Hip-hop and linguistics: you ain’t heard no research like it. Calgary linguist Daryn Howe investigates Black vernacular in hip-hop lyrics. Jeff Long, the GWUM[1], was the hip-hop fan here. The message: Black speech has lots of ain’t.
I was sitting on the bus this week idly eavesdropping on conversations and just could not understand the boys behind me, who were conversing in their particular northeast London urban Black/chav patois that I assume is an “in-group” dialect and meant to be unintelligible to me. It succeeded. It succeeded so well that I thought one of them was replying in French to his mate. I could make out a few words, but my ear honestly thought the pronounciation was Gallic. When I listened harder it became apparent it was the aforementioned dialect, but really? Couldn’t understand for the life of me.
[1] Grunt-Work Undergraduate Minion. We’ve all been there.
Edited to add: I wondered about the possible offensiveness of my phrase “northeast London urban Black/chav patois”, but I can’t really think of a better way to put it. It’s not exclusively Black. It’s not exclusively a class thing, either, and chav is the nearest I can come up with.
Strangely enough, I was in the local Sainsbury’s this evening, and the Black woman behind the counter kept asking me a question over and over, and I had trouble understanding. I have the same problem with the woman at the canteen at work. The women both speak with British inflection, but have speech patterns that seem to involve dropped words and yes, patois. And both had trouble understanding me, in turn. This doesn’t feel like a foreign language problem so much as a … dialect issue?