Nigger vs. Colored, et al.

[Michael Newman]

Obviously, the intention is key.  If someone said the non-rhotic version with racist intent or was interpreted as such, phonology wouldn't matter. However, with a dialect with variable rhoticity, I never once heard the r-ful version except possibly in one case of a girl keying, saying over and over, "I'm a niggerican," because she was part Puerto Rican and Part Black. The kid who transcribed it, did so with an orthographic <r>. He was a Black 2nd gen. Trinidadian. 

It's worth considering the social context too. You have a multiracial group of kids, about half Latino who get criticized by adults for using the word. I think in part this was a position they took in response essentially to those criticisms. The position was, "it doesn't mean that." Essentially, it was functionally equivalent to dude. So, the r/ schwa split became something of a stance. In NYC, I doubt that they could determine whether someone had an underlying /r/ there or not much of the time. That said, my participants weren't really children but people in their late teens, and quite intellectual too. I wouldn't dismiss their intuitions, not that you intended to.  It's a fascinating case of language ideology and lexicon and definitely worth a deeper exploration. However, White Jewish me isn't the one to do it. 


I am no relation of that particular language maven, who was wrong about plenty of other things too. Not related to the cardinal either or the actor. But if I had to choose a long lost cousin, I'd pick the actor. Coolest of the three famous Newmans. 



Michael Newman
Associate Professor of Linguistics
Queens College/CUNY
michael.newman at qc.cuny.edu



On Mar 19, 2011, at 3:20 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: Nigger vs. Colored, et al.
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> On Wed, Mar 2, 2011 at 8:25 PM, Michael Newman
> <michael.newman at qc.cuny.edu> wrote:
>> 
>> in current usage for many speakers, the form nigga has no racial reference. It's essentially         > dude, but for a different demographic.
> 
> Being, like Dave Chappelle, a nigger who uses "nigger" a lot, let me
> say rather, that as everything else in life, it depends. The
> trickeration of spelling or of pronunciation is not what matters.
> 
> And, as you yourself point out, you're working with children.
> 
> BTW, you're not related to the late Edwin Newman, who wrote that the
> insertion of _like_ into the flow of a sentence or conversation was
> the due to the influence of the speech of Negroes, are you?
> 
> --
> -Wilson
> -----
> All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint
> to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
> -Mark Twain
> 
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