If you've used slay, bussin', periodt, finna, woke, shade, tea, lit, cap, chile, main character, queen, or on God, you've used African American Vernacular English. Most of what feels like fresh internet slang is actually decades-old AAVE that recently broke out to mass audiences. Pretending otherwise is a flattening, and the flattening is doing real damage to the language.
This piece is a clearer look at the lineage. Not a guilt trip — just the facts about where the words come from, why they spread, and how to talk about them without erasing.
What AAVE actually is
AAVE (African American Vernacular English) is a recognized dialect of English with consistent grammar, syntax, and phonology, spoken primarily by Black Americans. Linguists have studied it for decades. It is not "broken English." It has its own rules — the habitual be ("she be working" = a recurring action) is the famous example — and a vocabulary that has been generating new English for at least a century.
AAVE has been the largest single source of new mainstream English vocabulary in living memory. Words like cool (1930s jazz), hip, jive, dig ("you dig?"), chill, fly, dope, fresh, def, phat all entered the broader lexicon from Black culture decades before the internet existed.
The internet accelerated everything
What used to take a decade to cross from AAVE into mainstream English now takes weeks. Three things changed:
- Twitter (especially Black Twitter) made AAVE writing widely visible to non-Black audiences for the first time at scale.
- Vine and TikTok made AAVE phonology — not just spelling — viral. People could now hear how the words actually sounded.
- Stan Twitter and drag culture built communities (often queer, often Latino, often white) that adopted AAVE as a baseline register.
The result: by 2020, the average teenager's slang was indistinguishably AAVE-derived. By 2022, Oxford named rizz word of the year — a Kai Cenat coinage rooted in AAVE phonology.
The flattening problem
Here's where it gets uncomfortable. As AAVE words spread, two things happen at once:
- The words get de-attributed. They become "TikTok slang" or "Gen Z slang" — generations or platforms get credit for words those generations and platforms inherited.
- The words get flattened in meaning. AAVE has rich, specific senses; mass adoption typically collapses them. Bussin' in AAVE has more nuance than the TikTok meaning of "tasty." Slaycarries a long history in Black queer culture that gets lost when it becomes a brand caption.
This isn't moralizing. It's a description of what's measurable. When mainstream coverage credits "Gen Z" with words that are 40 years old in Black communities, that's an inaccuracy. The dictionary's job is to be accurate.
How Slangora handles this
We tag words that originate in AAVE with the aave tag and try to put the actual origin in the etymology field rather than crediting whichever platform popularized them. When a word's contemporary mainstream meaning has drifted from its AAVE meaning, we try to note both.
This isn't always clean. Some words are old enough that their lineage is genuinely contested. Some entered AAVE from somewhere else first. We try to be specific where we can and explicit where we can't.
How to use AAVE-derived slang without being weird about it
For non-Black readers, the practical question is usually: am I allowed to say this? The honest answer is that nobody owns words, and nobody can revoke them. But there are still better and worse ways to use AAVE.
Better:
- Use the words you've actually absorbed naturally. Don't perform a register.
- Know where they come from when asked.
- Don't credit "Gen Z" or "TikTok" for words that aren't theirs.
- Pay attention when Black users say a word has been overused into uselessness — that's market signal.
Worse:
- Putting on a "Black accent" for laughs while using the words.
- Claiming the words for your generation, your country, or your platform.
- Using them to mock the people they came from.
- Pretending the lineage doesn't exist because pointing at it makes you uncomfortable.
A short list of AAVE-rooted slang currently in heavy mainstream use
Many of these have older histories than the dates suggest — these are when they broke wider, not when they were coined.
- woke — 1930s, currency 2014
- shade / throwing shade — Black/Latino ballroom, 1980s
- tea / spilling tea — drag and ballroom culture, 1990s
- slay — Black queer culture, 1980s
- periodt — AAVE/queer culture, 2010s
- finna — AAVE contraction of "fixing to," 19th century
- bussin' — AAVE intensifier, decades-long history
- cap / no cap — AAVE for "lie" / "no lie," 1900s onward
- rizz — Kai Cenat coinage, 2021–22, AAVE phonology
- main character — Twitter/AAVE narrative framing, late 2010s
Why this matters for the dictionary
A slang dictionary that lies about origin is less useful than one that doesn't. If "tea" is dated to 2018 instead of the 1990s drag scene, readers get the wrong picture of how language works. If "rizz" is credited to TikTok instead of a specific Twitch streamer drawing on AAVE phonology, readers can't trace the next big word when it comes out of the same lineage.
Our entry on rizz is an example of how we try to handle this. For more on how words move from a specific creator to a global vocabulary, see where slang is born now.