c. 1997 Religion News Service

(Andrew M. Greeley is a Roman Catholic priest, best-selling novelist and a sociologist at the University of Chicago National Opinion Research Center. Check out his home page at http://www.agreeley.com or contact him via e-mail at agreel(at)aol.com.)

UNDATED _ Everyone talks funny, except us _ and the”us”depends on who and where we come from.

Take people from Boston and New York: They don’t serve sweet rolls for breakfast, they serve danish. Nor do they drink pop, they drink soda. And they don’t have malts, they have shakes.

Moreover, they subtract the letter”r”from places it should be and add it to places where it shouldn’t be as in”you drive the cah around the cawnah and then you can pick up the dater.”By which they mean”you drive the car around the corner and then you can pick up the data.”Much of this is a remnant of the Irish-speaking immigrants who came here in the middle of the last century.

And as for the South,”y’all”know what I mean when I say that they use a second person plural instead of the more appropriate Irish-English word”youse.” I don’t have to say anything about Texans, do I? And as for Appalachian folks, their English is often unintelligible to those of us who speak it correctly, even though linguists have proven that Appalachian dialects are closer to the English spoken in Shakespeare’s day than anything we speak today.

Irish-Americans often use the phrase”wodcha evah?”(would you ever), which is a translation of one of the four or five different Irish subjunctives, this one the subjunctive of polite request. Fortunately, unlike their cousins in the old country, they do end some of their sentences with periods. However, they still prefer the indirect way of saying something if they can possibly avoid being direct.

Poles, coming from a language background in which there are no articles, often omit the articles when speaking English, even after three generations. Only we Chicagoans pronounce the letter”a”correctly. So what?

I’m not going to argue with the ignorant bigots, white and black, who are currently ranting about black English. If one can distinguish a language from a dialect by the fact that a language has its own internally consistent syntax and grammar, than black English is a language, every bit as valid a language as standard English. It is a mix (like Pidgin or Creole) of English and the syntax and grammar of West African languages.

Black English is not ugly; it is not bad; it is not even ungrammatical. Quite the contrary, it is a fluid, flexible, often lovely language. It is nothing to be ashamed of. For many young African-Americans it is their first language. There is nothing wrong with speaking it.

Since some variant of standard English is required for economic and educational success, blacks must master it. But their teachers should understand three things:

_ Standard English will sometimes be a black student’s second language.

_ Young people ought not be made to feel guilty or ashamed of their first language.

_ Teachers must understand black English if they are to effectively teach standard English.

It seems that proponents of standard English are most annoyed by the black English version of the verb”to ax”which means”to ask.”But here’s a message for the Irish-Americans among them: The same word (often spelled”exe”) was once part of our heritage.

If Americans were not so prone to nativism, they would be more tolerant of people who say”ax”instead of”ask”or who decline the verb to be as”I be,””you be,””he be.”They might even think that linguistic pluralism is a blessing to a society instead of a curse.

English itself is a bastardized mix of Old Teutonic, French and Latin. Does that make it unacceptable?

Oakland, which may be the most la-la place in the la-la state of California, made a mistake when its school board proclaimed”Ebonics”_ a blending of”Ebony”and”phonics”_ to be a valid second language. Nothing was more likely to stir up bigotry and racism all across the land.

As the story has developed, apparently all the Oakland school board members wanted was that teachers better understand those students who speak black English as a first language.

Should black English be preserved as a useful, interesting, and fruitful cultural artifact? Radical pluralist that I am, I believe it should be. But that’s a decision for blacks to make.

Ought black English be presented and preserved as a second language in public schools? Surely not, at least in the present nativist temper of our society. Nonetheless, black English and those who learned it as their first language should be regarded with appreciation, patience and respect.

MJP END GREELEY