Black/Urban English? Is the inability to speak correctly contributeing to unemployment?

originally posted by: AugustusMasonicus
a reply to: crazyewok

There was two pages of writing like that and at first I thought it was one of my counterparts having fun with me.

I then realized it was authentic and I felt kind of sad for this person, who depsite trying to get a job, would most likely never get one due to their inability to communicate properly.

WELCOME TO PUBLIC EDUCATION!! Where we will teach your shildren its OK to say O TAY!! WHere they can learn to AXE you a Quesion. When to say hur(her) and hum(him) And point Or dere"over there"

As you can see this is th e governments plan to keep them down and cause another divide.

originally posted by: crazyewok
Yet you invalidate your entire point by writing that entire entire post in coherent English we all understand .
If you showed such skill in your CV and interview I would have little problem.



If wanting someone that speaks clear, fluent english at work makes me a evil racist..........sue me.

you're not racist, just a bit irrational in your thinking. I wonder how many really good workers you passed on based on a simple issue you could have addressed upon hire. simply put, people change more than just their vernacular to fit in the work environment. some people are asked to change hair cuts, or stop doing certain gestures, or be respectful to others due to religious beliefs etc...

you dismiss a potential employee based on a proviso you think that a potential employee cannot comply with shows me what type of boss you'd be.
You: "hey Matt. you interviewed really well, but you will need to clean up the way you talk a bit. i was able to get the gist of what you were saying, but you were not clear. While you are working here do you think you' could lose the street slang for us (chuckle or laugh to ease tension) and by looking at your CV i see you are a great candidate for this position, i wouldnt want 'slangs' keeping you from getting the position"
Matt: "Sure, not a problem. its just a force of habit. I assure you, my vocabulary will change the minute i punch into work. thank you for the opportunity"

I hope you get a pristine speaking employee.... who also has a habit to steal stuff from the job...

Good luck Bruv ( its Brah here in the states)

originally posted by: yuppa

Where we will teach your shildren its OK to say O TAY!!

Hey, I learned that from Buckwheat!

originally posted by: AugustusMasonicus

originally posted by: yuppa

Where we will teach your shildren its OK to say O TAY!!

Hey, I learned that from Buckwheat!

Eddie Murphy is the best comedian alive right now.

Nutty Professor
The Clumps
Coming to America
Trading places
His old school standup

a reply to: onequestion

Very true.

Except s---ty minimum wage parttime service jobs.

Very true indeed.

It is funny here, only east indian teen gangsters talk ebonics..nothing to do with education(although I don't doubt some are not too bright), they just think they are cool..true story.

well duh if you cant speak proper english i wouldnt want to work with you either, youre in an english speaking country after all, it should be the first skill you excel at.

originally posted by: odzeandennz

You: "hey Matt. you interviewed really well, but you will need to clean up the way you talk a bit. i was able to get the gist of what you were saying, but you were not clear. While you are working here do you think you' could lose the street slang for us (chuckle or laugh to ease tension) and by looking at your CV i see you are a great candidate for this position, i wouldnt want 'slangs' keeping you from getting the position"
Matt: "Sure, not a problem. its just a force of habit. I assure you, my vocabulary will change the minute i punch into work. thank you for the opportunity"

Hahaha! You are in dreamland if you really think the conversation would go as you suggest!

If someone is too uneducated or lazy to attend an interview and speak business English while attempting to gain a position which requires it then they lose out to someone who can.
You bleeding hearts lol, he is an employer, not a support worker, why the hell would you want to employ someone who fails to meet the basic criteria of the job?!

...and your snide line hoping the OP gets a well spoken thief as an employee says much about yourself.

originally posted by: odzeandennz

You: "hey Matt. you interviewed really well, but you will need to clean up the way you talk a bit. i was able to get the gist of what you were saying, but you were not clear. While you are working here do you think you' could lose the street slang for us (chuckle or laugh to ease tension) and by looking at your CV i see you are a great candidate for this position, i wouldnt want 'slangs' keeping you from getting the position"

It is quite obvious you have never interviewed anyone or been coached on proper interview techniques. What you just suggested would get yourself and the company that employs you a nice discrimination lawsuit if you did not hirer the person and most likely one even if you did.

originally posted by: odzeandennz

originally posted by: crazyewok
Yet you invalidate your entire point by writing that entire entire post in coherent English we all understand .
If you showed such skill in your CV and interview I would have little problem.



If wanting someone that speaks clear, fluent english at work makes me a evil racist..........sue me.

you're not racist, just a bit irrational in your thinking. I wonder how many really good workers you passed on based on a simple issue you could have addressed upon hire. simply put, people change more than just their vernacular to fit in the work environment. some people are asked to change hair cuts, or stop doing certain gestures, or be respectful to others due to religious beliefs etc...

you dismiss a potential employee based on a proviso you think that a potential employee cannot comply with shows me what type of boss you'd be.
You: "hey Matt. you interviewed really well, but you will need to clean up the way you talk a bit. i was able to get the gist of what you were saying, but you were not clear. While you are working here do you think you' could lose the street slang for us (chuckle or laugh to ease tension) and by looking at your CV i see you are a great candidate for this position, i wouldnt want 'slangs' keeping you from getting the position"
Matt: "Sure, not a problem. its just a force of habit. I assure you, my vocabulary will change the minute i punch into work. thank you for the opportunity"

I hope you get a pristine speaking employee.... who also has a habit to steal stuff from the job...

Good luck Bruv ( its Brah here in the states)

That is what school and college is meant to be for.

Thats not my job.

a reply to: odzeandennz

Nothing irrational about it. It is a social skill to recognize what your social environs are and modify your behavior and speech appropriately.

If you cannot recognize that no one in a business office speaks street lingo before you use it in your application for that job, then you already have one strike against you.

a reply to: ketsuko

For me it goes much further, I am in construction/property maintenance and I wouldn't even take on a labourer if they couldn't communicate effectively with me in English.
I wouldn't care how strong and hard working he was, if I would struggle to understand what he's saying then no work for them.

Plenty of Polish and Czech labourers in my area who speak perfect English instead of pseudo-gangsta language.
No, I say tough luck, effective communication is a requirement of anyone working with or for me.

certainly, eloquence is in decline. and not exclusively among any particular demographic, or within any particular age-bracket. it's more of a general linguistic malaise. a 'word-sickness' of sorts.

a reply to: RoScoLaz4

It's the general trend. Everyone is thinking that to equalize, we need to go down, not up. So in order to equalize our language, we must dumb it down too.

I wanted to chime in and agree with the OP on this but I also have a unique perspective on the english language because of where I'm from.
I live in a city in the north east of Scotland and we have a local language called Doric, this an old colloquial language that has been used in the local area for centuries.
So we use Doric in our everyday lives when speaking to locals or people who have lived here for a while and know the language.
But while Doric is used as common as English, in a professional environment you can't operate in the same way, as you will be dealing with people who don't speak it.
The problem is that some members of our society only really know Doric much in the same way the OP describes street slang.
This brings the same problems the OP described where CV's and speech restrict their ability to gain certain types of employment. In the same way if you are in the company of these people if you speak proper English it's seen as weak sauce.
The problem isn't racial, it's educational as I work with a lot of Africans daily and their grasp of the English language is impeccable. In fact more often than not they are better educated in the language than most of the locals.

I seen someone talking about Glaswegians and them mentioning the sentence 'I dinnae ken', that's doric not weegie.

Common sayings in doric are 'Fit Like?' Which translates as 'What like?' As in 'How are you?' A common response would be 'Nae bad, chavin awa, ye ken fit like.' This translates to something like 'Not bad, working away, you know what it's like'.

Doric Article

originally posted by: grainofsand
a reply to: ketsuko

For me it goes much further ...

Plenty of Polish and Czech labourers in my area who speak perfect English instead of pseudo-gangsta language.

I agree with everything you say, but for me it goes even further still. The Polish and Czech workers are really saying "I want to be part of your society". The pseudo-gangstas are really saying "I don't want to be part of your society". You reap what you sow.

a reply to: lacrimoniousfinale

I work with a lot of migrants from the EU and elsewhere and they all want to succeed and work hard for their families.
A colleague of mine is from Latvia and she works in a high tech job, that is well paid and highly stable in the current job market. Yet as soon as she finishes that job she goes straight to working as a waitress and does this 4 nights a week.
Why does she do it? She wants to be active and prefers working and making money to support her and her family back home than sitting at home watching TV.
That's the fundamental difference, she doesn't feel that society owes her anything and would rather grasp the opportunities the society has given her than waste them.

a reply to: lacrimoniousfinale

Agreed, I see it as if someone refuses (or is unable) to speak to me in the common business English we understand as the norm, then no work.

I was involved having to work with a bloke who had a really strong Geordie accent/dialect recently, and I ended up being really blunt after asking him to repeat himself as we shouted communication from different rooms.
I asked why the # he doesn't just say it the way everyone else does first time instead making me say "What?" twice.
Then something like "You ain't in Newcastle now so it's up to you to make yourself understandable or this job ain't happening because I won't work with you" came out and I was a bit cross.
He spoke using business/common English after that and we got on well with the work.

It was refusal to speak 'normal' English to me, not inability.

originally posted by: onequestion
Come on let's be honest. The reason people can't find jobs is because there aren't any left.

Some of the people who posted here are talking about people applying to jobs they have open. If there weren't any jobs left, they wouldn't have made those posts.

a reply to: mclarenmp4

The problem isn't racial, it's educational as I work with a lot of Africans daily and their grasp of the English language is impeccable. In fact more often than not they are better educated in the language than most of the locals.

This fits with what has been observed in the US on occasion although it's not PC to do so. African immigrants and immigrants from regions like the Caribbean who are of African descent tend to do much better than Americans of African descent mainly because they work harder to integrate and part of that is speaking business English.