that it is meant mostly for lower-class blacks and not for the lower class in general. It comes, fortunately, at a time when many blacks are piecing together their identity, saving it from powerful attempts to fragment and destroy it. It is therefore controversial and widely discussed (see, for example, Olivia Mellan, Black English. Why Try to Eradicate It, The New Republic, 28 November 1970, pp. 15-17). But it has not been discussed in a wide enough context, so it is my purpose to do that in the following pages, thus to indicate why this ill-advised attempt to change people should be rejected. Let me begin with what I understand to be some facts and some pretty good hunches about language and language learning. It is, for example, an empirical assumption that language differences intuitively understood as dialect differences are relatively superficial, that is th t they amount to rule differences (in the terminology of the linguistic theory of Chomsky) which fall quite low in the ordered set of rules that constitutes