“For our generation, what [Black people] did is we took the word [nigga] and we took the power out of that word. [We] turned a word that was very ugly and hurtful into a term of endearment.” — Jay-Z, The Oprah Winfrey Show (Sept. 24, 2009)

A widely held belief is that nigga has been reappropriated—specifically that hip-hop artists and comedians have recently shifted it from a racial slur to an affectionate term. Others reject this entirely, insisting that n*gger and nigga are the same slur and that no context justifies its use by anyone. These opposing—and equally erroneous—views persist because discussions are dominated by non-linguists and because we lack comparative research on the term’s historical and contemporary use.

To determine whether nigga has truly been reappropriated, we must
-establish its earliest uses and meanings,
-compare historical and contemporary usage to see whether, how, and when meanings shifted, if at all, and
-assess whether any changes reflect gradual evolution or abrupt, recent shifts driven by Black agency.

This talk draws on Smith's own research (Smith 2019; and his forthcoming book Wassup, My Nigga? The Hidden History of a Controversial Word) and on foundational scholarship by African American language scholars. He employs a two-tiered approach. First, he presents a qualitative analysis that documents how—and in which linguistic and social contexts—Black speakers who had been enslaved earlier in life used nigga in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Second, he presents the results of a quantitative analysis of modern-day speakers that examines how the term is distributed by speaker race, gender, and linguistic context in computer-mediated conversations. His data comes from the Federal Writers’ Project slave narratives, the ex-slave recordings, nineteenth-century autobiographical novels, and contemporary interactions on Facebook and Twitter (now X).

Comparative evidence shows strong historical continuity: many present-day meanings, referents, and functions have existed since at least the nineteenth century. As we will see, these findings offer no support for the reappropriation hypothesis and instead align with the Recency Illusion (Zwicky 2005). Notably, the widely cited phrase my nigga—often treated as a term of endearment par excellence—functions primarily as a masculinizing marker of social identity rather than a true-blue term of affection.

Smith would like to make a clear and necessary distinction at this point between use and reference. In this talk, he does not use the word nigga; he refers to it. For the sake of linguistic accuracy, he names the term explicitly rather than euphemizing it as “the n-word.” Far too many conversations about this term are shaped by taboo and assumption—and outright avoidance—rather than scientific evidence. This talk models an open, evidence-based academic discussion of controversial language and underscores the importance of bringing linguists—especially African American linguists—into these conversations. He hopes this information helps teachers, decision-makers, HR professionals, and school boards as they confront issues involving socially contested and politically sensitive language in their realm of influence.