John McWhorter on Slang These Days

The moderate-liberal commentator and former linguistics professor responds to some people's charges that the English language is being undermined by slang:

"One hears this a lot, but it's easy to miss that today's slang can become tomorrow's grammar. Exactly this is happening under our noses among young brown folks. I speak of yo. Time was that yo was used as in 'Yo! Get off of there!' But nowadays, yo has floated to the ends of sentences and lost its shouting intonation. Listen to young black men, in particular, talking casually and you hear sentences like 'The party was really off the hook, yo.' This is a brand new yo. The pronunciation here is not '… hook, Yo!' The 'hook, yo' in that sentence is pronounced with the same melody as on ice cream. The new yo has no accent. It has become what linguists call a pragmatic marker."

He continues: 'Interestingly, this 'yo' makes Black English more like Chinese than standard English. In Cantonese, instead of 'yo' there is 'lo,' which has the same feel and function. If you say 'Ngoh gokdak keuih m-ngaam lo,' it means roughly, 'He's not playing fair, yo.' There are little words like this with this function in countless languages around the world. As spoken among America's young and brown, English has joined them. An English with what linguists would call a persuasive pragmatic particle is more complex in that regard than Standard English. However, because nonstandard speech is perceived as 'wrong,' Standard English will never have a persuasive pragmatic particle like Cantonese does."

And more: "Between Ignatz and Lucy, then, we see that in America before about 1950, vernacular speech in at least New York included a use of 'hey' as a pragmatic marker just like the 'yo' baggy-pants teens are using today. Thus the 'yo' that the woman would dismiss as slang is in fact something that adds to the grammatical apparatus of the language. It makes English more like, say, Japanese, where a little word 'ne' is used in the exact same way. In Japanese you can even use it alone and ask someone 'Ne?' which means, basically, 'Are you okay? Is everything all right?' And no one calls it slang, hey."