“Nah, ‘cause you know I’m all ‘bout dat life, twin. On gang, don’t play wit me.”

“What on Earth are you talking about? I just asked you why you haven’t taken out the trash yet.”

And so, a new epidemic was born. Upper-middle class kids from the suburbs talking like they grew up in the depths of Detroit for seemingly no reason at all. They’re not fooling anybody, they don’t seem any “cooler,” they’re not even doing it right and they certainly are not “all ‘bout dat life”—in fact they have an AP Lit project due Friday.

So what’s the point?

Why pretend to be somebody you aren’t? Why act like you grew up differently than you really did?

But most importantly, why take from a culture that doesn’t belong to you?

Though it’s nothing new, this has certainly become increasingly more prevalent in young people’s speech patterns. Many attribute this to social media, which allows trends, and in this case, culture, to traverse even the seemingly impenetrable barriers of our gated communities.

To be more specific, the dialect that has much of white America’s youth in a chokehold is AAVE: African-American Vernacular English, also sometimes referred to as Ebonics.

AAVE has a rich and complex history. Originating as a combination of British English dialects spoken by American colonizers and various West African languages, the dialect can be easily recognized by…

• The distinct addition of the word “be” to indicate an action.
  • “She always be doing that.”
• Using double negatives like:
  • “I didn’t see no sign.”
• Dropping consonants at the end of specific words.
  • For example, “test” may sound more like “tes.”

…and numerous other hallmarks in addition to AAVE’s own unique vocabulary.

Today, it is most commonly spoken by middle-class, working Black Americans in urban areas, though speakers of various backgrounds and races can be found across the country. Still, it’s important to note that not all African-Americans speak AAVE, and speaking the dialect doesn’t make anybody “more” or “less” Black.

Furthermore, the degree to which a speaker adheres to the linguistic rules of AAVE depends on a multitude of factors, such as where and how they grew up, and the prevalence of code-switching in many Black Americans’ day-to-day lives.

Since its conception, the dialect, more specifically its vocabulary, has spilled into mainstream pop culture. For example, words like “cool” (meaning something positive) and “crib” (in place of the word “home”) both originate from AAVE, but they are terms that non-speakers don’t think twice about using.

So then, what’s the problem? If AAVE is just another dialect of English, why can’t everybody speak it? Most people already use words and phrases like “ate” (meaning doing something well), “clock it” (meaning to call something out) and “bet” (meaning “okay”), so is the problem just that young white people are misusing a few turns of phrase and coming off as corny?

Well, no. At least, not entirely. Because language belongs to everybody, and by extension, so do different dialects and their vocabulary, it’s not necessarily wrong for non-AAVE speakers to adopt certain words into their own vocabularies. Who am I to say that you can’t call your best friend “twin”? The world has bigger problems.

But it is wrong to adopt the words and terms as your own without knowing where they come from, and it is even worse to judge AAVE speakers for “sounding ghetto” or “speaking in ganglish” when you just put a promise “on gang” in front of your Black friends to try to sound cool.

(It never works, by the way; you’re just embarrassing yourself.)

This is where the mainstream adoption of AAVE terms becomes a problem. Because for decades, AAVE has been stigmatized as “improper” English.

But at the same time, society has been taking phrases like “clocking a gag” (calling someone out), “turning up” (partying) and “popping out” (showing up to an event) and treating them like new, edgy terms.

These phrases are more than “slang” (more on that later), as they act as social indicators, subconsciously showing people that you’re “cool” and “in-the-know.” Would you rather party with someone who tells you to “arrive at the destination” or “pop out to the function?”

I know who I’m picking, and realistically, so do you. It’s subconscious.

For the longest time, Black culture has dominated the mainstream. From hip-hop to street fashion to the way we talk, American pop culture owes a lot to the Black community, yet we almost never see these things attributed to the people who came up with them. And instead of celebrating the creativity and uniqueness of Black America, a lot of the time, society treats them as less than while taking the more digestible parts.

For example, though the majority of American “slang” originates from AAVE, studies show that AAVE speakers may experience “more negative outcomes in school and in the workplace” (via EBSCO).

Even just calling these terms “slang” is demeaning, as the word was first defined as “vulgar” language used by “low” or “disreputable” people. And though now the definition has evolved to just mean “informal language,” the connotation clearly still holds weight today.

So, with all this said, what does this mean for white students who like to claim they regularly “run up on the opps” and are “finna slime these jits?” What does this mean for a girl who screams “periodt, boo!” when her Black friend says something funny? And what does this mean about how American society views the Black community as a whole?

At the end of the day, language is not something to be gatekept. But there is a fine line between appreciating a culture and appropriating culture.

I mean, we can’t all be “all ‘bout dat life.”