Ebonics

[Blend of EBONY and PHONICS.]

Thanks to a resolution passed by the Oakland, California, school board on December 18, 1996, Americans in 1997 not only focused on Ebonics, or "African-American English," but also invented a new suffix to describe any dialect or way of speaking.

The name Ebonics had been invented more than twenty years earlier, on exactly January 26, 1973, by Robert R. Williams, an African American and professor of psychology at Washington University in Saint Louis. Its first published appearance was in a 1975 book edited by Williams, Ebonics: The True Language Of Black Folks. Williams fashioned the term Ebonics by combining ebony (for "black") and phonics (for "the scientific study of speech sounds"), and he used Ebonics to identify the variety of English spoken by many black Americans as a language or at least a dialect of its own rather than merely "bad English." Aside from some Afrocentrists, however, everyone else continued to call it Black English or, in a more scholarly vein, African-American Vernacular English, for the next two decades.

Then the Oakland school board, concerned that its black students (some 53 percent of the total) were not learning as well as they should, passed a resolution recognizing that most of these students spoke Ebonics and calling for improved instruction in Standard English. Overlooking the board's emphasis on the standard, the predominant reaction was one of shock at the respect and recognition for African-American Vernacular English implied by the word Ebonics.

As the shock subsided, the often sarcastic notion grew of making -onics or -bonics a suffix designating any dialect or distinctive way of talking. Among the countless inventions were Chicagonics for Chicago talk, Hebonics for Jewish speech styles, TVbonics for the language of television game shows, and Greasebonics or Mechanics English for the language of automobile repairpersons.

The noun has one meaning:

Meaning #1: a nonstandard form of American English spoken by some American Black people
  Synonyms: Black English, Black English Vernacular