Ebonics is greatly
misunderstood, largely because
of how it gained global
attention during a racially
charged education controversy in
Oakland, California. On Dec. 18,
1996, the Oakland School Board
passed
a resolution declaring
Ebonics to be the language of
28,000 African-American students
within that school district. Few
people had ever heard of the
term Ebonics prior to the
passage of that resolution, to
say nothing of how it was
created or originally defined.
Dr. Robert Williams, an
African-American social
psychologist, coined the term
Ebonics in 1973. His goal was to
combine the words “ebony” with
“phonics” to refer to “black
sounds.”Williams and several
other African-American social
scientists had gathered that
year at a conference sponsored
by the National Institutes of
Health to discuss the
psychological development of
black children. Williams and his
associates had been displeased
with the term Black English
and began to ponder the
alternatives.
Williams recounted the
creation of Ebonics as follows:
We need to define what we
speak. We need to give a
clear definition to our
language. …We know that
ebony means black and that
phonics refers to speech
sounds or the science of
sounds. Thus, we are really
talking about the science of
black speech sounds or
language. (Williams, 1997a)
Although the preceding
statement offers an early, vague
conception of Ebonics, the term
was formally defined in 1975
when Williams published an
edited volume, Ebonics: The
True Language of Black Folks.
In it, he classified Ebonics as
the
…linguistic and
paralinguistic features
which on a concentric
continuum represent the
communicative competence of
the West African, Caribbean,
and United States slave
descendant of African
origin. (Williams, 1975)
