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 on Poole Road 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.
Drug traffickers' code?
"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 five 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."
'Just another dialect'
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," said Wolfram. "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.
The Raleigh Police Department and the Wake County court system have both hired Spanish-speaking officers and officials to meet the needs of the area's growing Hispanic population. But the police department does not have a similar investigative component in its drug and vice unit to ferret out suspected drug dealers using Ebonics.
"I'm at a loss for words," said Jim Sughrue, a Raleigh police spokesman, of the DEA's decision to hire Ebonics translators. "Obviously, our investigators are dealing with a lot of slang issues, and that's constantly changing."
