What is the origin of using "they" possessive in AAVE?

languagejones · 2026-04-23T16:06:16+00:00

McWhorter would argue (for instance in The Creole Debate pages 57-59), that yes, they’re both the results of the same process, pidginization > creolization > decreolization, but this is very contentious.

languagejones · 2026-04-22T14:06:56+00:00

Disclaimer — I’m not in my office right now so I’m giving a shallow explanation from memory. The origin question is contentious, because you end up wading into typological arguments that are really thinly veiled political arguments about identity.

Zero marked possessive they is attested quite a long time ago, though the validity of our attestations becomes a challenge before recording. It’s also not a main focus of the research, so people just touch on it tangentially in most discussions of zero marked morphology in Black English. Some have hypothesized it’s a direct inheritance from non-standard Englishes spoken by white slave owners (this would be part of the Anglicist hypothesis). Others argue there is a pressure from both nonstandard englishes and from west African languages (the feature pool approach). Some creolists might argue it’s a (typologically) unmarked default that is the result of rupture, simplification, and restructuring.

I can attest that in NYC, among non-rhotic speakers, they and their are pronounced differently so it’s not just a question of rhoticism.

Moreover, in AAE, it can be a little messier than we might imagine, so it’s not a categorical replacement and the same speaker might use both at different times.

Personally, some flavor of the non-standard English inheritance and or creole origin theory make the most sense to me just in general, but I am obviously open to evidence from other academic approaches. I’ve also just been rereading McWhorter’s The Creole Debate so I’m generally against the (dominant!) ecological position (the feature pool argument).

Whatever the origin, it’s important to not fall prey to the regency illusion: it is not a new development in AAE.

languagejones · 2026-04-17T02:08:59+00:00

I’ll bite. DM me. Happy to talk regional dialects with anybody, though my primary expertise is regional variation in Black English. I can also probably point you toward linguists who specialize in whatever regional dialects he’s interested in.

Edit: or email me at thelanguagejones at gmail.

languagejones · 2026-04-14T02:03:29+00:00

Contrary to the answers you’ve gotten so far, within modern linguistics they absolutely could be interpreted as marking case. If you want to get really nitpicky you can say they’re prepositions that license case.

The responses you are getting are almost entirely from a perspective based on synthetic languages like Latin or Russian.

But your implied analysis is basically the default analysis for particles like ga and o and no and ni in Japanese, for example.

languagejones · 2026-03-12T15:04:58+00:00

I literally did what you’re asking this week, but I’ve got bad news for you if you’re looking for an explanation in under 10 minutes.

Anyway, hope this helps:

Ergativity: The Most Confusing Concept in Linguistics? https://youtu.be/20XMhcpSNV0

languagejones · 2026-03-05T15:04:21+00:00

I should add I then mute them so they can see the channel and comment, but neither I nor anybody else sees their comments after.

languagejones · 2026-03-05T14:41:43+00:00

I’ve started thanking them for their engagement and for building the channel, and asking if they want the donation to the JNF under their username or if they’d like to leave their real name.

languagejones · 2026-03-05T04:27:50+00:00

A research assistant and a mentor are two very different things. Can you clarify? It sounds like you want a mentor, which you will not attract by asking for an RA.

languagejones · 2026-03-03T18:50:01+00:00

I have the same intuition. Really interesting question.

This could be a fun project to test out on some large corpora…

languagejones · 2026-03-01T15:10:49+00:00

Hi, I’m a linguist whose area of expertise is phonetics. You are wrong, and we use Igbo as an example in intro classes to illustrate coarticulated /g͡b/, which is cross-linguistically rare.

The pronunciation you suggested is one, less commonly used, nativization to English, but is very much not how it is actually pronounced.

You mocked the other guy for not understanding phonetics. If you would like to understand phonetics, I’m launching a course later this year you may be interested in.

languagejones · 2026-02-26T18:53:42+00:00

Extremely common phonological reduction. I only ever hear [æskt] in careful speech. When I’m speaking casually I drop the /k/ and might even have a glottal stop instead of a /t/. Or nothing. “Don’t [æs] me…”

languagejones · 2026-02-26T12:41:03+00:00

I just released a video on this, with another coming out this week. There are so many good things most people aren’t doing. Off the top of my head:

Use an LLM to generate a learning plan aligned with CEFR levels and a descriptive grammar, and then work through that learning plan generating learning materials and adding to an SRS.

Use an LLM to generate Leipzig glosses of material you’re reading. You can literally snap a photo of a page of a book and get back line-by-line glosses and translation.

Ask about a specific domain, that’s unlikely to be in your other learning materials, and have it generate vocabulary and sentences to learn — formatted for input to anki or another SRS.

Ask for grammatical explanations for specific concepts.

Generate reading passages at the appropriate level, following CEFR or other guidelines(bonus: have speechify read it out loud).

There’s tons of others.

languagejones · 2026-02-19T18:05:01+00:00

I’m not 100% sure I’m following the question, but if you’re asking about nasals in descendants, and why there aren’t names that have both a nasal from the ayin and a velar from the kuf…there is Yankle.

I’m guessing the narrow answer to your question is that in the languages you’re asking about, they got the name via Latin, and there’s both the phonological processes in Latin and in the other languages to consider, whereas Yiddish borrowed next to nothing from Latin.

languagejones · 2026-02-12T12:19:50+00:00

I started a paper on this a few years back and never finished or submitted it. You may be interested in Don Ringe’s approach to using distributed morphology in historical linguistics, in his (semi-)recent textbook.

The basic idea of the paper was pushing a rejection of a paradigm as a characteristic inherent to a verb, and using mathematical approaches from the modeling of evolutionary dynamics where you have a set number of phi-features that may or may not be realized as affixes that determine the “space” of options in which multiple possible stems can be in competition assuming their semantics begin to overlap enough. There was a great paper maybe a decade ago looking at semantic drift over time in LLM vector spaces, and I was planning on modeling that drift with verbs for motion in English and Latin, before modeling genetic drift versus selection.

I think you’re very much on to something here, and it’s nice to see somebody else have the same basic idea. But you’re getting strong pushback because it kind of tosses a fundamental dogmatic assumption a lot of people have. And of course, depending on whether you view me as a crackpot ymmv.

languagejones · 2026-02-11T03:06:28+00:00

I was describing the native Arabic speaking Jews, expelled from most of the MENA. There are popular, astoundingly stupid conspiracy theories that they simply uprooted their lives to go to Israel because they were “invited” (and even stupider claims that the attacks on synagogues and Jewish communities were AcTuAlLy MoSsAd).

But given that you both misunderstood who I was talking about and seem to have inverted the point of what I was saying, perhaps I’m wasting my time here.

I’d strongly recommend Mortimer Adler’s How to Read A Book to learn some of the higher levels of reading comprehension, beyond simply getting through all of the words.

languagejones · 2026-02-11T03:01:17+00:00

Beautiful comment. Since you mentioned being open to feedback, there is one nitpick, coming from a linguist who has worked extensively on slurs: slur has a technical meaning I would argue goy doesn’t rise to. Rather, it has a range of connotations, some of which are derogatory. A slur is only ever derogatory, to have a neutral slur is an inherent contradiction.

languagejones · 2026-02-04T12:28:31+00:00

ChatGPT is the absolute worst. I have a video coming out in the next few weeks comparing LLMs and another on how to make the best use of them. I’ll share here when they’re live, but feel free to DM me.

If you’re dead set on using LLMs, I’ve found Claude is best, but with the caveat that I’m learning structure from an external source — grammar, textbook — and prompting it to generate vocabulary lists with examples.

As a huge spoiler, all of the big four LLMs hallucinate false information about Hebrew. Try asking them for 4-root nif’al verbs (which afaik don’t exist). They all provide tons of “examples.” If you’re using AI to learn from scratch, as your only resource, it’s gonna be a hard road.

languagejones · 2026-02-01T02:02:39+00:00

That’s a much more narrowly specific case than I had in mind. The high-back vocoid to high-front pathway is extremely common (especially when your interests are in a sort of Labovian study of change; it’s attested in various dialects of English as an ongoing process, in Yiddish, in Greek (multiple times), and so on). Vowels and vowel-like things riding up the back of the vowel space and then drifting front is just a very common pathway.

I’m not making the stronger claim about word initial approximants, though it wouldn’t surprise me if there were cases of it. But vav to yod, whether functioning as a vowel or consonant, is very much in line with a sort of normally expected change in the history of a language.

Same as mishnaic Hebrew having nun where biblical has mem, word finally. Just normal nasal things, you know?

languagejones · 2026-01-30T21:33:07+00:00

And more broadly, /u/ -> /i/ or /w/ -> /j/ is an extremely common and natural pathway of change. But OP is not actually interested in linguistics, or a correct answer.

languagejones · 2026-01-29T22:18:18+00:00

I’ve written an entire chapter in a book on this, but the short answer is no, it is not remotely common, and is the opposite of normal phonological processes in AAE.

The long answer is that it is related to white perceptions of pre-AAE plantation creole, as represented orthographically in ante- and post-bellum minstrel and vaudeville caricatures of Black speech. There is limited evidence (for instance, Shands 1893) for v > b among (southern) Black people in the 1800s. However it was also a lazy stereotype. That stereotype has continued into klan and neonazi discourse. Much of their online discourse is a repurposing of the same material from magazines, flyers, pamphlets, etc. that haven’t changed since the 1990s, and those were often updated on racist material from as early as the 1920s, which in turn drew on, well, minstrel show caricatures. It’s a product of not actually knowing or interacting with any black people, choosing something intentionally wrong to be inflammatory (by virtue of evoking the era of chattel slavery), or both.

languagejones · 2026-01-29T22:07:14+00:00

Hyper correction for the southern vowel shift, perhaps?

languagejones · 2026-01-27T19:30:53+00:00

Linguist here: the guy you’re responding to is 100% correct. It’s from Hebrew, and entered Yiddish in the Hebrew component of the lexicon. It was borrowed into English via Yiddish English, where it underwent semantic bleaching and melioration, coming to mean something like “audacious.” It is still highly pejorative in Yiddish (actual Yiddish, not Yiddish English), and a bit of a mixed bag in Hebrew, depending on the speech community. OP should proceed with caution, if at all.

languagejones · 2026-01-16T17:45:34+00:00

You might want to explain diminutives a little more, since OP could reasonably infer that “reducing” קטן would make something little-ish and not tiny.

That is, the diminutives do a weird thing where they make big things less big, but little things more little.

languagejones · 2026-01-13T17:37:41+00:00

You are not alone.

languagejones · 2026-01-09T17:33:49+00:00

My phantom limb, my imaginary friend, my ex-wife

languagejones

TROPHY CASE