The problem that is under our serious consideration in this article is the phenomenon called Black English or Black English Vernacular (1). This phenomenon is typical for the ethnical dialect of the Afro-Americans of the USA. The cause of its spread is the migration of black Americans to the North and to the West of the USA. According to the statistics, approximately 80% of black Americans speak this English. Some scientists classify Black English Vernacular as ethnosocial dialect proving that this is the dialect of the lowest layers of Afro-American population. However, the majority of the famous sport stars (basketball, boxing, baseball etc.), show business and Hollywood celebrities, who have the Afro-American background but a high social status, use different grammar, vocabulary and phonetic peculiarities of Black English. There are some adjectives and nouns in speech of the White Americans that bear a negative emotional and value connotation. For example, badass, crazy, fat, dirty, deadly, foolish, furious, killer, kooky (slang), nasty, retarded, rude, the shit (slang), vicious, wicked and so on. As for the members of African Diaspora, all the mentioned adjectives and nouns in their speech are considered to have a positive emotional connotation. On the contrary, they mean excellent, perfect, energetic etc. As for the adjective «white» the Afro-Americans give it the negative connotation. For example, white devil, white knuckle, white lightning, white bread and so on. In this case, the linguist Bill Rodgers considers this phenomenon as «bad is good». Obviously we have a phenomenon that might be called «the war of the languages» within the same language. As a result of lexico-semantic variation these lexical units receive some additional meaning which is absolutely anatomical to their basic lexical meaning. Since their full meaning antonymy (black and white), these lexical units are turned into the homonyms – the words which share spelling and pronunciation but have different meanings. They can be called ethnical antonymic homonyms. As for the sociology and culture studying this phenomenon could be determined and specified as ethno-cultural opposition.
Thus, black English and white English are simultaneously both one and the same language and separate languages of the unified American culture (2).
Библиографическая ссылка
Lukashuk V.U., Vorobets L.V. «BLACK ENGLISH» AS THE CULTURAL OPPOSITION OF THE LANGUGE // Международный журнал экспериментального образования. – 2014. – № 6-2. – С. 86-86;URL: https://expeducation.ru/ru/article/view?id=5201 (дата обращения: 17.08.2024).