Mock Ebonics: Linguistic racism in parodies of Ebonics on the Internet

Abstract

This study describes and analyzes outgroup linguistic racism in parodies of Ebonics (‘Mock Ebonics’) that appeared on the Internet in the wake of the December 18, 1996 resolution of the Board of Education of the Oakland (California) Unified School District on improving the English‐language skills of African‐American students. We examined 23 World Wide Web pages containing 270,188 words, from which we chose nine pages containing 225,726 words for in‐depth analysis. Drawing on a characterization of Mock Spanish, our analysis shows that Mock Ebonics is a system of graphemic‐phonetic, grammatical, semantic, and pragmatic strategies for representing an outgroup's belief in the imperfection and inferiority of Ebonics and its users. We show how producers of Ebonics parody pages employ these strategies, which are common in speech stereotypes, to articulate an anti‐Ebonics language ideology and shift the blame for the poor academic performance of African Americans from a racist society to learners and the community from which they come.