If Black English Isn't a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?

“Language, incontestably, reveals the speaker.”

Baldwin asserts here that how a person uses language—such as word choice, pronunciation, inflection, and direct versus indirect expression—can’t help but reveal who that person is, including factors such as where they grew up and many aspects of their background. Simultaneously, using only five words, Baldwin presents his statement as incontrovertible fact, daring anyone who disagrees to provide an evidence-supported counterargument.

“People evolve a language in order to describe and thus control their circumstances, or in order not to be submerged by a reality that they cannot articulate.”

This sentence provides the foundation of Baldwin’s joint thesis of the purpose of language along with the specific functions that make something a language. The first half of the sentence is the thesis, and the second half of the sentence theorizes the likely consequences of the lack or loss or destruction of language. The word “submerged” evokes an image of death, emphasizing the stakes of his argument.

“A Frenchman living in Paris speaks a subtly and crucially different language from that of the man living in Marseilles; neither sounds very much like a man living in Quebec; and they would all have great difficulty apprehending what the man from Guadeloupe, or Martinique, is saying, to say nothing of the man from Senegal–although the ‘common’ language of all these areas is French. Each has paid, and is paying, a different price for this ‘common’ language.”

Without explicitly saying so, in this quote Baldwin brings into his argument various issues regarding the consequences of imperialism, exploitation, and enslavement. He refers to Caribbean islands that France colonized in 1635 that remain Overseas Departments of France (Martinique and Guadeloupe) and to Senegal, a West African country that France colonized in 1659 that won independence from France in 1960. The subtext of the “different price” in this quote refers to how the present-day inhabitants of each region have widely disparate cultural histories regarding the centuries-long slave trade of Indigenous African peoples and other aspects of economic exploitation or manipulation.

“It goes without saying, then, that language is also a political instrument, means, and proof of power.”

This sentence showcases a hallmark of Baldwin’s style, in which he packs lots of information into few words. He argues that language is political and supports his argument by listing how language is a critical facet of any political system, serving as political instrument, means of political communication, and proof of political power. As he does several times in the essay, Baldwin also offers this aspect of his argument as simple fact, by using the phrase “it goes without saying.”

“There have been, and are, times, and places, when to speak a certain language could be dangerous, even fatal.”

With the words and verb tenses he chooses, Baldwin structures his argument to incorporate both past and present (“have been, and are”); various social circumstances and environments (“times”); and multiple geographic constructs (“places”) such as countries, regions, or even city blocks in examples like Harlem, the south side of Chicago, or Compton, California. This joining of temporal periods and geographic spaces demonstrates the vastness of the problem of the subjugation of Black English while using specific examples to back up his points. In a single sentence, Baldwin strategically uses five commas to communicate extensive information with relatively few words.

“The range (and reign) of accents on that damp little island make England coherent for the English and totally incomprehensible for everyone else.”

This quote offers an example of Baldwin’s wordplay, including the sounds of words and the relationships between and among words. “Range (and reign)” shows Baldwin playing with the sonic differences and disparate meanings of two five-letter words that have nearly the same letters but very different pronunciations and linguistic histories. This emphasizes linguistic divergence from shared etymology, which reinforces his point that Black English is a language unto itself despite shared etymology with standard English.

“To open your mouth in England is (if I may use black English) to ‘put your business in the street’: You have confessed your parents, your youth, your school, your salary, your self-esteem, and, alas, your future.”

In this quote Baldwin explicitly introduces specific examples of Black English as supporting evidence for his argument. Baldwin both fleshes out the meaning of “put your business in the street” and animates it by listing what happens when someone puts their business in the street—at least in England.

“Jazz, for example, is a very specific sexual term, as in jazz me, baby, but white people purified it into the Jazz Age.”

This quote is the first example of Baldwin describing how a term that originated in Black English was co-opted by white English and in the process given a different meaning. In the case of jazz, a sexual term was changed to identify and name a music genre as well as a socio-historical period typified by that genre. Simultaneously, in this quote Baldwin offers an education for those who don’t speak or know the linguistic history of Black English.

“Beat to his socks, which was once the black's most total and despairing image of poverty, was transformed into a thing called the Beat Generation, which phenomenon was, largely, composed of uptight, middle-class white people, imitating poverty, trying to get down, to get with it, doing their thing, doing their despairing best to be funky, which we, the blacks, never dreamed of doing—we were funky, baby, like funk was going out of style.”

In this long, winding sentence, Baldwin offers a litany of words and phrases that originated in Black English and were then co-opted into white American English. He lays the sentence’s foundation by starting with the phrase that was most changed by being co-opted, describing how a vivid image of despair was twisted into a sought-after signifier for American artists and writers during the 1950s and 1960s.

“A language comes into existence by means of brutal necessity, and the rules of the language are dictated by what the language must convey.”

This passage pulls together all the elements of the argument that Baldwin makes in the paragraph as a whole. The paragraph addresses the context of the enslavement of Black Africans primarily in the American South but also throughout first the British colonies in North America and then the United States from roughly 1619-1861. Baldwin’s “brutal necessity” refers to the fact that none of the Black Africans who were enslaved could speak each other’s language when they arrived in North America.

“Now, if this passion, this skill, this (to quote Toni Morrison) ‘sheer intelligence,’ this incredible music, the mighty achievement of having brought a people utterly unknown to, or despised by ‘history’—to have brought this people to their present, troubled, troubling, and unassailable and unanswerable place—if this absolutely unprecedented journey does not indicate that black English is a language, I am curious to know what definition of language is to be trusted.”

Here, Baldwin builds a long, pulsing sentence that pulls together divergent ideas and vast amounts of information. By using strings of words such as “passion,” “skill,” “sheer intelligence,” “music,” and “mighty achievement” along with “troubled,” “troubling,” “unassailable,” and “unanswerable,” Baldwin creates a musical sentence filled with rhythm to highlight the expressive powers of language.

“The brutal truth is that the bulk of white people in America never had any interest in educating black people, except as this could serve white purposes.”

For the second time in this brief essay, Baldwin uses the word “brutal,” here pairing it with “truth.” Though sonically musical, the phrase carries a harsh meaning with a repetitive, percussive “t” sound to convey the violence about which Baldwin talks.

“A child cannot be taught by anyone whose demand, essentially, is that the child repudiate his experience, and all that gives him sustenance, and enter a limbo in which he will no longer be black, and in which he knows that he can never become white.”

This quote shows the common usage of the pronouns “his,” “him,” and “he” to refer universally to all humans, a linguistic artifact used by many writers and scholars of the period. Just as Baldwin advocated for the specificity and importance of the name “Black English” and for respecting the culturally anchored meanings of words and phrases that originated in Black English, the essay subsumes the specificity of the experience of Black women compared to Black men.