Are there any dictionaries for African-American English with definitions and pronunciation? I couldn't seem to find any on the internet.
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3Try looking under African-American Vernacular English also known as AAVE– Mari-Lou ACommented Dec 27, 2017 at 1:40
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For more info encyclopedia.com/humanities/… and a PDF link which has a short list of AAVE words. Unfortunately, I don't know how reliable or authentic that list is.– Mari-Lou ACommented Dec 27, 2017 at 1:54
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thoughtco.com/african-american-vernacular-english-aave-1689045– Mari-Lou ACommented Dec 27, 2017 at 2:00
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1 Answer
If you are interested in particular in African American slang, two useful mainstream resources are Clarence Major, From Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of African-American Slang (1994) and Geneva Smitherman, Black Talk: Words and Phrases from the Hood to the Amen Corner (1994). Of the two, Majors's book is far more comprehensive and scholarly, but Smitherman's is well worth consulting for slang of its era. Unfortunately, both are now more than 20 years old, and—although they are searchable online—they provide only snippet views of search results.
A more up-to-date scholarly treatment of African American Slang appears in Maciej Widawski, African American Slang: A Linguistic Description (2015), which is likewise searchable in snippet view but shows very little of the glossary portion of the book in the full-page previews online.
