
Originally Posted by
The Other Owner
Educated African Americans are often bilingual and can easily code-switch between SAE and AAVE with little trouble. So far from being "lazy" or "stupid," those bilinguals who speak both SAE and AAVE have the ability to move freely and fluently in two slightly different cultures.
The importance of teaching SAE in the US school system is economic, not linguistic. It is the most broadly accepted dialect in US society and pretty much the key to social and economic upward mobility. But that is an accident of predominant population. There are nations with black majority rule where a dialect much closer to AAVE is in fact the official dialect, and any individual speaking SAE would be looked on as either foreign or uneducated.
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