Dialects in the Classroom

Features that affect the comprehension and encoding of sentences

It is not only spelling that presents a challenge for the varied dialects that students may come to school with – misunderstandings may sometimes arise (or students may take more time to identify standard usage) as a result of grammatical differences between students’ Playground and Classroom English. While it bears remembering that speakers of nonstandard dialects generally have lots of passive (i.e. listening) experience with the standard) and consequently these issues may be minor, they may occasionally occur.  Our stress here, therefore, is primarily to caution the standard-speaking teacher who may encounter nonstandard constructions in student writing to approach these issues as dialect rather than error.  


The copula is a verb, in English a conjugated form of the verb to be, that appears between subject and predicate.  In some dialects, notably African American English, it may be dropped in certain contexts, resulting in utterances like “They not home right now.”  This is not specific to New Orleans English but is commonly heard here.


The use of ain’t for negative to have or to be (“I ain’t hungry,” “I ain’t been there”) is common throughout the world.  The use of ain't for negative forms of to do, as in a sentence like He ain't finish yet, is less common, though it is heard across the US.  It is generally considered a feature unique to African American English, though in New Orleans there is evidence that it is used by other speakers as well. 


Multiple negation, often called double negative, has long been derided by grammarians as illogical and incorrect.  It is doubtful, however, that there is a person alive who would misinterpret I ain't done nothing to mean I have done something (unless the speaker were to use intonation that implied a coy use of nothing).  Bachman-Turner Overdrive sang “You ain't seen nothin’ yet” without confusing a world of listeners.  Linguists have shown that the use of multiple negation, which may include more than two negatives–consider a construction like I ain't never been nowhere with nobody–serves to reinforce the negativity, helping the listener to interpret the sentence as negative, not to cause them to perform mathematical gymnastics in their heads.  This feature is common to many dialects of English world-wide.


The use of they(ve) got to indicate the existential there is is typical in New Orleans, resulting in sentences like They(ve) got a tree at the end of the street meaning Theres a tree at the end of the street. You may also hear it’s used the same way:  It’s a tree at the end of the street.


You have likely come across constructions like She be walking to that store every day at some point, even if you don't speak a dialect that uses it.  The use of unconjugated be (as opposed to she is walking to that store) indicates that the action occurs habitually, or regularly. For example, you could not say she be walking to that store right now, as this implies a punctual aspect to the action. This feature is common in African American Language used throughout the US; other dialects of worldwide English have also been shown to have similar constructions – for example, Irish English (McCafferty 2014).


For some speakers, the simple past tense is formed using the auxiliary verb had.  To non-speakers of such dialects, it can sound as though the speaker is relating an event that happened prior to another in the past, when this is not the intended meaning.  A student who says I had went to the store means, simply, ‘I went to the store.’ (Other speakers might use this construction only when introducing an event that also happened in the past, but later, as in I had gone to the store to check if they had king cakes in stock, but I quickly discovered there were none left).


In New Orleans, you can do something on Tuesday or on Sunday.  You can consequently also do it on yesterday, today, or tomorrow.  


The use of for [time] instead of at [time] is a common New Orleans way of 

expressing when an event will happen.  For example:  I’ll meet you there for 3 oclock:

Sign on McDonald’s door, Claiborne Avenue, 2012.  Photo by Nathalie Dajko 

Make [age] is the New Orleans way to say turn [age].  For example, My niece just made 11.  Its origin is unknown.  We have been able to eliminate Irish and German as sources, but there is only weak evidence that it may come from French (that is, some French speakers in France have been willing to accept it as something they think they have heard somewhere).  


The use of by to mean at is in all likelihood one of very few (if not the only) feature that made its way into New Orleans English from German.  While New Orleans is (quite fairly) understood to be a French city, in the nineteenth century, when New Orleans was a major port of immigration, millions of German immigrants passed through on their way to the Great Plains via the Mississippi River, and a significant number of them chose to put down roots here instead of continuing on (Nau 1958).  The German immigration made important contributions to Louisiana culture, notably in the importation of the accordion to the Louisiana music scene, but left very little evidence of its passing linguistically.  I’m by my mamas ‘I’m at my mamas [house]’ is thus far the only feature linguists (Reinecke 1985:60) have so far identified (German bei and Dutch bij are used the same way).  The feature is also found elsewhere in America.


As is the case in other regions, in New Orleans, speakers may use the word stay to mean live, as in, I stay over there ‘I live over there.’  The past tense of this meaning of stay is stood, as in Before the storm, I stood in the sixth ward.