Mock Ebonics: Linguistic racism in parodies of Ebonics on the Internet

Abstract

This study describes and analyzes outgroup linguistic racism in parodies of Ebonics (`Mock Ebonics') that appeared on the Internet in the wake of the December 18, 1996 resolution of the Board of Education of the Oakland (California) Uni®ed School District on improving the English-language skills of African-American students. We examined 23 World Wide Web pages containing 270,188 words, from which we chose nine pages containing 225,726 words for in-depth analysis. Drawing on a characterization of Mock Spanish, our analysis shows that Mock Ebonics is a system of graphemicphonetic, grammatical, semantic, and pragmatic strategies for representing an outgroup's belief in the imperfection and inferiority of Ebonics and its users. We show how producers of Ebonics parody pages employ these strategies, which are common in speech stereotypes, to articulate an anti-Ebonics language ideology and shift the blame for the poor academic performance of African Americans from a racist society to learners and the community from which they come.

Discourse as virtue ethics: Muslim women in the American Southwest

“…Related to this, studies of "mock" speech-Mock Spanish (Hill, 1993(Hill, , 2008, Mock Ebonics (Ronkin and Karn, 1999), and Mock Asian (Chun, 2004), as they have been called-have made it possible to unpack the covert "othering" that even non-serious speech can perform. I use the foundation laid by this work to argue that core halaqa members' mock Arabic and PakistaniUrdu accents, considered in the latter part of the analysis below, help construct their status as normalizers of Muslim difference.…”

Harsh Voice Quality and Its Association with Blackness in Popular American Media

“…Thus, the researcher must necessarily proceed with caution and awareness of possible interpretations of such analyses. Ronkin and Karn [1999] contend, however, that the identification and study of linguistic parody or mocking serves to increase or enhance awareness of how racist or prejudicial ideologies are operationalized. Discussing such data in an academic context can serve to raise awareness of the vehicles used to express these ideologies and to invite discussion of racism and prejudice in a public forum for scrutiny and understanding.…”

“…A key difference between these cases is that, while the Zhenhai stereotype is an example of the value-encoding (or enregisterment) of an actual sociophonetic property of the language, HVQ is not a sociophonetic feature of any variety of BVE. Yet, in the performances under consideration here, other linguistic variables that do correlate with, most apparently, BVE and its stereotypes [Ronkin and Karn, 1999] are used, as was noted in sections 3.1.2 and 3.1.3. However, in comparison to segmental or morphosyntactic variables, voice quality, especially phonatory voice quality, arguably has a stronger association with affective state, of which it is reportedly a primary index [Laver, 1980[Laver, , 1994Nolan, 1983, p. 62;Scherer, 1986;Teshigawara, 2003].…”

Making Pittsburghese: Communication technology, expertise, and the discursive construction of a regional dialect

“…However, as Ronkin andKarn (1999), Hill (1995), and others have shown, popular discourse about vernacular speech often enacts racism, classism, and other forms of discrimination, and this is as true for Pittsburgh speech as it is for any other non-standard way of speaking.…”