On "Mommy, what does 'Nigger' mean?"

Gloria Naylor in her essay “Mommy, what does ‘Nigger’ mean?” emphasizes implicitly or explicitly some characteristics of Modern Linguistics, specifically the one concerning the view of language “…as a dynamic, changing system that varies with time and according to social, geographical and even individual contexts…” (Antonini, 1987, p.8) The other characteristic states the primacy of spoken language over written language.

Besides, this essay shows clearly one of the characteristics of language: arbitrariness. As Naylor says when she introduces the essay, words are innocuous; consensus is what gives power to them. The conflict in the essay is given by the fact that the girl is alien to a consensus out of her world. That is why she cannot understand the meaning of the word in a context different from her family’s.

In this particular case, two social groups have established different consensus toward the same word, one opposing the other. In a way, we are dealing with semantic and pragmatic constructions of the same word, one to attack and the other to react.

MT