Has nigga Been Reappropriated as a Term of Endearment?

Abstract

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.

Temperature impacts on hate speech online: evidence from 4 billion geolocated tweets from the USA

“…Specifically, some proportion of the tweets classified as hate contain the N-word with the spelling variant ending in "a" which has, in contrast to the spelling with "er", according to some sources been reappropriated as a type of endearment in some communities. 76 However, the use of the word and its variants remains highly controversial. In the examples observed in our data (appendix p 7), the context is typically aggressive and derogatory.…”

African American English intensifier dennamug: Using twitter to investigate syntactic change in low-frequency forms

“…While some features, such as habitual be or postvocalic /r/ deletion have been extensively studied, there are other features known to speakers that have received scant or no attention in the academic literature (Lanehart, p.c., Smith, p.c., Hall, p.c.). Examples include the associative plural ' nem (Mufwene, 1998 ) and the broader change of initial /ð/ to [n] in some phonological contexts, talkin' 'bout as a verb of quotation (Cukor-Avila, 2001 ; Jones, 2016a ; Labov, 2018 ), syntactic change in use of nigga (Grieser, 2019 ; Jones and Hall, 2019 ; Smith, 2019 ), and dismissive bye among others.…”

“…The format is inherently informal (Han and Baldwin, 2011 ; van Halteren and Oostdijk, 2012 ; Eisenstein, 2013b ), people write for their social networks (Eisenstein, 2013a ; Doyle, 2014 ; Eisenstein et al, 2014 ; Yuan et al, 2016 ), and unconventional spellings that pose challenges for traditional NLP applications nevertheless provide rich linguistic information as people engage in identity construction—often through intentionally representing their accents and pronunciation through innovative orthography (Jones, 2016c ). People also navigate linguistic taboos orthographically: as Smith ( 2019 ) notes, “most white Facebookers (and a few blacks) variably spelled nigga as n***a, nga, ninja, nucca, and nicca, betraying some degree of awareness of the word's taboo status in wider social circles.” The usefulness of social media data for investigating low-frequency forms, especially lexical items, is well established (see, e.g., Grieve et al, 2017 , 2018 ). One largely unexplored avenue of linguistic investigation, however, pursued here, is the use of social media as a window into rebracketing, reanalysis, and syntactic change (Eisenstein, 2015 ; Jones, 2015 ; Bleaman, 2020 ; Jones, 2016a , b , c ; Austen, 2017 ; Jones and Hall, 2019 ).…”

Digital Rage: Testing “the Obama Effect” on Internet-Based Expressions of Racism

“…Both the Simpson trial and the Ninth Circuit ruling institutionalized the taboo of the n-word as a term, using which accompanied unwanted consequences across most public contexts. Running concurrently to its growing stigma in formal institutionalized spaces was the increasingly recognized reclamation of the term in Black popular cultural and vernacular (Asim, 2008; Smith, 2019). In intraracial Black contexts, the term was divorced from its cultural taboo and White supremacist function (Smith, 2019), but rabid White consumption of Black television, film, and music placed the word again in the laps of those who did not have within-group license to use it unproblematically (Asim, 2008; Chun, 2001; Croom, 2015; Rahman, 2012).…”

“…Running concurrently to its growing stigma in formal institutionalized spaces was the increasingly recognized reclamation of the term in Black popular cultural and vernacular (Asim, 2008; Smith, 2019). In intraracial Black contexts, the term was divorced from its cultural taboo and White supremacist function (Smith, 2019), but rabid White consumption of Black television, film, and music placed the word again in the laps of those who did not have within-group license to use it unproblematically (Asim, 2008; Chun, 2001; Croom, 2015; Rahman, 2012). As such, the meaning of the n-word as a tool of racialization has arrived at yet another destination, from an insult conferring white superiority, to litmus test for intentional racial bias and technology of ethnoracial stratification, to its current iteration: the only extant item in our oral and written culture that has more negative consequence when used by Whites than Blacks.…”