Hip, Woke, Cool: It’s All Fodder For the Oxford Dictionary of African American English

Tracy Weldan took notice when he first heard Barbara Walters use the expression “scream” on television.

Weldon, a linguist studying African-American English, said:

There are many words and expressions in English such as “screaming”. It started in the black community, traveled all over the country, and passed through the English-speaking world. According to linguists, this process has been going on for generations, with countless contributions to the language, including hips, essential grittyness, coolness, and awakening.

Today, a new dictionary — the Oxford Dictionary of African-American English — is trying to systematize contributions and capture the rich relationship between Black Americans and English.

A project of Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and Black Studies Studies and Oxford University Press, this dictionary does more than just collect spellings and definitions. Henry Louis Gates Jr., editor-in-chief of the project and director of the Hutchins Center, said it would also serve as a tribute to the people behind the words, setting historical records.

“Just like Louis Armstrong took the trumpet and turned it over from the way people play European classical music,” Gates said. .. “

The idea came when Oxford asked Gates to work together to better represent African-American English in existing dictionaries. Gates instead suggested doing something more ambitious. The project was announced in June and the first version is scheduled for less than three years.

Oxford’s isn’t the first dictionary focused on African-American speech, but it’s a well-funded initiative, and the project is funded by the Mellon and Wagner Foundations, leveraging the resources of major institutions. You will be able to do it.

According to Danica Salazar, Editor-in-Chief of World English in the Oxford Language, the dictionary contains words and phrases originally used primarily or exclusively by African Americans. This may include words like “kitchen”, which is a term used to describe the hair growing on the nape of the neck. Or it could be a phrase like “side hustle” that was created by the Black Community and is now widely used.

Some of the research related to dictionary building involves figuring out when and where a word occurred. To do this, researchers often look to books, magazines, and newspapers, Salazar said.

The resource is “Cab Calloway Cat-Olog: Hepstar’s Dictionary,A collection of words used by musicians. “Beat” means tired. “Original Handbook of Harlem Jive in Dunbarley” published in 1944. “Black Talk: Words and Phrases from Food to Armen Corner” published in 1994.

According to Salazar, researchers can turn to music such as recording interviews with formerly enslaved people and old jazz lyrics. According to Salazar, project editors gather information on Oxford’s website and social media, cloud-source the information for help in creating historical documents, what words they want to display in dictionaries. I’m planning to do it.

“Maybe there is a diary in your grandmother’s attic with evidence of this word,” Salazar said.

She added that the Oxford English Dictionary has been crowdsourced since the 19th century. When the first edition was created, the inserts were put into a book, reading specific titles, writing down phrases they found interesting, and looking for volunteers to send them back to Oxford. The OED editor received so many emails that he set up his mailbox in front of his home.

Gates explained that the Oxford English Dictionary of African-American English not only gives definitions of words, but also explains where they came from and how they emerged.

“I don’t usually think of dictionaries as a way to tell the story of African-American evolution, but it does,” Gates said. “Sit down and read the dictionary to learn about the history of African Americans from A to Z.”

Sonja Lanehart, a professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona and a member of the Dictionary Advisory Board, states that linguistic differences evolve from separation. These barriers can be geographical, such as the ocean or mountains, but they can also be social or institutional.

“In this country, we are descendants of Americans who were enslaved, grew up, grew up, and lived in different places,” she said. They were all geographically, for example Georgia, but their lives and communities within those spaces were very different. “

Weldon, Dean of the University of South Carolina Graduate School and a member of the Dictionary Advisory Board, said African-American English has a variety of unique syntax, word structure, and pronunciation capabilities. However, it has long been rejected as inferior, stigmatized, or ignored.

“African-American English is rarely recognized as legal, much less” good “or praised,” she said. “Still it is In the vocabulary, the most imitated and admired is the vocabulary, but the African-American language community has not been recognized for its achievements. “

According to Gates, this dictionary provides a lot of insight, but one comprehensive lesson pops up.

“The conclusion of African Americans when reading this dictionary is that they are language lovers,” Gates said.