The word negro makes me uncomfortable. I never hear it, but I occasionally read it. There’s a pretty famous book by sociolinguist Walt Wolfram (Professor of English, North Carolina State University) called A Sociolinguistic Description of Detroit Negro Speech published in 1969. Every time…
A while back, I read H. Samy Alim and Geneva Smitherman‘s excellent book Articulate While Black. The book takes an in-depth look at racialized public reaction to Barack Obama especially as a candidate for president. One phenomenon they explore is the use of the…
For over a month now, I’ve been taking a look at Gizoogle, a website that parodies the search engine Google by rendering web content in language resembling Snoop Dogg‘s speech. In a series of posts, I’ve been trying to arrive at…
For several weeks, I’ve been writing about the website Gizoogle, which ‘translates’ internet search results and webpages into language modeled after the hip-hop artist Snoop Dogg (see my first post for more details). Specifically, I’ve been looking into the question: Is…
In my last post, I took up the question of whether the website Gizoogle (see the previous post for an explanation of it) is an amusing tribute to hip-hop artist Snoop Dogg, a racist caricature of African American English (AAE),…
linguistic pulse 