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We were shown this video as a cohort in Methods I last year, and it will forever be something I pull into my classrooms when linguistic justice is a central aspect of the unit. Through this video, Jamila Lyiscott displays the method of code-switching by emphasizing her "tongues" in school, with family, and with friends. This video pairs so well directly with the mentor text, because our protagonist displays code-switching as well.

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Jamila Lyiscott: 3 ways to speak English | TED

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This novel has been chosen to be the central text of the unit because of how it addresses racial injustice, systematic issues, and the importance of Black Voices. The book follows a 16-year-old female protagonist who experiences systematic racism as she navigates transformative life events. The linguistic justice aspect is woven throughout the novel as the theme of the power of Black language. "From the lyrics of hip-hop to the teachings of the Black Panthers, language in The Hate U Give is a tool for education, justice, and speaking truth to power". As our schools and classrooms are diversifying so are the needs for more diverse, inclusive novels.

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Read 74.4k reviews from the world's largest community for readers. An alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780062498533 can be found here. Sixteen-year-old St...

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Within this video, we see how artist Chance the Rapper changed the music industry by giving away his music for free. As a video offering a different perspective we see how he has used his voice and music to create social change.

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Video Music mogul Chance the Rapper on changing the music industry

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Part 4 of ABC News' "Game Changers": The unsigned hip-hop artist talked with Robin Roberts about his success.

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This poem by Tupac is a piece focusing on resilience and hope. It delivers a powerful message about individual strength and the capacity for positive transformation, using the image of a rose breaking through concrete to convey its profound themes.

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The Rose That Grew From Concrete by Tupac Shakur

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Comments & analysis: Did you hear about the rose that grew / from a crack in the concrete? / Proving nature's l

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Learning How to Code-Switch: Humbling, But Necessary

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Learning How to Code-Switch: Humbling, But Necessary

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Code-switching is a term that describes how a speaker alternates between communication styles in different contexts. In this informational text, Eric Deggans discusses his experiences changing how he communicates based on the person he is interacting with and the culture he is navigating.

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CommonLit | Learning How To Code-Switch: Humbling, But Necessary by Eric Deggans

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Level-up your ELA curriculum with CommonLit 360 Unit Skills Assessments and curriculum consulting with School Essentials PRO Plus! Get a quote for your school. Dismiss Announcement Dismiss Announcement For full functionality of this site it is necessary to enable JavaScript. Click here for instructions on how to enable JavaScript in your web browser.

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"How to Tame a Wild Tongue" is an essay by Gloria Anzaldúa that explores the complex relationship between language, identity, and cultural heritage. It hits on points such as code-switching, linguistic oppression, language as identity, and more.

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This is an interview with the author of our mentor text, The Hate You Give. Angie Thomas unpacks the inspiration for her novel touching on movements such as black lives matter, and how police brutality has impacted her life.

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"We Real Cool" is a brief yet powerful poem that captures the essence of youthful rebellion, the consequences of nonconformity, and the potential pitfalls of a carefree lifestyle. Through its concise language and stark imagery, the poem invites readers to contemplate the lives of the characters and the broader societal issues it addresses. It dives deep into a vernacular style, using language that reflects the speech patterns of the characters.

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We Real Cool by Gwendolyn Brooks | Poetry Magazine

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If Black English Isn't a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?

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If Black English Isn't a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?

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This article written by James Baldwin confronts the stigmatization of African American English (AAE) and challenges the dismissive attitude toward it. He hits on points such as cultural and historical aspects of language and language as a tool of oppression.

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If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?

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t. Paul de Vence, France--The argument concerning the use, or the status, or the reality, of black English is rooted in American history and has absolutely nothing to do with the question the argument supposes itself to be posing. The argument has nothing to do with language itself but with the role of language. Language, incontestably, reveals the speaker. Language, also, far more dubiously, is meant to define the other--and, in this case, the other is refusing to be defined by a language that has never been able to recognize him.

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Clint Smith is a teacher, poet, and aspiring doctoral student at Harvard University. Smith talks about the danger of silence in this TED talk by describing the consequences of choosing to remain silent in the face of injustice.

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"We spend so much time listening to the things people are saying that we rarely pay attention to the things they don't," says poet and teacher Clint Smith. A short, powerful piece from the heart, about finding the courage to speak up against ignorance and injustice.

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"Talking Black in America" is a documentary that explores the linguistic diversity and cultural significance of African-American English (AAE).

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DVD now available!
The long-awaited release of the first documentary feature ever on African American language varieties and the powerful role of language in African American culture.

An amazing and thought-provoking film.
- Roger Stolle, Cat Head Delta Blues & Folk Art

Absolutely fabulous. ... thoroughly educational, engaging and inspirational.
- Rick Moss, Chief Curator, African American Museum and Library, Oakland, CA

An awesome achievement!
- Barbara Boschert, Coahoma College, Clarksdale, MS

An awesome film. ... This video belongs in an international museum for the world to see.
- Jerome Forbes, Principal of Old Bight High School, Cat Island, Bahamas

The creativity and resilience of people living through oppression, segregation and the fight for equality, and the powerful identity forged by a shared heritage are all expressed in the ways African Americans communicate. TALKING BLACK in AMERICA chronicles the incredible impact of African American English on American language and culture. Filmed across the United States, this documentary is a revelation of language as legacy, identity and triumph over adversity.

The status of African American speech has been controversial for more than a half-century now, suffering from persistent public misunderstanding, linguistic profiling, and language-based discrimination. We wanted to address that and, on a fundamental level, make clear that understanding African American speech is absolutely critical to understanding the way we talk today.
- Executive Producer, Walt Wolfram
Visit the TALKING BLACK in AMERICA Website
From TALKING BLACK in AMERICA

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DVD now available! The long-awaited release of the first documentary feature ever on African American language varieties and the powerful role of language in African American culture. An amazing and thought-provoking film. - Roger Stolle, Cat Head Delta Blues & Folk Art Absolutely fabulous. ... thoroughly educational, engaging and inspirational.

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This poem written by Langston Hughes is a cultural masterpiece. It connects African-American heritage and culture to various rivers.

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I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.

I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.

I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.

I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

Langston Hughes, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" from The Collected Works of Langston Hughes. Copyright © 2002 by Langston Hughes. Reprinted by permission of Harold Ober Associates, Inc.

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The Negro Speaks of Rivers by Langston Hughes | Poetry Foundation

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This resource is the film adaptation of the novel The Hate You Give written by Angie Thomas. Directed by George Tillman Jr., this novel is 2 hours and 25 minutes. It follows the story of Starr Carter as she switches between two worlds.

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The Hate U Give (2018) ⭐ 7.5 | Crime, Drama

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Within this article, JSTOR writer Chi Luu describes how people who criticize African American Vernacular English don’t see that it shares grammatical structures with more “prestigious” languages. It breaks down the structures historically and grammatically of African-American English.

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The icon indicates free access to the linked research on JSTOR.

Ain't nobody got time for double negatives...said no grammar pedant ever. To a prescriptivist, using double negatives for actually emphasizing more negation is just the worst. If I'm not saying nothing, obviously I must be saying something. As the assumption goes, because two negatives must logically cancel each other out, people who use double negatives in this way must also logically be uneducated or unintelligent. This, of course, is a false belief that is still widely shared in mainstream American culture (possibly even among speakers who regularly use double negation themselves).

Like many language myths that are still fervently repeated, it's only since the eighteenth century that we became loath to use double negatives in this way (no thanks for nothing to the grammarian Robert Lowth) and to consider it wrong and illogical. Before then, speakers were using double negatives illogically daily (and probably twice on Sundays), from Chaucer to Shakespeare and many others. Surprisingly, it was not impossible that people could have no trouble understanding each other whatsoever. Nevertheless, standard English speech finally rid itself of this turbulent double negation, until it is now seen as not merely ungrammatical-it's also socially unacceptable.

It still is very much the case that many people, without thinking, can harbor negative assumptions about the different ways other people speak.

Well, why does this matter? As flippantly as we can talk of language myths, put simply, what's widely considered bad grammar, or bad language, can have truly problematic repercussions for how many people live, especially for those who speak dialects that aren't considered standard, mainstream, or prestigious. It still is very much the case that many people, without thinking, can harbor negative assumptions about the different ways other people speak. This can have a profound effect on how whole speech communities can live, learn, work, and even play. Getting job interviews, renting an apartment, raising kids to have better options and advantages, even getting through an unexpected, fraught interaction with the police- all these things can be made much harder simply because of a particular accent or dialect.

African American Vernacular English (AAVE) speech or Black English (often used as an umbrella term for the many varieties of speech used by African American communities) is a prime example of how a regular way of speaking can have a major impact on people's lives. On absolutely no scientific basis, linguistically consistent grammatical features like double negatives, along with other marked grammatical differences to standard American English, such as use of habitual be, as in "he be walkin'," or perfective, as in "he done did it," have stigmatized the speakers of Black English as linguistically backward, uneducated, or unintelligent.

Black speech has historically been maligned as just a broken form of English, but this is as unfair as it is wrong-many of its core grammatical structures can be found in many other languages. Those who consider themselves culturally aware might marvel at a politician's empty but seemingly erudite smattering of Ancient Greek, in which the double negative construction, for example, is correctly used to emphasize a negative meaning, not cancel it out. And the usual way to express a negative in oh-so-chic French is with two negative elements (ceci n'est pas une négation, par exemple).

These grammatical structures in influential foreign languages that are culturally valued by a wider mainstream society are often the very same systematic structures that many unthinkingly despise in more marked or less prestigious dialects of English, such as in Black English. For the grace of being another language, Black English speech might have been considered as linguistically civilized as a classical Greek or Latin, or as linguistically chic as French or Italian.

There's one kind of story, in which the rough-and-tumble speech of the people later acquires legitimacy and prestige as a valid, socially accepted language, through cultural objects such as the printed word, popular culture, and a community's linguistic pride. It happened to standard English, which was once a nonstandard creole of divergent linguistic influences, as it has to other languages of the world. So why not Black English? The dialects of an entire speech community have a perfect right to be respected as other, more prestigious languages are. What makes one system of speech a language and another a dialect and still another a despised, broken speech, after all, is subjective and political.

In fact, it once did happen that some tried to elevate the status of Black English to the level of a language in the eyes of the general public. For decades, linguists and other educators, pointing to the logic and science of language, have tried to convince people that Black English exists, that isn't just a politically correct label for a poor version of English but is a valid system of language, with its own consistent grammar. In 1996, with the unanimous support of linguists, the Oakland School Board voted to recognize AAVE, or the more politicized term "Ebonics" (a portmanteau of "Ebony" and "phonics"), as a community language for African American students, a decision which might have opened up much needed additional funding for education.

Instead it resulted in intense public backlash and derision due to the still widespread, incorrect belief that Black English was an inferior, uneducated form of English associated with illiteracy, poverty, and crime. It's hard for a language to get ahead when it keeps getting put down. Some linguists, such as John Russell Rickford, have noted how even sympathetic linguistic research, which has derived a lot of benefit and understanding from Black English grammar, can unknowingly focus on data that represents African American communities negatively, giving "the impression that black speech was the lingo of criminals, dope pushers, teenage hoodlums, and various and sundry hustlers, who spoke only in 'muthafuckas' and 'pussy-copping raps.'" The term "Ebonics" even now is used mockingly by some as a byword for broken English.

Perhaps no other variety of speech has been quite so significant, innovative, and influential to the development of standard American English.

But Black English is not just one monolithic dialect spanning the many millions of speakers across the country. There are rich regional and class differences with a deep linguistic history intertwined with stories of migration and movement, and there are dialects that grew to include more standard as well as vernacular forms. There's an almost relentless creativity to the linguistic innovations found in Black English. In fact, as linguists have found, there's a lot more that Black English speech can teach about language in general and a lot more that Black English has contributed to American cultural life, both past and present, than it may ever get back in kind, given its reputation as a broken language.

This is the remarkable twist to this tale. All along, while standard American English was busy convincing everyone that it was a superior dialect, it's Black English that's been a true cultural and linguistic force in contemporary society. Standard English is in fact deeply indebted to this so-called impoverished speech. It's Black English that has left its mark on the popular culture we participate in, sliding seamlessly into the language of art, music, poetry, storytelling, and social media. Perhaps no other variety of speech has been quite so significant, innovative, and influential to the development of standard American English.

Linguist Margaret G. Lee notes how black speech and verbal expressions have often been found crossing over into mainstream prestige speech, such as in the news, when journalists talk about politicians "dissing" each other, or the New York Times puts out punchy headlines like "Grifters Gonna Grift". These many borrowings have occurred across major historical eras of African American linguistic creativity. Now-common terms like "you're the man," "brother," "cool," and "high five" extend from the period of slavery to civil rights, from the Jazz Age to hip-hop: the poetry of the people. This phenomenon reflects how central language and the oral tradition are to the black experience. As Lee points out, from "the disguise language used by enslaved Africans to conceal their conversations from their white slave masters to the lyrics of today's rap music, [the magical power of] the word has been shaped by a time when, as observed by Harlem newspaper writer Earl Conrad, 'it was necessary for the Negro to speak and sing and even think in a kind of code.'"

It's a kind of code that's highly creative, and conducive to sharing. Despite this speech being "low prestige," there's a strong covert prestige to using African American vernacular speech. As outside the mainstream as it is, it's often seen as cool for rebellious outsiders to use these expressions, from fans of hip-hop and jazz to other marginalized but influential African American sources of language such as in camp or drag queen linguistics. It's a sign of a strong linguistic culture, tradition, and community that linguistic innovations can be so widely distributed and end up having such an outsize impact on the standard language.

A recent corpus study that looked at lexical innovation in social media found that African American users had a strong cultural impact on how language changes, starting from small but influential hubs and rapidly moving across the country before eventually appearing in mainstream use. The study found that "African American culture is an especially important source of lexical innovation [...]. Although African Americans are somewhat overrepresented on Twitter compared to the general population [...], they are still clearly in the minority, whereas three of our five common patterns of lexical innovation appear to be primarily associated with African American English, showing the inordinate influence of African American English on Twitter."

It's ironic that Black English speech is still dismissed and devalued as being linguistically broken, and at the same time is one of the richest sources of lexical innovation in English. It's clear that the linguistic creativity of Black English and African American vernacular speech, which across history has contributed so much to standard American English and American culture, is something to celebrate, not despise. It's not just another language. To those who speak it, and to those who feel its cultural impact-Black English matters.
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People who criticize African American Vernacular English don't see that it shares grammatical structures with more "prestigious" languages.