My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I've read books by John McWhorter that are more entertaining than this one, which is still pretty entertaining, but it's excellent information well-presented and worth a read.
The main idea behind the book, or the unifying principle, is language change--how and why it happens--and how to categorize, compare, and evaluate the resulting variants. Most of the beginning section is dedicated to giving a framework for understanding what we mean by an accent, a pidgin, a creole, and other terms describing a language undergoing change. Useful.
I liked the bit about Shakespeare and his refreshing personal opinion about how his plays should be studied in the present. Maybe I like it because I agree with it. Having taught both English as a second language and mainstream high school literature, my opinion is that there is very little utility in teaching Shakespeare in the original. Beyond giving students cultural knowledge and the sense of accomplishment of going through a whole play, which are probably good enough reasons to justify doing one Shakespeare play at some point, there is very little learned by struggling to make sense of language that even educated adults only half comprehend.
(I have read all of Shakespeare's plays in the original, and I have enjoyed the process, but even now I find the very best way to read a play, even one I know pretty well, is to read a portion in modern English, as in "No-Fear Shakespeare," and then read the corresponding section in the original, back and forth. I'm far from a Shakespeare scholar, but compared to every other adult in my life I might as well be. And compared to 15-year-old students, I'm a master of Shakespeare. And it's still hard.)
The point is that Shakespeare is still recognizably English, easier to understand than, say, Chaucer, and much nearer our own language than the Anglo-Saxon of a thousand years ago, it is still diverging more and more over time. English from the year 1600 is not a foreign language, but maybe halfway? (My words, not his.) And our modern English is just as beautiful as Elizabethan English. We're not speaking a debased version or anything. No reason to genuflect to Shakespeare's version of the language.
The main discussion here is about Black English, and it's a difficult conversation, even for the author, who is himself Black. His thinking emerged from the situation in the 90s when "ebonics" was being discussed. I remember the controversy pretty well, because I was teaching ESL at that time and the idea was that Black students should consider their language variety as a different language so that the schools could use additional resources to better transition them to standard English. And the point of that was to improve overall achievement, helping them succeed in all of their classes. I supported their goals at the time, but I wasn't well enough informed in the matter to have a strong opinion about whether it would work or not.
There were several responses to this movement. One was to mock it, and with it Black English. McWhorter does an excellent job of responding to this, as it is the central idea of the book still--showing how language changes over time and under certain conditions, producing different varieties within a language and even new languages. He gives Black English the respect that detractors will not, showing how it is systematic, following rules in pronunciation and sentence formation that are as regular as any other sentence variety, and just as flexible and expressive as any other form of language. (He gives many examples from around the world of similar bundles of varieties, such as forms of German and types of Finnish, that have survived alongside the standard form, which is, after all, just one among many.)
However, he also shows that the evidence doesn't support treating Black English like a second language, disputing some of the claims made by ebonics supporters about how different it is. This put him on the outs with many black scholars, but I found his arguments persuasive. Teaching teachers that Black English is not substandard or something to be despised is useful, elevating the prestige of the home language to the place it should be, helping students avoid the stigma to often placed on such varieties, which does great harm to those students and those communities. But mainstreaming instruction in standard English appears to be the most efficient way to achieve that, based on studies in many countries, and I am inclined too agree at this point.
In any case, it's an interesting debate, and I feel like he treats all aspects of it with respect and integrity.
I recommend the book for those interested in the topic or in language in general, especially if you enjoy his distinctive style and voice, which I do.
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