According to the Daily Telegraph, on August 24, the US is seeking to hire nine people fluent in Ebonics, also known as African American Vernacular English, in order to interpret wiretapped conversations between suspected drug dealers, the US Drug Enforcement Administration stated.
Special Agent Michael Sanders said experts were needed to determine precisely what suspects were saying, which could be crucial in gaining convictions.
The Oakland board called for public money to fund "bilingual" education in English and Ebonics. However, the proposal was rejected by the Clinton administration, and sparked a fierce racially-charged national debate over whether learning, and language, could be "genetically based".
"It seems ironic that schools that are serving and educating black children have not recognised the legitimacy of this language, yet the authorities and the police are recognising that this is a language that they don't understand, ” said Professor H Samy Alim, an expert on black language and hip-hop culture at Stanford University.
The Linguistic Society of America has not taken a position on whether Ebonics is a language, but has said characterisations of Ebonics as "ungrammatical or broken English" were "incorrect and demeaning".