You Know My Steez an Ethnographic and Sociolinguistic Representation

Language is leaky. While this blog has been tentatively named "Speech Events", we wait at language more broadly than many linguists typically approach it. One fashion that advice seeps out of the limits of language strictly divers is in the use of gestures. But fifty-fifty the line between gestures and spoken language can be tricky. Suck-teeth is great example of this. Cheque out the video below to get an thought of what I am talking virtually and how 1 might react to it:

[http://www.youtube.com/lookout?v=WeDYrTVQ2cE&t=0m30s]

Rickford & Rickford (1976) defines suck-teeth as "the gesture of drawing air through the teeth and into the mouth to produce a loud sucking audio" and which is used to limited "disgust, defiance, disapproval, disappointment, frustration or impatience" (Alim, 2006). Rebekah Baglini and her co-presenters at the 2013 Annual Conference on African Linguistics recently explored suck-teeth in the Wolof language of Senegal equally part of their investigation of what they were tentatively labelling verbal gestures. While not conforming to the sound-organization that is used to course words in Wolof or other languages, verbal gestures such as suck-teeth are rich communicative device that are used to make meaning orally.

I originally became aware of suck-teeth while serving in the Peace Corps in Burkina Faso — though as the video above demonstrates, information technology also conspicuously a phenomenon in the US. While I was unaware of US-based suck-teeth before, a blackness friend from Texas with parents who emigrated from Nigeria pointed out that he was aware of information technology but not but from his family and contacts with the Due west African diaspora of Texas, but also because it was more generally a "blackness thing". This echoes Rickford & Rickford (1976) who knew and used suck-teeth in their native Guinea, but were struck to find blackness Americans using it to the same result while white Americans were more or less completely unaware of it at the time of their study.

Interestingly, my get-go conscious exposure to suck-teeth in the West was in France where noesis of its meaning seems to cantankerous racial lines more than than in the US. In France, sucking your teeth is known every bit tchiper and something that one hears regularly in Paris à la this skit where a ticket-inspector in the métro gets tchipé-d by a woman that hasn't paid her fare.

Information technology appears that tchiper may be a loanword in French from the Wolof expression for suck-teeth which Baglini et al. place every bit cipptu or cippetu (pronounced roughly similar 'cheap-as well'). Rickford & Rickford (1976) also wrestle with the linguistic origin of the expression suck-teeth and its Caribbean equivalent stchoops or chups. In a number of West African languages the expression for suck-teeth is translated literally as something close to 'suck ane'south teeth'. Stchoops and chups on the other hand bears a phonetic resemblance to numerous African languages such as Wolof besides as Portuguese (chupar 'to suck'). Alternatively, these similarities may likewise result from onomatopoeia or the fact that the name of the act resembles the bodily sound of sucking one's teeth. This case pulled from my own facebook feed captures this nicely:

As the red arrows bespeak out the human action of sucking one'southward teeth is inserted following French and Manding but is always written out as thip or tchip with possible emphatic lengthening of the suck-teeth through the use of multiple i's. Tchip in this case seems to stalk from the French verb tchiper but is used not equally a verb but as a stand-in to represent the deed of sucking i's teeth in disapproval. The concluding two comments on the condition feed use the traditional Muslim Arabic greeting and so are written in Manding. Despite Manding take a unique give-and-take for suck-teeth, súruntu, the final annotate represents the suck-teeth act not with a form resembling súruntu but with the possibly Wolof-derived or onomatopaiec thiip. Pitiful for not translating the extract — maybe I'll practice a more than detailed analysis and translation down the road.

The exact etymology of words describing it bated, suck-teeth as an activity meaning 'disappointment' or 'disapproval' seems to have remained relatively stable across continents.  The more interesting question is to come across how it is used in everyday interaction every bit it is associated with dissimilar people and places. Alim & Goodwin (2010) indicate out that in the U.s.a. suck-teeth is "stigmatized by dominant culture" and "used […] to index black working-form women." But as the first YouTube clips shows white males likewise suck their teeth at their friends! Suck-teeth may conjure images of blackness working-form women now, but equally exposure to it expands and the types of people that use it (i.e., West African immigrants, Black Americans, white Americans etc.) mix, its connotation and use will change besides. Given the large amount of Westward Africans who already practice suck-teeth moving to places similar West Philly, it'll exist interesting to run across if this will further the idea that suck-teeth is "blackness affair" that stretches across borders.

Await forward to hearing about other possible names for and encounters involving suck-teeth from here in the Usa, France, Africa or elsewhere!

Some references for those works without links:

Alim, H. S. (2004). You Know My Steez: An Ethnographic and Sociolinguistic Report of Styleshifting in a Black American Spoken communication Community. Duke University Press Books.

Goodwin, Thou. H., & Alim, H. S. (2010). "Whatever (Neck Coil, Centre Roll, Teeth Suck)": The Situated Coproduction of Social Categories and Identities through Stancetaking and Transmodal Stylization. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, twenty(i), 179–194.

Rickford, J. R., & Rickford, A. E. (1976). Cut-Eye and Suck-Teeth: African Words and Gestures in New World Guise. The Journal of American Folklore, 89(353), 294–309.

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Source: https://speechevents.wordpress.com/2013/05/30/sucking-teeth-2/

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