When many African Americans speak, what are they speaking? / From the archive

They're speaking African American English, according to linguist Lisa Green at the University of Massachusetts Amherst - in other words, "it's not mainstream English with mistakes." Lisa grew up speaking AAE in Louisiana, and since then, her ground-breaking research has found that AAE is based on a system of consistent grammatical rules, pronunciations and definitions. Some call it a dialect, which evolved from the African languages that slaves spoke blended with plantation English; in fact, when someone says, "she aks" instead of "she asks," they might be echoing Old English from centuries ago. Lisa argues that schools need to acknowledge and respect black children's African American English, even while they teach them Standard American English that they need to succeed in broader society.