Word.ws English Dictionary

blackspeak

blackspeak noun: the dialect of English spoken by people of sub-Saharan African ancestry living stateside.

Noun

blackspeak (uncountable)

  1. The dialect of English spoken by people of sub-Saharan African ancestry living stateside.
    • It sounds odd to us now, but contemporary sources... suggest how the archaic blackspeak that we associate with blackface performers had some of the aura of the later white appropriations of black speech.1995, Robert Dawidoff, “The Kind of Person You Have to Sound Like to Sing 'Alexander's Ragtime Band'”, in Elazar Barkan, Ronald Bush, editors, Prehistories of the Future: The Primitivist Project and...
    • Jordan's records were the first time many whites encountered the nuances of hip urban blackspeak.2002, Joe S. Harrington, Sonic Cool: The Life & Death of Rock 'n' Roll, Hal Leonard, →ISBN, page 64

Synonyms of blackspeak

Origin of blackspeak

From black + -speak.

Questions about blackspeak

What does blackspeak mean?
Blackspeak means the dialect of English spoken by people of sub-Saharan African ancestry living stateside.
What part of speech is blackspeak?
Blackspeak is a noun.

Words near blackspeak in the dictionary

  1. blacksnaking
  2. blacksome
  3. Blackson
  4. Blacksonian
  5. Blacksons
  6. blackspeak
  7. blacksplain
  8. blacksplained
  9. blacksplaining
  10. blacksplains
  11. blacksploitation

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: blackspeak (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “blackspeak.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/blackspeak. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.