Kinfolk Kollective’s commentary: “This is a must read. MUST READ. There are so many ways that white supremacy and racism affect us that we don’t even consider. And this is why I am annoyed with people who constantly brag about code-switching. We can’t be authentically us and conduct business. AAVE is a full, robust, sophisticated dialect with a complex set of grammatical rules. The fact that we do not have a written index of our language for reference does not make it invalid. We communicate perfectly well with each other. That should tell you that we have a valid language.”
[excerpt from article] “We had 27 court reporters who currently work in Philadelphia. And we gave them 83 sentences spoken by nine different speakers from North Philadelphia and West Philadelphia.
“The sentences were regular, mundane everyday speech. But they did have grammatical features of African-American spoken English. And they were spoken by people who have African-American Philadelphia accents.
“What we found is that they were not transcribed at the level of accuracy that we expect from court reporters — 95 percent accuracy.
“That seemed, in part, related to familiarity with the dialect and familiarity with the accents.”
African-American dialects are often misinterpreted in U.S. courts, study finds
