Geoffrey Hughes. An Encyclopedia of Swearing: The Social History of Oaths, Profanity, Foul Language, and Ethnic Slurs in the English-Speaking World. M E Sharpe, 2006.

The history of the term is largely, but not exclusively, confined to American English and to insulting references to blacks. In detail it is more complex, as are the semantic nuances, which in American English vary from extreme offensiveness when used of blacks by whites, to affectionate expressions of solidarity when used in black English. The history of the term shows three basic stages. The first is as a descriptive term not always intended to offend, recorded from ca. 1574 to 1840. However, many of the early instances derive from the practice of slavery: “One niggor Boy” comes from an inventory of slaves dated 1689, while John Anderson styled himself as “Governor over the niegors in Connecticut” in 1766. This primal link with slavery is obviously vital, since it embodies in an intensified fashion the demeaning roles of servitude and of being an outsider that have characterized the early roles of black people in Western society. In his Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785), Francis Grose noted that the basic term negro carried the sense of “slave” in uses like “I’m no man’s Negro.” The history of the term in the southern United States is obviously colored by the slave relationship.

The second and dominant sense is that of the contemptuous and highly offensive racial insult (ca. 1800 to the present), recorded in a dismissive comment of the poet Lord Byron to “The rest of the world—Niggers and what not” in 1811, and the comment in 1860 that “A Southern gentleman rarely, if ever, says nigger” (in Hundley, Southern States, 170). The key factor in the dynamic of insult, as with most ethnic terms, is who uses the term and the context. Thus a problematic instance is Mark Twain’s comment in a letter of 1853: “I reckon I had better black my face, for in these Eastern states niggers are considerably better than white people” (Twain’s Letters, vol. I, 4). In one of many such discriminating comments, John Dollard observed in Caste and Class in a Southern Town (1927): “Evidently Southern white men say nigger as standard practice, “nigruh,” a slightly more respectful form, when talking to northerner (from whom they expect criticism on the score of treatment of Negroes), but never Negro; that is the hall-mark of a northerner and caste-enemy” (47).

A third usage, strictly dependent on context, is a reclaimed currency of the term by those previously insulted but used exclusively among themselves, as an affectionate, ironic, or jocular epithet. This usage is comparatively recent, with quotations dating only from the 1950s, especially in contexts expressing solidarity, such as “You know you’re my nigger, man” (in J.A. Williams, The Angry Ones 1956-1960, chapter xxi). However, the usage was commented on in 1925 by Carl Van Vechten in Nigger Heaven: “While this informal epithet is freely used by Negroes among themselves, not only as a term of opprobrium, but actually as a term of endearment, its employment by a white person is always fiercely resented” (26). The term can be used as an honorific title “for a nonblack person behaving in an admirable manner associated with African-Americans” (Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, 1997). The authority’s first instance is from Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land, referring to the early 1950s: “that paddy boy is twice the nigger of any of you cats might think you are” (1965, 137). In popular culture, especially in rap, the term has been reclaimed, as is shown in groups with provocative names like Niggaz with Attitude. (Alternative spelling, usually of an illiterate kind, is also a way of establishing identity: it is also found in the British alternative form wimmin, coined in 1983.) A similarly provocative title is Capitalist Nigger (2003) by a Nigerian author, Chika Onyeani. The films of Spike Lee, notably Do the Right Thing (1989) and Get on the Bus (1996), which focus frankly on the Black community, use the term profusely, often in an ironic and self-mocking stereotypical fashion.

To these may be added a fourth sense, recorded for about half a century, which is not confined to Blacks or Americans, referring to any victim of racial or other prejudice, a person who is disenfranchised economically, politically, or socially. Thus Atlantic magazine for December 1972 observed: “The Jewish, the Italian and the Irish people were the niggers of the white world” (91). The major Irish novelist Roddy Doyle concurred in The Commitments: “The Irish are the niggers of Europe, lads” (1987, 13).

The extensive treatments in the Dictionary of American Regional English and in the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang (1997) bring out both the complexity of usage and the term’s problematic origins. The second source argues that nigger is not, as is commonly claimed, “originally a mispronunciation of Negro,” but an independent early modern English term derived from Latin niger, “black.” It also observes: “The historical record epitomized here … suggests that the high degree of offensiveness attached to the term per se, particularly in the discourse of whites, has increased markedly over time, perhaps especially during the 20th century.” Of many instances, James Agate’s comment “This was nigger Shakespeare” in his review of Paul Robeson’s role as Othello in 1930 is especially notorious (1943, 287). The contemptuous quality of the term is reflected not simply in the main word but in the great number of compounds and idioms, such as nigger gin (ca. 1890>), niggerhead (tobacco, ca. 1809>), nigger heaven (the topmost balcony in a theater (ca. 1866>), and nigger lover (ca. 1856>). All such uses, many of them in currency for a century and a half, are marked “usually considered offensive” in Random House.

The high degree of offensiveness of the term has not always been registered in dictionary usage labels, as is shown in the following table:

The trend from acceptance to condemnation is obvious, especially in the American dictionaries. The turning point clearly occurred in the 1960s, a time of increased racial sensitivity and the Civil Rights Movement. In the racially charged atmosphere of the trial of O.J. Simpson, the New York Times reported that Mr. Darden, a black member of the prosecution team, “his voice trembling, added that the ‘N—word’ was so vile that he would not utter it. It’s the filthiest, dirtiest, nastiest word in the English language.” (January 14, 1995, 7).

Although nigger is still found in British English, it has diminished in currency in the face of an increasing taboo. H.W. Fowler’s Modern English Usage (1926) clearly regarded the term as being insulting, not per se, but when used of other races: “applied to others than full or partial negroes, is felt as an insult by the person described.” Eric Partridge showed a mixture of accuracy and insensitivity in Usage and Abusage (first published in 1947 and revised up to 1980): “Nigger belongs only, and then in contempt or fun, to the dark-skinned African races and their descendants in America and the West Indies. Its application to the native people of India is ignorant and offensive.”

There is a different dynamic in Caribbean usage, as Frederic Cassidy, the noted authority on Jamaican English, has observed: “The feeling of the Jamaican Negro that he was far above the African is reflected still in many expressions. The word niega, which the OED enters under neger, but which is usually spelled nayga or naygur in the dialect literature, is used by black people to condemn those of their own colour…. Naygur is often tantamount to ‘good for nothing’ and neegrish is ‘mean and dispicable'” (1961, 156-57).

Although the word no longer features in other global varieties, it was previously a basic term used to demean black people in the colonial era. Thus the first white settlers to Australia (from 1788) used nigger of the aborigine population in the nineteenth century, but this usage has since steadily declined, having been replaced by abo and boong. Surprisingly, the Australian National Dictionary (1988) carries no usage label, although the early quotations are openly racist and hostile. Thus G.C. Lefroy wrote in 1845: “It is shocking … to see a fine young fellow cut off by the odious detestable niggers” (in C.T. Stannage, ed., The New History of Western Australia 1981, 95). There are also references from 1901 to “nigger hunts” (originally used in America from the mid-nineteenth century to refer to hunts for escaped slaves).

The same pattern occurred in South Africa. In his major collection Africandersims (1913) the Rev. Charles Pettman noted that the word was “a term of contempt widely applied to people of coloured blood, and as a rule vigorously resented by them.” He carried a quotation from Olive Schreiner’s powerful anticolonialist visionary novel Trooper Peter Halkett (1897), in which British soldiers “talk of the niggers they had shot, or the kraals [villages] they had destroyed” (20). Since then nigger has steadily declined in usage, the dominant insulting terms for black people having become munt, and the highly offensive kaffir.