Yes, the "burden of communication"
section of Lippi-Green's
English with an Accent builds on
an amazing study by Donald Rubin reported in 1992:
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=18053876336300254670
It's definitely a real phenomenon. I would caution against
over-interpreting it, however. The fact is that there's probably
as much variation within Ebonics/Black English/AAVE as between it
and any other variety. I have a story that I tell my students
about this:
When I first arrived for grad school at the University of
Chicago twenty years ago, I arrived in Midway and took the 59th
Street bus right across the South Side. When we got into the
black parts of town, people got on the bus and started chatting
with the (black) driver. They would occasionally smile at me and
make some small talk. I realized that I couldn't understand most
of what they were saying.
I generally understood when black Chicagoans spoke directly to
me, but I was pretty much lost when listening to a conversation
between two people. I eventually figured out that I had developed
receptive competence in New York Black English, but that didn't
carry over into Chicago Black English. It took me two months to
get to the point where I didn't have to strain to understand.
You should always be skeptical when someone says "I'm not a
racist, but..." Still, I hope you all believe that I really
wanted to understand these Black English speakers that I met in
Chicago. I'm a linguist, I'm proud of my ability to understand
language, and I wanted to reciprocate the friendliness that people
were showing me. I didn't blame them for my inability to
understand them. I had just read Labov's dissertation, and as I
talked to South Siders I listened for phonological differences,
like the palatalization of the "s" in "street" [ʃʧɹit]. Sometimes
intelligibility is about exposure to a variety.
It's also quite common for intelligibility to be asymmetric.
It's been widely reported that Portuguese speakers have an easier
time understanding Spanish than vice versa, and that speakers of
other varieties understand Cairene Arabic better because of the
Egyptian film industry.
At the LSA in 2008, there was also a talk by someone about two
varieties in Cameroon that had been classified as separate
languages based on reports that they were mutually
unintelligible. A team who returned to the area reported that the
varieties were in fact very close and that the responses were more
along the lines of, "Oh, nobody can understand them! They talk
really weird in that village!"
On 8/1/2013 4:11 PM, Kephart, Ronald wrote:
[log in to unmask]" type="cite">
Yes. I've told this story several times, hopefully not here
though. Back when I was taking field methods, we had an
in-class consultant from Nigeria who spoke Isoko, and that was
the language we were working on. He told us about a closely
related language, Urhobo, spoken by some in the same region. As
he explained it, the speakers of Urhobo were the dominant or
elite group, while Isoko speakers made up a group that
considered itself exploited or dominated. Anyway, he told us
that Urhobo speakers insisted they could fully understand Isoko,
but that Isoko speakers could not understand Urhobo.
I've always felt (but never formally investigated) that white
speakers of Accepted English who claim they can't understand
Ebonics speakers really just don't "want" to understand them, or
maybe assume they won't understand them, and so don't even try
and kind of tune them out as "noise." This would be sort of the
reverse of the Urhobo-Isoko situation, I guess.
The other thing is that in my classes, I often show students
a few sentences in Ebonics and ask whether they know what they
mean. They generally don't. This is getting back to looking at
single grammatical or lexical items. I think the ones that are
most misleading are the ones that actually look like Accepted
English, but have a different meaning. My favorite example
comes from English Creole in Carriacou (Grenada), from which I
can get a sentence like 'They go in the store.' Nobody ever
correctly interprets that as 'they went into the store and
haven't come out yet.'
Interesting, and important, stuff.
Ron
However, I would be remiss if I did not through a
critical wrench in the wheel. The fourth chapter of Rosina
Lippi-Green's textbook English with an Accent,
particularly the part beginning on p. 69, speaks directly
to non-intelligibility-related explanations for reported
unintelligibility. We like to criticise syntacticians for
accepting grammaticality judgments at face value, and we
ought to subject ourselves to the same scrutiny with
respect to intelligibility judgments.