DW2b

In my DW2b I will compare my previous web site exploration to Nakamura’s paper. In my evaluation of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) I failed to discuss other types of rhetorical features, such as repetition, but I did pick up on the fact that AAVE is rarely used on the general BET website. But you are able to find bits of AAVE on blogs linked to the BET website.
These BET affiliated blogs, such as “Hip Hop vs. America” incorporate AAVE into their blog posts. I believe that this is in order to further appeal to the African American (AA) population of internet users who are the primary viewers of BET.com and its TV channel. Nakamura describes in her paper that internet sites generally don’t write in AAVE because it does not appeal to the general public of internet users, which they believe to be white Americans. But this trend is changing:
“Increasing numbers of racial minorities and women are acquiring access to the internet…” (Nakamura 410)
This demonstrates the fact that AA trendy sites should attempt to curve their writing to a different population than they currently are. They may be able to get a positive response with AA internet users. But Nakamura says that nearly every website is designed for white users, I saw this not to be true in the “Hip Hop vs. America” blog. I saw several examples of AAVE phonology that can only be seen for the primary purpose of attempting to attract more African American users. Sites such as BET.com are not using AAVE for a few reasons; one being that they might be looked upon as a lesser website and a less educated writing staff due to the AAVE discrimination of white Americans.
AAVE is correctly used in the “Hip Hop vs. America” blog in the following quote,

“Those people who are scared are the people that were content with being on that
level that they was on. The rest of these people, we’re not scared. We are ready
and willing to live and die for a better future for our kids. All races and
nationalities, it’s gonna be so historical that it scares you.”

In this quote the author uses “they was on”, the phrase “they on” is a quality of AAVE, and considered poor grammar by SE standards which suggests that it should have been “they were on”. The AAVE form of this is referring to the past tense incorrectly. The author again uses “gonna” instead of the correct SE version “going to”. This article is mainly directed towards African Americans who can directly relate to this sort of speech while most white Americans don’t know how to correctly speak AAVE

DW2a

My website of choice for this piece of work is www.BET.com, BET is an entertainment sight aimed towards African Americans, as BET stands for Black Entertainment Television. The sight promotes and features mainly black artists and celebrities. It can be found on the internet, but it also has its own channel TV.
The general site is predominantly written in Standard English, but I did find one blog within the sight which used AAVE, the blog “Playa Hater” uses AAVE by dropping the “er” on the end of Player. But the rest of the blog uses SE, which is unfortunate because I think that it would be interesting to read an entire blog from the perspective and writing of AAVE. I think that the title uses AAVE for a couple of reasons; first, it could be used to draw in more African Americans because they can easily relate to this type of speech and language use. This title could also be used to draw in white Americans also because they know that they are on a predominantly black site while on BET.com, and they may find it cool to read a blog that is titled in AAVE when most of the sight is in SE.
I did not expect BET.com to be so thoroughly written in SE, none of the editors write anything, even titles of articles, in AAVE it seems. But I did see some AAVE in blogs that are affiliated with BET.com but not directly on BET.com. In the blog “Hip Hop vs. America” I found a post titled Trick Daddy’s Law, in it I found the following quote.
“ There’s gonna be a lot of nervous people at the inauguration, but there ain’t nothing to be scared of. There were people who were scared if Barack became president that something would happen to him. Barack already got more secret service than any president in history”
There are a few referenced to AAVE in this quote. In the first sentence the author uses the word “gonna” instead of “going to”; this is a quality of AAVE because it is a shortened and condensed version of SE. Another reference to AAVE is “ain’t”, where is SE it would have been “isn’t” or “is not”.
“Those people who are scared are the people that were content with being on that level that they was on. The rest of these people, we’re not scared. We are ready and willing to live and die for a better future for our kids. All races and nationalities, it’s gonna be so historical that it scares you.”
In this quote from the same post, the author uses “they was on”, which is a quality of AAVE, and considered poor grammar by SE standards which suggests that it should have been “they were on”. The AAVE form of this is referring to the past tense incorrectly. The author again uses “gonna” instead of the correct SE version “going to”. This article is mainly directed towards African Americans who can directly relate to this sort of speech while most white Americans don’t know how to correctly speak AAVE.

DW1b

After reading the Smitherman text “From Ghetto Lady to Critical Linguist”, one of the passages really caught my eye and resonated with my prior life experiences. In my previous writing I discussed my code-switching skills between my language style with my friends and then my language style at school and home. Just like Smitherman, I had acquired adequate language switching skills between my most common settings, and I was seen as intelligible to those who I was talking with. Smitherman describes that feature in the following paragraph.
“It wasn't that young people of Color and whites from working-class backgrounds could not be understood. By the stage in our lives, we had developed adequate enough code-switching skills that we were intelligible to those who "carry on the affairs of the English-speaking people." Rather, the problem was that there existed a bias against this different-sounding American English emanating from the margins. Yet our sounds were "American as apple pie,"...”
(Smitherman pg. 54)
This passage is similar to my experiences in Catholic school because during my time there I was taught to speak very precise English and use correct grammar. But when I was with my friends it was the opposite, I would have been made fun of if I talked the same way in both situations. Both of my dialects were English, one was a cruder version of the other. If I would have spoken the dialect of my peers around my teachers or parents I would have been looked down upon, just as Smitherman describes she way looked down upon and even held behind in school for the way she talked. But as soon as she learned that not talking at all could fix the problem, she excelled in school and nobody thought anything bad of her. Until she got to college and she had to take a linguistic test, which she failed. I can see some of myself in some ways in this story; I would have been punished by my teachers if I spoke anything other than their version of perfect English.
I do not agree with this practice of only accepting perfect or “Standard English”. A lot of these dialects even originated in America, such as “Appalachian English” or “Black English”. These are different American dialects that should be accepted and not discriminated against when applying for jobs or schools; Smitherman flunked her linguistic test for becoming a teacher because of these norms that say “Standard English” is the only good English.