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Originally posted by SYSTEM-J Technically speaking, ebonics is more of a dialect than either of these things, as it's just a variant of standard American English. However, I imagine a lot of the linguistic features of the dialect can be traced right back to times of slavery, so it's a dialect that arguably has its roots in a creole.

That's kind of interesting as when I travelled and lived in east Africa there was a lot of kids that had grown up with sort of a Pigeon-English (or a Creole as you call it) of some sort from their parents or picked up some English from a minimal formal education or media. But it was very understandable from my perspective even with a 'back to front sentence structure' and mostly because they didn't mix it in with slang- which is where I got lost watching youtube on the subject.

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Originally posted by Lira Pretty much what Sys said in the first paragraph, and what he said in the second paragraph is one of the traditional hypotheses regarding its origins. However, linguists who study ebonics (which I'll call African American Vernacular English, or AAVE) nowadays point out that it's most likely a hybrid of old English dialects from Great Britain (don't take my word for it here's an expert talking about it) - and it's great Jack joined the debate because he's a local

If you're interested in old-english, large parts of India still formally learn it in schools, it literally dates back to the 18th to late 19th century in both sentence structure and words we'd consider anachronistic or have fallen completely out of use in modern english.
For example, you might get asked to 'please help Lilith understand' in modern english would be phrased 'please do the needful for Lilith to understand'

Anyway, have a fun christmas you two.