Linguistics & Cultural Appropriation

What happens when White people appropriate Black slang? Commodification without stigma. Here is a great linguistics analysis of racism and White people’s use of the word “bae”:

“Cultural appropriation at its best, steals, reduces, overuses and then disposes of words like so much bathwater. The linguist Jane H Hill defines language appropriation as “a type of complex cultural borrowing that involves a dominant group’s ‘theft’ of aspects of a target group’s language.” Hill claims that the ‘theft’ adds value to white identity while further marginalizing nondominant groups. This cultural “borrowing” of black language and phraseology happens regularly, allowing non-black folk to “try on” black culture through the use of African American English vernacular and slang without having to “put on” the cultural consequences of actually being black in a culture conditioned to devalue and dismiss it.”

Photo and quote: http://buff.ly/1x4cdBH #linguistics #socialscience