I recently received a message asking a question I am asked a lot: Why isn’t it racist to call African American English a separate dialect? Or even to talk about African American Language as its own language distinct from English?

Usually the person asking is starting from some common, but linguistically uninformed, assumptions. Given how often I’m asked this, it seemed like a good idea to share my response here, and hopefully it’s useful to others.

I edited this particular version of the question to eliminate identifying or sensitive information, but it’s pretty representative of this line of questioning:

A colleague, […], passed along your AAE blog post and I found it very helpful to share with my audience- I work in the speech tech space […] so for reasons that may or may not be obvious, I believe it's important that our NLU datasets include wider varieties of speech than is currently being represented. I have a background in ling but most of my work colleagues don't, and so I've been asked the question "Why isn't declaring AAE/BE a separate dialect/language racist?" and I still can't seem to put my finger on a strong and persuading answer. If you have any thoughts on this, I'd love to hear from you! :)

My response, with a few added bits here, was as follows:

Thanks for reaching out. I get asked this a fair amount, and should probably get around to making a blog post about it.

While this is sometimes confusing for people, it is not racist to call AAE a distinct dialect, or even to discuss whether it is better to think of it as its own distinct language variety. The reason for this is that the discussion is based on the linguistic facts, not on race or ethnicity. What confuses people is that AAE is an ethnolect, meaning it's associated with a particular ethnic group because of history (in this case, chattel slavery and the separation of people who spoke the same African languages combined with the imposition of English, followed by Jim Crow, and enduring residential and educational segregation). This history, especially segregation, is very similar to known processes that have historically given rise to new languages and dialects, like the range of Romance languages.

It is very important to note that not all Black people speak AAE, and not all people who speak AAE are Black. Saying that all Black people speak the same is racist! Saying that there is a distinct language variety characterized by specific phonological rules, distinct morphosyntax, and associated with different cultural and pragmatic norms is just descriptive linguistics. Recognizing that the language variety under question is spoken overwhelmingly by African Americans, and thinking about why that is, is just good social science. While this isn’t necessarily the origin of the study of AAE, it’s now the state of the field.

Now, the inverse -- refusing to acknowledge the very well established linguistic and social facts -- is ignorant in the neutral sense, but can lead to negative, and systemically racist outcomes. If I were to speak French, and you just declare it to be "bad Italian" it may go no further than simply hurting my feelings. However, if I were a school child in Italy, this dynamic would have radically different implications -- I wouldn't get the resources necessary to learn Italian, you might convince yourself and others that I'm stupid, etc. And we can imagine similarly how this might play out for adults on the job market, in contact with the judicial system, and so on. But nobody in their right mind would seriously claim that French doesn't really exist and is just defective Italian, and we can arrive at that conclusion simply by looking at the linguistic facts. The same is true for AAE: it has a well-described system of Tense, Aspect, and Mood that are distinct from "standard English", different phonological rules, different morphology, and a dispassionate and descriptive scientific approach reveals that it behaves like a regular old language (or dialect) and not like a pathology, learning disorder, or any such thing. The problem is that people still declare it just “bad English”, facts be damned. That’s why there’s a long history of articles in Linguistics with titles like “The Logic of Nonstandard English” (Labov 1970) or “African American Vernacular English is Not Standard English with Mistakes” (Pullum 1999).

So the quick answer for your colleagues is:

It would be racist to say that all Black people talk the same, especially if you believe that way of talking to be just "bad English", however:
AAE refers to a linguistic system that is very well studied and understood, and which is not spoken by all Black people, nor is it spoken exclusively by Black people, although it is spoken primarily by Black people who are the American descendants of enslaved Africans.
The existence of this system, and general contour of its structures and rules are not debatable. They're settled science. Though, like any other language, linguists are still discovering new interesting facts about it.
The language variety is an ethnolect: meaning it's associated more strongly with a particular ethnic group because of historical and social factors that affect language evolution (like segregation).
Denying the existence of this system can lead to racist outcomes. Assuming all Black people speak AAE is also likely to create problems, and will be perceived as racist, especially by Black people who don’t speak AAE, and especially by those who also share common, uninformed, negative views about AAE.
AAE is not the only stigmatized language variety that regular folks wrongly consider to be defective, and this social pattern is also pretty well understood (see, for example, Yiddish, or even regional Romance langauges like Niçart). Some of what our teachers tell us in school is wrong, especially in most people’s English classes.

I hope this helps, and don't hesitate to follow up with me if you have any other questions.

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I truly believe that for many people asking some version of this question, their hearts are in the right place, and they’re genuinely trying to understand. Where most people get hung up is the link to race and ethnicity. It’s not causal! Melanin does not give you the ability or right to speak AAE and lack of it does not take those things away — rather, as with any language, it’s about culture, contact, upbringing, respect, and all the social factors that go into language acquisition and language use. Recognizing AAE as a legitimate language variety just forces us to confront the history of this country, including it’s upsetting parts, and forces us to see how that history continues into the present.

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