I've got a few questions for you all. Have you ever used the word "whip" to describe your car? If someone is being a total snob, would you call them, "boujee?" When you hear the word "basic," do you think of pumpkin spice lattes and UGG boots? If you answered yes to any of these questions, you're probably one of three things.
1. A person who spends a lot of time on Tik Tok
2. Hanging out with a person spending a lot of time on Tik Tok
3. A person who grew up speaking African-American English
What's African-American English or AAE? I'm so glad you asked. Basically, AAE is a dialect of English that was created by Black people in the United States. While studies around the language are fairly recent, many linguists have recognized AAE as its own form of communication in the Black community, with its own unique set of grammatical rules and vocabulary.
I'm sure at this point you're asking, "Arianna, why are you talking about AAE? This is a newsletter, not a linguistics lesson."
Well, I'm talking about it because a lot of people don't even know that AAE exists, at least not in the capacity of it being its own dialect. Plenty of people think that AAE is just "slang" or "improper English"—but it's not. And now with social platforms like Twitter and Tik Tok, these misconceptions have grown stronger than ever.
People appropriating AAE is nothing new. Words like "jazz," "banjo" and "hip" all originated as AAE before eventually being absorbed into the public lexicon. However, the digital landscape has made it so much easier for these words to be adopted, only for their origins to be erased.
Recently, a social media management company was criticized for claiming that words like "boujee," "swole," and "drip" were created by teens, even though the history of these phrases existed long before Gen Z existed. But like I said, the digital appropriation of Black culture is not a new phenomenon. But this week, we published Morgan Jerkins' excellent piece, "Black or Bot: The Long, Sordid History of Co-opting Blackness Online" where the New York Times bestselling author and professor broke down how Russian disinformation trolls appropriate AAE and pretend to be Black online for their political gain.
I'm still thinking about this piece and encourage you to sit with it this weekend, too.
—Arianna Coghill
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