Language with Covert Prestige

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Cecily, and I’m from Indianapolis, Indiana.

Welcome to the show, Cecily. How can we help you?

I do love your show, and my mother and I both listen to it.

You had a caller a few weeks ago that had a roommate.

I wish I could remember. I can’t remember the particular phrase.

But the caller wasn’t familiar with it, and he was wondering if it was specific to the African-American community.

Do you remember that?

Yeah, we get a few of those now and again. I’m not sure which one you were talking about, but we do get those off and on where people know it’s not part of their own community and wonder if it’s part of another community.

Have you found in your studies that it’s common for certain phrases, because it doesn’t seem to be particularly just words, but certain phrases that begin in any type of a minority community to then sort of trickle upwards from small to big into the majority?

For instance, like even on your show, you say, hit us up.

Right.

Or there’s another show that’s called It’s Been a Minute.

Right.

And I’ve heard those particular sayings first in the African-American community, and then they sort of make their way to the majority community.

Is that something that’s been going on for a long time?

I mean, as in centuries?

Centuries, not quite.

Really what it took was African Americans coming into their own as a people with a strong identity and a lot of forward momentum and trying to get out from under the majority white culture.

I mean, if I can just put it plainly.

So by the 1960s, we firmly see, although it had already started before, we firmly see African-Americans becoming stars, TV stars, music stars, radio stars.

There had already been some radio stars for decades who were African-American.

Like Aretha Franklin, right.

Right, Aretha Franklin.

But I’m also thinking of like Eddie Anderson on The Jack Benny Show, who was a mainstay of this hugely popular radio show for decades.

And some of his catchphrases like, come now, and a few other things kind of became well-known.

So what it takes is for people from the minority culture to rise to this real public presence and begin to impress upon the larger culture outside of their home group different ideas, different catchphrases, different language, different ways of thinking, different ways of talking.

And certainly since the rise of hip-hop in the late 1970s, hip-hop has been a huge force for a lot of this.

And I also will look at today, although I don’t know if it’s been well-studied, but RuPaul and drag culture and certainly African-American drag culture just keeps dropping all this amazing slang and language into popular culture that just like balloons outward and becomes mainstream.

So, yeah, it absolutely can happen that minority culture can make a gigantic impact on the larger majority culture.

That’s fascinating to me as well.

My mother would say that I’m easily entertained, but I’m really not.

It actually takes something with some thought behind it.

But that’s wonderful.

I was thinking that, but I wasn’t sure.

There’s a phrase I want to leave you with, a two-word expression.

It’s called covert prestige.

Covert prestige.

So you have what’s called the prestige language.

This is the language we speak, say, to judges and cops and principals and our grandparents, people of authority, people that we are supposed to show deference or respect to, right?

Right.

Then there’s covert prestige, which is where a minority language or part of a minority language gets its own moral force.

It gets its own cultural strength and begins to assert itself all out of proportion to the minority group’s true influence on the larger culture.

And I think a lot of what is happening with African-American English or Black English is a really good example of this covert prestige coming to the fore.

I like that phrase, covert prestige, because there’s some things, if I say certain things, my mother will say reverting to the vernacular.

I’m going to say no.

It’s a covert prestige phrase.

That’s right.

You tell her.

We’re really delighted to take your call, and we’re so happy that you spoke with us today.

Thank you so much.

I’m so happy to have spoken with both of you.

Okay.

Keep up the good work, and I’ll keep listening as well.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

Thanks a lot.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye, Cecily.

877-929-9673.