My name is cynthia chaldekas. Thank you for coming here tonight. Im a librarian at manhattan library. Im happy to present John Mcwhorter. Were lucky that john has come more than once. He has been very kind about that. This is his third visit. Tonight he will speak about his most recent book, talking back, talking black, truth about americas lingua franca. John mcwhorter is associate professor of english and comparative literature at Columbia University where he teaches linguistics, western civilization, Music History and american studies. New york times bestsellerring author and columnist for Time Magazine and regular contributor to the atlantic, the wall street journal, and the Washington Post and he is the author of 16 books, and tonight he is going to be speaking about his most recent book, talking back, talking black. Without further adieu, John Mcwhorter please. [applause] thanks, folks. Thank you for coming here tonight. What i want to talk to you about, for not too long is the last book that i published which was called, talking back, talking black. Itit had a very compact thesis. I wanted to see if i could make the general public have a more positive view of the dialect that most black americans use in casual situations because the general idea is that black english is some sort of a lapse or stain or scourge. Always bothered me. I never heard it that way. But the misperception continues and we linguists, this crowd known as linguists shake our head at this idea that the general public, including the educated general public has, that there is something wrong with the way black people talk. We always say, the public just doesnt get it. But, to tell the truth, i started to feel as if a lot of why the public doesnt get it is linguists fault, and by linguists i include myself. So i thought somebody needs to put something out there that addresses this all in a new way. First what do i mean by black english . These days if the troll the academic literature, you will find it called africanamerican vernacular english or ave. I learned it as black english in the 80s, i formed habits. I will stick with black english but what is meant by that . Okay, it doesnt only mean the slang that is more commonly used by black people and especially black young people than others. Thats part of it. But it is not only the slang. We linguists are not shaking our head about slang. People dont like dissertations about slang. I would not waste a book on just the slang of black english. The slang is maybe 1 8 of it. That is not what we mean by black english. What we really mean is two other things. First of all, there is the different, now in link linguistics we call it phonology but others call it accent. Every american has a sense on some level there is a black way to sound and if it bothers you for me to say that, i will be talking about that in about 15 minutes. But most people have a sense that you can usually tell that a person is a black american even if youre not looking at them, you would know from listening to them over the phone even if no slang were being used. That has been proven scientifically again and again. Americans, both white and black, are very, very good at that. To a linguist it is black english has a different phonology than mainstream standard english. The slang, sort of, especially the sound system, it is a system, and then it is how you put words together. Linguists call that grammar we learned that is not a good word to use in the real world, because the way were all taught grammar, grammar is about a bunch of things people do wrong. So to the general ear, so to the extent black english has grammar it is bad grammar. To a linguist it is genuinely coy inherrent and legitimate grammar. But the grammar is absolutely essential to a different way of speaking. Slang, which i am never going to mention again, really mainly the sound system, and the grammar. That is what im talking about when i say black english. And, who speaks it . Definitely not all black americans. Definitely not. There are black americans who do not speak black english on any of those three levels. However, its impossible to put an exact figure to it especially because, as with almost anything that is interesting, were talking about continuum and climbs. The vast majority of black people control black english to some degree. It may be in only the sound. It might be the sound and the grammar, but the vast majority, in other words this corresponds to the gut sense that we have that there is a black way of speaking or a black sound. So that is what i mean by black english. It is not the same thing as southern whitening like. I will get to that. It is a black heritage possession. That is what black english is. A great many of people think of it as trash. This goes on decade after decade after decade and there are scholars who have come before me who have done magnificent, detailed work on black english and yet whenever the dialect comes up in the news for some reason, people always have the same hoaried misimpressions. It is frustrating and i wonder if it has to be that way. Now there are two things that linguists ha often said about how black english should be perceived. There are two major prongs, there is a message weve given the public. One of them is, is that if you dont like black english, then inherently youre not liking black people. So that means, if you diss black english youre a racist. That has been said, not usually in so few words but thats a point that many people make in classes. You can read it in books. You can have conversations about it. I dont think that goes through and it is not just because as some of you may know, i have a reputation as being a contrarian on race issues. Any linguist would agree with me on this point which is, the people who think black english is bad grammar are the same people who would say the same thing for example, about poor southern whites grammar which is very similar. Nobody is saying those people are using perfect english grammar and black people doing the same things are getting it wrong. There is a general sense we have in this country, in the educated world in general, that most people walk around breaking the rules of their own language. That there are all of these grammatical constructions people get wrong, that people say less books, rather than fewer books. Wrong to say billy and me went to the store rather than billy and i went to the store. Yes, i can do a whole talk on that. We have a sense that people mess up their grammar. So you can listen to black people using constructions that are considered bad grammar in the same way that very similar around often the same constructions as seen as bad grammar when white people use them and you dont have to be a racist. Something i have heard many whites say i would be a racist if i didnt think this was bad grammar. I understand that black people have been condemned bad grammar by slavery and jim crow but our job is to teach them out of it, not to pretend it is okay to use bad grammar. Now you may disagree, but that is not a bigot. Racism alone doesnt help us here. Im not saying that it is not part of it, certainly racism plays a part but is it the only part and more to the point, can the racism itself be changed. But it is not the only part. And by it is not the only part, i dont mean it is 85 . It is really not the only part. Another aspect of it is that linguists will say, black english is okay because it is systemic. And what that means is you look at the things that are different in black english and they actually follow rules in the same way as your own language follows rules. So that means it is a structured and legitimate form of speech and you know, i am sorry to say this to my own dissertation advisor and all the people who came before me and frankly the ones right along with me and the ones that have come after, folks, i know some of you are watching, i will say it, the system argument doesnt convince the public. Im sorry youve seen it. What i mean is Something Like this, deserve to be, which is very different in black english than it is in standard english. A black person might say, she my sister. You dont have the wish, to be, but again the same person would never say i your sister. That is bad grammar in black english. It has to be im. You use the word, to be, with some persons and numbers and not others. So it is omitted as linguists put it, only in certain contexts as we put it. So if a martian were learning how to speak black english for real to be indistinguishable they would have a lot to learn how that to be is used. Would surprise you how high the stack of papers have been written about to be in black english. It is complicated. Most of the people outside, few hundred pointy academics think, it is systemic, but why are they leaving the verb to be at all . This is english, youre supposed to include it. To the extent they leave it out it is bad structure. It is bad systems. The mafia is a system. Nobody would want a mafia to run a town. A toy piano is very systemic. I couldnt build a toy piano at gunpoint. Nobody wants to hear show chopin on a toypy anna. Systemty is no argument. That is the place which started with that book. I thought is that it . Matter of saying youre a racist if you dont like the dialect or it is systemic while the American Public thinks, yeah it is a broken system . So talking back, talking black, gets across four quick points designed to get under or maybe around the typical argument. I will typically outline what they are. One of them is this. Black english is full of things that it does not do that mainstream standard english does. This verb to be is not there. So you think something has been left out, its broken. What is less covered is that black english is more complex in many ways than mainstream standard english but we have a hard time hearing it because all we hear is quote, unquote, bad grammar. The slang also gets in the way. There are all sorts of things in black english that would be more challenging for the foreigner to learn than if they had to learn the language of the wall street journal. I will give you two quick ones. All of these things sound what we classify as slang. Theyre not slang. Theyre bull. For example, you could listen to, i picture a little black boy. First time i heard it, one of cousins. Sounds like theyre over using had when they tell a story. What happened was she come to my house and she had said i she wants lemonade. I will get you some and i dropped pitcher and i bent over on the floor and she had said what are you doing . I had said, im having a bad day. It stops there. Youre wondering, had, had, had, where does it end. You notice that the had is at the end. Some people listen to that, that person doesnt know how to use the perfect. That is not what it is. Black english has something you can find in languages spoken by obscure groups of people all over the world. It has a narrative past separate from the regular past. You can find this in many languages f youre a linguist who describes languages you kind of wait for it. There is a path you use to say Something Like i spilled the lemonade on the floor. There is a past you use, some different suffix or prefix or some little word you use when youre spinning through a narrative. It would be as if in english we didnt have the ed, but he had some other suffix we used. English has to be a speech variety with a narrative past. Not that my cousin doesnt know how to put ed on end of things, i say, he is grown man now but back then, he is fluent speak of english, when he tells the story he piles in the hads. He wouldnt think about that anymore than any of us can really explain when you use ah, and the, when we think about how we use it going throughout the day. Human beings speak english subconsciously. Nobody goes around thinking about the narrative had. There is a sense after joke people say what happened is that . That one thing. Nobody thinks of it as grammar. Really its a kind of grammar. It is more complex what you have to do to tell a story in standard english. For example, done. You done ate it. You hair somebody saying. The natural thought that person is saying something blackly. What do you mean, done ate . Should have done eaten, maybe . Why not in general, you ate it . What is the usage of done . You move on thinking black people did it wrong. Done is really interesting. I dont mean subtle, endless complexity no system at all that. Would be a way tricking you thinking something is complex. That is actually a very precise usage took people a long time to figure out. It is interesting, is it the recent past, like you done ate it, which presumably happened ten minutes ago. No, there are other things that people use done for. Somebody say i done had a crush on you since you were 12. That isnt recent. That was presumably a long time ago. It es recent past, it is distant past, it is in between and challenging but it is not random. Nobody walks around using some bit of stuff in a language randomly. That is not what black people are doing anymore than anybody else is doing. Turns out that done marks counterexpectations. What i mean whenever you hear a black person using done where if you dont speak black english you would just use the past. What theyre talking about is something that you wouldnt have expected. So you done ate it, is somebody who thought it would be there for them to eat. I done had a crush on you since you were 12, means you wouldnt have known it, but here you are 40 and ive had a crush on you since you were 12. It is not, how did you get here, i done took the subway. No, unless the subway was just built yesterday and it was you first time on the subway or Something Like that. Otherwise just took the subway. This is grammar, people. This is what people study. This is books this thick. Black english has lots of those things. Im giving you two for purposes of time. Please think i can only think of one more. Black english is full of these things. You listen to it as trash because it has the slang and breaks mainstream english rules but what is harder to hear, all these things in it more complex than we know. That is the first thing. I wish that had been made clearer to the public than it has been because it has to be stressed. People respect complexity. Not just difference but complexity. Boy, black english is very complex. That is the first thing. Second thing, if were on our way to understanding that black english is not wrong and that it is not, not wrong wrong because the people who speak it are black, but not not wrong but not only systemic but complicated then we can address this prickly issue whether its wrong to say that somebody does or does not sound black. Because, it can be really tricky to talk about sounding or not sounding black because given the way black english is perceived, and given the way black people are often perceived, very hard not to hear that person had a black sound as meaning something negative as sounding like some kind of a slur. The idea, there must be something wrong with the black sound. We think it must mean, that that person uses bad grammar, quote, unquote, et cetera, et cetera. But actually what would be surprising is if there were no black sound, because, human speech starts in one place and then there are some people who go in this direction and some people who go in that direction. Now latin started here, the people who went in this direction ended up speaking french because latin kept changing in various random ways. The people who went in this direction ended up speaking spanish because late tin changed in random ways different from the ones over there. That is how it works. Same thing with dialects. Some people go over here end up speaking a different kind of english than people over here. This is every bit the point even when the people live like this because it is not always a matter of geography. It is also social identification. You talk like the people you are most intimate with. English will naturally change in Different Directions and sounds are always changing in any language. Listen to most americans now, it is getting to the point under 40. You will notice that theyre more likely to say i caught a fish, rather than i caught a fish. Very subtle. There is no value judgment attached to it, but the ah sound is melting in the ah sound. I caught a fish. Sushi is raw fish. Hawks make lazy circle in the sky. If it isnt the way you talk listen to your kids, ever more common, more regions in america every decade. That is a sound change. That is one example what is happening in all human speech all the time. Of course black people has a sound. The sound has nothing to do with sinuses anything like that, just that the vowels are a little bit different. This has been studied in sources so obscure it seems almost willful. Nobody wants to touch this. You find it in journals with nothing to do with linguistics. Journals printed in one issue in finland but it has been proven again and again, a person will study one vowel at a time and basically never tell the world. Great. So about three years ago i decided what would happen if you actually used a specially modern technology and analyze ad few black peoples vowels and a few white peoples vowels, wouldnt you find that the vowels sit in different places in the mouth . I used two students, coal and hickman, thank you, guys. It was like this. I was driving listening to npr, i had a experience i suspect a lot of us have often. Somebody was talking about tax policy, in the back of my mind thought black. How do you know . In the back of my mind. I wasnt sitting there tabulating is this person that is a black person. How do i know . It is interesting because were trained to think no, if youre white, im a racist for even supposing that and black people often think, there is not a black way to talk because it seems like it is playing into the whole idea there is racism. Own a certain level. All of us know southern whites dont sound exactly like black people. What i was listening to on npr was not a southerner, it was a black person. I checked and it was. I thought what were the vowels and there are some. It is kind of hard to talk about in this format. It would be kind of boring but there are different vowels. There is also a different tambre. This is nothing to do with anatomy where you happen to produce your sound. If youre opera singer you are taught to place your voice in a different way. Different languages have different tambre. Different tile elects have different tambre in some way. Different tambre tip you off subconsciously this person is viola davis and not Melissa Mccarthy. You know instantly, it can be analyzed scientifically. That is interesting. Time that got out there. The interesting thing is, what about your kids . Your kids will ask, i asked my mother, in 1973, people ask all over the place, your kids, how can you tell somebody is black even though you cant see them, mommy . The impulse to say that is not true. Black people sound like southerners. You know that is not true. Or the impulse is to say, no, everybody talks in different ways, you