Ebonics Defended at Psychologist Meeting

Black psychologists got a crash course in the West African origins of black American English and were urged to keep up the fight to have U.S. schools recognize ebonics’ linguistic value. “We want to remove the stigma that the language our kids speak is a deficient language,” said psychologist Robert Williams, the man who coined the word “ebonics.” He told members of the Assn. of Black Psychologists, meeting in Washington, that linguistics studies show ebonics resulted from combining English vocabulary with African language structure and does not constitute grammatically incorrect speech.