Black culture & AAVE

Black American Vernacular English (AAVE), hip-hop, drag and ballroom, Caribbean patois, and NYC street vocabulary are the single largest source of new mainstream English slang since the 1980s. Most terms here originate inside Black communities — often inside specific cities, scenes, or subcultures — and then migrate outward through music, social media, and white appropriation, usually with a five-to-ten year lag and significant semantic drift. Signature exemplars: bussin, no cap, hits different, mandem, periodt. The category leans US-South and NYC for AAVE proper, with Caribbean (wha gwan, bashment) and ballroom/drag (gagged, serve) as distinct sub-streams. Platform: organic speech first, then Twitter and TikTok.