photo courtesy of pbs.org
Oxford University Press, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Harvard University are working to create an Oxford Dictionary of African American English, the ODAAE, scheduled to be released in 2025– according to a press release recently.
“African American English has had a profound impact on the world’s most widely spoken language, yet much of it has been obscured,” Casper Grathwohl, President of Oxford Languages at Oxford University Press,
said in the statement. He continued, “The ODAAE seeks to acknowledge this contribution more fully and formally and, in doing so, create a powerful tool for a new generation of researchers, students, and scholars to build a more accurate picture of how African American life has influenced how we speak, and therefore who we are,”According to the press release, the entries will have everything from quotations to examples of usage, history, and meaning. The extensiveness intends to continue to further “
the evolution of the US English lexicon and the English lexicon as a whole.” The contributions of African American artists and modern writers are the main things they want to uphold in the new creation.“Every speaker of American English borrows heavily from words invented by African Americans, whether they know it or not,” Henry added, “Words with African origins such as ‘goober,’ ‘gumbo’ and ‘okra’ survived the Middle Passage along with our African ancestors. And words that we take for granted today, such as ‘cool’ and ‘crib,’ ‘hokum’ and ‘diss,’ ‘hip’ and ‘hep,’ ‘bad,’ meaning ‘good,’ and ‘dig,’ meaning ‘to understand’—these are just a tiny fraction of the words that have come into American English from African American speakers, neologisms that emerged out of the Black Experience in this country, over the last few hundred years,” He explained.
Henry is the Director of Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and American Research and intends to be an editor for Oxford as they develop the dictionary.