African Slave influence in American English

Belle Montgomery

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Ready For A Linguistic Controversy? Say 'Mhmm'
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Engraving shows the arrival of a Dutch slave ship with a group of African slaves for sale, Jamestown, Virginia, 1619. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images) Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Kumari Devarajan | NPR | August 17, 2018
Pop quiz: What's a word you use a hundred times a day — that doesn't show up in the dictionary?

Give up? Mhmm.

You got it! Mhmm is a small word that's often used unconsciously. But it can actually tell us a lot about language, bias and the transatlantic slave trade.

Once upon a time, English speakers didn't say "mhmm." But Africans did, according to Robert Thompson, an art history professor at Yale University who studies Africa's influence on the Americas.

In a 2008 documentary, Thompson claimed the word spread from enslaved Africans into Southern black vernacular and from there into Southern white vernacular. He says white Americans used to say "yay" and "yes."

As for "mhmm"?

"That," he says, "is African."

(By the way, no one really seems to know how to spell "mhmm" — we're guessing here, too.)

But it's tough to verify whether Thompson is right.

And there's a reason for that:
THE REST OF THE ARTICLE FOUND HERE:
https://www.scpr.org/news/2018/08/17/85503/ready-for-a-linguistic-controversy-say-mhmm/
 
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