Grammar Girl here, I'm Mignon Fog Fogi and today I'm here with Dr. Sanja

Lane Hart, a professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona, the author of the Oxford Handbook of African American

Language, and more recently a member of the Advisory Board for the Oxford Dictionary of African American English, which is eagerly anticipated in coming out in the spring of 2025.

Today we're talking about how they're making that dictionary and some of the first entries including

kitchen, Antagar's children and Dureg. And a quick note we had some technical

problems with the interview so this is a slightly paired down edited

version but if you want to watch the whole thing you can find it on my YouTube channel

at YouTube.com slash grammar girl.

Thank you for being here Dr. Lane Hart. Thank you. It's my pleasure.

I've been looking forward to it.

Yeah, I have so many questions.

So I know when I look at the like main Oxford English dictionary, there are some sources that, you know,

they get a lot of the citations from, like, you know, people mailed in snippets with Shakespeare

on it and stuff.

Are there big sources like that for the project that you're working on?

So the sources that we're using, I don't know how familiar you are.

There's a long history of African American newspapers in this country, especially in the 19th century, 18th century.

So there's a long history of those newspapers,

but also there's a rich literary history.

So there's that to use as well. We just met like a week or so ago and we were talking about Zoranil

Hurston and how Zoranil Hurston has supplied a lot of the def- in some cases she supplied the word and she

supplied the sort of etymology for it. You know as know, she was a great anthropologist.

...