Talking like a pirate essentially consists of copying the diction developed by English actor Robert Newton in his magnificent interpretation of the Long John Silver character in Disney's version of "Treasure Island". It's amazing that an accomplished Shakespearean and matinee idol should be remembered for one role, and that his performance has influenced how we think about pirates for decades, even by people who never saw the film.

The urban ebonics dialect may indeed have legitimate roots in history, but I believe it also has a deliberate political and cultural significance as well. Many ebonics speakers are perfectly capable of speaking good English when it suits them. It shares much in common, both sociologically and esthetically, with the clipped and guttural grunts and swallowed syllables, dropped consonants and other barbarisms employed by some rural white Southerners. A traditional aristocratic Southern Accent (Shelby Foote comes to mind) is distinctive, but clearly understood and quite melodious. As for rural blacks, their accents can be quite appealing, Mark Twain did quite a study of their geographic distribution prior to writing "Huckleberry Finn". Urban ebonics is, I believe, a recent invention. Black urban southerners had a distinctive, but clearly understood and pleasant speech when I was growing up. And the English of civil rights leaders, and even radical black activists, was always clearly understandable and grammatically correct.

Rural black accents, West Indian dialects, and the Cajun speech of New Orleans can all be quite charming, even beautiful, as was the speech of Western Pennsylvania and Eastern Tennessee where I once spent some time. But ebonics and redneck always struck me as just a deliberate attempt to sound different from the mainstream. I believe it is a subconscious attempt to make outsiders to those cultures sound elitist and effete, and to make themselves sound slightly menacing.

For what it's worth, lower class Cuban blacks spoke Spanish with a distinctive dialect. The white Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier even wrote a novel exclusively in it.