Feds get help translating Ebonics, reigniting debate

RALEIGH, N.C.
— The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s decision to hire nine
Ebonics translators for the Southeast region briefly reignited a
40-year debate over whether African-American speech constitutes a
separate language.

The translators are expected to help the agency
decipher wiretapped telephone conversations of suspected drug dealers
who speak in the African-American vernacular, which some people think
of as little more than slang.

The DEA, which works with other federal, state and
local law agencies to enforce the nation’s drug laws, has been
tightlipped about the translators and how they would be used. The
website thesmokinggun.com published documents recently indicating the
agency’s desires to hire linguists for 114 languages and dialects,
including Ebonics. That sparked a flurry of news reports.

After telling CNN last month that Ebonics was “a language form we have a need for,” DEA spokesman Michael Sanders released a statement saying the agency does not recognize Ebonics as a
formal language. But the agency spokesman stopped short of indicating
what the DEA actually means when it refers to Ebonics.

“DEA encounters many linguistic variations during
the course of drug investigations,” Sanders said in the statement. “A
list of more than 100 languages, dialects, colloquialisms, and idioms
was compiled in which these variations were generically referred to as
‘languages.'”

For Carlos Kelly and his patrons at Master Trim barbershop in Raleigh,
Ebonics is all about the latest slang and the government’s inability to
translate that manner of speaking into a cause for legal prosecution.

“It’s hard to convict somebody because of the slang
they might be using,” Kelly said. “You can say I want five candy
machines, or five DVDs and nobody will know you want 5 kilos of
cocaine.”

Michael Lowe, who was next in line for a haircut, agreed.

“All jokes aside, black folks are very creative. A
guy was in here the other day with his hair all laid back and in a pony
tail,” Lowe said. “One of the other guys said, ‘He got Jesus grass on
his head.’ “

Joi Porter, a cashier at Uncle Bill’s Mini Mart, grew up in Philadelphia. She says Ebonics and drug slang is all about the neighborhood you grew up in and what terms became popular.

“Like in the old days, in the ’70s, they said
‘puffing the dragon’ for smoking weed,” Porter, 26, said. “Now they say
‘I got that green’ or trees.”

A linguistic scholar in the Triangle said that it’s
a good thing for the DEA to have linguistic consultants — to translate
not just Ebonics but other dialects such as ones spoken in Appalachia,
the Outer Banks or among the Lumbee tribe members in the Piedmont.

“Unfortunately, the use of the term ‘Ebonics’ in the public sphere raises a red flag,” said Walt Wolfram, the William C. Friday professor of English linguistics at N.C. State University. “(T)he term has been politicized and racialized.”

Wolfram said the dialect has either been
marginalized or used as a basis for ridicule — “bad English.” But he
insists that Ebonics is a legitimate language system that people need
to take the time to understand.

“It’s just another dialect like any other dialect,”
Wolfram said. “It is a language variety that has a cultural basis, like
any other language variety.”

The DEA proposal in May noted that the majority of
the agency’s language requirements were for Spanish originating in
Central and South America and the Caribbean. The agency also sought experts in the Berber dialects of Morocco, the Kurdish language of several countries in the Middle East, the Fulani language of Nigeria and French for countries across the European, African and South American continents.

Ebonics is listed on the proposal as a common language in the United States.

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