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Showing posts from June, 2022

Dialect Fusion, Cultural Appropriation, Queer Linguistics, and AAVE

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We've all wanted to  spill the tea   on our new   bae  or comment on how you can't stop   cheesin ' because of what your new   homie  said, even though it was so not   woke   and probably   cap  - but do we know where these words come from, and should we be using them at all? Much of the vocabulary we use and hear today has its roots in various oppressed subcultures, namely in African American spaces (especially by women,) and in spaces and media dominated by the LGBTQIA+ community. But with the rise of the digitization of these spaces through popular and social media, this language is spread through all social circles - circles that are ignorant of these terms' origins - and the line between subculture and mainstream is blurred by our new collective cultural consciousness on who can say what and why. The most prominent example of this is through the absorption of queer slang into our cultural knowledge thanks to popular media like RuPaul's Drag Race. However, reco