(I had to rewrite this because Reddit refreshed on mobile and deleted my original editing and fact checking. Yes I’m mad)
Imagine this: 500 years from now they did up ShadowBudd bones and see that hey he spoke English lived in a place colonized by the English and all of his writings are in English.
Would they be erroneous to conclude that ShadowBudd was an English man?
What if I moved to the UK ? What would they say then? Would they add context to the history ? What would it depend on?
The reason I bring this up is because I want you all tow challenge the reconstructed history these race theorist concocted. They are mainly bullshit. contextualized when it doesn’t matter to them but not contextualized when it means something they don’t want you to know. It fits their historical world model
One of my favorite things to bring up when they talk about Black American English being improper English is one of ya boys favorite civilizations. The Roman Empire (The Roman Republic Era) because everyday Latin was spoken throughout the empire and nobody in the Roman world spoke Classical Latin the way it exists in textbooks.
Vulgar Latin was the everyday spoken language of the Roman world, and over centuries it naturally fractured into new, independent languages as Roman political control collapsed and local communities evolved in isolation. What emerged were not “dialects of Latin,” but entirely new languages spoken by new peoples who no longer identified as Roman.
In the western provinces, the Latin spoken in Gaul gradually transformed into what would become French and its closely related regional forms. This process is visible in medieval legal documents and sermons where Latin grammar breaks down and new syntax, pronunciation, and vocabulary appear. By the early Middle Ages, speakers in Gaul could no longer understand Classical Latin without formal education.
On the Iberian Peninsula, local varieties of spoken Latin evolved into Spanish, Portuguese, and closely related regional tongues. These languages developed distinct sound changes, verb systems, and sentence structures that were already clearly separate by the 10th–12th centuries, long before modern nation-states existed.
In the Italian peninsula, Latin did not remain “pure.” It fractured into multiple regional speech communities, one of which later became standardized as Italian. Others continued as independent languages spoken by millions, reflecting long-standing regional identities rather than a single Roman continuity.
Further east, Latin survived in isolated pockets of the Balkans, where it developed into Romanian and its sister languages. These preserved some older Latin features while also absorbing local influences, again showing continuity of language evolution rather than cultural sameness.
Even in Roman North Africa, everyday Latin evolved into its own Romance language before disappearing under later political and religious changes. Its existence is attested in inscriptions and church writings that no longer follow Classical Latin norms.
The key point is that Romance languages are historically documented outcomes of lived speech, not reconstructions or ideological claims. People did not “stay Roman” because their language descended from Latin, just as modern speakers of Romance languages are not Romans today.
Language descent does not freeze identity; it records transformation over time. Classical Latin was a prestige register. It was learned, written, taught, and performed. It was the language of law, elite education, inscriptions, and literature. It functioned the way “Standard English” does today not how people naturally speak, but how institutions demand you write and speak formally.
This is why we can watch Latin “disappear” without anyone actually switching languages overnight.
French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Romanian with Sardinian often noted as the most conservative Romance language still closely reflecting features of early spoken Latin.
Black American English is not improper or “vulgar” English any more than French was “bad Latin.” Like all living languages, English has always changed as people used it in real conditions, and BAE developed naturally over centuries among Black Americans within an English-speaking society shaped by enslavement, segregation, and regional contact.
It has its own consistent grammar, tense systems, pronunciation rules, and expressive logic, passed down across generations, not random mistakes or broken speech. Calling BAE improper repeats the same error Romans would have made by dismissing everyday Latin as corrupt, ignoring that today’s standard languages are simply yesterday’s “non-standard” speech elevated by power, not correctness.
What’s important is this: English has never been a single rule set. Standard English is just one institutionalized variety that froze certain rules and ignored others. BAE preserved some older English features, restructured others, and created new grammatical strategies to express time, emphasis, certainty, and social meaning more precisely than Standard English often allows.
English itself is a Germanic language profoundly transformed by Romance superstrates and not regarded as a creole because racist didn’t want to call in one. If we say English isn’t a creole because it never underwent grammatical collapse, then Haitian Creole forces us to admit something deeper: the collapse narrative was always ideological.
English is not a creole by current definitions but the logic used to deny that label to English is the same logic that exposes how politically loaded the creole category itself has always been.
I might be biased when saying this but BAE is the most colorful of all English derivatives creole or not. Yes it taking shots.
BAE is has slowly become the global contact English that most non English speakers hear first
Put that in perspective Black America when you are told BAE is improper
English has always existed as multiple Englishes, constantly changing, absorbing, and reshaping itself through contact, power, and everyday use.
Before English was standardized, there was no single “English”there were many Englishes.
People spoke regional, class-based, and occupational varieties that could differ dramatically in grammar, pronunciation, and vocabulary.
A London dockworker, a West Country farmer, an Irish laborer, and a Scottish sailor were all speaking forms of English, but not the same one, and often not easily intelligible to each other.
What later became “Standard English” was just one regional elite variety, frozen through printing, schooling, and state power and not a natural or original form.
So when people in the Atlantic world learned English in the 1600s–1700s, they weren’t learning a standard at all.
They were learning contact Englishes shaped by ports, ships, plantations, and working-class speech.
Black American English emerged from that plural English world, not from deviation from a standard that didn’t yet exist.
Which English is proper? Pre Norman ? Old English? Middle English? Lmfao
Standard English exists so everyone understands the message but that doesn’t mean everyone will speak it the same way
Example: I am going to the store.
Black American English (BAE): I’m finna go to the store.
Southern American English: I’m fixin’ to go to the store.
Standard British English (RP / General British): I’m going to the shop.”
Appalachian English: I’m a-goin’ to the store.
Cockney (traditional): I’m goin’ down the shop.
Multicultural London English: Man’s goin’ shop.
Welsh English: I’m goin’ to the shop now, like.
Irish (Hiberno) English: “I’m goin’ to the shop now”
Scottish English: I’m away tae the shop.
Caribbean English (English, not Creole): I’m goin’ to de shop now.
Gullah-influenced English: I gwine to de store.
Early Colonial / Maritime-style English: Me go store now.
West Country English: I be goin’ down t’ shop.
Australian English: I’m headin’ to the shops.
New Zealand English: I’m off to the shops, eh.
Canadian English: I’m headin’ to the store.
Indian English: I’m going to the shop only.
Pakistani English: I’m just going to the market.
Nigerian English: I’m going to the shop now.
Ghanaian English: I’m going to the market now.
South African English: I’m just popping to the shops.
Singapore English: I going to the shop lah.
Malaysian English: I’m going to the shop now.
Native American English: “I’m going to the store now.”
Etc etc etc
Language is fluid and morphs all the time
