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Introduction

From Dead Presidents to the Benjamins
(1): The Africanization of American English

Lyin and signifyin . . . talkin and testifyin . . .
marinatin and playa hatin . . . This is the dynamic
language of U.S. slave descendants, more commonly
known as African Americans. Terms for this language
vary - Black Talk, African American Vernacular
English, Black or African American Language, Black
English, Black Dialect, Ghetto Speech, Street Talk,
Ebonics, and others. This book favors the
terms "Black" or "African American Language," "Black
Talk," and "U.S. Ebonics" (more accurate than
just "Ebonics" because there are other Ebonic
languages, such as Jamaican). Speakers of U.S.
Ebonics can be found in all sectors of African
America, from senior citizens to Hip Hoppers, from
preachers to politicians, from schoolgirls to
gangstas, from the African-Centered to the e-light.
Black Talk crosses boundaries of age, gender, region,
religion, and social class because it all comes from
the same source: the African American Experience and
the oral tradition embedded in that experience. In
this dictionary you will find words and phrases from
all segments of the Black (2) community, with
cultural history and experience that charts word
meanings within the various contexts of Black life.
And, to paraphrase the late writer James Baldwin, if
the language spoken in these contexts isn't a
language, then tell me what is.
In one sense, there is today greater diversity within
the African American community than ever before in
the history of U.S. slave descendants. Take just a
simple thing like a Sista's hairdo. There was a time
when virtually all Black women straightened their
hair, usually with a hot comb and/or hot curlers.
There was good hair and bad hair. The bad hairstyle
(which in the 1960s would come to be celebrated as
the natural) was almost nonexistent; it was viewed as
ugly and uncouth, a disgrace to the race. And braids,
they wuhdn't even in the running! Today, African
American women wear their hair in all variety of
styles. There is the natural, in both long and short
hair versions. There are dreads, adopted from the
Rastafarian Culture of the Caribbean, in both long
and short hair versions. There are all kinds of
braided styles, done up with and without extensions,
in zillions, goddess style, and the Senegalese twist.
There are permed hairstyles, relaxed, Jheri- Curl,
and wave nouveau treatments. There are all sorts of
weaves, including those that render an ultrathick
hairdo. And there are still the older hot combed and
hot curled treatments. Sometimes these styles are all
worn by the same Sista at different periods of time.
In another sense, however, there is an underlying
uniformity among Blacks, owing to the fact that race,
meaning not just skin color, but also culture,
history, and experience, continues to define African
America. Contrary to what many assume, the language
within the African American community goes beyond
mere slang, encompassing words and phrases that are
common to generations, social classes, and both males
and females. True, Black slang is Black Language, but
all Black Language is not Black slang. (And what is
Black slang today often becomes mainstream American
English tomorrow.) Black Language is much more
inclusive and expansive than the label "slang"
suggests. For one thing, slang refers to language
that is transitory and that is generally used by only
one group, such as teenagers' slang or musicians'
slang. African American Language, however, has a
lexical core of words and phrases that are fairly
stable over time and are familiar to and/or used by
all groups in the Black community. This dictionary
attempts to capture the essence of this lexical core.
Africans in America have always pushed the linguistic
envelope. The underlying tone of resistance in the
language may explain why African American linguistic
innovations are so often dismissed as slang. It's an
easier concept to deal with than confronting the
reality that the words represent. Slang, after all,
is rather lighthearted and harmless, and it's usually
short-lived - here today, gone tomorrow - but the
social critique embodied in Black slang is serious as
a heart attack. For 1990s Hip Hoppers, fed up with
the oppressive treatment of People of Color in the
nation's major cities, it's not New York, it's Zoo
York; it's not Los Angeles, it's Los Scandalous. In
the 1960s, Malcolm X shocked white America by dubbing
northern cities up South, contending that these
supposedly progressive areas were just a variation on
the theme of racial domination that Blacks were
experiencing down South. In these and many other
examples, Africans in America flipped the script,
making an alien tongue their own by imbuing "ole
massa's" language with their unique, African
semantics. Words came to have double meanings as
their definitions shifted according to the situation
and were infused with irony, metaphor, and ambiguity.
When it first came into use, The Man referred to the
white man, or the white man's enforcer, the
policeman. Today, of course, it is used to refer to
any male of distinction and power. Ann is just a
woman's name, but in the past as well as today in
Black Talk, it represents an uppity, demanding,
spoiled white woman. In one context, "Everbody talkin
bout Heaben ain goin dere," an expression that dates
back to enslavement, was an admonition to those
Blacks not practicing the religion they sing and
testify about; in another context, it referred to
white Americans who preached Christianity but
practiced enslavement. "I cain't kill nothin and
won't nothin die" is still used as a blues metaphor
from the survival-of-the-fittest animal world and is
applied to times in a person's life when they are
down on their luck.
Alice tells Humpty Dumpty in the Lewis Carroll
classic that you can't make words mean what you want
them to mean. Communication demands linguistic
conformity, and so it has been said that words are
our masters, otherwise there would be no
communication. Yet it has also been said that we are
masters of words, otherwise there would be no poetry.
Although the "poetry" created in the Africanization
of American English undoubtedly dates back to the
seventeenth century (3), perhaps the richest period
of linguistic innovation was the last half of the
twentieth century, particularly the 1960s and beyond.
The emergence of the Black Freedom Struggle (4)
marked a fundamental shift in linguistic
consciousness as Black intellectuals, scholar-
activists, and writer-artists deliberately and
consciously engaged in an unprecedented search for a
language to express Black identity and the Black
condition. This era was in fact the first period in
the history of U.S. slave descendants when there was
a critical mass of highly educated Blacks. To cite
just one example, 80 percent of all the doctoral
degrees (Ph.D.s, Ed.D.s) in the entire history of
Africans in America were awarded between 1960 and
1980 (5). And although a conscious call for Black
pride had existed in other historical periods - for
example, the Harlem Renaissance (6) of the 1920s -
the era of the 1960s Freedom Struggle was the first
to call for linguistic Black pride. It was a call
characterized by the learning of African languages
(notably Swahili), by efforts to reinvent the
Africanized language of the Black community, and by
other forms of linguistic experimentation. Poet Haki
Madhubuti put it this way: "black poets [will] deal
in . . . black language or Afro-American language in
contrast to standard english . . . will talk of
kingdoms of Africa, will speak in Zulu and Swahili,
will talk in muthafuckas and 'can you dig it.' " This
linguistic consciousness and the experimentation
driven by it - particularly among intellectuals,
writers, entertainers, activists, and, in more recent
years, Hip Hop Culture - has continued virtually
unabated.
This dictionary takes you beyond a word list. It is a
cultural map that charts word meanings along the
highways and byways of African American life. In
order to understand idioms like H.N.I.C., forty
acres, and tryin to make a dolla outa fifteen cent,
and words like ofay, Voodoo, and Johnson, we need to
understand how this nation within a nation developed
its unique way of using the English language. Which
brings us to history and the importance of the past
in understanding, and moving beyond, the present.

From African to African American

Just as we were called colored, but were not
that . . . and then Negro, but not that . . . to be
called Black is just as baseless . . . Black tells
you about skin color and what side of town you live
on. African American evokes discussion of the world.
(7)

Names for the race have been a continuing issue since
Jumpstreet, 1619, when the first slave ship landed at
Jamestown. From African to Colored to "negro" to
Negro with the capital to Black to African American,
with side trips to AfroAmerican, AfriAmerican,
AfraAmerican, and Afrikan, what are we Africans in
America, today thirty-five million strong, "we people
who are darker than blue," as Curtis Mayfield once
sang, to call ourselves?
Debates rage. The topic is discussed at conferences.
Among leaders and intellectuals, as well as among
everyday people, the issue is sometimes argued so
hotly that folk stop speaking to one another! In
1904, the A.M.E. Church Review sponsored a symposium
of Black leaders to debate whether the "n" of "negro"
should be capitalized. However, participants in that
symposium went beyond the mere question of
capitalization to debate whether "negro" was the
right name for the race in the first place. In 1967,
during the shift from "Negro" to "Black," and again
in 1989, during the shift from "Black" to "African
American," Ebony magazine devoted several pages to
the question "What's in a Name?" And the beat goes
on . . . The status of Blacks remains unsettled. Name
changes and debates over names reflect our uncertain
status and come to the forefront during crises and
upheavals in the Black condition.
Although African Americans are linked to Africans on
the Continent and in the Diaspora, the Black
American, as James Baldwin once put it, is a unique
creation. For one thing, other Diasporic Africans
claim citizenship in countries that are virtually all-
Black - Jamaicans, Bajans, Nigerians, Ghanaians, for
example, are not minorities in their native lands.
For another, not only are Blacks a distinct minority
in America, but our status as first-class citizens is
debatable, even at this late hour in U.S. history. As
the Sista said about Rodney King's beating in Los
Angeles, the torching of a Black man by whites in
Florida, and Malice Green's death in Detroit, "After
all we done been through, here it is [the 1990s], and
we still ain free." Some activists and African-
Centered Blacks have coined the term neo-slavery to
capture the view that the present Black condition,
with whites still powerful and Blacks still
powerless, is just enslavement in another form.
Blacks are a minority amid a population who look
distinctly different physically and who promote
racial supremacist standards of physical
attractiveness. This state of affairs has created a
set of negative attitudes about skin color, hair, and
other physical features that are reflected in the
U.S. Ebonics Lexicon, in terms such as good hair
(which Zora Neale Hurston once described as "nearer
my God to thee"), bad hair, high yella, liver-lips,
and nappy. Because black skin color was so devalued
at one time, to call an African person "black" was to
call him or her outa they name. It was: "If you
white, you all right; if you brown, stick around; if
you black, git back." Thus the necessity, during the
Black Freedom Struggle of the 1960s and 1970s, of
purging the racial label "Black" and adopting it as a
name for the race in symbolic celebration of the
changed status of Africans in America.
Back to Giddayup. The British colonists, who would
become Americans in 1776, called the Africans "free"
(a few were, but most were not), "slave," or,
following fifteenth-century Portuguese slave traders,
negro (an adjective meaning "black" in Portuguese and
Spanish). But the Africans called
themselves "African" and so designated their churches
and organizations as in the names African Educational
and Benevolent Society, African Episcopal Church, and
African Masonic Lodge No. 459. In those early years,
the thought was Africa on my mind and in my mind's
eye. Enslaved Africans kept thinking and hoping, all
the way up until the nineteenth century, that they
would one day return to Mother Africa. Some hummed
the tune "I'll Fly Away," believing that, like the
legendary hero Solomon, they would be able to fly
back to Africa. And especially after fighting at
Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill in the
Revolutionary War, they just knew they would be free
to return home. Instead, the thirteen British
colonies that became the United States tightened the
reins on their African slaves, passing laws
abolishing temporary enslavement and indentured
servitude for Africans and making them slaves for
life.
By 1800, several generations of Africans had been
born on American soil, thousands had been transported
from Africa, and the Black population numbered more
than one million. Both the vision and the possibility
of returning to Africa had become impractical and
remote. Further, a movement had begun to abolish
slavery and to make the Africans citizens. And both
free and enslaved Africans were becoming critically
aware of their contributions to the development of
American wealth. In light of this new reality and in
preparation for citizenship and what they thought
would be opportunities to enjoy the national wealth
they had helped create through two hundred years of
free labor, enslaved Africans began to call
themselves "Colored" (often spelled "Coloured" in
those days), and the designation "African" declined
in use.
"Colored" was used throughout much of the nineteenth
century until the white backlash began. The year 1877
marked the end of Reconstruction and set the stage
for "the Coloreds" to be put back in their place. The
political deal cut in D.C. led to the withdrawal of
the federal / Union troops that had been stationed in
the South to ensure justice for the ex-enslaved
Africans. Power and home rule were returned to the
Old Confederacy. The "freedmen" (as they were called
by the federal government and by whites) lost the
small gains in education, citizenship, and political
power that the Civil War and the Emancipation
Proclamation had made possible. New forms of
repression and torture began - lynch mobs, Ku Klux
Klan, loss of voting rights, and the beginning of
separate but (un)equal. By 1900, the quest was on for
a new name to capture the new reality of being
neither "slave nor free," as one ex-enslaved African
put it.
Although some Colored had begun using and rallying
for the label "negro," when the National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was
founded in 1909, the community had not yet reached a
consensus. The push for "negro" and for its
capitalization hit its full stride during the period
between the two world wars. With the U.S. campaign
to "make the world safe for democracy," and with
Colored soldiers shedding their blood for America,
the community thought surely that the contradictory
status of Africans in America would be resolved on
the side of first-class citizenship and economic
equity. Leaders such as Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois, editor of
the NAACP journal, Crisis, launched a massive
nationwide effort to capitalize and to elevate the
Portuguese-derived adjective "negro" to a level of
dignity and respect. The NAACP mailed out more than
seven hundred letters to publishers and editors.
Community newsletters addressed the issue, both sides
debated it, and talks and sermons in the Traditional
Black Church focused on it. By 1930, the major
European American media were using "Negro" and
capitalizing it. (The two glaring exceptions were
Forum magazine and the U.S. Government Printing
Office.) The New York Times put it this way: "[This]
is not merely a typographical change, it is an act in
recognition of racial self-respect for those who have
been for generations in the 'lower case.' "
"Negro" was the name until the 1960s when Africans in
America struggled to throw off the shackles of Jim
Crow and embraced Black Culture, the Black
Experience, and black skin color. Again, conferences
were held, many under the rubric of "Black Power,"
debates ensued, and yes, folk had hot arguments and
dissed one another about abandoning the name "Negro"
for "Black," which was "only an adjective," as those
who favored "Negro" often put it. However, the motion
of history could not be stopped. The name change
to "Black" and the profound significance of this
change in the language and life of Blacks was
captured in a 1968 hit song by James Brown: "Say It
Loud (I'm Black, and I'm Proud)."
The final period in the name debate (for now, at
least) began in late 1988 with a proposal from Dr.
Ramona Edelin, president of the National Urban
Coalition, to call the upcoming 1989 summit the
African American, rather than the Black, Summit. She
asserted that this name change "would establish a
cultural context for the new agenda." Her view was
that present-day Africans in America were facing a
new reality - the erosion, since the late 1970s, of
hard-won progress; high unemployment; the rise of
racism; the growth of urban youth violence; the
proliferation of crack (introduced, it continues to
be widely argued in the Black community, by the CIA);
and the general deterioration of the community. The
situation called for a reassessment within the
framework of a global identity, linking Africans in
North America with those on the Continent and
throughout the Diaspora.
As in previous eras, the name issue, this time the
shift from "Black" to "African American," has been
debated at community forums and conferences. It has
been the topic of conversation and heated arguments
at the barber and beauty shop, at family reunions,
social gatherings, and at Church events. The change
has not been as cataclysmic, though, as the shift
from "Negro" to "Black" in the 1960s,
because "African American" lacks the negative history
of "Black." Further, "African American" returns us to
the source, the "African" of early years, but with a
significant dimension added: "American." This
addition calls attention to four hundred years of
building wealth in America and legitimates the demand
for political and economic equity, or at least forty
acres and a mule. This line of argument was put forth
as long ago as 1829 by David Walker, one of the first
red, black, and green Brothas, in his Appeal, in four
Articles: Together with a Preamble to the Coloured
Citizens of the World, but in particular, and very
Expressly, to those of the United States of America.
His Appeal was published during the era of "Colored."
Calling for open rebellion against enslavement, and
opposing the American Colonization Society's plan to
resettle enslaved Africans in Africa, Walker wrote:

Men who are resolved to keep us in eternal
wretchedness are also bent on sending us to
Liberia . . . America is more our country than it is
the whites' - we have enriched it with our BLOOD AND
TEARS.

To date, "African American" appears to have caught on
throughout the community, although "Black" continues
to be used also (and, to a lesser extent, the
name "African"/ "Afrikan"). In opinion polls about
the name issue, Black youth are the strongest
supporters of "African American," which is not
surprising, given the African-Centered consciousness
that has emerged in Hip Hop Culture. However, there
are those - generally the parents and older siblings
of youth - who still favor "Black" because this name
generated an intense, long-overdue struggle around
old, past scripts of racial self-hatred and because
the eventual adoption of the name "Black" symbolized
a victorious shift to the positive in the African
American psyche.
The historical motion to reconfigure Black identity
and Black Language, a movement launched in the 1960s
and 1970s, can be viewed as the quest for Re-
Africanization. The shift from "Black" to "African
American" was inevitable as Black Americans have now
come full circle, back to where they had been from
the Jump in 1619: "African." The process of
linguistic Re-Africanization continues today and is
most evident in Hip Hop Culture and in the works of
Black women writers such as Alice Walker, Toni
Morrison, and Terry McMillan. Simultaneously, there
is an emerging sense of a bilingual consciousness
among middle-class Blacks (particularly those who are
not yet middle-aged), who value both U.S. Ebonics and
the Language of Wider Communication ("standard
English"); this linguistic consciousness has set the
stage for a developing level of linguistic
experimentation as they incorporate the flava of
Black Talk into dialogue and discourse. The
linguistic efforts of Black women writers and the Hip
Hop Nation, in concert with the linguistic
experimentation of young Black professionals, will
eventuate in a new language, reflecting a dynamic
blend of traditional and innovative linguistic
patterns, as U.S. Ebonics enters the twenty-first
century. Stay tuned.

Grammar and Pronunciation in Black Talk

Although here we are concerned only with words and
phrases in African American Language (AAL), there are
correct ways of saying these words, of talking Black,
that is, that depend on knowledge of the rules of
grammar and pronunciation in U.S. Ebonics. Like the
popular DJ said to a dude who phoned in a request for
DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince's
jam "Summertime": "Okay, man, I'll play it for you,
but see, it ain't summertime, it's summahtime." A
complete inventory and analysis of the grammar and
pronunciation is beyond the scope of this
introduction. This Africanized style of speaking the
English language is a complicated system, made even
more complex by the existence of Euro-American
patterns of English within the Africanized English
system. Interested readers may consult Lorenzo Dow
Turner's Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect; Molefi
Kete Asante's "African Elements in African American
English" in Joseph Holloway's excellent collection
Africanisms in American Culture; J. L. Dillard's
Black English; Mervyn
Alleyne's Comparative Afro-American; my own Talkin
That Talk: Language, Culture, and Education in
African America; John Baugh's Black Street Speech;
John Rickford's African American Vernacular English
(Ebonics): Features and Use, Evolution and
Educational Implications; Walter Wolfram and Nona H.
Clarke's Black-White Speech Relationships; and
William Labov's Language in the Inner City.
Listed below are only a few of the patterns of AAL
grammar and pronunciation; these patterns are found
in some of the words and expressions in this
dictionary:

1.Final and postvocalic "r." The "r"
sound at the end of a word or after a vowel is not
heard in AAL. Instead, use a vowel sound, as
in "summahtime," as that big-city DJ instructed his
caller. The expression "Sure, you're right" becomes
Sho you right. "Torn up" would be toe up. Use yo
instead of "your." And Hip Hop Music's popular, if
controversial, word ho is the AAL pronunciation
of "whore" (not to be confused with "hoe," as the
white teacher in the film House Party did when she
asked her Black male student why he called another
Black male student's mother a "garden tool").
2.Final and medial consonants. Reduce
to a vowel sound or a single consonant sound. Thus,
for example, "cold" is coal in AAL. This can get a
bit complicated if a word requires the operation of
two rules simultaneously, as for example in the
phrase "torn up," where the double consonant "rn"
must be reduced while the "r" after the vowel sound
is deleted. Applying the rules correctly gives you
toe, not "ton," which is what one beginning student
of AAL produced.
3.Stress on first syllable. For most
words, put the stress, or emphasis, on the first
syllable of the word. For example, AAL speakers say
PO-leece, not po-LEECE, and DE-troit, not De-TROIT.
4.Vowel sound in words that rhyme
with "think" and "ring." In AAL, this vowel is
pronounced like the vowel in "thank" and "rang."
Thus "sing" is rendered as sang, "drink" is
pronounced drank, etc. This pattern produced
the "thang" in "It's a Black Thang," and the "thang"
of Dr. Dre's "Nuthin' but a ÔG' Thang," from his 1992
album, The Chronic.
5.Indicate tense (time) by context, not
with an "s" or "ed." For example, "Mary do anythang
she want to" and "They look for him everywhere but
never did find him."
6."Be" and "Bees" to indicate
continuous action or infrequently recurring activity.
For example, "Every time we see him, he be dress like
that." This rule produced "It bees dat way," which
may be shortened to simply bees.
7.Initial "th" sound, if voiced as
in "that" and "the," pronounced as "d." This pattern
accounts for the popular phrase da bomb.
8.Final "th" sound, if voiceless,
becomes "t" or "f." This pattern gives us def, as
in "Def Comedy Jam" from the 1970s expression do it
to def, with the final "th" in "death" pronounced as
an "f." This is also where wit, as in the Hip Hop
phrase git wit you, comes from, with the final "th"
in "with" rendered as a "t" sound.
9.Is and are in sentences. These words
aren't necessary to make full statements; nor are the
contracted forms of these words (that is, the " 's"
for "is" and the " 're" for "are"). This is the rule
that allows What up? for "What's up?"

"Ebonics" Here to Stay?

The term "Ebonics" entered the national consciousness
in the midst of the controversy set off by the
Oakland, California, School Board's Resolution on
Ebonics, passed on December 18, 1996. The board's
resolution was the result of months of deliberation
and study about the educational crises facing
Oakland's Black students. The resolution cited the
dismal facts about the educational achievement level
of these students - that they were 71 percent of
the "special needs" but only 53 percent of the total
student population, that they were 80 percent of the
suspensions, and that their grade point average was
1.8 (on a 4.0 scale) compared to the average for all
students of 2.4. Given this sorry state of affairs,
the Oakland board's resolution called for a plan of
teaching its Black youth through their primary
language, Ebonics. This language was to serve as a
vehicle for "maintaining the legitimacy and richness"
of the students' language and to "facilitate their
acquisition and mastery of English language skills."
The board based its plan on standard procedures for
teaching students by using their native language
(the "mother tongue") to teach the three Rs, and for
maintaining that language while teaching the students
English (and other languages as well). The Oakland
board also based its plan on the voluminous body of
research that linguists and other scholars have
conducted on the language of African America,
especially the work done since the 1960s.
Unfortunately, public discussion did not center on
the serious literacy and educational issues facing
Oakland's Black students, nor on the deepening
educational crises facing Black youth in all major
cities, not just Oakland, California. For instance,
according to national data presented during the 1997
Senate hearings on Ebonics, at age nine Black kids
are 27 points behind in reading; at age seventeen,
they are 37 points behind. Instead of focusing public
attention on these critical educational problems, the
Oakland resolution became an emotional, symbolic
issue in which racial attitudes and stereotypes, on
the part of both Blacks and whites, took center
stage. Some Oakland School Board advocates argue
that, in the context of a still-racialized society,
the sheer boldness of the resolution made its
rejection inevitable. Here was a policy issued by a
board comprised of People of Color, who were daring
to put forth a plan to empower Black youth while
simultaneously preserving their language, which also
happened to be the language of their community. Other
Oakland sympathizers contend that the negative
reaction to the resolution resulted from initial
misguided media coverage. From the outset, the
majority of the media portrayed the resolution as a
plan to teach Black students Ebonics instead of the
Language of Wider Communication; thus they would be
condemned to a future of poverty, illiteracy, and
outsider status in American life. Of course, the
resolution does not advocate Ebonics only, but
consistently calls for Oakland's African American
students to be taught "English proficiency"
and "mastery of English language skills." Thus the
students would become bilingual. However, by the time
the press got the story right, the damage had already
been done; people had formed negative opinions and
seemed impervious to the truth.
Whether one agrees with Oakland's educational plan,
the crux of the issue was, and remains, how best to
teach and prepare Black youth for the future. A full-
blown treatment of the racial dynamics and complex
educational issues involved in the Oakland Ebonics
controversy is beyond the scope of this introduction.
Interested readers should consult Theresa Perry and
Lisa Delpit's The Real Ebonics Debate: Power,
Language, and the Education of African American
Children (which includes an essay of mine); Ebonics I
and II (special issues of The Black Scholar; one
issue includes my article on the education of Black
children "one mo once"); John Rickford's "Suite for
Ebony and Phonics" in Discover magazine; Keith
Gilyard and Nicholas Sitx's debate "Would Ebonics
Programs in Public Schools Be a Good Idea?" in
Insight magazine; the Journal of English Linguistics
special issue on Ebonics (which includes my "Ebonics,
King, and Oakland: Some Folk Don't Believe Fat Meat
Is Greasy"); and a special issue on Ebonics in Black
Issues in Higher Education.
As for the term "Ebonics" itself, even though it was
Oakland, California, that showcased it to the nation
at large in December 1996, the term has been in use
by some Black scholars since 1973, the year it was
coined by Black clinical psychologist Dr. Robert
Williams at a conference on language and the urban
Black child. The conference was convened in St. Louis
by what was then the Institute of Black Studies. In
1975, Dr. Williams published the conference papers in
his book Ebonics: The True Language of Black Folks.
In the Preface and Introduction to that book,
Williams writes:

A significant incident occurred at the conference.
The Black conferees were so critical of the work on
the subject done by white researchers, many of whom
also happened to be present, that they decided to
caucus among themselves and define Black Language
from a Black perspective. It was in this caucus that
the term Ebonics was created . . . [It] may be
defined as "the linguistic and paralinguistic
features which on a concentric continuum represent
the communicative competence of the West African,
Caribbean, and United States slave descendant of
African origin. It includes the various idioms,
patois, argots, ideolects, and social dialects of
Black people," especially those who have been forced
to adapt to colonial circumstances. Ebonics derives
its form from ebony (black) and phonics (sound, the
study of sound) and refers to the study of the
language of Black people in all its cultural
uniqueness.

Dr. Williams and the other scholars who early on
subscribed to the term "Ebonics" clearly conceived of
it as a broad term covering all of the various
African-European language mixtures that had developed
as a result of enslavement and contact between
Africans and Europeans over the past several hundred
years. The Ebonics spoken in the United States is
only one of the Ebonic languages. The term also
refers to the French-African language mixture spoken
in Haiti, to the English-African language mixture
spoken in Jamaica, to the Dutch-African language
mixture spoken in Surinam, and so forth. As is the
case with all other languages, each of the Ebonic
languages, including that spoken here in the United
States, has a grammatical structure, a system of
sounds, and a vocabulary.
"Ebonics" is no longer confined to the inner circle
of a small group of Black scholars and educators; the
term has gone mainstream. And although some linguists
and other scholars continue to use the term "African
American (Vernacular) English," what one hears
outside the academy is "Ebonics." Perhaps in the
public mind, the term doesn't shout "Race!" in the
way that a term like "Black English" or "African
American English" does. Or maybe folk just like the
sound of the word - "pretty cool name for a
language," one Blood remarked recently. In any event,
while the Oakland, California, School Board, who
brought the term "Ebonics" out into the public arena,
has had its proverbial fifteen minutes of publicity
and has faded from the national scene, "Ebonics" is
enjoying widespread public use. A Traditional Black
Church preacher used it in a recent sermon. Warning
his congregation not to be "playin wit God," he said
that "some of yall call yoself talkin in tongue and
don't even know what it's all about, can't speak
English or Ebonics." While some people now view the
term as simply a neutral label for a Black style of
speaking, others, especially those among the Hip Hop
generation, loudly celebrate the term and the
language. Late Hip Hop artist Big L., in his 1998 jam
entitled Ebonics, gives a lesson in Ebonics, using a
kind of Ebonics glossary with interlocking rhymes,
flaunting his vocabulary skillz and his ability to
flow. The term "Ebonics" seems destined for a long
linguistic life.
We cannot always determine the exact origin of words
and phrases in African American Language as we are
able to do with the term Ebonics. However, some
understanding can be gleaned by looking at four
critical forces that have clearly played a role in
shaping the direction and evolution of Black Talk: 1)
African languages and cultures; 2) the Traditional
Black Church; 3) Black Music; and 4) servitude and
oppression.

"what is africa to me?"
What is Africa to me:
Copper sun or scarlet sea,
Jungle star or jungle track,
Strong bronzed men, or regal black,
Women from whose loins I sprang
When the birds of Eden sang?
One three centuries removed
From the scenes his fathers loved,
Spicy grove, cinnamon tree,
What is Africa to me?

Writer Countee Cullen posed this question in his
poem "Heritage" (1925) during the Harlem Renaissance,
but it is a question that continues to be raised in
African America. Over the past three decades, there
has been a decided emergence of African-Centered
consciousness, evidenced, for instance, in the
wearing of Kente cloth accessories; in the
establishment of Africentric schools, teaching
materials, and curricula; and in travel to Africa by
church and school groups, professional organizations,
and individuals. Still, many Black Americans feel a
disconnect with Africa, making statements like those
in a survey I conducted some years ago: "We are more
American than African; we have been here too long"
and "What do they mean about 'African American'? By
now we have no African in us." On the other hand,
there are also many Black Americans who feel and
acknowledge a strong connection to Africa, what some
Blacks in the same survey called "our origin and
cultural identity."
As far as historians, linguists, and other scholars
go, during the first half of this century it was
widely believed that enslavement had wiped out all
traces of African languages and cultures, and that
Black "differences" resulted from imperfect and
inadequate imitations of European American language
and culture. George Philip Krapp, writing in the
1920s, is one linguist who held this view about the
speech of Africans in America. In the 1960s these
opinions came under close scrutiny and were soundly
challenged by a number of experts, such as historian
John Blassingame and linguist J. L. Dillard. Today
scholars generally agree that the African heritage
was not totally wiped out, and that both African
American Language and African American Culture have
roots in African patterns. (This view had also been
advanced by anthropologist Melville Herskovits and
linguist Lorenzo Dow Turner in the 1930s and 1940s,
but they were a distinct minority in those days.)
Over time, and after prolonged contact with European
Americans, Africans in America adopted some
Eurocentric patterns, and their African patterns of
language and culture were modified - but they were
not erased.
African American Language and Culture thus reflects a
dual heritage, part African, part American. As Dr.
W.E.B. Du Bois put it nearly a century ago in The
Souls of Black Folk, "One ever feels his two-ness -
an American, a Negro." However, Yoruba, Wolof, Efik,
Mandinka, and other African languages did not survive
enslavement intact. As linguist John Baugh has noted,
Black Americans are the only racial/ethnic group in
the United States in which the first generation did
not speak its native tongue. (Pidgin and Creole
English were spoken in the enslavement community.)
Nonetheless, there are a few words of direct African
origin that did survive; these have become household
words, for instance: tote (to carry), from Kikongo,
tota; jazz, from Mandinka, jasi; banana, fromWolof,
banana; cola as in Coca-Cola, from Temne, kola; juke,
as in jukebox, from Wolof, dzug (to misbehave), and
Bambara, dzugu (wicked); gumbo, from Tshiluba,
kingombo, and Umbundu, ochingombo; banjo, from
Kimbundu, mbanza; and Voodoo, from Fon, vodoun, and
Ewe, vodu.
Although exact African word survivals are few in
number, there is a dominant African linguistic
presence that survived in the African style of
speaking; in other words, using English words with an
African linguistic flava. One such example is found
in word meanings that have survived by way of what
linguists call loan translations. These are words and
phrases in which the literal meaning of the African
language phrase is retained, but not the word itself.
For example, in U.S. Ebonics, the word bad
means "good." In Mandinka, the language spoken by the
Mandingo people in West Africa, the phrase is a ka
nyi ko-jugu, which means, literally, "it is good
badly," that is, it is very good, or it is so good
that it's bad! Another example of this kind of loan
translation is in the good old American English word
okay. Several West African languages use the form
kay, which is added to a statement to mean "yes," "of
course," or "all right." For example, in Wolof, the
form is waw kay; in Fula, eeyi kay; in Mandinka, o-ke.

Copyright (c) 1994, 2000 by Geneva Smitherman.
Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.