The language of Black America is rich and diverse in its utterance, whether through music (Jazz, Blues, Soul, Gospel, and Rap), through street corner "shuckin''n jivin'," or through writing. This language is used as a means of survival, of getting from one day to the next. Blacks have developed a system of taking the fewest words and…

The speech habits of the most oppressed --and the largest-- segment of the black population in the United States did not spring solely from an inability to handle acceptable forms of spoken English, nor mainly from the limitations caused by the particular stock of words known to the speaker. Black slang stems from a somewhat disseminated rejection…

Verbal and nonverbal patterns of communication found in the black community are discussed in this paper. They have been selected on the basis of their potential as interference factors in intergroup communication. A section on black language describes and explains the following categories: rapping, running it down, jiving, shucking, copping a…