Ebonics: The True Language of Black Folks is a 1975 book written by the American psychologist Robert Williams. Williams coined the term Ebonics two years earlier at a conference he organized on the topic of the "cognitive and language development of the African American child".[1] This book defines the term (which Williams translated as "black sounds"[2]) as the "linguistic and para-linguistic features which on a concentric continuum represent the communicative competence of the West African, Caribbean, and United States slave descendants of African origin".[3]