Response to Smitherman

Paragraph response to "God Don't Never Change" by Geneva Smitherman

     In her article, “‘God Don’t Never Change,’” Geneva Smitherman discusses how students in the classroom are taught grammar. She gives three different groups of language. The first one is white English (WE), the second is blacks using both their dialect and WE (which is referred to as bidialectal, or BD), and the third is standard Black English (BE or BI). While reading this article, I was trying to come up with different meanings for how the title is perceived or what the meaning of it is. At first, I really thought it meant that language has just evolved, not necessarily has changed. I thought this because she talks about how Americans were colonized by the British and learned language from them, and blacks learned their language from the whites. I also noticed how she said “Sounds familiar?” multiple times, implying that we have some time in our lives, showing how it is always revolving. But then, the last two paragraphs made me think that the meaning of the title is that language definitely can be changed, but that it shouldn't be. Everyone should be able to continue to use their own form of language. I think this because she states, “… language does not exist in a vacuum but in the socio-cultural reality” (193). Every culture is going to have a different form of language, and I think it is important for everyone to realize this fact.