It is commonly believed that nigga has been reappropriated as a term of endearment. Perhaps this perception persists incorrectly because public conversations on this word are often dominated by nonlinguists. In contrast, linguists lack comparative studies of nigga’s historical and modern-day use. Addressing this misperception requires a multilayered approach, employed here. This study begins with a qualitative inquiry into the historical, linguistic, and social factors that have fueled the current perception of the nigger/nigga two-word dichotomy and of how nigga was used by blacks in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The second part is a quantitative study that examines the current apportionment of nigga by speaker race and gender, and linguistic context, as observed in computer-mediated conversations. Multivariate analysis reveals differences among black and white speakers, males and females, and in various linguistic contexts. Comparative analysis uncovers that many of nigga’s current meanings, referents, and uses have existed since at least the nineteenth century and that any changes to the meanings occurred gradually and not through abrupt reanalysis. This fnding lends no support to the reappropriation hypothesis. And crucially, the data show that the epitomized example of reappropriation, my nigga, does not function primarily as a genuine term of endearment but as a masculinizing marker of social identity.

In the original publication of this article (Smith, 2021), a production error caused some of the Examples to be misnumbered. The correct numbering is as follows:• The two examples given on the eighth page of the article are examples (4) and ( 5).• The examples given on the ninth page of the article are, in order, examples ( 6), ( 7), ( 8), ( 9), ( 10), and (11).

It is widely debated whether creole languages form a typological class; however, crosslinguistic generalizations from functional typology are seldom tested in creoles. Typological studies report a strong crosslinguistic tendency for asymmetries in habitual grammatical expressions across the present and past temporal reference domains (Bybee, 1994:245–8; Bybee, Perkins, & Pagliuca, 1994:151–60). This study analyzes two linguistic variants, preverbal asé and zero, which compete for habitual marking in Palenquero Creole (Colombia). I ask here: To what degree does the linguistic patterning of these forms conform to the crosslinguistic tendency? Results show that, despite Palenquero having widely cited creole features (e.g., preverbal markers and bare verb stems), the asymmetrical expression, distribution, and relative ordering of forms in the variable contexts closely align with crosslinguistic predictions for habituals, thus giving convincing evidence of typological markedness and not a Creole Prototype.

Formally similar grammatical features in a creole and its genetic or areal relatives may indicate substrate transfer, lexifier influence, or grammaticalization. Against this backdrop, the present study investigates the origin(s) of the preverbal past marker a in Palenquero Creole (Colombia). Results from distributional analysis and tests for significance indicate that several diachronically-related meanings are a-marked at rates approaching obligatory, suggesting advanced grammaticalization. Comparative results for Peninsular haber + PP suggest that past marking has grammaticalized much further in half the time in Palenquero Creole than in its lexifier, Spanish. Why? I argue, against traditional accounts about the origins of a, that, given the contact history of Palenquero speakers, most likely a pre-existing Kikongo prefixal form merged with an already grammaticalizing haber, thus propelling grammaticalization in the creole. The synchronic patterning shows adherence to typological patterns observed for perfectives in line with well-known constraints on competition and selection in contact languages, such as their grammatical congruence or particular social ecologies.

One of the most salient putative African features of Palenquero, an Afro-Hispanic creole spoken in northern Colombia, is the prenominal plural marker ma. However, plural number is not categorically marked with ma, which alternates with bare forms in plural contexts and also occurs in singular contexts. In a principled sample of noun phrases (n = 1,186) from the spontaneous speech of twenty-seven Palenquero-Spanish bilinguals, the rate of ma (versus zero) is 51% in plural and 13% in singular contexts. Singular ma is favored with subjects and specific objects, consistent with an association with definiteness. In plural contexts, where it is robust, selection of ma is favored with specific and generic referents in subject role. This conditioning indicates that plural marking is favored for discourse referential nouns, in accordance with the cross-linguistic generalization that morphological marking tends to appear on instances that approach the prototypical function of a category (Hopper & Thompson, 1984).