The Oxford Dictionary of African American English Is Coming

In 2025, Oxford University will publish a dictionary of African American English. Why produce a dictionary of a dialect instead of just expanding the “main” English dictionary? To answer this question, it helps to consider how linguist John McWhorter describes the difference between a dialect and a language. He begins by dispelling the common belief that: “If you can understand it without training, it’s a dialect of your own language; if you can’t, it’s a different language.”

This definition is wrong, he writes, because:

“there is nothing about Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian in themselves that classifies them as ‘languages’; especially on the page, they resemble each other closely enough to look more like dialects of one ‘language.’ Meanwhile, one generally hears Mandarin, Cantonese, and Taiwanese described as ‘dialects’ of something called Chinese ... [but] Mandarin and Cantonese, for example, are more different than Spanish and Italian.”

What is most interesting about this new dictionary, however, is that its intended usage seems less as a simple dictionary and more as a historical record of the many overlooked contributions to the English language from historically ignored African Americans.

This dictionary, in other words, is much more than what it appears to be.