The Location of Ebonics Within the Framework of the Africological Paradigm

Abstract

A new approach to cultural and social issues has been ushered in by the general discussion of Afrocentric scholars who have challenged the old theories of communication, social institutions, artistic developments, and economics by suggesting that Africans must be studied from the standpoint of agency. The discipline of linguistics-like history, anthropology, and sociology-is trapped in its discourse about Africans, because they have written from the standpoint of the European in the role of the dominator. Even African scholars writing about language have been captured by the same aura of European dominance and have written out of the same paradigm. Thus popular and well-known scholars of language and linguistics have often written from the standpoint of the received paradigm. For example, Mufwene (1993, 1994) stated that Vernacular English (AAVE) is adopted for the continental nonstandard varieties of African-American speech (1994, p. 3). Smitherman (1977, 1994) referred to the language used in the African American community as Talk, African American English, AAE, Black/African American Language, and Black/African American Lingo (1994, p. 1). Africanized English is another term that Smitherman (1994) employed (p. 30). In reference to the language of African people in the diaspora, Rickford (1993) indicated that Caribbean creoles share with American vernacular Black English a systematic but apparently unique rule (p. 348). These few examples are simply indications

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