[haku]

Originally Posted by freddie

Why would dialect be a product of lack of education?

Not always, like i said, a dialect can develop in a specific region with many changes to pronunciation and general morphology without the grammar being butchered.

Things like 'woddya' for 'what do you' are the result of lack of education, no educated person would merge an interrogative pronoun with an auxiliary verb and a personal pronoun because that makes absolutely no grammatical sense. Words with different grammatical functions have to remain seperate for a sentence to keep its grammatical coherence, you can't go merging things anyway you want just because in speech it sounds that way, people who do that were never taught proper grammar.

I could also give a French example of butchered grammar: 'oukilé ?' for 'où est-ce qu'il est ?' in correct French (or 'où est-il ?' in formal French), 'where is he?' in English. The slang form 'oukilé' is a grammatical abomination.

Originally Posted by Lux

slang, dialect, and language is vastly different and probably should be separated into different threads. language is official and dialect is usually a phonetic derivate of an official language. slang is ...refer to dictionary.com or any such source for a definition. i'm not sure what this thread is about really. are we comparing all three? are we talking about ebonics as a dialect? no idea now.

I changed the thread title because some people were complaining that it focused only on Ebonics, but now some people are complaining that it no longer focuses on Ebonics. Some people are never happy.

Ok, the thread title has been changed to 'Slang, result of ignorance or acceptable dialect?', i hope the topic will now be clear enough for everybody.