Note: this post was coauthored with Christopher Hall.

TRIGGER WARNING: this post will discuss profanity, obscenity, taboo language, slurs, and racially charged terms.

I recently received word that an abstract Chris and I submitted to the Linguistic Society of America was accepted for a 30 minute talk at the LSA annual meeting in January of 2015. While exciting, this is also somewhat terrifying, because our research involves not just syntax, but taboo words, dialect divergence, and America's ugly racial history (and present). Outside of academia, there's an enormous amount of potential for misunderstanding, offense, hostility, and other ill feelings. Even among academics there's the potential for hurt feelings.

In brief, our research takes both recent work in syntax and recent work in sociolinguistics, and couples it with good, old-fashioned field-work and new computation methods (read: tens of thousands of tweets). However, the subject matter involves the emergence of a new class of pronouns in one (sub-)dialect of English from words that are considered offensive or taboo in other varieties of English. As such, it's potentially quite charged.

Before describing the research, it is absolutely crucial to note that:

we work as descriptive linguists: this means we observe a real-world phenomenon and describe it. We neither condone nor disapprove of the data. Our job is simply to describe and analyze natural language as it is used in the world. Both authors are native speakers of the variety of English in question.

So what's the big deal? Well, we argue that there is an emerging class of words that function as pronouns (remember elementary school English class? A pronoun is a word that stands in for another noun or noun-phrase) in some varieties of African American Vernacular English (AAVE), that are built out of the grammatical reanalysis of phrases including the n- word. Well, sort of the n- word because there's excellent evidence that there are actually at least two n-words, and that some speakers of AAVE differentiate between them and use them in different contexts.

WARNING: from here out, we will be discussing the use of words some deem extremely offensive. Seriously, just stop here if such discussion will offend you despite the above points. We will be using the actual words, not variants like b-h and n-. You've been warned!

Some preliminaries:

Pronunciation

One of the most potent slurs in American English is the racial epithet nigger (we warned you!). However, many white people oblivious to history and privilege don't hesitate to muse, "why can they [read: "black" people] use it, then?" Their observation - that some black Americans use what sounds like the same word - is valid, although insisting that makes the use of slurs OK is not valid.

AAVE is (generally) what can be called r-less and l-less. That is, in some contexts, especially at the end of words or syllables and when not followed by a vowel, words that may have an r or l are pronounced as though they do not. The stereotypical Boston accent is r-less: "pahk the car in Hahvahd yahd." (Note: "car" comes before a vowel, and therefore the r is pronounced!).

So when some speakers of AAVE use the word nigga, it is understandably interpreted as an r-less variant of a word that underlyingly has an r. However, the supposed r never shows up, not even intervocalically (jargon for "between vowels").

When people maintain that they're two different words, there seems to be good evidence for that. Note to white people: This does not give you license to use either. If you do not speak AAVE, and chances are you don't, you don't get to use either word. You WILL offend people, and no one will like you.

Semantic Bleaching

This is a term that has existed in linguistics for a long time, which we did not invent, so there is actually no pun intended. It means that a word, over time, loses shades of meaning. For our purposes, there is excellent research on "obscenity" in AAVE, the main argument being that many things that are considered obscene in other dialects have been semantically bleached. Spears (1998), for instance, argues that nigga, shit, bitch, and ass have been semantically bleached. In fact, Collins and Postal have shown that there is a particular grammatical construction that relies on the semantic bleaching of ass: the Ass Camouflage Construction (ACC), as in:

how ya no-phone-havin'-ass gonna call me?

Not content to just rely on the previous literature, we collected data from our stomping grounds: Harlem and the South Bronx, as well as West Philadelphia (mostly, this required little more than going outside and paying attention, although we did take notes on time, place, and type of use). We also used the Twython library for Python to extract and stored 10,000 tweets using the word nigga. While this is a huge sample by regular regular sociolinguistic norms (where 500 data points is impressive), it's worth keeping in mind that it's about 1/60th of what is tweeted in an average afternoon.