Sociolinguistic and Ideological Dynamics of the Ebonics Controversy

Abstract

This article undertakes a critical language analysis of the Oakland Unified School District's 1996 resolution on Ebonics. The analysis focuses upon the form, content, and function of the resolution's explicit text semantics, separate and distinct from public statements made in its defense. It reveals that the resolution frames Ebonics as a non-English-related language system, with associated implications for English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) funding as well as the unintended promotion and perpetuation of extant sociolinguistic stereotypes. The resulting controversy, the author contends, was due to ideological commitments, which often act as constraints on the exercise of intellectual responsibility. With the exception of Sapir (1921; Mendelbaum, 1949) and Whorf (Carroll, 1971), most modern work in linguistics, stimulated by the pioneering approach of Chomsky (1957, 1965), has tended to focus on language as an autonomous subject. The associated goal of this work has been to develop a theoretical apparatus oriented toward the observation, description, analysis, and explanation of the structure of language as opposed to its function. The widely acknowledged success of this emphasis on structure has led to the conviction that language is a separate code that can and must be studied independently of social contexts and social processes. The recent resurgence of interest in the social function of language has largely been due to advances in sociolinguistics and the ethnography of communication. Practitioners in these disciplines have postulated a relationship between language and social phenomena in which linguistic practices are the primary medium or expressive form through which social structure and social processes operate. In effect, this postulation views group, institutional, and societal diversity as being established and maintained largely through diversity in language use, both in speech and in writing. Thanks to the seminal work of Kress and Hodge (1979) in the 1970s, differential perspectives or ideological elements in language use have become clearer and easier to identify. Language and its relationship to group perspectives and ideologies have aroused the interest of a diverse audience of scholars, linguists as well as anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, philosophers, semioticians, communication theorists, and literary theorists. A principal construct that has emerged from the study of language as a reflection of its users' ideology is that of discourse, which has been defined as the recurrent and characteristic use of (a) a constraining set of lexical and grammatical forms, and (b) the clustering of specific meaning categories (Fairclough, 1989). In tandem, these discursive elements provide a framework for projecting a selected image on various issues or making sense of the world.