Books and essays like Geneva Smitherman's Black Talk: Words and Phrases from the Hood to the Amen Corner, Clarence Major's From Juba to Jive, J. Dillard's Lexicon of Black English, Zora Neale Hurston's "Glossary of Harlem Slang," and Cab Calloway's "Hepster's Dictionary" show us that as far back as 1939, Black musicians, writers, and scholars chronicled how even the very vocabulary of Black folx is different. These collections are unique gifts in that they offer us Black-designed expressions and words that have traveled across the U.S. and across time for unique, race-based communicative purposes. In these weeks, we dive into sociolinguistics and Black Language (BL) that we seem to shape so much of Black online discourse.
|
|