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Essay on Speech Communities
To a speaker of Standard English, this exchange is only vaguely comprehensible. But it's normal speech for thousands of American children. In addition it demonstrates one of our biggest educational problems: children whose speech style is so different from the writing style of their books that they have difficulty learning to read. These children speak Black English, a dialect characteristic of many inner-city Negroes. Their books are, of course, written in Standard English. To complicate matters, the speech they use is also socially stigmatized. Middle-class whites and Negroes alike scorn it as low-class poor people's talk (Barbara, 2001).
Middle-class listeners who hear black inner-city speakers say "dis" and "tin" for "this" and "thin" assume that the black speakers are just being careless. Not at all; these differences are characteristic aspects of the dialect. The original cause of such substitutions is generally a carryover from one's original language or that of his immigrant parents. The interference from that carryover probably caused the substitution of /d/ for the
voiced th sound in this, and /t/ for the unvoiced th sound in thin. (Linguists represent language sounds by putting letters within slashes or brackets.) Most speakers of English don't realize that the two th sounds of English are lacking in many other languages and are difficult for most foreigners trying to learn English. Germans who study English, for example, are surprised and confused about these sounds because the only Ger- mans who use them are the ones who lisp (Barbara, 2001). These two sounds are almost nonexistent in the West African languages which most black immigrants brought with them to America.
Similar substitutions used in Black English are /f/, a sound similar to the unvoiced th, in medial word-position, as in birfday for birthday, and in final word-position, as in roof for Ruth as well as /v/ for the voiced th in medial position, as in bruvver for brother..........
