Why is it popular to actually write in ebonics?

Question

For example, I see people who actually write the "dat" where the word "that" should be in a sentence. Doesn't that kind of thing look even more uneducated and ignorant than it sounds?

Answer 1

yup.

I guess some people think it's cool to look uneducated.

Answer 2

Dat ish ain' coo. U done gone stone col' crazy!

Answer 3

I believe it's because people don't know how to spell anymore. They spell as they hear. That's my theory. Maybe, they think it's much "cooler" to spell that way.

Answer 4

"Dat" does not come from ebonics. To assume that it does sounds, frankly, quite uneducated and ignorant. True, it is used in textspeak, which attempts for valid reasons to shorten every word. But the term "dat" belongs to the same wise-guy Brooklyn jargon as "dese, dem and dose" (read Italian accent origin), which was already immortalized in vaudeville by the end of the nineteenth century. Then the black minstrel shows picked it up in the routine "Who dat?" "Who dat sayin' who dat?" "Who dat sayin' who dat sayin' who dat?" Etc. So it has become part of the colloquial comic lexicon of the US (very popular during World War II), not through ignorance but through making fun of our own diversity. As for "ebonics," that term was coined in the 1970s but fell out of use in the 1990s. It emphasized the independence from English of the African American vernacular, but even then it was clear that it did not refer to ignorance but rather to the African grammatical roots of certain oral speech patterns.

May I assume you are not a native speaker of American English? Ah, thank you for the confirmation. But not caring hardly qualifies as a defense of racist thinking.

Answer 5

it b calld da dumming of society, people like to hang out with stupid people is the only explanation that i come up with. why else would white kids be mimicking poor black kids in the ghetto??? nothing racial i grew up in a mixed neighborhood with black and white and i do not understand it. now mind you the smart black kids are then picked on because they are trying to act white??!?!?!?! go figure.

Answer 6

It's just a fashion at the moment. It will go as quickly as it came I'm sure. Every generation has or does something that others dislike. I think this generation's is linguistic.