Sunday, February 28, 2021

Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Top 7 Expressions You Didn’t Know We Owe to Black America

hi farooq
i am a native english speaker.
but what native? speaker of what english?
i don't understand the english of many many young people of today.
i grew up in the new york area, and spoke with the accent of my home town, mt vernon. but that was very different from the accent of our relatives in brooklyn  which we made fun of, and all the kids i knew had grandparents who spoke with an "accent."
my accent changed after i came to live in michigan, so that i still say  "wait on line" which people from here say "wait in line," so my speech is actually something of a hybred and accented jumble. i recognize people from around here say the "a" sound differently from me; i recognize some parts of the english speaking world say "different to" and others "different from" or "different than."
i hear the differences, when  my yoruba friends put an h in front of some words beginning with vowels and remove it from some beginning with an h, and so on.
i agree that this call for nativism is the height of the political, even as it is a source of pride for some, and a source of exclusionary thinking for others.
in the end, i am native only to my own speech, like a member of a family of one with my own history; yet i can be understood by many who came from somewhere else.
native to what?
ken

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

harrow@msu.edu


From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Farooq A. Kperogi <farooqkperogi@gmail.com>
Sent: Saturday, February 27, 2021 7:52 PM
To: USAAfrica Dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Top 7 Expressions You Didn't Know We Owe to Black America
 
Ken,

Questions of linguistic nativity are always interesting to me. A few years ago, for instance, I read that British Prime Minister Boris Johnson's great grandfather was Turkish. He spoke non- native English as a diplomatic representative of Turkey in England.

 It was also pointed out that his great grandfather's ancestors came to Turkey from Russia, which explains their blond hair (his great grandfather also had blond hair like him).

But Johnson is a poster boy of conservative English nationalism. 

His father acquired French citizenship last year as a result of Brexit because his maternal grandmother was French. The French was a mother tongue to his father.

At what point is it legitimate to lay claim to being native of any language?

 For some, nativity is always intrinsically political and cultural. I think that's narrow-minded and unsociological.

Farooq


Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.com
Twitter: @farooqkperogi
 

Sent from my phone. Please forgive typos and omissions.

On Sat, Feb 27, 2021, 6:49 PM Harrow, Kenneth <harrow@msu.edu> wrote:
thanks farooq for this lovely explanation of black speech becoming mainstreamed. i particularly appreciate the acknowledgment that west african english pidgin was spoken BEFORE the immigrants to virginia arrived, i.e., that english was spoken on the african coast, and esp as a lingua franca, along with west african coast before it was even introduced to the u.s.

who is the native speaker now?
ken

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

harrow@msu.edu


From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Farooq A. Kperogi <farooqkperogi@gmail.com>
Sent: Saturday, February 27, 2021 12:15 AM
To: USAAfrica Dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Top 7 Expressions You Didn't Know We Owe to Black America
 

Saturday, February 27, 2021

Top 7 Expressions You Didn't Know We Owe to Black America

By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.

Twitter: @farooqkperogi

In this final article in my #BlackHistoryMonth series, I bring you major expressions in the English language that owe entire debts to the linguistic ingenuity of Black Americans. As you will find below, the contributions that African Americans have made to global English also owe debts to the enduring influences of their (West) African origins.

1. Y'all. This colloquial abbreviation of "you all," which functions as the plural form of the pronoun "you," is recognized as the most famous American southernism (that is, the distinctive dialectal English of the American South) to be globalized. However, although "y'all" is now part of the linguistic repertoire of not just American southerners of all races—and, increasingly, the entire English-speaking world— it was invented by enslaved Black Americans during slavery.

Until the 1600s, the English language used to have "ye" as the plural form of "thou" both of which later merged to "you" which is both singular and plural. When enslaved Africans (who spoke the linguistic ancestor of what is now called West African Pidgin English) arrived in America in the 1600s, they couldn't relate to the use of "you" as both a singular and a plural pronoun, so they invented "you all," which later became "y'all."

White Southerners initially derided the expression when they encountered it. For instance, in his 1824 travelogue published as "Letters from the South and West," Henry Knight (who used the pen name Arthur Singleton), observed that "Children learn from the slaves some odd phrases ... as ... will you all do this? for, will one of you do this?"

As you can tell, Knight got the meaning of "you all" wrong. It didn't—and doesn't—mean "one of you." It is the plural form of "you."

 Before the invention of "y'all," Black Americans used "una" as the plural form of "you" because the earliest form of the English creole they spoke when they arrived in America—just like modern West African Pidgin English—used the Igbo word "una" as the plural of you.

Interestingly, "una" is still present in the Gullah language spoken in coastal Georgia, South Carolina, and Florida. Its singular form is "ya" (or "gi") in Igbo, which kind of sounds like "you" or "ye." While "una" is the preferred form of the pronoun in Gullah, other variants exist, such as "huna," "wuna," and "unu" (preserved from the original form in Igbo) in African-inflected English pidgins and creoles in the Western Hemisphere. In Gullah, "mi na una" means "me and you," where "na" means "and," as it does in Igbo.

In the last few years, "y'all" has exploded in usage in Anglophone West Africa (Nigeria, Liberia, Ghana, Sierra Leone and the Gambia)— and the rest of the English-speaking world.

2. "I dig it." In informal English, we say we "dig" something to mean we really like it, as in, "I really dig Beyoncé's songs." There's even a popular social content sharing platform called Digg that is inspired by the expression.

Well, the expression has origins in Black American speech—or what linguists used to call Negro Nonstandard English, which is now called African-American Vernacular English (AAVE). 

In their book The African Heritage of American English, Joseph Holloway and Winifred Vass show that this sense of "dig" is derived from "deg" or "dega," which they say is the Wolof word for "understand, appreciate, pay attention to."

3. "Guy/guys." The informal sense of this word that means a man, a boy, or a fellow is originally Wolof, Senegal's major language, and came to English thanks to American Blacks, according to Holloway and Vass. They traced its origins to "gay," the Wolof word for "fellow." (Gay is pronounced "ga-i"). 

Conventionally, in English, the singular form of "guy" denotes a youth or a man, and "guys" denotes people of both or either sexes. For instance, the expression "let's go, guys" can be directed at women alone, at both men and women, or at men alone.

 Dr. David Dalby, a well-regarded English linguist known for his popular LinguasphereObservatory, once made the case that the plural, non-gendered "guys" in English owes etymological debts to the Wolof "gay," which is also non-gendered and plural.

4. "Tote." This is a bag for carrying things. The word's adjectival inflection is "toting," as in "gun-toting soldiers." Well, this word came to English via Black America who brought it from their Bantu ancestors.

Tote is rendered as "tota" in Kikongo, a Bantu language spoken in Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the Republic of the Congo, where it means "to pick up." In Kimbundu, another Bantu language spoken mainly in Angola, it is rendered as "tuta." It means "to carry, load." 

In Swahili, the most popular of the Bantu languages, "tuta" also means "pile up, carry," according to Gerard Dalgish in his A Dictionary of Africanisms: Contributions of Sub-Saharan Africa to the English Language. Several variations of "tot"—and with the same meaning as the English "tote"— appear in many other Bantu languages in Cameroon.

The Oxford English Dictionary says "tote" was first recorded in the southern US state of Virginia in the 1670s. 

Historical records show that 85 percent of the Africans enslaved in Virginia were from four ethnic groups—Igbos from modern Nigeria, Akans from modern Ghana, Bantu speakers from modern Angola and the Congo, and Mande people from modern Senegal and the Gambia. It's obvious that Bantu people who have now become Black Americans introduced the word to the English language.

5. "My bad." This phrase is used to offer apologies for unintentional wrongdoing, as in, "Oops, my bad. I didn't mean to do that." 

Etymologists trace the origins of the expression to Black American basketball players in the 1970s and the 1980s, but it's now part of general informal American English and has even crossed over to every part of the English-speaking world.

As the next item shows, the unique ways Black Americans use "bad" to signalize things that are not really "bad"— in the conventional English usage of "bad," that is, — has origins in their West African heritage.

6. "S(h)e is bad." In African-American English (and, increasingly, in mainstream American English), "bad"—or, more appropriately, "baad"—doesn't mean the absence of good; on the contrary, it means an extreme excess of good. In other words, it means excellent, superb. 

 The comparative and superlative forms of this sense of "bad" are "badder" and "baddest," as in "her sense of fashion is way badder than my sister's" or "he is the baddest guy in town." In northeastern United States, especially in the New York area, "wicked" is also used to mean "brilliant, very good."

 Other seemingly negative expressions that connote a heightened positive in American English are "badass" (which means formidable and excellent) and "bad boy" (which, among other meanings, signifies something extremely impressive or effective).

The expression of positive extremes through negative terms in informal American English, Holloway and Vass say, derives from a direct translation of many West African languages, especially Mandinka, into English.

In Bambara, a linguistic sister of Mandinka, which is spoken mainly in modern Mali, the expression "a ka nyi ko-jugu" literally translates as "it is good badly." In Sierra Leonean creole, the authors also point out, "gud baad" means very good.

7. "Bad-mouth." To badmouth someone is to curse them, to talk ill of them, especially behind their back. "Bad-mouth" was initially an exclusively Black American English expression before it went mainstream in America and crossed the Atlantic to the UK—and the rest of the Anglophone world.

English etymologists admit that the expression is West African, but they don't identify the West African languages from where Black Americans inherited it. 

The expression is a direct translation of Hausa and Mandinka expressions, according to Holloway and Vass. It's derived from the Hausa expression "mugum baki," which literally translates as "bad mouth," but which connotes ill-natured talk about someone. In Mandinka, "da-jugu" also literally means "bad mouth" and is employed idiomatically to mean abuse, insult, etc.

Related Articles:

Gullah: Long Lost Africans in America Who're Still African

Surprising American Cousins Through My Mother's Ancestry

Yoruba, Fulani, and Other African Personal Names Among Black Americans

Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.
School of Communication & Media
Social Science Building 
Room 5092 MD 2207
402 Bartow Avenue
Kennesaw State University
Kennesaw, Georgia, USA 30144
Cell: (+1) 404-573-9697
Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.com
Nigeria's Digital Diaspora: Citizen Media, Democracy, and Participation

"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will

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