In his book, West Side: Young Men & Hip-Hop in L.A., William Shaw discusses the importance of language:

How you talk is what you are. The increasing isolation of America's underclass is not just economic and spatial: It's linguistic, too. The African-American vernacular that thrives so richly in hip hop has its roots in West Indian creole, and in the eighteenth-century speech patterns of the Irish and Scottish immigrants. But linguists who have studied black English over the last few decades have noticed that instead of converging with what they call standard American English, it is fast drifting ever further away from it. The creative, fast-evolving language black Americans speak in the inner cities may be increasingly desirable on wax, as a cultural artifact, but it is becoming less and less like the language of the majority, the language of the schoolrooms, of mass media, of politics, and of the workplace.

Source: W. Shaw, Westside: Young Men and Hip-Hop in L.A. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), p. 480.

1		Young boys from L.A. who were looking for work in the music industry often used "slangin" as their form of communication, but Mike Nixon, who had been in the music industry since the sixties, let them know that they weren't going to get anywhere in the music business if they couldn't communicate in a businesslike fashion. Do you find any analogous situations in today's world? That is, to succeed in business requires the adoption and use of communication that reflects a "businesslike fashion" as opposed to the everyday, common, ordinary speech that occurs between friends?
2		Have you any personal examples to support the insights that Shaw offers in this excerpt from his book? Have you detected, for example, the drift in black English further and further away from standard American English?
3		What do you think may be one reason why the fast-evolving language black Americans speak in the inner cities is becoming less and less like the language of the majority? Could it be, for example, that inner-city youth are creating a special language because they don't have as much power as the people around them? Are they doing it to exclude outsiders or members of the adult establishment?
4		Notice, in the example cited in question 1 above, that Mike Nixon understood why the young boys from the inner city of L.A. spoke the way they did, but he tried to encourage them to shift roles-to shift their speech-to adapt to a different language environment (business). How many different language environments do you adapt to in an average day? An average week? How about in an average month? With regard to effective communication, would you say that the more language environments to which one is exposed, the more effective communicator he or she is likely to be?