Ebonics And Tex-Mex
English By Any Other Name
By Daniel Muniz

Professor Sonja Lanehart is quite an accomplished linguistics scholar. She did her undergraduate work of linguistics at the University of Texas in Austin and in 1995 she earned her doctorate in English language and linguistics from the University of Michigan. Afterwards, she was employed by for the University of Georgia in Athens in which Lanehart became a respected academic.

And in my hometown, the University of Texas at San Antonio recently recruited this high caliber scholar into their faculty. In an interview with the local paper, Lanehart recounts her interest in linguistics at an early age. She explained that as an African-American, she was appalled at the use of Ebonics (it was also known as Jive when I was a kid) by certain high profile blacks on national television. Below is an excerpt of that interview:

But during Lanehart’s academic studies, she had a change of heart. Instead of being a stickler to the English language, she became fascinated with the Ebonics that she had so abhorred. In fact, during her professional career she became the author of the Ebonics book "Sista, Speak!,"

Today Lanehart vigorously defends the usage of Ebonics and she even advocates using it as part of curriculums for primary and secondary schools in minority neighborhoods such as what was proposed in Oakland California.

Myself as a Hispanic, I experienced the equivalent of Ebonics commonly known as Tex-Mex. That is, bad English with some Spanish tossed in. But Tex-Mex doesn’t stop there. It is also bad Spanish with some English tossed in. Not only is it speaking one language incorrectly, it is also speaking two of them incoherently.

As a kid, I grew up around plenty of people who could not speak English at all. And I also was around a lot of people who spoke English very poorly. And as I grew older, my mother quickly pointed out to everyone in the family that even a Hispanic can speak Spanish just as poorly as someone who speaks bad English.

Even though English was not the dominant language in my household when I was growing up, my mom was the language cop and she assertively corrected anyone who misspoke it. Although we lived in the barrio and we were poor, we were not ignorant. And that was something that my mother drilled into us every day.

And she also didn’t hesitate at all to correct my dad whenever he used bad Spanish.

But now as a grown adult with a good paying job, I vividly see how her dogged persistence has paid off. Each of her children can adeptly handle themselves in any type of professional environment especially amongst the educated. Each child also acquired their own college degrees and even my mother earned bachelor degrees in English and in Spanish as a middle-aged woman.

Being able to speak English fluently and correctly got us out of the barrio and out of poverty. For the children, it allowed us to pursue professional careers instead of being limited to low paying jobs.

Even my dad tremendously benefited. My parents take quite a few trips into Mexico to visit Mexico City, Monterrey, and Guadalajara. I was always concerned with their vacations because of the astronomical crime rate of places like Mexico City. Hispanics from the United States stick out like sore thumbs because of their broken and incorrect Spanish thus making them easy targets to such predators. But because of my mother’s diligence, city residents are often surprised to discover that my parents are actually from the United States because of how fluently they speak Spanish. As a result, they blended in fairly well with the population.

Consequently, it is fine for someone like Professor Lanehart to admire people who speak bad English especially since she now sits on a faculty chair that is endowed by a $500,000 grant from a local foundation as well as an additional $100,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

But for everyone else who cannot speak correct English, they don’t have the same kind opportunities that Lanehart enjoys. And with her doctorate in English, I am certain that she can expertly traverse from Ebonics to good English so it doesn’t impact her professional career. But the bottom line is that your employment options are severely limited if people cannot understand you at the workplace. And forget about any chances for advancement.

I have seen it happen too many times for people with broken English or no English at all condemned to a life of poverty. And what is worse is when you have the opportunities to master the language but do not take advantage of them because of admiring speaking our language incorrectly. Ebonics and Tex-Mex has robbed people from the ability to speak in a universal form of English that everyone can understand.

And as my mother rightly observed, being poor is not an excuse to be ignorant. While lots of people around me were content with bad English (and bad Spanish), my mother would never allow it in her house and that made all the difference for my future.

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