Black speech isn’t wrong, or uneducated, mistaken, or a corruption of the English language.

Like all language, it’s a way people have developed to communicate with each other. I see transcriptionists “correct” it, now and then, but we’re experts in capturing the spoken word. The funny thing about the spoken word is that it doesn’t follow the rules, necessarily, and you can’t always find it in text books. But it is language, and we do our best to capture how people speak!

The study of Black language is a complex and rich field. While many scholars focus their rigorous research on African American Vernacular English, others painstakingly examine pidgin languages, which are simplified versions of a language as used by speakers of different languages to communicate. 

Still other scholars are renowned creolists who specialize in the study of the creole languages that emerge from mixtures of multiple languages. Creole languages (such as Louisiana Creole) are themselves distinct languages with unique grammar and vocabulary.  

While we obviously cannot discuss every Black scholar who has contributed to the study of language, in this article we attempt to spotlight a wide variety of scholars with different approaches and also attempt to give credit to some who have been overlooked. 

If you would like to learn more about Black scholars of language, including some of those we will identify here, you can check out this list of Black linguists.  

Lorenzo Dow Turner (1890-1972)

Lorenzo Dow Turner is mainly known for his studies of the Gullah language, also known as Geechee or Gullah Geechee. Today, Gullah is described as a creole language derived from English and African languages. In Turner’s time, though, it was thought Gullah came purely from English and had no African influence. Through his research, Turner proved this was not true and presented his findings in the pivotal book Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect (1949). Today, Turner is often remembered as the “father of Gullah studies.” Turner’s groundbreaking work is credited not only with establishing the link between Gullah and African language but also with demonstrating evidence that African American culture was not simply a derivative of white American culture. 

Mark Hanna Watkins (1903-1976)

Mark Hanna Watkins was one of the earliest African American linguists and is said to be the first African American to earn a doctorate with a dissertation in linguistics. Watkins researched both linguistics and anthropology and studied many different languages and cultures during his life, including those of Indigenous Mexican peoples, Native Americans, Africans, and Haitians. His 1933 dissertation on the Chichewa language is still noted today as being the first book about the grammar of an African language written by an American. This was especially impressive given the challenges nonwhite academics faced during the time. A lifelong scholar, Watkins spent his final moments dictating his final book, which was published after his death.   

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Robert L. Williams (1930-2020)

Robert L. Williams coined the term Ebonics, a combination of ebony and phonics, to refer to what is now generally known as African American Vernacular English (AAVE). Williams believed that the English spoken by African Americans was its own dialect and not a substandard version of the English spoken by white Americans—a popular belief at the time. He presented his research and argument in his 1975 book Ebonics: The True Language of Black Folks. Williams was a psychologist who was a founding member of the Association of Black Psychologists. However, Williams is most often remembered for the contributions he made to the study of language.

Get to know some of the defining elements of AAVE.

John R. Rickford 

John Rickford is a renowned scholar whose research has focused largely on sociolinguistics, a field of study that analyzes the impact that societal factors have on language. Rickford’s research has spanned a wide range of language topics, including but not limited to AAVE, pidgin, and creole languages. In particular, he has thoroughly studied Gullah and the Guyanese Creole that he himself speaks. A few examples of his extensive body of scholarly work include Dimensions of a Creole Continuum: History, Texts & Linguistic Analysis of Guyanese Creole (1987) and African American Vernacular English: Features, Evolution, Educational Implications (1999). 

Sonja L. Lanehart

Sonja L. Lanehart has worked on a number of projects documenting the importance of AAVE and language, often with a focus on the role that sociological factors play on language. She was co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of African American Language (2015) and an associate producer of Signing Black in America: The Story of Black ASL (2020), a documentary about the history and importance of Black American Sign Language (BASL), which is a distinct dialect of sign language.  

Michel DeGraff 

Michel DeGraff is a creolist with a particular focus on Haitian Creole, also known as Kreyòl. He is a founding member of Akademi Kreyòl Ayisyen (the Haitian Creole Academy). He has advocated for recognition of Haitian Creole as an official language, and his research often discusses the intersection of language with education and social justice. In particular, DeGraff has often argued in favor of teaching Haitian children Haitian Creole rather than the French language often taught in Haitian schools. Some examples of DeGraff’s research include Language Creation and Language Change: Creolization, Diachrony, and Development (2001) and “The Politics of Education in Post-Colonies: Kreyòl in Haiti as a Case Study of Language as Technology for Power and Liberation” (2020).     

Check out some of the rich linguistic contributions to English that come from the Caribbean—including Haiti and beyond.

Nicole Holliday 

Nicole Holliday describes herself as a sociophonetician, and her research often analyzes the relationship between linguistics and social identity. Her research has often focused on phonology and phonetics. As an example, she has researched how speakers and listeners often judge each other based on intonation, pronunciation, and other aspects of speech. For example, she worked on the grant-funded study “’Don’t Take That Tone With Me’: Linguistic Variation and Disciplinary Action on African American Children in Schools.” Her recent research has also involved the study of the intersection of phonetics and modern technology, such as voice assistants and artificial intelligence.  

Salikoko Mufwene 

Salikoko Mufwene’s recent research has focused on evolutionary linguistics, a scientific approach that analyzes how ecology and biology have influenced the change of language throughout human history. Mufwene is a creolist whose extensive language studies have included research on Gullah, AAVE, Jamaican Creole, and a variety of Bantu languages, including one of his native languages, Kiyansi. Some of the books written by Mufwene include The Ecology of Language Evolution (2001) and Language Evolution: Contact, Competition and Change (2008).   

We love the Shop Talk section of the Chicago Manual of Style. New articles are not posted as often, but when they are always worth the read. If you frequently work with the CMOS as your style guide, this article will also help you refresh some of the rules.

Spotlight on CMOS 6.75–94

Most readers know that hyphens connect groups of words or numbers whereas dashes set things off. But from there it tends to get a little fuzzy. For example, which key do you press to get the dash? Is there more than one kind of dash? . . . What about minus signs?

Most copyeditors, on the other hand, will usually know their way around hyphens and dashes. But when it comes to knowing precisely which type of miniature horizontal line is needed for which context, most of us can use the occasional refresher.

We’ll start with the basics, and then we’ll review a few of the lesser-known varieties.

Some Definitions

Though it can be considered as a variety of dash, a hyphen, strictly speaking, is the punctuation mark that appears between words in certain compound constructions, as in the phrase well-edited manuscript or the number fifty-three.

Hyphens may also appear as separators between digits in phone numbers and other numeric strings, as in 978-0-226-28705-8, the International Standard Book Number, or ISBN, for the seventeenth edition of The Chicago Manual of Style.

When consecutive digits express a range, however, they are separated in Chicago style not by hyphens but by en dashes, as in the range 3–5 (“three to five”). En dashes also step in for hyphens in certain complex compounds like “pre–Civil War.” It’s usually up to copyeditors rather than authors to apply such dashes (by replacing hyphens with en dashes as needed).*

More commonly, dash refers to the punctuation that’s used to set something off from the surrounding text (much like parentheses). In Chicago style, such dashes consist of em dashes—like this—with no space before or after. In British style, spaced en dashes – like this – are more common.

A Comparison

CMOS 6.75 lists the hyphen along with en and em dashes, lining them up for comparison. Here’s the beginning of that same list, but with the Unicode names and code points added in parentheses:†

‑ (hyphen-minus, U+002D)
– (en dash, U+2013)
— (em dash, U+2014)

The shortest of the three, the hyphen is the only one that gets its own key on standard keyboards. On modern QWERTY keyboards, the hyphen key is to the right of the zero.

The Unicode name for the hyphen—hyphen-minus—itself includes a hyphen. The name reflects the fact that this character was interchangeable with the minus sign (which we’ll get to in a moment) before the Unicode Standard was first published (in 1991).

Inserting Dashes

Because it’s the one on most keyboards, lots of people use the hyphen as a dash ‐ like that, with a space on either side‐‐or like that, with two hyphens (or sometimes three), typically without spaces. One of the first things many copyeditors do—often before editing begins—is to replace these hyphens-as-dashes with em (or en) dashes.

True dashes—of either the en or em variety—would probably be more popular if they had their own dedicated key. But they don’t, so you have to do a little extra work to get to them.

On a physical keyboard, dashes can be inserted from a menu for special characters or by using keystrokes. On a PC, Alt+0150 will produce an en dash and Alt+0151 an em dash (using the numeric keypad); in Microsoft Word, you can use the hyphen key on the numeric keypad (where it is often referred to as a minus key) in combination with the Ctrl key (en dash) or the Ctrl and Alt keys (em dash). On a Mac, the keys are Option-Hyphen (en dash) and Option-Shift-Hyphen (em dash).

On a virtual keyboard (as on a mobile phone or a tablet), an em dash is typically inserted by holding down the hyphen and then choosing the longest of several options; the en dash can be inserted in the same way (where it would usually be the second-longest option).

By default, Microsoft Word will convert a double hyphen to an em dash; in Google Docs, double and triple hyphens become en and em dashes, respectively. But many editors who work in those programs turn such automation off lest it step in where it’s not wanted.

Minus Signs

A minus sign looks like an en dash. But even though most of us can’t tell the difference at a glance between, for example, −3 and –3 (the minus sign is in the first one), it’s important to use the right mark in the right context. For one thing, a minus sign is designed to line up with the horizontal part of a plus sign regardless of font.

In Unicode, the minus sign is U+2212. In Word or Docs, you can use the menu for special characters or symbols. Here’s the Symbol dialog box in MS Word (accessed via the Insert tab):

That screenshot is from Word 365 for a PC. Note the Unicode number. Word for the PC will also let you insert a minus sign—or any Unicode character—by typing the number directly into your document and then pressing Alt+X. On a Mac, the menu for special characters will be a bit different (and the trick with X won’t work).

2-em and 3-em Dashes‡

In Chicago style, the 2-em dash is reserved for missing or illegible text from a quoted source or text that needs to be obscured for some reason, as in “Admiral N—— and Lady R—— were among the guests” (where “N——” and “R——” stand in for names); note the space after each 2-em dash in the example sentence. See CMOS 6.93.

The 3-em dash is used in bibliographies, where it stands in for the name of an author in successive works by that same author (though some publishers prefer to repeat the name; see CMOS 14.67):

Chaudhuri, Amit. Odysseus Abroad. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015.
———. A Strange and Sublime Address. London: Minerva, 1992.

Traditionally, and in the examples above, each 2-em and 3-em dash literally consists of two and three consecutive dashes, respectively. And that’s how Chicago and most publishers produce those dashes when needed.

But Unicode now defines these dashes as distinct characters: U+2E3A (2-em dash) and U+2E3B (3-em dash). Those were added to the Unicode Standard in 2012 but aren’t in wide use. Not only are they not included in many fonts, but they aren’t all that easy to get from a keyboard. Em dashes, on the other hand, are widely supported and (relatively) easy to insert.

The only drawback to using multiple dashes for 2-em and 3-em dashes is that in some fonts there will be a gap between the consecutive dashes. This can be fixed either by switching fonts or by reducing the letterspacing between dashes.

Chicago-style trivia: The Unicode chart that includes the 2-em and 3-em dashes (“Supplemental Punctuation,” v. 6.1 or later), lists “omission dash” as another name for the 2-em dash, lending support for Chicago’s traditional use in the “Admiral N—— and Lady R——” example above. In common usage, asterisks are often used instead.

A Few More Dashes to Think About

It’s worth mentioning five more dashes, each of which can be found in Unicode’s “General Punctuation” chart (the first four under the heading “Dashes”). Copyeditors following Chicago style won’t normally need to use any of these, but it’s good to be aware of them in case they turn up in one of your documents.

‐ (U+2010, hyphen)

Believe it or not, Unicode defines another form of hyphen that’s simply called a hyphen. The hyphen assigned to U+2010 is identical in appearance to the hyphen-minus, U+002D (i.e., what most of us use as a hyphen), but it has two significant drawbacks. First, it’s not the hyphen you get by pressing the hyphen key. Second, it risks being ignored in a literal search for hyphens (i.e., hyphen-minuses).

So even though U+2010 is apparently preferred by Unicode over U+002D in typeset text (according to version 15.0 of the Unicode Standard, published in September 2022), it’s not what you’ll find in most documents.

‑ (U+2011, non-breaking hyphen [Unicode hyphenates “non-breaking”])

This character is modeled on the hyphen, but unlike an ordinary hyphen (either U+002D or U+2010), it won’t allow a break at the end of a line. MS Word includes a nonbreaking hyphen in its special characters menu, but that one is designed for use in that program only and isn’t the same character. Copyeditors can usually change either variety to an ordinary hyphen (U+002D) in the manuscripts they edit (if any nonbreaking hyphens are needed, they would normally be added after conversion for publication).

‒ (U+2012, figure dash)

The figure dash is designed to be the same width as a numeral (the word figure means numeral in this context), making it useful in tables that include hyphenated numbers that need to align down a column. For that to work, you’ll need to use equally spaced “tabular” figures rather than the proportional kind.

― (U+2015, horizontal bar)

The horizontal bar is notable mainly because the applicable Unicode chart lists “quotation dash” as what Unicode calls an informative alias for that character—in other words, a name that follows an equals sign in the chart and helps to explain how the character is used (like “omission dash” for the 2-em dash). But most publishers use an ordinary em dash for that purpose (see CMOS 6.91). So you can ignore the quotation dash (unless you find one, in which case you can usually change it to an em dash).

⁓ (U+2053, swung dash)

We’ll end with the swung dash, though most of us will never have occasion to use one. You may be familiar with this special kind of dash from printed dictionaries, where it is sometimes seen standing in for a headword within a definition (thereby saving valuable space). Here’s the entry for “dash” (first sense) from the eleventh edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (2003):

Note the angle-bracketed examples. The swung dash looks like a tilde (~, U+007E)—a character that’s available individually from most standard keyboards but is more likely to be seen above the letter n, as in the Spanish word cañón (canyon).

Summing Up

Editors should know how to use hyphens (hyphen-minuses, that is), en dashes, and em dashes correctly. But it can help to know something about minus signs also—and about some of the other variations on the dash—if only to be prepared to troubleshoot any problems and inconsistencies. A dash of knowledge may not be worth much, but a knowledge of dashes will prevent editorial headaches.

We love the Shop Talk section of the Chicago Manual of Style. New articles are not posted as often, but when they are always worth the read. If you frequently work with the CMOS as your style guide, this article will also help you refresh some of the rules.

Spotlight on CMOS 6.75–94

Most readers know that hyphens connect groups of words or numbers whereas dashes set things off. But from there it tends to get a little fuzzy. For example, which key do you press to get the dash? Is there more than one kind of dash? . . . What about minus signs?

Most copyeditors, on the other hand, will usually know their way around hyphens and dashes. But when it comes to knowing precisely which type of miniature horizontal line is needed for which context, most of us can use the occasional refresher.

We’ll start with the basics, and then we’ll review a few of the lesser-known varieties.

Some Definitions

Though it can be considered as a variety of dash, a hyphen, strictly speaking, is the punctuation mark that appears between words in certain compound constructions, as in the phrase well-edited manuscript or the number fifty-three.

Hyphens may also appear as separators between digits in phone numbers and other numeric strings, as in 978-0-226-28705-8, the International Standard Book Number, or ISBN, for the seventeenth edition of The Chicago Manual of Style.

When consecutive digits express a range, however, they are separated in Chicago style not by hyphens but by en dashes, as in the range 3–5 (“three to five”). En dashes also step in for hyphens in certain complex compounds like “pre–Civil War.” It’s usually up to copyeditors rather than authors to apply such dashes (by replacing hyphens with en dashes as needed).*

More commonly, dash refers to the punctuation that’s used to set something off from the surrounding text (much like parentheses). In Chicago style, such dashes consist of em dashes—like this—with no space before or after. In British style, spaced en dashes – like this – are more common.

A Comparison

CMOS 6.75 lists the hyphen along with en and em dashes, lining them up for comparison. Here’s the beginning of that same list, but with the Unicode names and code points added in parentheses:†

‑ (hyphen-minus, U+002D)
– (en dash, U+2013)
— (em dash, U+2014)

The shortest of the three, the hyphen is the only one that gets its own key on standard keyboards. On modern QWERTY keyboards, the hyphen key is to the right of the zero.

The Unicode name for the hyphen—hyphen-minus—itself includes a hyphen. The name reflects the fact that this character was interchangeable with the minus sign (which we’ll get to in a moment) before the Unicode Standard was first published (in 1991).

Inserting Dashes

Because it’s the one on most keyboards, lots of people use the hyphen as a dash ‐ like that, with a space on either side‐‐or like that, with two hyphens (or sometimes three), typically without spaces. One of the first things many copyeditors do—often before editing begins—is to replace these hyphens-as-dashes with em (or en) dashes.

True dashes—of either the en or em variety—would probably be more popular if they had their own dedicated key. But they don’t, so you have to do a little extra work to get to them.

On a physical keyboard, dashes can be inserted from a menu for special characters or by using keystrokes. On a PC, Alt+0150 will produce an en dash and Alt+0151 an em dash (using the numeric keypad); in Microsoft Word, you can use the hyphen key on the numeric keypad (where it is often referred to as a minus key) in combination with the Ctrl key (en dash) or the Ctrl and Alt keys (em dash). On a Mac, the keys are Option-Hyphen (en dash) and Option-Shift-Hyphen (em dash).

On a virtual keyboard (as on a mobile phone or a tablet), an em dash is typically inserted by holding down the hyphen and then choosing the longest of several options; the en dash can be inserted in the same way (where it would usually be the second-longest option).

By default, Microsoft Word will convert a double hyphen to an em dash; in Google Docs, double and triple hyphens become en and em dashes, respectively. But many editors who work in those programs turn such automation off lest it step in where it’s not wanted.

Minus Signs

A minus sign looks like an en dash. But even though most of us can’t tell the difference at a glance between, for example, −3 and –3 (the minus sign is in the first one), it’s important to use the right mark in the right context. For one thing, a minus sign is designed to line up with the horizontal part of a plus sign regardless of font.

In Unicode, the minus sign is U+2212. In Word or Docs, you can use the menu for special characters or symbols. Here’s the Symbol dialog box in MS Word (accessed via the Insert tab):

That screenshot is from Word 365 for a PC. Note the Unicode number. Word for the PC will also let you insert a minus sign—or any Unicode character—by typing the number directly into your document and then pressing Alt+X. On a Mac, the menu for special characters will be a bit different (and the trick with X won’t work).

2-em and 3-em Dashes‡

In Chicago style, the 2-em dash is reserved for missing or illegible text from a quoted source or text that needs to be obscured for some reason, as in “Admiral N—— and Lady R—— were among the guests” (where “N——” and “R——” stand in for names); note the space after each 2-em dash in the example sentence. See CMOS 6.93.

The 3-em dash is used in bibliographies, where it stands in for the name of an author in successive works by that same author (though some publishers prefer to repeat the name; see CMOS 14.67):

Chaudhuri, Amit. Odysseus Abroad. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015.
———. A Strange and Sublime Address. London: Minerva, 1992.

Traditionally, and in the examples above, each 2-em and 3-em dash literally consists of two and three consecutive dashes, respectively. And that’s how Chicago and most publishers produce those dashes when needed.

But Unicode now defines these dashes as distinct characters: U+2E3A (2-em dash) and U+2E3B (3-em dash). Those were added to the Unicode Standard in 2012 but aren’t in wide use. Not only are they not included in many fonts, but they aren’t all that easy to get from a keyboard. Em dashes, on the other hand, are widely supported and (relatively) easy to insert.

The only drawback to using multiple dashes for 2-em and 3-em dashes is that in some fonts there will be a gap between the consecutive dashes. This can be fixed either by switching fonts or by reducing the letterspacing between dashes.

Chicago-style trivia: The Unicode chart that includes the 2-em and 3-em dashes (“Supplemental Punctuation,” v. 6.1 or later), lists “omission dash” as another name for the 2-em dash, lending support for Chicago’s traditional use in the “Admiral N—— and Lady R——” example above. In common usage, asterisks are often used instead.

A Few More Dashes to Think About

It’s worth mentioning five more dashes, each of which can be found in Unicode’s “General Punctuation” chart (the first four under the heading “Dashes”). Copyeditors following Chicago style won’t normally need to use any of these, but it’s good to be aware of them in case they turn up in one of your documents.

‐ (U+2010, hyphen)

Believe it or not, Unicode defines another form of hyphen that’s simply called a hyphen. The hyphen assigned to U+2010 is identical in appearance to the hyphen-minus, U+002D (i.e., what most of us use as a hyphen), but it has two significant drawbacks. First, it’s not the hyphen you get by pressing the hyphen key. Second, it risks being ignored in a literal search for hyphens (i.e., hyphen-minuses).

So even though U+2010 is apparently preferred by Unicode over U+002D in typeset text (according to version 15.0 of the Unicode Standard, published in September 2022), it’s not what you’ll find in most documents.

‑ (U+2011, non-breaking hyphen [Unicode hyphenates “non-breaking”])

This character is modeled on the hyphen, but unlike an ordinary hyphen (either U+002D or U+2010), it won’t allow a break at the end of a line. MS Word includes a nonbreaking hyphen in its special characters menu, but that one is designed for use in that program only and isn’t the same character. Copyeditors can usually change either variety to an ordinary hyphen (U+002D) in the manuscripts they edit (if any nonbreaking hyphens are needed, they would normally be added after conversion for publication).

‒ (U+2012, figure dash)

The figure dash is designed to be the same width as a numeral (the word figure means numeral in this context), making it useful in tables that include hyphenated numbers that need to align down a column. For that to work, you’ll need to use equally spaced “tabular” figures rather than the proportional kind.

― (U+2015, horizontal bar)

The horizontal bar is notable mainly because the applicable Unicode chart lists “quotation dash” as what Unicode calls an informative alias for that character—in other words, a name that follows an equals sign in the chart and helps to explain how the character is used (like “omission dash” for the 2-em dash). But most publishers use an ordinary em dash for that purpose (see CMOS 6.91). So you can ignore the quotation dash (unless you find one, in which case you can usually change it to an em dash).

⁓ (U+2053, swung dash)

We’ll end with the swung dash, though most of us will never have occasion to use one. You may be familiar with this special kind of dash from printed dictionaries, where it is sometimes seen standing in for a headword within a definition (thereby saving valuable space). Here’s the entry for “dash” (first sense) from the eleventh edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (2003):

Note the angle-bracketed examples. The swung dash looks like a tilde (~, U+007E)—a character that’s available individually from most standard keyboards but is more likely to be seen above the letter n, as in the Spanish word cañón (canyon).

Summing Up

Editors should know how to use hyphens (hyphen-minuses, that is), en dashes, and em dashes correctly. But it can help to know something about minus signs also—and about some of the other variations on the dash—if only to be prepared to troubleshoot any problems and inconsistencies. A dash of knowledge may not be worth much, but a knowledge of dashes will prevent editorial headaches.