I's gots'ta be introduucin' dis essay in some puh'fo'mative style. What it is, Mama! In de followin' space ah' gots'ta examine da damn " JIBE" funcshun dat gots'ta become quite popular on de internet. Aside fum de obvious racit undertones uh such some funcshun, ah' am interested in de process uh tranfo'min' "standard" English into JIBE. Please bare wid me. What it is, Mama!..

greetin'
JIBE at da Department uh Computa' Science, University uh Zurich

What you just read is not a hoax. The Department of Computer Science at the University of Zurich (Switzerland) provides an expedient, transformative "jive" function that translates email messages from standard English into (what I will from this point refer to as) jive-ass vernacular forms. In this essay I will gloss three of the jive-ass variables employed by this function and along the way I intend to highlight the insensitivity inherent in such a function. The crux of my argument is that the function (possibly because it exists in cyberspace, but more likely because it attempts to visually represent otherness) relies too heavily on eye dialect, a system employed by many artists and writers to orthographically (mis)represent the phonetic nuances of vernacular English.

I first "encountered" this nightmare in a computer lab. Several students found the function to be hilarious. My immediate reaction to it was one of nostalgic disgust. In ninth grade I was forced to read the part of Jim (being the only African American in a class full of whites) in Twain's Huck Finn. It was at that time that I knew that no matter how eloquent my own speech or how agile my code switching abilities were, people's perceptions of how one speaks are always already prejudiced by a history of the English language in America. What I couldn't know and can't explain to every person who laughs at the jive-ass vernacular trick, is that the vernacular in which one speaks is not an accurate indicator of intelligence, nor is it fodder for ignorant play. Language, particularly how we speak is a part of our culture and ethnicity.

Thus began my thinking about this function. Its most striking characteristic (jive-ass linguistic otherness) is that programming in cyberspace is predicated upon the notion that bugs must be removed from computer language. This function's purpose is to BUG the language. In order to represent othernesss here in cyberspace the programmer inverts the fundamental premise of programming.

In order to represent othernesss here in cyberspace the programmer inverts the fundamental premise of programming.

I should add here that the commands for the program don't appear (to the "standard" English eye) to have any functional problems. The purpose here is to signify off of the bugs in vernacular English.

However, the use of eye dialect, and a healthy dose of sociolinguistic ignorance has permitted a host of bugs disguised as either cyberjokes, or unnoticed as normative forms for an African American Vernacular English (AAVE). I'm assuming that this function targets AAVE, not only because it is one of the most distinctive American vernaculars, but because of the "jive" epithet.

It is incredibly urgent that people understand that vernaculars are languages too.

My sense is that at some utopian point in the future when children are not educationally tracked on remedial courses because they do not speak the arbitrarily deemed "standard," this type of function may incite one of my descendants to smile.

But for now it is incredibly urgent that people understand that vernaculars are languages too. Indeed, the alleged "standard" is (in the words of a truly sharp professor) merely a vernacular with an army and a government.

Eye dialect is severely limited. Whether you are Twain, or some cyberwhiz at the University of Zurich, attempts to orthographically represent vernaculars are largely unsuccessful. AAVE is acoustically rich in intonation and pitch, it is grammatically structured and oftentimes more regular than the so-called standard. When one attempts to represent AAVE in literal form, by relying heavily on truncated words, the reader's experience with the vernacular is dictated by a sense of linguistic approximations, morphologically culminating in inadequacy. The challenge to the REpresenter is to employ grammatical forms that don't require truncation and highlight the systemic underpinnings of the "other" language. In the case of Jean Toomer (Cane), the REpresenter chose to dispense with apostrophes which suggests that the words may not be truncated. It also highlights the arbitrariness of orthography, standard or otherwise. Gloria Naylor (Mama Day) does an excellent job of employing vernacular forms, while John Williams (The Man Who Cried I Am) demonstrates an acute pragmatic sense of the AAVE lexicon.

The jive-ass function overuses the word-initial 'theta -> 'd' form in variations such as "that -> dat'. And it misuses the complex, but systemic uses of the verb 'to be'. Thus it exploits the worst aspects of eye dialect. It overexposes the visual forms and misrepresents the deep grammatical structures or the linguistic inner workings of the vernacular other, if you will. The third (listed here -- there are dozens of other language crimes) is the absurd and random insertion of the phrase "what it is Mama!" This must be worth a million Swiss-cyberlaughs, but it reminds me of performative racist exploitation. The average white net-surfer can have their language transformed into a quaint asinine "blackspeak" without any recourse.

In short, I think that this particular representation of a racial, sociolinguistic "other" (although imported) smacks of traditional American racism. It's ass-backwards. The joke hinges on how and what a person sees when reading the vernacular instead of underscoring the "insides" of the language. This is, of course, typical of our society. In addition, it ignorantly seeks to make examples of linguistic "bugs" by butchering a vernacular that is too complex or too foreign for the programmers to understand, but just quaint enough to let users jubilantly appropriate it.

James Peterson
University of Pennsyvania
If you must try it. . .jive@ifi.unizh.ch