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The May 3 ASHA Leader published an article, "Difference or Deficit in Speakers of African American English," by Linda M. Bland-Stewart that was very informative and contained valuable information for clinicians who are unfamiliar with African American English features. As an African-American speech-language pathologist in the public schools I have seen, too often, assessment reports that do not consider linguistic differences and have wrongfully labeled African American students as disordered.
On another note, however, the terms that were used to describe African American English were the same terms that describe disorders. When we talk about articulation disorders we use such terms as deletion, lack of, omission, reduction, and absence. To use these same terms to describe features of African American English gives it disordered connotations. We must use more constructive terminology to describe African American English and stay away from terms that are used to describe disorders. Instead of saying plural markers are absent we could say plurality is expressed within the context of the sentence, and instead of saying there is a lack of past tense markers, we could say past tense is expressed with the same word forms as are used for the present tense. I feel it is important to be more descriptive in our references to African American English features rather than comparative. Even though AAE is a dialect of Standard English, it should not be perceived as a disordered form of English.
Evelyn Veney-Freeman
Washington, DC
speechlangserv@aol.com
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