The idea that our language creates a uniquely Anglophone “worldview” can seem less

intuitive than that Japanese creates a Japanese worldview. It isn’t hard to imagine a
language called Guugu Yimithirr creating its own worldview, since its very name
suggests a world of life vastly unlike our own. But when it comes to future tense markers,
ways of saying before and after, or nonexistent gender markers on nouns, what worldview
are they creating for the man reaching for a box of cereal at a Walmart outside of St.
Louis?
The question bears exploration. In this chapter we will settle in with just a single sentence
of English and train the Whorfian light upon it in the same fashion as we usually see it
trained on other languages. However, we will not examine a passage from the Bible or
Henry James or even Henry Miller: we want live, spoken language. As real and live, for
example, as a guy of about sixteen I overheard saying something one weekday morning
in Jersey City on his way to school with a friend. He was black, for the record, and that
aspect of him is in itself handy, in that any claims about how English shapes thought must
be applicable to him as well as to a middle-aged person who subscribes to the Atlantic —
in treating English as shaping thought, we must account for a vast array of people, and
for that matter, not only in the United States but worldwide.
In that light, here is what a human said to his friend one morning in 2012: “Dey try to
cook it too fast, I’m-a be eatin’ some pink meat!” If anyone needs translation, the standard
version would be If they try to cook it too fast, I’m going to be eating some pink meat!
We know that if we asked our teen to participate in certain kinds of psycholinguistic
experiments, we would see that his modern American English shapes his thought in
certain ways. However, how plausible would we find the assertion that his speech — Dey
try to cook it too fast, I’m-a be eatin’ some pink meat! — conditions in him a worldview
(1) different from that of an Indonesian or a Brazilian and (2) akin to that of Lindsay
Lohan, Condoleezza Rice, Ben Kingsley, me, and probably you?
We shall see.
[…]
How our particular adolescent used try on one particular morning is especially interesting.
Note he said Dey try to cook it too fast, I’m-a be eatin’ some pink meat! If you think about
it, that usage of try is somewhat off in the logical sense if we take try as intended in its
core meaning. It would be one thing if he said, If they try to cook it too fast, I’m going to
tell them to turn down the heat or If they try to cook it too fast, I just won’t have any
chicken. Overall, if he says, If they try to cook it too fast, we expect that he will follow
this up with something about him either stopping them from doing so or turning away
from what they cook.
Instead, though, his sentence has him eating the meat that the people “tried to” cook too
fast — that is, they would appear to have not tried to, but succeeded in, cooking the meat
too fast, which makes you wonder why the guy put it as “try to” when, after all, they quite
simply did. One feels as if the sentence should have been simply If they cook it too fast,
I’ll be eating pink meat — the try to seems extra.
And it is, but not in a random way. This usage of try to is actually an example of how the
dialect of English that most black Americans switch in and out of all day, so often thought
of as “bad” grammar, a deformation of “correct” English, is in many ways more complex
than standard English. Our adolescent’s usage of try to is, of all things, a subjunctive
mood emerging in Black English.
Its air of extraness is analogous to how the subjunctive in languages like Spanish feels to
English speakers. In Spanish, I doubt you will go is Dudo que él vaya, where the
subjunctive form vaya conveys the hypotheticality of the going instead of the indicative
va. To an English speaker learning Spanish this seems a finicky add-on. One wonders
why a language has to actually have a separate verb form to mark such a nuance. In the
same way, the try to in Dey try to cook it too fast, I’m-a be eatin’ some pink meat is
marking the hypothetical.
Those are some of the ways that try to is interesting. How does the Whorfian take on it
stack up? Language shapes thought — and so now we have to speculate that black
Americans are possibly more alert to the hypothetical than other Americans. Are we to
say that the black cop in Oakland, or the black woman minister in Atlanta, or Kanye West,
or Barack Obama, hearkens more keenly to the if over the is than Ashton Kutcher or Tom
Friedman?
Thought patterns drive culture. What, then, does the culture of black Americans have in
common with that of Ancient Romans, whose Latin had a subjunctive, which then
evolved into the subjunctive today used by speakers of the languages that developed from
Latin, like French and Spanish?
Lesson: black Americans’ dialect is more subjunctive grammatically than standard
English. However, any attempt to extend that into characterizing speakers of that dialect
as fascinatingly attuned to the if over the is fails, once we consider how likely we would
be to parse all of the peoples of Portugal, Spain, Latin America, France, Italy, and even
Romania as subject to the same influence of the subjunctive on thought as upon a black
boy in New Jersey.