DW2b

“In one of the few groundbreaking works on women’s representations on Web pages, Hawisher and Sullivan (1999) found that many women put aside traditional rhetorical modes of politeness, apologetic modesty, and deference for a sassy, in-your-face, self-assertive attitude…” (Knadler 236).
I found this statement in E-Racing difference in E-Space: Black female subjectivity and the Web-based portfolio by Steven Knadler to be very true. Many women posting online are comfortable enough to show sass and self-assertive attitude while appropriating African American Vernacular English. Politeness, modesty, or deference is often disregarded online because polite, modest, and deferent comments don’t generate a response by other bloggers. On a blog on bet.com about the New York Post cartoon incident, Sharonda wrote : “I DONT WANT NO APOLOGY I WANT MONEY AINT NOTHIN GONNA BE RITE TILL OBAMA GETS US PAID WE THE ONES THAT BILT THIS COUNTRY AN WE RUNNIN IT NOW. OBAMA ALL DAY”. Here, Sharonda gets other bloggers fired up as she preaches her opinion of the potential New York Post boycott. Her bold post draws the attention of other bloggers and causes feedback to her post. This feedback is either in agreement or disagreement to her general opinion, but contain no remark or judgment to her sass or AAVE rhetoric. In this post, AAVE is strong with multiple negations, tonal semantics, and zero copula. The use of all capital letters also seems to be common among women wishing to show strong feeling on a subject. On a blog about the Rihanna/Chris Brown dispute, many posts from females spoke out in defense of Rihanna, claiming that she is clearly the victim. Lovergirl feels is appropriate to objects and wants her feelings to be known in her post: “…YOU DO HAVE TO LOOK AT THE WOMEN SIDE. IM A WOMEN MYSELF AND I KNOW THAT I WOULD NOT LET A MAN BEAT ME…SHE NEED TO SHOW SOME PHOTOS OR SOMETHIN…” Like Sharonda, Lovergirl was so bold with her blog postings partly because she was comfortable online to do so. As in the Knadler reading, LaChia was able to find “the ideal community [online] where she no longer has to explain or apologize for her ‘Blackness’ and where others understand her as she understands herself.” (236). Similarly, Sharonda and Lovergirl found a community on controversial bet.com blogs where they won’t be judged. Other bloggers may agree or disagree with what they have said but their morality, character, or intelligence isn’t questioned based on the way they express attitude, write, and type. Women can feel free to voice their opinions in a way that they wish because blogs (especially those where AAVE is actively appropriated) are relatively free of judgment.

AAVE online, DW2a

When first posed with this assignment, my first thought was to go to www.bet.com. I expected a website aiming primarily at a young, hip, black audience would embrace the appropriation of African American Vernacular English and use it frequently. However, the only evidence of AAVE I could find on the main page of bet.com was in headline links. One link read “Mayor Kilpatrick is ballin’ again!” Seeing AAVE in the headline, I was attracted to that link because I anticipated many examples of AAVE in the full article. When I clicked on the link, I found that the full story of Ex-Mayor Kilpatrick was written in Standard English. With the exception of one commenter who urges his “young brothas to get an education”, all of the comments on this article were written in Standard English. I felt like I had to search bet.com for a while until I found good examples of AAVE. The best examples of language appropriation are by bloggers not directly affiliated with BET. While some posts were written in Standard English (and one was written in Spanish), majority of the posts had traces of AAVE. One post about Trick Daddy read, “Dis ya boy Fat Tony…niggas out the hood is ready for change”. This sentence follows the rules of AAVE in three places while in Standard English, “Dis”, the omission of the word “of” between “out” and “the” and the subject/verb agreement problem between “niggas” and “is” is incorrect.
Most of the people attracted to BET are familiar with AAVE but not all of them take advantage of the opportunity to be able to practice AAVE or support black people in BET blogs. Although BET editors doe not use AAVE in any of their main news articles, AAVE is definitely appropriated by BET’s many blogs. BET offers blogs on everything from Barack Obama’s economic stimulus plan and the latest genetic oddities to Rihanna’s classy ensemble and 50 Cent’s latest beef with DJ Khaled. A post about Trick Daddy by Lisa Williams read “All I can &will say iz obama made history &trick daddy spoke on it……y yall hating on trick black people stay on the subject &stop being ignorant….ya girl roc city” and assumes that all users on BET are black or that all black users support Trick Daddy. The Don argued "Of all the intelligent black actors, athletes and entertainers who have a perspective on what is at stake now, you had to pick this nappy headed nitwit."

DW 1B

There was one reason why I couldn’t stand my senior year publications class. A group of five or six junior girls would sit at a table and gossip during the entire class. It wasn’t so much what they were saying that irritated and distracted me, but how they said it. Each of the girls spoke with a dialect that sounded like a super annoyed “valley girl”. Their voice inflections, tone, pronunciation, and unnatural pauses were like nails on a chalkboard to me as they pronounced “I don’t care” as “Ion’tcaire” (that had a particularly heinous stress over the “Ion”). Another common phrase they used was “I was just sitting there, and then…”, which came out as “Ias jus- sitting there…and aTHEn”. It seemed like everybody else I knew spoke with the same tone, inflections, and mannerisms except for the nonsense of that particular group of junior girls. However, the more junior girl dialect I listened to during that semester, the more patterns I noticed. What sounded at first like sloppy, attitude-induced English surprisingly turned out to follow a structure. If not for structure, how else did the girls become fluent in this dialect? One girl must have started the high to low voice inflections, slurring of similar sounding words, and inserting a pause to illustrate a point. Her style was systematic enough for other girls to catch on and mimic the dialect. I noticed this dialect was stronger in some girls than in others and the dialect seemed to go away depending on their audience. Soon, I saw variations in other people’s speech as well. For example, some people say “like” more often than others, some drop the “g” on “ing”, and some omit syllables altogether. Then I realized that I say things in a way that is exclusive to me. What gave me the right to get down on the way the junior girls spoke when I speak in an equally matchless way? Leah Zuidema explains in “Myth #3: Standard English is better than other varieties” in Myth Education that “judgments about “good” and “bad” language use are subjective social constructions”. What may sound rash and annoying to one person may be totally acceptable and ordinary dialogue to another person or a group of people. “There is really no single dialect of English…[because] the norms for Standard English are not identical to all communities”. It is not fair for one dialect to be stigmatized because “…no matter how standard [you think your] English, all speakers are perceived by some listeners to have an “accent””. If I had seen the dialect of the junior girls as just a distinguished variety of language characterized by phonology I wouldn’t have ranked my own dialect above theirs. Had I not been so ignorant I could have placed an importance on what they were saying instead of how it had been said.