Best of Both Words is a newsletter for language workers, community organizations, neighbors, and kinfolk about the evolving landscape of language justice. It’s an act of refusing binary, either/or thinking with language and the social relations that languages express. Best of Both Words engages the need for language justice and how people are fighting to build it.
In this month’s edition of Best of Both Words, we’ll spend some time considering African American Vernacular English (AAVE). I’ve curated a list of recent articles that cover the origins and development of AAVE, the significance of AAVE in fostering cultural identity and linguistic diversity, reflections on the Ebonics controversy from the 1990s, and research into how automated tools discriminate against AAVE.
In 1996, the Oakland School Board passed a resolution declaring that AAVE was a distinct language and that it should be welcomed in classrooms. The freakout was immediate and intense. America’s out-of-hand dismissal of AAVE has widened the racial achievement gap, entrenched discrimination and made us all a little more scared of each other. Which raises the simple question: What’s keeping us from making another push for AAVE now?
“The depressing lesson of the Ebonics controversy is about the nature of power in America. When white people want to do something experimental in education, it’s called charter schools, or Montessori, or experiential learning. When black people do it, it’s called identity politics or political correctness gone mad.”
As Generation Z influencers and Black entertainers continue to shape the internet landscape, from viral memes to TikTok dances, AAVE has shown up in more online spaces. But some Black AAVE speakers believe that the language has been incorrectly chalked up as new vocabulary started by young people — and they’ve been calling out non-Black people for glorifying internet stars who butcher the speech and lack understanding of the language’s cultural significance.
For decades the study of American English left a big territory unexplored on the map. Even as researchers divided northern New Jersey from southern New Jersey, or the inland South from the Gulf Coast, linguistics held as conventional wisdom that African American English was a single entity, regardless of place. In this interview, Taylor Jones, a quantitative social scientist with a doctorate in linguistics, discusses the complexity of the different ways of speaking African American English, the role language plays in stigma, how vowel enunciation offers insight into someone’s origins, and how accents shift.
In black sign language, a relic of segregation has become a sign of solidarity.
What is AAVE? Where did it come from? How is it used today? All this and more are answered in this installment of the United States of Accents.
Time and again, we’ve seen how technology can be discriminatory and, specifically, anti-Black. Researchers and artists like Joy Buolamwini have shown how facial recognition technologies fail to recognize dark-skinned Black women. Safiya Noble, the author of Algorithms of Oppression, has shown how search engines like Google can enforce racist stereotypes, especially against women of color. When Perspective categorizes AAVE as “toxic,” we need to recognize the implications it could have for Black people — how their voices could be further marginalized in both online and offline spaces.
In other news…
“A Hidden but Necessary Labor”: Kate Briggs on Translation and Parenthood
In this wide-ranging conversation with Lauren Goldenberg, Kate Briggs discusses her recent novel, The Long Form, and considers the parallels between two overlooked forms of labor: translation and parenthood.
“La lucha por la lengua tiene que entenderse como lucha del territorio”: Yásnaya E. Aguilar Gil
Una entrevista con Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil, en la que habla de lenguas, de mestizaje y los movimientos antirracistas, y de por qué trabaja en la reivindicación y difusión de los derechos lingüísticos.
Si lo lingüístico es personal y lo personal es político, en la medida en que los usos del lenguaje constituyen una acción humana con unos u otros efectos subjetivos y culturales, la educación lingüística debiera fomentar no solo la adquisición de competencias comunicativas en las aulas, sino también el aprendizaje de una ética democrática de la comunicación que favorezca la equidad y la convivencia armoniosa entre las personas, entre las lenguas y entre las culturas.
Translation in the spotlight...
By Juan Gabriel Vásquez | Translated from Spanish by Anne McLean
In this essay, Colombian writer Juan Gabriel Vásquez praises the translator and translation’s ability to increase our access to the world and broaden our sense of humanity.
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Lauren Ray 
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