Darth Wong wrote:Yes, "fitting in" is precisely the point; it's about creating socially exclusive associations, not about adding anything constructive to the language. Even a word like "fuck" is actually useful; it saves time and its meaning is well-known.
To say it's about creating socially exclusive situations would imply that the dialect was deliberately constructed so as to be unintelligible to outsiders, which isn't the case. It's simply the way people who live in certain areas talk.
Using the dialect in the presense of those who can't understand it is another matter entirely, but if those who speak it don't care if outsiders understand or don't want them to understand, then that's their business and doesn't indicate the intelligence level of the speaker.
You could say the same thing about hillbilly dialect. If you want to split hairs, it sounds retarded, since it is correlated with people who have poor education levels (exceptions do not disprove the correlation). But whatever the exact description you want to apply, one does not make oneself sound intelligent by using those kinds of dialect.
To outsiders, yes, it does. Local dialects rarely sound intelligent to outsiders, which is why I don't say "youse" or pronounce water "wooder" during job interviews, even though that's how I speak in casual company. But why would this matter when communicating with insiders?
Look, obviously, if Joe Whitebread walks into Suburban High talking like Snoop Dog, then he's a moron (or trying to get a rise out of people). But if a kid at 62nd and Lancaster speaks like that, it's just the way he and his peers talk. The real problem is if the kid from 62nd and Lancaster can't make himself understood by people who aren't part of his world, but that's a failing of the education system.