(shouting) - Come on down and say hello. Shake my hand. I am Tina [ ].com, yes indeed. Doing what I do. Remember, Harlem got its own radio station, baby. Yes, we do, the one, the only. - You know, my father was an entertainer, wrote a song called "Word Up." And it was about the language, it was about someone saying, word up, right? That was the language of our street. - When I talk to people, and I ask them about that, ask 'em about what 'blackness' is, what 'black language' is to them, what does 'sounding black' mean to them, more often than not, it's about a sound and a rhythm, this sort of movement and fluidity. It's sort of imbued with this cultural richness. - Language is music. They say a picture's worth 1,000 words, but I feel like I grew up in an environment where a person could use a few words, and it felt like 1,000 pictures. - [Baldwin] I'm afraid it's one of the great dilemmas, one of the great psychological hazards of being an American Negro. One's born in the white country, where one was once a slave. But all the standards, none of it applies to you. Obviously, I didn't always talk the way I forced myself to learn how to talk. I realized it was a cadence, it was a beat, it was not a question of dropping Ss or Ns or Gs, but a question of the beat, really. It's that tone or that sound. You know, just, which is in me. - What defines 'talking black'? That's the real question to me 'cause 'talking black' to me is an insult when you say you're 'talking black' or you're 'talking white.' Because I choose to pronounce my words, I'm not talking black? I'm totally black, I'm black. So every word that comes out of my mouth is me talking. So I'm 'talking black.' - But you're not talking black 'cause you don't sound black while you're talking. - And that's my point. And I'm offended by that. What do you mean I don't sound black? I'm black, so I sound just as black as you do. - While I think anybody's who's African American, you speak African American language because it's about you, the person, being African American in what you use, at the same time, I'm sort of pushed on that notion when I hear people or know that people exist who don't really seem to sound in a particular way. - I'm told all the time, if somebody answers the phone, "Oh, I thought you were a white boy." What was that supposed to mean? I'm speaking the way that my family spoke. But did I know the language? Do I know another language? Yeah, I know another language. - It's just like anything else. As surely as a kid learns how to use words, they learn how to use them in the ways that they're being used. - What is it you know when you know African American English? When you know it as a system, when you use it as your native language? Speakers of African American English from my particular viewpoint, are those speakers who grow up in African American English speaking communities. - Many people assume that black English is one thing. All black people speak it pretty much the same way. There are many, many types of black English here in the United States. - Certainly, there are differences that are regional differences. But I think there's some core aspects and I think that's shared by many, many, many speakers of African American English. But as a speaker who grew up in southwest Louisiana, I do things with African American English that I might not expect my counterparts who grew up in some other areas to do. - I walked up to him, I said, "What's up?" I'm speaking, I'm saying, "Hey, how you doing?" I ran into some guys from New York up there in the middle here. We in a Burger King getting something to eat. I'm standing in line, they're standing beside me. I like, "What's up?" and he just turned to me like, "What's up?" You know, to them, what's up means... No, I was speaking. I'm from Mississippi. - Between Cali, Saint Louis, Chicago, Detroit, Philly, New York. You'll get a different greeting. And that's just the start. I can go down to Atlanta and say, what it do. Detroit, what up doh. New York, wassup, son. Cali, what up, blood. Gotta be careful where you at if you say blood, though. But they know if you say wassup, blood, it's family. - Well, I'm from a place where we don't use the dialect that I use here. But I'm able to maneuver with it. So you might hear, what up, shorty. What up, doh. You know, and I just give 'em something that I have from Detroit. You'd be like, what up, shorty. I'd be like, what up, doh. Or if you go to New Orleans say, hey, wohdi. The language gives you access, and it'll give you a barrier, so the best thing to do is use it for your access. - I am from an African American background, but I went to a predominantly white school. And even when I was younger, my black family members would make fun of me and call me white girl. "White girl, you talk like a white girl. "You talk like a white girl." Because they lived in a more urban area, and I lived in the suburbs. So all my life, it's kind of been this, I talk like this with this group of people, and then I talk like this with this group of people. - I think a lot of people are surprised at how much individual speakers can actually shift. I use two mainstream ways of talking so much in my professional life that a lot of people doubt that I actually speak in other way. But when I'm outside that professional setting, then it really is sort of my language of comfort. It's my language of home, it's my language of family, it's my language of friendship. I think you can look at middle-class speakers and assume that they don't speak African American vernacular English because all I'm hearing is standard English. But what happens is that a lot of middle-class speakers do what I like to call code switching. I consider myself to be a code switcher, but I don't spend a lot of time thinking now I will use the vernacular. So, this is a girlfriend that I'm talking to. Let me tell ya, that daycare tuition ain't no joke. It ain't no joke. Yeah, mm-mm-mm, mm-mm. But I only got a few more months, girl, and we'll be out. A few more months. (laughs) This is it for us, girl. And so, the last one is me with my mom. Where you from? Outside Columbia. What part of Columbia you don't know about hags. (laughing) I was like, "The suburbs." And he thought that was just so funny. I don't know nothing about no doggone hags. With any kind of code switching, I think it happens below the level of conscious awareness. - [Jasmine] When I'm talking to my sisters, it's very casual, it's very comfortable. But when I'm talking to other people, or when I'm talking to professors, it's like, for them, it's like I'm a different person. And it's, it makes you self-conscious, and it makes you feel, for me, as though I was not necessarily being true to myself or being black. But then you come to find that it's okay to kinda meet people where they are. - It's so interesting, this issue of identity, language, acceptance, and inclusion, or exclusion. I wanna be included, so I will use a certain type of language. Who wants to be excluded? - You have this kinda complex push in on the one hand. The language is vibrant, it's fulfilling, it's expressive, it's enjoyable. And on the other hand, you have African Americans dealing with the larger society, getting pushback, getting misunderstanding. - Unless you have your own company, or you're are a rapper, or you're an athlete, with vernacular, you are going to be pushed out of opportunities and marginalized. For survival, economic survival, I'm gonna have to do that song and dance. (upbeat music) - African American English has a place, but for the most part, it's always relegated to entertainment. In rap music, R&B, things like that. But it's not okay outside of those realms. - The game only changes if you can commodify certain aspects of culture in disadvantaged communities. But the game doesn't really change when it comes to the different things that we see as professional and managerial. They're changing in the sense that they're allowing more of us in, who were historically excluded. But in order to be in, we have to read the cultural codes of that space. - I enjoy the nuances of how they speak and how I speak. And I'm not changing me. But I'm also grown. I do tell them, and I'm very transparent and honest about the fact that you live in a world where you do need to translate, and you do need to code switch, and you do need to speak 'King's English,' and you do need to make sure that you are able to navigate the systems, right? Because there is privilege, and that does exist. - It was always very contentious about what we should do with student language. They need to have standard English in order to be successful in school the way it's set up right now. But there was a lot of times, a real negative, people talked about student language in a really negative way. That came not just from white teachers, but that came from African American teachers, it came from parents, it came from societal messages. - Me telling you what you just said is said incorrectly is like telling you that your mama is not smart. The what I just said, my mom said to me. That's where I got it from. Or my dad, or my people, or whatever. If I said, that's not how smart people talk. 'Cause that's something teachers say, right? That's not the correct way to say that. Then what you're not saying is that everybody in my life doesn't speak correctly. Right? What you're not saying is that everybody other than you, right, is wrong. Which can't be right. - People have the impression that African American English is nothing more than a collection of errors because that's how they've been socialized. If it's not standard English, it's wrong. So we have this framework that all of us have been indoctrinated into that there's a right and a wrong in language. Language itself is always right because there's always a systematicity, a patterning to it. - All stigmatized languages usually have this false reputation of having no structure or having no grammar. - What does standard English accomplish that these so-called versions of substandard English don't accomplish in terms of communication? Nothing, you know what I mean? Nothing at all. And anything that seems to stand in the way, you say, oh, it'll help you get a job. Well, is that because of the language? It's not that you're unable to communicate. Or is that because of all these various 'isms' that stand in the way of you being able to take care of yourself? - That's the one thing that people don't understand the most. This is not random. People are not making mistakes, people are not confused about a rule. They are governed by a different set of rules. - In African American language, you can say things like, he happy or John tall or he da man. You might say, well, okay, folks are just leaving out his or her. But they're not just leaving it out. In language, nothing is ever just, like, random. You can just leave it out or put it in. No, there's again, there's a very, very strict set of rules. Like, there's some places where you can't leave it out. - You will hear speakers say quite often, he nice, he running. But you wouldn't hear those speakers say I nice, I running. And you can see these patterns emerging as children are developing African American English. So people don't wake up at 15 and just start speaking African American English. This is a system that's really in place early on, and children are working it out as they become older. - Let me give you a different example that people talk about a lot. You can say, John be studying Saturday nights, okay? Now, a lot of people think that that be is just like is in English. I could look at somebody sitting in front of me, and I could say, John's sitting down right now. But I can't say, John be sitting down right now. Be always means it's something happens habitually, frequently, and so on. - It's a whole bunch of people in New York that we know, and the way they be talking and stuff. The way they be talking and stuff. - You acquire it as a part of a normal human vicinity of acquiring a language. - A lot of times, people assume that there is some linguistic basis for the stigma against a variety. And they're not aware that it really is about the people. - The issue, Mr Chairman, has received a lot of attention all over the United States. And I simply want to say that that I think Ebonics is absurd. - In the mid-90s, in 1995 and 1996, there was the big Ebonics controversy. The Oakland School Board was trying to get what had been fairly solidly established linguistic research into schools. - Many linguists have stated that Oakland's decision is credible, it is rational, and a potentially effective way to improve the academic standard of its students. - [Mike] And the public really misunderstood the message of what was happening and reacted in ways that kinda set back what educators are trying to do with language. - That's just bad English, isn't it? How could you say that's a language? - That's different English. - No, it's bad English. - But that's your opinion that it's bad. - A lot of teachers just kinda take what they've heard, sort of the predominant social narratives. And they just sort of reproduce them. When we start being more critical of those, and teachers start thinking about it more closely, then we've got a lot more opportunities to help kids. - I'm really actually quite tickled when I move into classroom spaces and I see how facile kids are with language even if they're not adept as we measure on a test with standard English. But they are so adroit at moving back and forth and talking to one another and volleying. And we don't know how to fold that kind of energy, that kind of skill into the tests that we're using to evaluate them, that then has some serious consequences for their mobility in America's society. - Because language and identity are so closely tied, if we value more language, then we also value more student ways of being within schools. - ...If this person says, "He be going to work"... - The average citizen who encountered the term of Ebonics during the Oakland controversy, did so at a time when late night talk show hosts were lampooning the term. And as a professional linguist, I was disheartened when I saw so many people mocking a term that referred to linguistic circumstances that I think should be better understood, by the entire nation, but which have been the object of linguistic discrimination since the inception of slavery. (people chattering among each other) Slave descendants have a unique linguistic heritage in comparison to every other immigrant group that came to this country. African slaves, when they were captured, were often isolated linguistically from others that spoke their own mother tongue while they were on the west coast of Africa. That linguistic isolation was also maintained on the ships during the Atlantic crossing. And as a result of that, not one indigenous African language has survived the Atlantic crossing intact. Once they got here, it was illegal to teach them to read and write. For hundreds of years, slaves were denied access to education. As a result of that, many of the linguistic stereotypes, many of the negative linguistic stereotypes that people embraced regarding African American English, dismissing it as the language of someone who's being lazy or not attending to language, doesn't fully appreciate the linguistic isolation that slave descendants experienced is unlike any other immigrant group in this country. - When they were brought here, African Americans were segregated into plantations. That's what happened in the Caribbean also. And what they did was to invent new languages, new varieties, taking linguistic properties from the surrounding varieties and creating new forms. These are creations of people putting their absolutely horrible set of circumstances and out of that milieu came new language forms. - We're standing on an island where we know 40% of all people of color that were taken and survived the Middle Passage, that arrived in North America, first stepped foot on North American soil right here on this island of Sullivan's Island. Any vessel coming into the New World, coming into the Port of Charleston, were required to quarantine their cargo. African cargo, human cargo, here on this island for approximately 10 days. Then they would be taken into Charleston and to be sold as part of the African slave trade. And then, now their labor, their talents, their gifts and their skills would now be diffused across the low country of South Carolina and Georgia and north part in Florida as well. (speaking foreign language) - [Woman] Gullah is an African American language variety spoken along the coasts of South Carolina and Georgia. Gullah is Creole variety. Linguists use that term to refer to languages that emerge in situations of contact between speakers who have no common language among them. (speaking foreign language) - [In Gullah] Once upon a time you know Us had a language all we own - [Translator] We had a language of our own. - [In Gullah] I 'member like t'was yesseday - [Translator] I remember like it was yesterday. - [In Gullah] When I fust had to go to school - [Translator] First went to school. - [In Gullah] You know what I done night befo'? - [Translator] The night before. (speaking foreign language) - [Translator] To the dresser. - There was some controversy over where African American English comes from. But one side of that debate, of course, is that it was once a Creole-like variety, a Gullah-like Creole. - When I grew up, all my grandmother, my mother, my father, my aunts and everybody spoke the same language so you didn't know a difference because you grew up in a community where everybody's speaking the same language. My mother's 73 years old, and she speak Gullah. And my sisters and brothers, all of us speak Gullah. But we don't realize we speaking Gullah. It's just a natural language to us. - When a stranger come to your door, you say, what oona come here fa? Why did you come here? And oh, we glad fa see oona. We glad oona come fa see we. - I really recognized it when I left home and went to college. I realized that all these people talk funny. And they realized with me, too, I talk funny. But and so, they call it broken language, but we say broken to who? - As we continue to educate the public about this culture, then the public, the outside public would then accept it. And we would feel accepted. - [In Gullah] We Papa, in Heben let everybody honor You name 'cause You da holy. We pray that soon You gonna rule o' d'we. What's da big 'ting you want Let it be in dis world like same like it be dere in Heben. Give we da food dis day n every day. Forgive da bad 'ting we da do, 'cause we forgive dem dat do bad to we. (trumpet music) - We are the Gullah kin folk. All da way 'cross da water. 'Cause whether you know it or not, you is Gullah kin folk. 'Cause it's the blending of all of those cultures that came together during that transAtlantic slave trade. So turn to your neighbor, say cousin. Oh, cousin. ♪ This is a family reunion ♪ A family reunion - The rhythm of it is very much like Caribbean English Creoles. And so, a lot of times, my husband, for example, is from Jamaica and now living in South Carolina. And we'll often hear a Gullah and Geechee speaker and assume that they're from Jamaica or from the Caribbean. - People don't understand, but Jamaicans are the same. They come from Africa also. But it's just that they went to the Caribbean side of the area when we came for this side of the border. So we still speak the same kinda language, but we just have a different dialect. - African Americans are trying to say, who am I, who am I? And so, they're always looking back, right? They're looking to Africa. I always say, before you get to Africa, you gotta get to the Caribbean. (children singing in foreign language) - [Man] No matter who you is in this world, empty hand you come, and empty hand you leave. You not gonna pack up nothin' outta here - We don't really have the records to know what exactly happened in the 17th century or the 18th century. So we have to look at language to give us, language can give us some indication. (people talking to each other in Bahamian Creole) - I think there definitely are connections between African American language and the language of the Caribbean. South Carolina and Georgia sea islands are the one place where there was consistently for long time, very high numbers of Africans. Black and particularly African ways of life and speaking was much stronger there as it was in parts of Jamaica. - A lot of the early African Americans were coming from the Caribbean, rather than directly from Africa. Since, for example, Charleston, South Carolina, founded in 1670 as a colony of Barbados, there have been other connections. So I don't find it surprising that there are similarities, that there are things that show up in the Caribbean and in the US. - So that's the beauty about it. The way they behave, and the way they using the language is very systematic and is bearing out the patterns, the footprints of history. That's what culture's all about, cultural inheritance. You do things, but you don't really know exactly why. (upbeat music) - If we look at what I refer to as African-isms that remain in Bahamian culture, we are an African people. You really see it coming out in the food ways, and you also see it in the language. And we want to ensure that our children are aware and know that they have a very,very rich legacy and history. Emphasizing that will go a long way in terms of helping children to know who they are. - It's really important to be able to show the connection between African American English and Caribbean English Creoles. The one thing I think about African Americans and Caribbean Americans is the longing to know. The longing to know who am I, how'd I get here, who are my people? Linguistics just gives you that little extra something that you go like, okay, I get it. I belong somewhere, I'm connected to something. (blues music) ♪ While I was gone ♪ Gone on the road ♪ I was gone ♪ A long time ♪ Well when I come back home, my babe ♪ ♪ They said she's mine ♪ They said she's mine ♪ They said she's mine - My grandfather, my grandmother, I got to listen at them talking about things that you have to get from black people their age. Well, Lincoln freed the slaves. We s'posed ta been free. But you wadn't. If you was in North, you was kind of free. If you was in the South, you weren't free at all. You done worked the whole year for the people you're working for. You still ain't got nothing. You owe 'em. You can't go nowhere. You can't leave. That's the struggle they were going through. - So in the early part of the 20th century, the South was mainly rural. And about 90% of the African American population was living in the rural south. You had Jim Crow laws. You had institutional segregation. However, you had a lot of contact because they shopped in the same general stores, they worked alongside each other as tenant farmers in the fields. So you had linguistic contact there. So what we consider to be now present day African American vernacular English is quite different than what we saw in speakers who were born, say, 100 years ago. - Wherever there were African slaves, they contributed to shaping American English. And then came Jim Crow, and then the Great Migration. And something that had emerged in the southeastern part of the United States was spread. ♪ ...One town that won't let you down ♪ ♪ It's my kind of town - And you can play it like this. (soft organ music) - For me, the Great Migration is captured in the stories about how lynching in the South and a lack of opportunities drove folks to pack up trucks and vans and suitcases and foot lockers in hopes of achieving a better life here in the North. They started coming just before World War I, and they didn't stop until maybe around the 1970s. - I don't think that African Americans at that time called it a migration. They called it an exodus. And on the cover of The Defender, that's what it says, exodus. And that's how they left, with the hope of finding a promised land, specifically, coming here to work, and finding a whole different level of segregation and racism that wasn't what they experienced in the South, where you couldn't live next door to a white person or a white family. So that over the three waves of the Migration, literally, a half million people were confined to living in one area. (soft piano music) - Why does black English exist? Isolation. For a population to develop its own variety of language, there has to be some kind of apartness. Whenever people are apart, they diverge culturally and linguistically. - In the period of the Great Migration, which started around World War I, and continued 'til after World War II. You had a mass exodus of people leaving the South. Then you had African Americans living in concentrated areas in these urban areas of the North. But they didn't have the same kind of contact that they had had previously with the white population. - You had 300,000 peoples crammed into a narrow band of land at its height. So you had people in kitchenettes and piled on top of one another. Commerce everywhere, restaurants, clubs, businesses, et cetera. And so, you had a very vibrant, though repressed community, it was a very vibrant community. - These blacks came from the South and brought with them, the linguistic properties in their speech that they learned in the South. - A good majority of the African Americans in this community, their families originated from the South. They migrated here, I'd say four out of five people that you see that be African American in this community, probably if you go back two generations. Their family was from the South, you know. - This area, here, is the entering stage of that earlier period of the limits of the black community, close to the downtown area. And in this general area, jazz and blues, coming up from New Orleans and other places, became elevated. (joyful blues music) In this confined, segregated area, there was accomplishment. This was the dividing line. On that side, I could go and do whatever I wanted to do. On this side, I better not come. Just across the street. (joyful blues music) Okay, now we're getting into another era. And this is the beginning of public housing. - They contained us within the Black Belt, and rather than let us expand out geographically, they went up vertically. Public housing literally cordoned off the entire Black Belt all the way around in a 360 degree radius. That's how hard they worked to contain us within that Black Belt. (blues music) - In the first two decades of research, linguists were divided in their views of the origin of African American English, whether it was a Southern regional dialect descended from non-standard English and Irish dialects, or the descendant of a Creole grammar, similar to that spoken in the Caribbean. Research of the language of ex-slaves show that some of the most prominent features of the modern dialect were not present in the 19th century. African American vernacular English is becoming not less, but more different from other dialects. - In the mid 1960s, we did a large language study in Detroit and interviewed over 700 residents. It became immediately obvious there were two worlds of dialects. One participated in by the white population, and another participated in by the black population. It became immediately clear, these are two different linguistic worlds. It was both shocking and intriguing. - As a child in the hood, it was all black. And the only time we seen white people was when we went a town over, and they owned the stores. It wasn't a shared cultural kind of exchange going on. We communicated with the black vernacular. How we communicate to make it cool, make it fly, make it dope, to give you that hood pass. So you had to learn that. - But why do kids growing up in the black community have to become skilled at language use? The community requires it. The culture requires it. If you can't defend yourself verbally growing up in a black community, a traditional black community, then everybody else picks on you. You're forced to develop, you could think of them as verbal defenses. I prefer to think of them as verbal skills. If you grow up in that kind of language environment, you come to like it and appreciate it. (hip-hop music) - Here we go, what's popping? It's Q C.O.D.Y Got my man, Uncle P, with me. There's one C in M.C.O.D.Y, if you know me click pile if you click file. In Detroit, We in here, make some noise. - Let's go, let's go, let's go. - Call your girl, she hit me back like, "You rang? "I'm the hottest thing you seen." - You basic, dude, you tripping. Lace your shoes, think again. Deja vu, you play with me, you play to lose. - An individual's ability to speak spontaneously, authoritatively, in the vernacular is not only highly prized, but is literally used in verbal combat. - Some people call it shooting, some people call it banging, some people call it capping, some people refer to it as dozens. But I mean, it's just this idea of verbal one-upsmanship. - Look at the crowd, they eyes glued like they got lashes on, and the draft is on. I'm with some mean boys, run up deep in a Jaheim voice, while you at the crib with your son watching Nickelodeon Teen Choice. (laughter) You often throw a lot of negative shots at each other. And they're not necessarily genuine, you know what I mean? It's all friendly competition. - There's no boundaries. You know, I've heard all the type of jokes, all the type of direct blazes. Somebody might call it blazing. With us, it didn't have to be like, you know, I hate you. It's just, we just battle with words, you know? - It's as much about the language itself and the connections that are being made as it is about how the language, like, how it's being delivered. (people chattering among each other) - Who got them bars on deck, though? Let me hear some bars on deck. What's your name, homie? - Y'all want it to cipher? All right, my name's Flex Bands. - Tell 'em what your name is. - All right, my name Flex Bands. I'm 15 years old, and I'm straight outta Detroit, Michigan. All right, y'all wanted to cipher on it? - Man, kick it - You all got it, come in. - [Man] Do your thing. - Come on. Hey. Uh-huh. Every time, I step in the booth, I'm telling the truth. I bring sir, oo to the youth. I love to the coupe, some born a fool. - Just because you the baby daddy, you ain't my damn baby. I don't owe you nothin', and you don't get it so willingly. Give me a damn thing. If we can't be friends, then we can't co-parent. - Aiming that barrel, you rolling in flame, torching the game. Victor and here again, then I'll appear again. - This a dead end, I'm a head in with my brethren, blunt with me all the time like a best friend. Grind 'til this ray bends, infrared lens, put the lead in, chop a rhyme like it's Columbine with my concubine. - As much slang as we use in hip-hop, there are probably more people that would've been English majors or writers in hip-hop than there is in any other genre. Just the usage of words. Like metaphors, similes, double entendres, triple entendres. You might not even have a high school diploma, and you know how to use these things. (cheering and applauding) - People think that African American English is picking up these things from hip-hop, when in fact, hip-hop is making use of longstanding features of African American English. - The very first band that ever introduced hip-hop was The Sugarhill Gang. The Sugarhill Gang was kind of a popular disco group that was presenting kinda light-hearted music. But then Grandmaster Flash produced a song called "The Message." And "The Message" was one of the most powerful hip-hop songs ever produced because it talked about life in the inner cities and broken glass and drug addicts and drive-by shootings. These things are connected to at least some of the anger that is conveyed by hip-hop artists. And it's a means of expression that is not only accepted within African American culture, but it's now spread far beyond, and is actually often used by young people in various parts of the world that wish to express defiance to authority. ♪ Speak if you know what you're worth ♪ ♪ Seek if you know what you're worth ♪ ♪ Teach so they know what they worth ♪ ♪ Speak if they taking your birth- ♪ ♪ -right, so pursuing the hurt - I know that for some people, it truly is therapy. You look out, and everything you see around you is destructive. It becomes an outlet. - When you find something that gives you an opportunity to express what's going on around you, it's a relief, and it's a creative-like spark. That's why you have MCs that rap about fancy cars and... We criticize these MCs a lot. We say, ah, he's rapping about things that he doesn't have or things that he wants. But it's things that we aspire. We're the same kids that sat on our grandma porch and said, "That's my car." So when we rap about that's my car it comes from somewhere. And where it comes from is like having nothing. It gives that kid that didn't have anything something. - And then I grew up in a church. There would be all this improvisation They would do. The Spirit is taking over, and all sorts of stuff is going on. I mean, they're just, like, kicking out these lyrics and talking about their lives on the fly, on the spot. And that just, that is really when I became aware of hip-hop culture and freestyle as a part of it. (singing Gospel music) - From Sunday to Sunday, He helps us. From Sunday to Sunday. - The preacher has to be very nimble and understanding where all of the people are. It's important to speak vernacular, especially to get a point across or to utilize humor. And then there are others that want to see that moment of improvisation where the Spirit takes over, and you fly from the page, and something unique is created in the process of communication. Don't look at me funny up in here. We've got to make a priority and recognize that sometimes, we are our worst enemy. - That's what people expect in service. They expect communication to take place in church in the language of the people. Whether that's Northern, urban, whether that's Southern rural, whether that's low-country Geechee-Gullah. Being able to communicate in the language of the hearers in a way that they understand and the way that they feel that they are part of that congregation becomes crucial. (singing Gospel music) The oral tradition and language are key, they're central. Without language, you would have no black church because it had been against the law to teach Africans how to read or write. The oral tradition, and the aural-oral tradition were the sum and substance of the black church. - [Otis] She's right here. Right before us. - It's a give and take. It's a dialogue that goes on - call and response. Preacher says something, the congregation says something back. That's very different from European worship. They don't say anything back. In fact, they're taught not to say anything. That's disruptive, you're disrupting service. Missionaries taught us that. You don't disrupt service. Be quiet and let the minister finish. - Let me break it down. Nobody is dismantling schools in Lincoln Park. No one is dismantling schools in any wealthy area in Chicago - One of the things, the differences between African speech and European speech, is European speech, like to tonight on the news, talking heads. That's it from Channel Five. What do you say, Sue? What do you say, Bob? Right? When black people talk, they get involved with the body. The body is a part of the speech event. Homiletics, when I was back in schools, say no, you don't do that. That distracts from the message. (singing Gospel music) - For our community, we come out of an oral culture and movements that are transformative in our community, always have people who are able to communicate with oral power and dexterity and improvisation and communicate head and heart and spirit. And allow those words to take life and flight in the hearts of God's people. - When we allow freedom ring. When we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty, we are free at last. (crowd cheering) - MLK was one of the most powerful speakers ever. And his speeches are incredibly rhetorically profound. So of course, he was educated. And therefore, he tended to avoid features of speech that were socially stigmatized. So he tended not to use those traditional vernacular forms. But at the same time, whatever speech to whatever group, he was identifiably African American, and he was also identifiably southern and urban. So these are really noteworthy stances that he took, in a sense, saying the power of what I have to say is transformative, and I'm going to say it in an authentic voice for me. And so, what stands out from King is his rhetorical power and his social and political voice. And the fact that it was framed in African American identity and southern identity, is one of the great lessons about the authority and the authenticity of speaking black in America. - All in favor, let it be known by standing on your feet. (crowd cheering) (blues music) - Been a great change, seen a lot of changes. I tell my kid. I tell him about it. A little history, they need to know about that. It wasn't easy. Somebody had to pave the way for 'em. That's right. - The language has changed considerably from the time when I was growing up opposed to now. I mean, don't get me wrong. These young kids, just unbelievable with the modern technology. (hip-hop music) - A lot of language, a lot swag, slang, lingo, however you call it, originated from Atlanta. But it kinda originate from other cities as well. But as far as Atlanta, as far as the phrase, turn up, which we not even on no more. It's pipe up. But by the time y'all even see this, we gonna be on to the next thing. - I wanna tell him something. Like, if I need to tell him something, but I ain't trying to let everybody know, I tell him Like, eh, fool, we need to go handle business. Like, if I say we preparing to go handle business, we really just gonna go off and talk about the stuff we don't need nobody else to know about. Like, they say this a lot, they Be like, I'm fixin' to slide up to the crib. And slide up to the crib mean, oh I'm fixin' to go home. - All of 'em don't talk alike. Sure does, makes me have to tell 'em, kinda straighten it up a little bit Where I can understand it. 'Cause I got some grandchildren. I can't hardly understand them. [Makes Sound] I said wait, baby. I said grandaddy trying to understand ya. (laughs) - Rural kids, who used to be much more regionalized Want to sound more urban because it's more hip. And so, the old time rural styles of African Americans, which tended to be more closely aligned with southern white varieties, are now moving away and becoming much more urban, and actually, in some ways, more like the urban North and some of the southern urban areas, for example, like Atlanta, and so forth. - You know, we know as linguists, right, that who's the most important for the young people are their peers. Doesn't matter how older people speak around you. It's the peer group that's the main influence. - I came down here once, and I started calling everybody Joe. Because in Chicago, they call everybody Joe. And they was like, "What you talking about?" And I was like, "My bad, y'all." 'Cause I had stayed a whole summer. So I was calling everybody Joe. And I was like, "Hey, let me get this, yo." Like, I had developed like this. I don't even know where it was coming from. I was around my cousin so much, and that was the way they were talking. So I guess I just picked up on it. When I got ready to come home. I was just still stuck in that city language. - So there's a kind of movement of urbanization so that young people in remote areas now, are adopting more urban features because that's the cultural standard and the norm of what is cool. ♪ This is my boom, 97.5 ♪ 102.9, DJ Nabs going live ♪ This is my boom, 97.5 ♪ 102.9, DJ Nabs going live - Myself, Shocka Zooloo, and a few other people who were hired to be on hip-hop radio in 1997, right, were invited on BET with Tavis Smiley. And it was called BET Talks. And it was talking about the change in radio. Like, the changing of the guard. Like, it changed from the old-school days of black radio when radio guys talked like this. Welcome to the show. It's WKBC, W so and so, so and so. Can you dig it? Blah, blah, blah. And it become, you know what it is? You know, it was that hip-hop language. It's the way we talk and spoke. You know, we're just speaking our everyday language, but that was different from the language of radio prior to that period of time. And, there was a change in language, but we wasn't thinking about it in that sense. We were just, it was just our music, just who we were. But to be on the radio playing these records and to be saying, here's another dope joint from Schooly D, "PSK," you know what it means. Bang, and play the record. You know, if you wasn't in the culture, you didn't understand that. What you think? Should we do it 80s style? Yeah. (hip-hop music) - The different culture may be more in age bracket. 'Cause you know, all the young guys all talk a certain way. Most of the lingo comes up as new. The lingo we used is outdated now, when we was coming up, so. They come up with new words that mean the same thing. - It's a big divide. And it's between the elders and the youth. And what happens is the elders don't tend to wanna understand what the youth are doing, and the youth are growing up in a world different than what the elders grew up in. - A lot of the language is changing, the music is changing. But it's like, that one term or that one dance never changes. No matter what comes out in the music, they're always gonna hear their father or their uncles have this greeting with each other. So when they grow up, that's their greeting. It's amazing how strong it is. - People of African descent have been moving from the beginning of time and interacting and transforming. I think there's some things that are constant, but I also think it's constantly transforming. - People may feel like the things that they're saying, regardless if it's considered improper English, that's what may make them feel the closest to home. So it's almost like, kinda like a special legacy. - For me, black language is natural. That's the language, the first language I speak. It's my first language. It's how my people adapted to whatever, having their language stripped away or having put it together from different parts and pieces of different Creoles, or... It's what we did with what we had, and that is not just sufficient, it's more than enough. My hope is that we begin to see our language and everything else that we can do that way. - When I was a child, when whites would imitate black speech, it was often done in a racist way, to make fun of the way that black people talked. Through time, and with the advent of hip-hop, you now see white kids in the suburban malls with their baseball caps on backwards. They're imitating black speech patterns, but they're doing so because they try to embrace the culture. Even though our culture has been the object of racist discrimination, it's also been embraced by American society as really being very cool. Our styles of speaking, our styles of dress, the way we dance, the music, the food, it's cool. (shouting) (upbeat jazz music) - We're live 24/7, 365. You like jazz, we got it. If you like hip-hop, we got it. You like R&B, old school or new, we got it. Yes. (soft music) - I was on the train two days ago going up to Harlem to see my sister. And so, this train was packed, and I was sitting on the train. And there were two women talking. They had a lot of good energy. And they must've been in their young 30s. And one was singing a song by Sir Mix-a-Lot. She's going, "baby got back, baby got back." And you know, some people are very stiff in the train. But you know as you go closer to Harlem, people are loosening up. And there were four young men. And one of the young men said to her, these are all, you know, shades of black people. One of the young men said to her, "Why you singing that song? "Why you singing that song?" And she said, "I like that song." He said, "Well, why you really singing that song?" And she starts singing her song again. "Baby got back." And she said, "Because around that time, "I was young, and that song came out, "and for the first time, I knew, "I knew that I was okay. "All of this was okay." And he was like, "Okay." And she said, "So what's your story? "What's your story?" And so, she went to each one. "What's your story?" "You know, I'm from Harlem." "I'm from Queens." "I'm Dominican." "Okay, papi, okay." And so, you just all of the black diaspora interacting and coming together, mixing and transforming right there in front of your eyes. And we got to 125th Street. And they were like, "You know, I see you." And there was just wonderful cadence and rhythm and impromptu, articulation of who they were. And we got to 125th Street. And I just looked at my husband. I said, "We're gonna be okay. "We're gonna be okay if this is what is coming behind us." ♪ Who's gonna protect the women and the children ♪ ♪ Lions, we in the building ♪ If you're tired of the struggling ♪ ♪ And the killing ♪ Zion, we need some healing ♪ I was born in them killing field ♪ ♪ Where the love at? ♪ It's really real ♪ Stretch me like a skull cap ♪ I got love for y'all ♪ Now run and tell that. King of the jungle ♪ ♪ Yeah, we run that ♪ Frustrations are replacing ♪ The emotions that I'm relating ♪ ♪ Maybe you're mistaking my kindness for weakness ♪ ♪ Nah, that's cool ♪ There ain't no ill that I'm speaking ♪ ♪ Speak to inherit the Earth ♪ Speak if you know what you're worth ♪ ♪ Seek if you know what you're worth ♪ ♪ Teach so they know what they worth ♪ ♪ Speak if they taking your birth- ♪ ♪ -right, so pursuing the hurt ♪ Damn, pursuing the hurt for real ♪ ♪ Pursuing the hurt ♪ Seems to be all that you know ... ♪