Race, US: class, UK.

[jotham]

The quote talks about conjugating speech, which talks directly about ebonics. Obama was making a statement about dialect and the need to speak Standard English. I only said that his comment approached that of Cosby. Is that naive? Do you disagree with that, or disagree with Obama's and Cosby's comment? Earlier, I didn't want to talk about race issues divorced from language on a language forum (but then you responded that they were always tied together anyhow).

[Stephen Jones]

To equate using particular verb constructions with the practice of reading books is grotesquely ignorant. Barack would do well to read a book on elementary linguistics himself, or at the least a book on how to hire quaified speech writers.

IF 80% if black people use certain verb constructions, and 100% of white people use another kind, then using the white sociolect is speaking white.

[womblingfree]

According to Jennifer Jenkins, in her book World English, the lack of acceptance of non-standard native forms of English seems to have connections with race, in the US, and with class, in the UK.

Would you also say that it seems that way?

I think that's a rather simplistic view and I suspect that Jennie went into considerably more detail than this.

Anyway in the States it's just as likely to be based on a form of class prejudice. White trash, blue collar, white collar, deep south, New York, upstate, etc, etc.

How better to simplisticly stereotype someones intelligence than to do the 'non-standard', pronunciation of their accent?