The first time she heard Barbara Walters use the phrase “shout out” on television, Tracey Weldon noted.
“I was like, ‘Oh my god, it’s crossed over!'” said Weldon, a linguist who studies African-American English.
English has many words and expressions like “shout out,” she said, that started in black communities, made their way across the country, and then across the English-speaking world. The process has been going on for generations, linguists say, and has added untold numbers of contributions to the language, including hip, nitty gritty, cool and awake.
Now, a new dictionary — the Oxford Dictionary of African American English — will attempt to codify the contributions and capture the rich relationship black Americans have with the English language.
A project of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University and Oxford University Press, the dictionary will not only collect spellings and definitions. It will also create a historical record and serve as a tribute to the people behind the words, said Henry Louis Gates Jr., the project’s editor-in-chief and the director of the Hutchins Center.
“Just as Louis Armstrong took the trumpet and turned it inside out of the way people played European classical music,” Gates said, black people took English and “reinvented it, to make it reflect their sensitivities and to make it their cultural selves.” reflect .”
The idea arose when Oxford asked Gates to join forces to better represent African American English in its existing dictionaries. Gates instead suggested doing something more ambitious. The project was announced in June and the first version is expected in three years.
While Oxford won’t be the first dictionary ever to focus on African American speech, it will be a well-funded effort – the project has received grants from the Mellon and Wagner Foundations – and will be able to draw on the resources of major institutions.
The dictionary will contain words and phrases that were originally, primarily or exclusively used by African Americans, said Danica Salazar, the executive editor for World Englishes for Oxford Languages. That could be a word like “kitchen,” a term used to describe the hair that grows on the nape of the neck. Or it could be expressions like “sideshow,” which was created in the black community and is now widely used.
Part of the research associated with creating a dictionary involves figuring out where and when a word originated. To do this, researchers often look to books, magazines and newspapers, Salazar said, because those written documents are easy to date.
Resources can also include books such as “Cab Calloway’s Cat-ologue: a Hepster’s Dictionary,” a collection of words used by musicians, including “beat” to mean tired; “Dan Burley’s Original Handbook of Harlem Jive”, published 1944; and “Black Talk: Words and Phrases from the Hood to the Amen Corner,” published in 1994.
Researchers can look at recorded interviews with previously enslaved people, Salazar said, and at music, such as the lyrics in old jazz songs. Salazar said the project’s editors also plan to crowdsource information, with calls on the Oxford website and on social media, asking black Americans what words they would like to see in the dictionary and for help with historical documentation.
“Maybe there’s a diary in your grandmother’s attic with evidence for this word,” Salazar said.
The Oxford English Dictionary has been crowdsourcing since the 1800s, she added. When the first edition was made, inserts were placed in books, looking for volunteers to read certain titles, write sentences they found interesting and send them back to Oxford. The editor of the OED received so much mail that he had his own letterbox installed in front of his house.
Gates explained that the Oxford Dictionary of African American English will not only give the definition of a word, but also describe where it comes from and how it came to be.
“You wouldn’t normally see a dictionary as a way to tell the story of the evolution of the African American people, but it is,” Gates said. “If you sat down and read the dictionary, you would get a history of the African American people from A to Z.”
Differences in language stem from separation, said Sonja Lanehart, a professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona and a member of the dictionary advisory board. Those barriers could be geographical, such as oceans or mountains, she said, but they could also be social or institutional.
“In this country,” she said, “descendants of enslaved Americans grew up, evolved, lived in separate spaces. Even though they were all geographically in, say, Georgia, their lives and communities in those spaces were very different.”
African American English is a variety with its own syntax, word structure and pronunciation characteristics, said Weldon, the dean of graduate school at the University of South Carolina and also a member of the dictionary’s advisory board. But it has long been dismissed as inferior, stigmatized or ignored.
“It’s almost never the case that African American English is recognized as even legitimate, let alone ‘good’ or something to be praised,” she said. “And yet it is the lexicon, it’s the vocabulary most imitated and celebrated—but not with the African-American speech community getting credit for it.”
This dictionary will provide many insights, Gates said, but one overarching lesson stands out.
“The bottom line is that the African American people, if you read this dictionary,” Gates said, “is that you’re going to say these are people who love language.”