Publish Dictionary Of African American English Oxford University Press and Harvard University are collaborating to create the Oxford Dictionary of African American English (ODAAE).

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Director of Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and American Research, will provide editorial guidance to Oxford because it develops a dictionary dedicated to African American Vernacular English (AAVE).

“African American English has had a profound impact on the world’s most generally spoken language, yet much of it has been obscured,” Casper Grathwohl, President of Oxford Languages at Oxford University Press said in a written statement.

“The ODAAE seeks to acknowledge this contribution more fully and formally and, in doing so, create a strong tool for a recent generation of researchers, students, and students to construct a more accurate picture of how African American life has influenced how we speak, and subsequently who we’re,” he continued.

Each dictionary entry will include quotations from real-world examples of language in use and meaning, pronunciation, spelling, usage and history. Based on the release, this is supposed to acknowledge the contributions of African American writers, artists on a regular basis people “to the evolution of the US English lexicon and the English lexicon as a complete.”

“Every speaker of American English borrows heavily from words invented by African Americans, whether or not they realize it or not,” said Gates, Jr.

“Words with African origins reminiscent of ‘goober,’ ‘gumbo’ and ‘okra’ survived the Middle Passage together with our African ancestors. And words that we take with no consideration today, reminiscent of ‘cool’ and ‘crib,’ ‘hokum’ and ‘diss,’ ‘hip’ and ‘hep,’ ‘bad,’ meaning ‘good,’

and ‘dig,’ meaning ‘to know’—these are only a tiny fraction of the words which have come into American English from African American speakers, neologisms that emerged out of the Black Experience on this country, over the previous couple of hundred years,” he added.

The three-year project is partly funded by grants from the Mellon and Wagner Foundations. The Oxford Dictionary of African American English is scheduled to be released in 2025.