Gee, James article

The James Gee theory talks about different grammatical uses of the English language depending on the different social communities.

He uses the example of a seven-year-old black child and how she constructs the sentence “My puppy, he always be followin me”. He shows two different opinions about this phenomenon, on the one hand, there is people who thinks that this is because the child “attends to a poor and neglected school and comes from an impoverished home with few or no books in it, a home which gives little support for and encouragement to education” (Gee, James L.14), this is a charitable point of view. Secondly some people like some teachers explain that this is because the child is a “slow learner” (Gee, James L.19).

But James Gee disagree with these two points of view due to he thinks this is not a wrong construction but a modification of the “Black Vernacular English” grammatical constructions (we can see it in the “bare be” use that is an innovation of young black speakers.)

Moreover, in the child’s example there isn’t only innovation items but, as in the “followin” case, the “-g dropping” is because an informal use of the word “following”.

To sum up, in this case, the child hadn’t a problem in her intelligence but she uses a different dialect.

In other languages happens something similar. For example in the case of Spanish language, there is people that say “me se+verb” instead of “se me+verb”. The grammatical Spanish rules says the first combination is wrong but the people who use it they do it always, although it doesn’t means they are illiterarte or less intelligent than the other people, it only means they use a non-standard form to say “se me+verb”.