A Look at the Condesce’s Dialog

The Condesce speaks a short 101 words, which isn’t a lot, but it’s enough to be able to figure out something about how she talks. Here I’ll look at how it references African American Vernacular English (AAVE; the meaning of it is obvious) and other forms of speech and subcultures.

Her dialog is short enough to quote in full. She addresses the Dersite fashion community in the first section, Jane in the second, and Roxy in the third and fourth parts. I removed the flashing glitter effect since it was hard on the eyes.



(Rest under the cut because it’s long)



As a white undergrad student majoring in linguistics, I know my perspective on this matter won’t be perfect, but I’m trying my best to understand the situation within my limitations.

The most obvious thing is that there is no punctuation at all and the only capitalization is for emphasis, a user handle, and an abbreviation, which are exceptional cases. These features are most strongly associated in Homestuck with informality and internet chat speak. Connections with lesser education for these thing can be mostly disregarded in the context of the comic as they have much lesser importance. Note the @ sign in the handle that denotes a Twitter-like community. The Condesce defies the idea that royalty should speak in elevated, wordy ways. This makes her funny, but personally I also find it a bit scarier as the emotions are much closer to the surface.

There are also several shortened forms of words or expression, including “w”, “u”, “thru”, and “DWI”. In the story, these have similar connotations to no punctuation and limited capitalization: informality and internet language. “DWI” is most strongly connected with digital speech patterns.

It is interesting that HIC doesn’t always use “u” for “you”. She uses the full form of the word twice in the lines “you take a flip thru ma secret jam yet” and “and do not even THINK i dont know you out a jail bitch”. The first is a question about whether Roxy has looked at the folder containing the Ring of Void yet and the second is more obvious without content. The use of “you” here could suggest that stress is being placed on “you” rather than another adjacent word; speak these lines outside and compare them to other HIC lines containing “u”.

All of these previously mentioned features are found in each of The Condesce’s conversations and are pretty consistent.

Now let’s consider what some of the specific vocabulary makes reference to.

HIC uses quite a bit of cursing in her small amount of dialog and has a cursing rate of 5.94% (6 words total), about 1 in 20 words, which is very high, in fact the third highest of any character. She curses less often than Gamzee but more often than entranced Meulin or Tavrisprite. In alphabetical order, the frequencies of her curse words are ass 1, bitch 1, fuck 2, shit 2. Only fuck has a variant form (“motha fuck”) while the others are as they appear in the list, which will be discussed later. This gives a fuck-to-shit ratio of 1:1 (which is high, suggesting greater intensity in cursing) and a total fucks given percentage of 33.3%, which is also high. Do note the presence of “bitch”, which is a marked word in Homestuck used most often by only a few characters. Here it serves to connect her identity with Meenah, who also likes to use the word. Also notice how she addresses Roxy directly with it instead of using “son of a bitch” or referring to a non-living thing.

“Yo” in the sense of “hey!” is used two times to introduce the conversations. This word is very much associated with AAVE and rap culture in general, but other people use them as well on occassion.

“Cocoon” in the phrase “gurl u made your cocoon” very transparently points to troll culture. The word in their society has two different meanings as seen in the comic: the gel-filled bed used by trolls to sleep in or the enclosures larval trolls spin to metamorphose inside. It looks like the intended normal expression is “you made your [own] bed; now lie in it”, and it seems that the gel-filled bed meaning is intended here. It’s pretty common for troll terms inserted into normal English expressions to not have quite the same meaning as the original words, but here the meaning is almost exactly the same.



“Public works my ass” shows how The Condesce rejects the normal role of a public leader of giving services to the public, which is at least the norm from a Dersite perspective; we’re not quite certain about the troll one in the beta troll universe. “what a waste of royal gold” also connects to her imperial status as a fuchsia blood and of her inherent, selfish nature that desires material wealth. It’s also thematically similar to a line in one of Dave’s raps where he says “WASTE OF TAXPAYER MONEY YO”. This rejection of standard leadership and adoration of riches is very much like Meenah, and eventually Meenah does gain an interest in power in her session as she was the one who had them play Sgrub in the first place. “porpoises” for “purposes” is an obvious sea-dweller class-connected pun.

She calls the Dersite fashion conversations “prissy hat chat”. “Prissy” could mean that she thinks caring about hats is inappropriate feminine behavior for male carapacians, but I think it’s more likely that it’s used to show her general disdain for all fashion as she associates it with an overly refined culture that is not strong enough to fight. The rhyme further serves to suggest how she does not take the subject seriously.

The special decorated folder she send to Roxy is called a “jam”. This term is indirectly associated with music and shows that The Condesce really likes how she decorated the folder, as she then proceeds to describe what it looks like to make sure that Roxy knows what she’s referring to. She calls the moving gifs of ICP members “dance clowns” as opposed to the more expected “dancing clowns”. This may be part of “Twitter speak” or just loose informality. It’s kinda funny that she frowns upon fancy fashion but does like highly decorated folders.

Now let’s look at spelling variants that are not simple abbreviations.

“Gurl” is used four different times in three different conversations. The only other character that uses this variant spelling is Meenah, so it’s certainly Hussie trying to connect the two of them. This spelling is associated with a certain kind of informal femininity, especially when two females are communicating with each other. In the context of the dialog, it seems to suggest The Condesce is speaking personally and frankly with Jane and Roxy.

Of the one possible “ng” found in “letting”, the g is dropped. G dropping is standard in a lot, if not most, forms of spoken English, so all it indexes here with any certainty is informality.

Of the two times a form of “of” appears, once is is replaced with “a” in the phrase “out a jail”. The indexation is somewhat ambiguous as “a” is a commonly reduced version of “of” when spoken. This may also be written as “outta” (famously in “Straight Outta Compton”) since there is no standard way to spell this pronunciation since it is not commonly acknowledged. Again, all that is obvious is informality. A quick search on Twitter seems to suggest popular associates with AAVE.

My is also written as “ma”. This suggests the shortening of the “ai” [aɪ] vowel to “a”. This pronunciation and spelling are associated with Southern American English and African American Vernacular English (which is considered a subgroup of Southern English). Although there are probably other dialects of English that have this vowel change, these dialects are definitely the most relevant considering some of the other signs.

One time in seven possible slots, “d” is replaced for “th” in the phrase “dat sparkle shit”. This sound change is very strong associated with AAVE, especially in the word “that” (like in the expression “true dat”), but it’s curious how it occurs only once. It occurs phrase initial in an utterance that serves to disambiguate what HIC is referring to. It could again indicate different inflection on the word, but that seems less likely here. Compare it to the “tha” in the same line “tha dance clowns on” and it makes less sense in context why it wouldn’t be consistent if the “d” was for different stress; However, the “a” in “tha” can easily be explained by stress differences. There are indexations of “tha” with AAVE as shown through a quick Twitter search and, much less convincingly, in the name of Lil Wayne’s Tha Carter albums. My guess is that the variation in th-to-d shows that The Condesce has a range of varying spoken registers at her hand, which would be appropriate for someone of her status who would be expected to speak to people of many backgrounds.

She also uses “bidness” for business. A quick Twitter search shows popular association with AAVE, and the spelling is found in the name of two rap albums titled Da Bidness and a Snoop Dog song “The Bidness”. Here, again, connections of the word with both rap culture and AAVE make it unclear whether Hussie was trying to reference just one or both of them.

The phrase “motha fuck” shows an isolated case of derhotacization (r-dropping). We might expect to also find r removal in “your”, changing to the other “yo”, but we don’t find it. Considering how Gamzee uses many forms (link to article) of “motherfuck” and her admiration of rapping clowns, I would take this to be a reference to rap culture rather than AAVE.

Now we can look at things on the broader phrase level.

We find negative concord (also called a double negative) in the line “yo i cant deal w this prissy hat chat no more”. Negative concord is found in many dialects of English (cool fact: prescriptive grammar nuts are the reason why many people will tell you double negatives are not good in English even though we use them all the time), but it is also strongly associated with AAVE.

“Run shit” seems to be a notable, distinct expression. A search on Twitter shows connections to patterns associated with AAVE and forms of the expression appear in the titles of several rap songs. The possible indexation seems fairly clear.

So then there’s the big question: Does The Condesce’s speech index AAVE? Yes. It’s not a perfect rendition of the dialect (which is variable anyway), but it features several key features that are associated with simplified (often stereotyped) ideas of the language form: negative concord, th to d changes, “ai” to “a”, and derhotacization. The resemblance is obvious.

But there’s a bigger question: is this portrayal of a AAVE-inspired speaker respectful?

It’s a complicated question. One thing that goes in favor of a positive representation is the partial invertion of speech style formality in the post-Beforus Alternian society. The highest three classes of fuchsia (Feferi rejected her role so she’s not counted here), violet, and purple blood speak in registers most English-speaking humans would call more informal than proper. This is made more clear by Eridan’s insistence on using more “Earthly” terms like “refrigerator” instead of awkward troll terms like “thermal hull”. They also curse more often as well. The fuchsia and purples bloods also show influences from rap culture, which includes AAVE-like features. Considering that purple bloods are in terms of Alternian government ranked above violet bloods as shown by the bloodstains on the Grand Highblood’s chair, it’s less surprising that the Amporas do not show any influence from it.

Now consider the characters that have shown any reoccurring use of AAVE features and/or rap culture: Meenah, The Condesce, Gamzee, Kurloz, Tavros, and Dave. These features are associated with popular characters, a main character, and several characters that are associated with rank and prestige. Although it is true that part of Tavros, Gamzee, and Dave’s rapping is meant to be humorous, as a whole, these components are connected with strength, power, or creativity. In terms of social position, the placement of AAVE is positive.

But what about the actual words and structures that are used? We must look at other characters to get meaningful information on this. Hussie is generally correct when using AAVE-associated forms, but his knowledge doesn’t seem to be very deep. There are cases where the habitual be (like “I be going to church every Sunday”; it shows habits) is correct, as in Dave’s “dudes be worshiping me left and right”, but there are also instances where is incorrect or marginally correct, such as Dave’s “it’s a stupid story and I’d rather not talk about it / shit be embarrassing yo”. This refers to him refusing to tell John the story of how he lost his Sburb discs. He’s not in the habit of losing CDs and the “be” isn’t in any kind of conditional phrase, so the occurrence here is puzzling. Meenah uses a number of correct instances of the “have” being omitted in “has been” sort of statements, such as “you been draggin your talking booth”.

The odd things about these uses is how these features are dispersed out through a number of different characters, especially when it comes to AAVE grammatical components. We would never expect a character to have every single thing like a textbook, but there’s a certain irregularity to it. Part of this is caused by the code-switching of some characters (mostly Dave), but what it feels like is that Hussie is trying to be cautious. Consider how the sound changes in The Condesce’s speech happened only a small part of the time. Although he doesn’t mind to have some characters use some AAVE traits, he remains shallow in his grammatical inventory and lexicon. Even though this is just speculation, it seems quite possible that most of Hussie’s knowledge of the dialect comes from absorbing it through media and listening to people rather than using it himself actively in conversation.

Although The Condesce and other character’s use of AAVE features is imperfect, these flaws do not wholly destroy the authority or personal importance the characters have in the story.

This is my advice to roleplayers about being sensitive with these characters’ speech that’s pretty close to Hussie’s probable strategy: only use grammatical features you’re confident in using and keep phonetic (sound) respellings for dramatic effect. Study what features character do and don’t use; err on using less than more. There’s a history of stereotypes you should definitely try to avoid so you won’t look like a jerk.

I would like to thank lackadaisicallexicon for giving me advice on writing this post.