There certainly must not be enough blacks that post on this website (just like I feel there aren't enough, OR ANY, Japanese Americans on this post after that racist-ridden thread on Pearl Harbor). A lot of the comments on this thread could certainly be construed as racist, but, I'm going to assume that it's just ignorance. Black Americans certainly do not "talk" a certain way to "distinguish" themselves or even segregate themselves from the rest of society. Young blacks have, for decades, developed a slang way of speaking to each other that's distinct to their generation. I'm a black man in his thirties, and sometimes I have to ask my 18 year old nephews to explain what they just said to me. Just like I hear young white men calling each other "dude", the young blacks calling each other "dog", my generation called each other "man" and my father's generation called each other "cat", it's all slang, the majority of it coming from the music culture. The jazz culture of the 30s and 40s had their own way of speaking and it filtered into the population, just like the beatniks and hippies of the 60s and the rappers (particularly the gangsta rappers) of today. It certainly shouldn't be considered a "second language", but, it is the way young people, especially young black people, speak.