Lexical Creation in African American Slang

Lexical creation is an important part of African American slang and involves such mechanisms as coinage, onomatopoeia, reduplication, and phoneticism. They are enormously productive and account for numerous slang expressions. Their productivity testifies to great linguistic creativity of African Americans; moreover, as in the case of phoneticism, it shows that lexical creation can be used consciously for sociocultural reasons stemming from the African American experience. This paper presents these processes in detail. Partially drawing from the book African American: A Linguistic Description (Widawski, forthcoming) and an earlier publication on African American lexicon (Widawski & Kowalczyk 2012), the presentation is based on lexical material from a sizable database of citations from contemporary African American sources collected through extensive fieldwork in the United States in recent years.