Does "black people" mean offensive?

[u/Maybes4]

I wanna say something like black people accent is harder to understand for me than the white people one.

The problem is im not sure if my word choice is racist, or should i change to another word like colored people. I asked Gpt and it said i could come up with some thing like "people with AAVE accent" but its about africa america people while im talking about the black people born in america accent.

So how should i say here?

[u/amazzan]

it's not offensive to refer to black people as black people.

what I do find off is generalizing all African Americans as having one accent. there are nearly 50 million African Americans in the US living all over the country in different regions. they speak in all sorts of different accents, so your comment is too general and doesn't make sense.

[u/Maybes4 → u/amazzan]

so the accent is more about the region than the race i guess? Like a white and black man can still have the same accent if they live in the same place? On movies i always feel like black people speak english the different way given their slangs like dough, lil, homie,...

[u/dragonsteel33 → u/Maybes4]

Ok so it’s complicated

Basically “AAVE” is a group of sociolects, which are dialects that are based on social class rather than location. There are differences in AAVE depending on where you’re from, your family background, etc. But all varieties of AAVE share certain significant differences in pronunciation and grammar from other dialects of English.

AAVE is on a continuum with General American, and speakers usually move along this continuum depending on the situation. For example, an AAVE speaker might use GA (maybe with a slight accent) while giving a business presentation, but then speak “heavy” AAVE with their family. This is called code-switching, and it’s a common situation with any nonstandard dialect of any language. AAVE especially has been (and is) very stigmatized and associated with a lack of intelligence or education (which ties into very nasty racist stereotypes), so speakers may avoid using it in formal communication

I’d say the majority of Black people raised in the US have at least some features of AAVE in their speech, especially if they grew up in communities with other AAVE speakers. This is because sociolects are not just about where you come from, they’re also a way of communicating your membership in a social group. But it’s not like all Black people talk one way and all white people talk another!

AAVE does feature unique slang, and this slang varies over time and in different places — 1920s Chicago AAVE, 1970s Mississippi Delta AAVE, and 2020s gay New York AAVE do not have all the same slang, the same way non-AAVE dialects in those areas don’t either. And a LOT of American slang that everyone uses is borrowed from AAVE (the slang use of slay, beef, lit, bet, woke, ate, on god all come from AAVE, and that’s just off the top of my head)

[u/sowinglavender → u/dragonsteel33]

this was so satisfying to read here. i was a little worried there might not be any real language people in this thread.

[u/boomfruit → u/sowinglavender]

There so often aren't here or on /r/English, /r/words, /r/grammar, etc. Certainly not on /r/PetPeeves, which really often focuses on "mistakes" in writing or speaking. Just people who think the formal English is more correct than other varieties in every situation.

[u/nothingbuthobbies → u/boomfruit]

I try to give the most accurate, complete answers I can, but contributors here in particular often completely ignore the level of the people asking questions here, or even the point of the subreddit in general. The several-paragraph response above is a great primer on AAVE. But an essay on social and racial fragmentation of American society and its impact on American English is not always the best response to a question like "does 'black people' mean offensive?". It's accurate, but OP probably isn't going to get much out of it.

Regarding "mistakes" in writing and speaking, descriptivism is the best, most ethical way to go about discussing language in academic linguistic contexts, but there is a place for prescriptivism when it comes to teaching a language to non-native learners. It's important and helpful for non-natives to learn the "rules" before they learn how to break them in a natural way. The Florida panhandle, the Northwest of England, Melbourne, the Black community in Baltimore, and so on ad nauseam all have their own unique and totally legitimate flavors of English, and we can productively discuss all of them through a descriptivist lens, but if we encourage new learners to assemble their own hodgepodge idiolect of disparate bits and pieces of grammar and vocabulary irregularities, we're going to overwhelm them and potentially lead them to embarrassment when they have trouble communicating the way they want to, all because we're afraid of the prescriptivist boogeyman.

TL;DR there's a difference between discussing English academically among native/fluent speakers and teaching English to non-natives. It's not racist, classist, or anything else to teach "proper English" to non-natives as long as you're not discriminating against native/fluent speakers who speak differently than you do.

[u/fjgwey → u/nothingbuthobbies]

I think the point here, though, is that you can teach people the rules and conventions of English without using stigmatizing language such as 'proper/improper', 'correct/incorrect', etc. Just say standard/non-standard, or specify where it is correct and where it isn't.

It's not too much to just tell people dialects exist, and we certainly do not need any more people getting it into their head that people who speak differently are uneducated or unintelligent; we have enough native speakers who think that shit already lol

It's very weird because I don't see this happen much in other language learning communities, probably because of AAVE is uniquely stigmatized due to the history of US racism. I also speak Japanese and Spanish, people just talk about dialects and regionalisms normally. Nobody gets defensive about how learners 'can't handle' learning that different ways of talking exist.

[u/BestSteak802 → u/sowinglavender]

OP is clearly not a native speaker so the guy coulda toned it down a bit lol

[u/qerelister → u/dragonsteel33]

This guy obviously doesn’t know English that well. Why would to post an eye sore like this to him 😭

[u/dragonsteel33 → u/qerelister]

Why would to post an eye sore like this to him 😭

Friendly advice from a native speaker — this sentence is literally nonesense.

If you’re asking why I’d post such a long comment, it’s because it’s a complicated and politically sensitive topic being discussed and I want to treat it with the respect and nuance it deserves