if blacks aren't dumb,why can't they speak english?

[88jose88]

They've been here for over 400 years yet can't speak english.

'Ya'll'is so f***ing annoying.he be instead he is or dey be instead of they are.'he goin to skoo'instead of he's going to school.

and then my name 'Bennie',they call me beeeeeneee'.

[yick]

Shut up, idiot. You can't even find a job, let alone stick to one.

[88jose88]

Shut up, idiot. You can't even find a job, let alone stick to one.

that's purely due to documentation issues .Also,I make enough from SSI to live off,I'm not stupid enough to get a job that loses my SSI that pays just the same,where I'm living paycheck to paycheck struggling.

I will get to work once I get a job that is worth it.I'm just working to save to go to maastricht,holland within 6 months of saving.

[88jose88]

I fail to see the correlation between intelligence and speaking English. I've met people who speak English (or a close approximation) and they're total fools. @Lucas88 will surely agree that speaking English and/or getting a job don't mean someone is unintelligent.

@88jose88
@yick

Do you deny that blacks have a average iq of 85 in america and lower in africa according to all studies?

[MrMan]

Shut up, idiot. You can't even find a job, let alone stick to one.

that's purely due to documentation issues .Also,I make enough from SSI to live off,I'm not stupid enough to get a job that loses my SSI that pays just the same,where I'm living paycheck to paycheck struggling.

I will get to work once I get a job that is worth it.I'm just working to save to go to maastricht,holland within 6 months of saving.

Why don't you study something that will land you a job with a salary high enough to get you out of the just-scraping-by SSI handcuffs. Those are copper handcuffs instead of the golden handcuffs of an executive or managers who feels stuck to the job because the benefits or retirement are so good. You could also try to start a small business and keep reinvesting profits in advertising right before the end of the year or right before an SSI review period so your income is below the threshold, and build it up.

[MrMan]

The footnote links just copy as numbers, but this is what Bing chatbot says about SSI.

The maximum monthly Supplemental Security Income (SSI) payment for 2024 is $943 for an individual and $1,415 for a couple1. However, the actual amount you receive may be lower based on your income, certain family members’ income, your living situation, and other factors1.

SSI payments are reduced by about $1 for every $2 you earn from work1. Money from non-work sources will lower payments by about $1 for every $1 received1. If you live with a spouse, their income may affect your payment1. Children on SSI who live with their parents may have their payments lowered based on their income or their parents’ income1.

If you live in someone else’s home, your SSI may be lowered by up to a third of this year’s maximum payment1. This reduction doesn’t apply if you live with someone else and pay your fair share of food and shelter costs1.

For 2023, an individual beneficiary cannot earn more than $1,913 per month2. For couples, that figure is $2,827 per month2. In addition, the limit on assets in 2023 and 2024 is $2,000 for individuals and $3,000 for couples2.

[MrMan]

They've been here for over 400 years yet can't speak english.

'Ya'll'is so f***ing annoying.he be instead he is or dey be instead of they are.'he goin to skoo'instead of he's going to school.

and then my name 'Bennie',they call me beeeeeneee'.

Aren't you part black?

But speaking a certain dialect doesn't make you stupid. American dialects might seem strange to the English. Why can't those Americans drop their 'r's like the queen? Are they stupid? It's stupidity. We speak whatever language and grammar we were taught growing up. I would imagine dialects of black English are grammatically simplified because there were probably communities of slaves hundreds of years ago that were nonnative speakers that learned broken English to get by, and they kept adding slaves, and it all mixed together with the English of their masters or slave drivers and other slaves.

A use of the subjunctive that might have been more common a couple of centuries back would be, "If it be raining tomorrow, I will not go out tomorrow.' Some blacks picked up 'be', and used that a lot more than white varieties of English. Nowadays white Americans say, "If it is raining, I will not go out tomorrow." and their ancestors might have thought them dumb or poorly educated if they heard them speak that way. And then Black ebonic speakers look out the window and say, "It be raining." Their ancestors adopted the word 'be' to be used a bit more broadly.

Anyway, it is not a matter of intelligence. I haven't seen IQ tests for American blacks. I suspect this has nothing to do with the dialect they speak, except if speaking informal English hinders their reading and writing skills in the standard dialect of English taught in school, and reading and writing has an impact on IQ, then there could be a relationship.

If white's are raised around a 'ghetto' accent, they pick it up. Blacks raised in households that speak standard dialects speak standard dialects. But it does seem like some aspects of pronunciation carry on from generation to generation even if the grammar is standard. I occasionally run across a black person who 'talks white.' I can think of one friend of mine.
I don't notice 'black accents' with a lot of speakers from the UK that have been there for generations, but I might not be sensitive enough to the dialect to discern. Blacks have preserved intonation, style, and pronunciation that is a little different for hundreds of years.

Honestly, for me personally, some of those ghetto accents are the harshest sounding native speaker English language accents, and I don't care for a thug ghetto accent on a woman. Some of those tough-sounding or nasal-sounding New York accents can also detract from a woman's attractiveness from my perception. But some Singapore accents are rather rough to my ears, too.

[Lucas88]

They've been here for over 400 years yet can't speak english.

'Ya'll'is so f***ing annoying.he be instead he is or dey be instead of they are.'he goin to skoo'instead of he's going to school.

and then my name 'Bennie',they call me beeeeeneee'.

Speaking African American Vernacular English (AAVE) doesn't necessarily mean that somebody is dumb. AAVE is a sociolect which many people speak simply out of habit and due to the influence of the wider community, not due to low IQ. It just happens to be considered low status.

I have high intelligence and a relatively high level of educational achievement but I still often speak English with dialectal features and use non-standard contractions all the time. It might sound dumb to some people but I'm simply accustomed to speaking like that since childhood. I live in a town where most people speak the local dialect more than they do standard English.

As for AAVE, it actually evolved from the English of Southern Whites. That's where the "y'all", "finna" and other non-standard contractions come from. In fact, AAVE is believed to preserve more of these archaic features than the contemporary speech of Southern Whites. Southern Whites integrated into mainstream American society more than African Americans did and lost more of their dialectal features as a result while African Americans remained relatively isolated in their ghettos and therefore preserved more of their sociolect.

Here is a video about AAVE:

[MrMan]

@lucas88

I am a southern white with some welsh heritage maybe a great-great grandmother was a Price. What is finna?

I hear dropping the g in -ing like saying fishin' comes from Irish dialects of English. American English dialects likely got jumbled features from various UK dialects, and a bit of Scandinavian influence in Minnesota.

[MrMan]

I caught the finne thing on tge video. I would not have spelled it that way.

I have perceived that as a truncated form of the Southern expression 'fixing to' used like going to.

without checking to see if there's any research on this specific idea my guess is that the African-American dialect of the core dialect from which most of them derived probably came from Virginia with a mix of early slaves and white settlers. I get the impression that many of the other southern colonies received inflows of immigration from Virginia with some of the colonists coming directly from the UK. some of them may have brought slaves with them who influenced the dialects of other African-American communities, so that they spoke the same Creole derived language that was similar across the states. After emancipation many African Americans went to urban areas to find jobs.

[Lucas88]

I have perceived that as a truncated form of the Southern expression 'fixing to' used like going to.

Yes, that's exactly where AAVE "finna" comes from.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/finna#English

I've heard Southern White rednecks on TV using the "fixing to" construction (e.g., "I'm fixin' to give you a whoopin'!") but I've never seen Whites contract it to "finna". I've only ever heard African Americans use the contracted form.

As the video explains, AAVE actually has quite a few contracted future constructions -- gon/gonna, finna, I'mma, etc.

I hear dropping the g in -ing like saying fishin' comes from Irish dialects of English. American English dialects likely got jumbled features from various UK dialects, and a bit of Scandinavian influence in Minnesota.

The dropping of the -g in the -ing suffix is common throughout England and most people pronounce it as -in' in natural speech. The -ing pronunciation predominates in certain Southern and Midlands dialects but, generally speaking, people only pronounce the -g when they're trying to sound formal.

[Moretorque]

They've been here for over 400 years yet can't speak english.

'Ya'll'is so f***ing annoying.he be instead he is or dey be instead of they are.'he goin to skoo'instead of he's going to school.

and then my name 'Bennie',they call me beeeeeneee'.

Black man will KILL YOU....

[MrMan]

I have perceived that as a truncated form of the Southern expression 'fixing to' used like going to.

Yes, that's exactly where AAVE "finna" comes from.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/finna#English

I've heard Southern White rednecks on TV using the "fixing to" construction (e.g., "I'm fixin' to give you a whoopin'!") but I've never seen Whites contract it to "finna". I've only ever heard African Americans use the contracted form.

I don't know if there is any official spelling of the term. Do the Welsh say 'fixing to' to designate the future tense, or 'finne' by itself, or just reduce words similarly?

I jokingly irritated my foreign high school Spanish teacher with a sentence like, "Estoy fijando ir al marcado.' He was irritated by students with southern and other American accents that did not seem to be trying to have an proper accent in Spanish. I was a bit of a perfectionist in that regard, but just messing with him.

I hear dropping the g in -ing like saying fishin' comes from Irish dialects of English. American English dialects likely got jumbled features from various UK dialects, and a bit of Scandinavian influence in Minnesota.

The dropping of the -g in the -ing suffix is common throughout England and most people pronounce it as -in' in natural speech. The -ing pronunciation predominates in certain Southern and Midlands dialects but, generally speaking, people only pronounce the -g when they're trying to sound formal.

[/quote]

I have read it attributed to Irish influence, but I do not know if that is right. Is it possible Irish dialects influenced English dialects?

Are there any dialects where e sounds turn into short i sounds before nasals in UK dialects?

[MrMan]

If I mastered ebonics after watching that video, as a white man, I can't really talk black unless I convince them that's the way I always talk.



And if you talk Black, like in the video, you get to be rude to customers.

I taking a flight, international I think, and stopped somewhere like Detroit, or Chicago, or maybe it was Mineannapolis, and before takeoff, this Black flight attended saw someone who had his seat leaned back. She told him he needed to put it in the upright position for takeoff. Then she starts talking to herself all sassy like some character off a sitcom as she walked up the row and by me, "These people here be laying their seats back. I got to be tellin' these people to put seats in the upright position." A friend of mine said a white employee couldn't get away with complaining like that.

The Asian flight attendants on the other legs of the flight before it switches to Delta planes sure are nice and police. They tend to hire pretty thin ones, too.

[Lucas88]

I don't know if there is any official spelling of the term. Do the Welsh say 'fixing to' to designate the future tense, or 'finne' by itself, or just reduce words similarly?

No, the Welsh don't use "fixing to" to designate future intention. Nowhere in the British Isles uses either that construction or any contraction thereof (I even checked with ChatGPT). It seems to be a purely Southern US phenomenon with the "finna" contraction being its derivative in AAVE.

Welsh English doesn't really have any unusual contractions of that sort. They're basically the same as those of standard British English: gonna, don't, isn't, etc. Welsh English does have some peculiarities though. They include a generalization of the third-person verb conjugation to all subjects (e.g., I goes, you goes, we goes, etc.), double negatives (e.g., I don't see nothin'), and occasional placement of adjectives after the noun (e.g., the car red), the latter being influenced by the syntax of the Welsh language.

I have read it attributed to Irish influence, but I do not know if that is right. Is it possible Irish dialects influenced English dialects?

That probably isn't true. The reduction of -ing to -in' is found throughout England, even in faraway regions that didn't receive much Irish immigration. It's more likely that the contraction emerged in England first and then spread to Ireland through colonization.

Are there any dialects where e sounds turn into short i sounds before nasals in UK dialects?

Yes, some dialects in Yorkshire, Lancashire, the Midlands and North East England change pre-nasal "e" into a short "i" (e.g., pin instead of pen), but it isn't consistent throughout those regions and is instead limited to certain towns and areas.