Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Ebonics, Local Color, And Official Language: Who Resists Whom?, Richard L. Murray

Trotter Review

At a time when the media has branded Ebonics "a second class language for a second-class life" and worse, a time when politicians have sought to legislate standard English as the only official language in an increasingly linguistically diverse United States, the link between the power of a single language and the power of those who determine its dominance should come as no surprise. Those who, like columnist Ellen Goodman, oppose recognizing Ebonics as a separate language hark back to the melting pot era in which the children of immigrants were "Americanized" in the public schools because "there was ... …