What is Ebonics? Ebonics is a new word to many people. Ebonics is a variation of English. For centuries, researchers have debated what to call Black speech: Black English, Ebonics, Black Language, Black Dialect, Black Vernacular, African-American Language System, or Pan-African American Communication Behaviors. Professor Williams, a psychologist, named Ebonics in 1973 to describe a black dialect (Lamb 1E). Williams created the word from "ebony" and "phonics," which means black sounds. Williams and his colleagues are consultants to the Oakland School Board and trace the origins of Ebonics to African languages such as Yoburo, Ewe, Mandingo, and Fula (Fillmore npg). No matter the name, it is not new.
Ebonics has a cultural and historical base that goes back to slavery. Historical research suggests many features that differentiate Ebonics from mainstream English developed not from ancestral roots, but from other American populations. Some Black speech certainly goes back to Creole, which means a mixture of languages. The absence of "to be" in "they working" appears in most Caribbean Creoles. The use of "to be" plus a verb shows habitual behavior that appears in the records of Black English before World War II. The same is true about "had" plus a past tense word, for example, "Yesterday I had told him I was coming" (Gibbs 25-27).
According to Currie Ballard, a historian at Langston University, the dialect has historically been known as Gullah and is a mixture of several African languages and English. Gullah developed during slave times when African-American people started to speak Pidgin English as a way of communicating. Slaves spoke African languages; thus they were not educated in English and the dialect formed from conversation and contact with Whites. Naturally, when slaves got off the boats, they had to deal with different cultures and had to figure out how to communicate to their masters and overseers.
