The Philology of Negro Dialect

What is the Negro dialect? What is it to the white reader or listener? To the Northerner and to the Southerner? What is it to the Negro reader or hearer? What is its influence on the English language? What are some of its social effects? What is accent and what is natural speech? What direction is the American taking? Those questions are not all going to be answered, and some not even dealt with. The point is: there is a problem. There is a social, a philological problem. Language constantly undergoes change. America, a melting pot of peoples, is also a melting pot of tongues. The Negro contribution to the evolution of the English is extensive. In the present period, the times of World War II, a stage of language maturity has been attained. That is, enough transformation has occurred in speech and writing, as it issues from and relates to the Negro, so that something substantial may be examined. Pardon me if I reach no conclusions, if I succeed only in presenting a situation that has developed. I say that something interesting is happening in our land, and it is important. Negro slang expression, jazz expression, street parlance, and the peculiar colloquy of various regions of mass Negro residence, have entered into the English to stay, to root themselves, to become part of the orthodox expression of the future. That is no more unnatural than that so much of our formal derives from Latin and Greek origins. Who is to say that the contractions, the blurrings, and the melodic ripplings which the Negro voice contributes to language, to social communication, may not form the substance of the prefixes, the stems and the suffixes of many of our words of tomorrow? Who will deny that much idiomatic expression, originating in the experience of Brown America, has become part of the arsenal of the broader American forms of communication? Who will deny that a tremendous leap has occurred in the used by Shakespeare and the phonetic spelling employed by Richard Wright, while yet, both belong to the English language? It is a great adventure, this transformation of and communication: we are all part of it, we go along with it, and it goes along with us, albeit subtly. Suddenly we wake up to find that an expression, an attitude, or an idiom has become a permanent feature of our spoken intercourse, that it becomes orthodox, and that which was once orthodox has become archaic or obsolete. In and around the new Negro word-forms lies much of the growth in our time. The transfer of word and thought forms, ideas and expressions from the Negro world to the white world (the two are, by and large, separate worlds) goes on in the philological spheres as surely as transfers of relationships take place in the labor and

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