Finna

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Franklin. I’m calling from Monon, Indiana.

All right. What’s going on, Franklin?

Well, when I went to school up at IU Northwest in Gary, I heard a lot of people saying the word finna and substituting it with, like, going to do. And I was just wondering if there was an actual derivative of that slang term.

Now, give me an example.

Like, I’m finna go to the store.

Okay.

So that’s like F-I-N-N-A.

Right.

Okay.

Sure.

That makes sense. And you say it means I’m going to do something, right? I’m about to do something?

Yeah.

Okay.

This is a great example of a corruption of a dialect phrase that turned into a slang phrase. The original form of this is fixing to. You’ve probably heard that, right?

Yeah.

I’m fixing to go to the store.

That’s probably what it meant.

Yeah.

It is. It’s exactly where it comes from. And I’ve seen it in print as early as 1993. I have no doubt that finna is one word spelled F-I-N-N-A is older than that. Another variant is fitna, F-I-T-N-A. And you’ll frequently see it used in the very informal writings of black Americans in black speech because it’s something particular to certain regions of the South where they used fixing to, and then over time the pronunciation kind of got mushed together. It’s very similar to rendering going to as gonna.

Right.

Or in it for isn’t it?

Yeah, something like that. How does that sound?

Well, it’s very interesting. My wife said it was probably fixing to us. Like, I don’t know, it sounds really kind of warped from that.

So you heard this as a university student. Was it white kids, black kids, everyone?

It was mostly black people who used it, but, you know, anyone who was, you know, from a predominantly black area would kind of catch on and use it that way.

Yeah, it’s definitely characteristic of African-American vernacular English. And you will hear it among the speech of white Americans, but it’s less common there.

Yeah.

Well, Franklin, we’re finna go.

Did I say that right?

Yeah, it’s something like that.

All right, yeah.

All right, thank you so much for your call, Franklin.

All right, well, thanks a lot for having me on the show.

Sure.

Super duper. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Thanks.

I probably sounded like an idiot saying that, didn’t I, Grant?

You’re all right.

Thank you. You’re very generous.

No, it’s an interesting one.

It is. It’s usually in very colloquial or very informal language. It’s not something you’ll ever find in a formal letter or business writing or school writing.

Finna.

That’s so interesting that, I mean, I’m quite familiar with Fixintu, having grown up in the South.

Well, see, that’s what I was saying. That’s why it usually appears in the language of black Americans is because it comes from the post-war migration of the blacks to the north, and they brought a lot of that southern language with them.

Fascinating stuff.

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