“If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What is? By James Baldwin

 

In the article, "If Black Isn't a Language, Then Tell Me, What is?" (1917), James Baldwin explains that the way people speak today is because of multiple languages merging together. This article was published on July 29, 1979 in the New York Times. The audience is educated people reading the paper and adults who read the paper regularly. The main idea overall is not just "black English" but in different countries that bring slag over and merge with other ways of conveying ideas with people and their languages. 

In James Baldwin’s essay "If Black Isn't a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?" he speaks on how Black English is a language of its own.  He says there can be many versions of a language depending on where it is spoken.  He uses an example of a French person living in Paris that can’t understand the different language of a person from Quebec.  Baldwin supports his claim by using history, he talks about how Black English originated from slavery times.  When they came to America they all came from different tribes so they all spoke different languages.  Since they didn’t speak the same language, they came up with their own language.  Baldwin also includes how Black English influenced White English.  Words were taken from the Black English and was changed and used in White English.  He wonders how the white Americans would sound if there were never any black people in the U.S. and did not create their own language. 

In Baldwin’s article, “If Black Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What is?” he states that not only black English and the way black people talk, but also people from France, that if they never came to America, we would be talking differently and so on for every country. According to Baldwin when he says, “What joins all languages, and all mean, is the necessity to confront life…the price for this is the acceptance, and achievement, of one’s temporal identity” (Baldwin) he means that everyone talks differently. People down South will talk differently than people up North because up North it tends to get more formal. Everyone’s dialect is different based on where they’re from and other languages that have influenced them throughout their life. Another way Baldwin describes this is when he states, “I do not know what white Americans would sound like if there had never been any black people in the United States, but they would not sound the way they sound (Baldwin) because black people have a different dialect than we do and we have merged two dialects together. An example of this is “Jazz” (Baldwin) which can be used in a sexual way, and “sock it to me” which is basically saying the same thing but can be thought of just Jazz music. Throughout this article Baldwin generates this idea that without the continuous and interchanging communication today, we wouldn’t talk the way we do.