United States Slave Descendants of African Origin.

296

297

REFERENCES

298

REFERENCES

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