Is “Finna” a Real Word?

A pseudonymous Twitter user earned her fifteen minutes of fame this month, which she probably didn’t want, when she shared this specious claim:

“Finna” is not a real word
“Finna” is not a real word
“Finna” is not a real word
“Finna” is not a real word

— JayJ. 🦋 (@Jayy_wealth) February 29, 2020

Look, I get it. People who spend years mastering the inner nuances of English, feel squeamish when neologisms crop up. Respected eminences of written English, like Oscar Wilde and Ambrose Bierce, wrote entire books attempting to stop English from changing. Authors like Henry Watson Fowler, Bryan Garner, and Strunk & White, even invented new rules that didn’t previously exist, to stop what they considered a rapid slide into pop mumbling.

But something about the claim that “finna” isn’t a real word cheeses me off to an unusual degree. Certainly, the word comes from Black English, which is always policed more harshly than my Honky academese. Also, the word’s root comes from “fixing to,” a term that almost exclusively exists in Southern American English, which always gets treated as inferior by Northerners, Whites, and people with credentials.

I probably shouldn’t bring race into the discussion, since the specious tweet’s author is Black herself. But it bears repeating that many words which originated in Black English, including “bae,” “YOLO,” and “on fleek,” were actively discouraged by the word police for years, until White people adopted them. The imprimatur of whiteness often marks the boundary between Proper English and disparaged slang, which seems clearly unfair.

Yet I feel something more visceral than a programmed response about racial fairness and English credentials. I remember Fourth Grade, when a classmate told me, with the smugness only pre-tweens can truly muster: “‘Ain’t’ ain’t a word, because ‘ain’t’ ain’t in the dictionary.” I had multiple problems with this: first, a quick check proved the word “ain’t” actually was in the classroom dictionary. Don’t use proverbs anyone can quickly disprove.

Second, it makes the dictionary the arbiter of “real” words. The reality of words, whether casual 19th-Century Britishisms like “ain’t” or recent AAVE inventions like “finna,” isn’t dependent on some lexicographer somewhere. Dictionary writers respond to regular English, they don’t create it.

Besides the regional origins of “fixing to,” a phrase I still occasionally use despite not having lived in the South since 1987, the mixed racial aspect is pointed. If you’re White reading this, please, try saying “fixing to,” making sure to pronounce every letter as written. You’ll notice it’s quite difficult. The vowels slide all over your tongue, and the consonants shift from the back to front to sides of your mouth.

That’s why White Southerners already reduced it to “fix’-ǝn tǝ.” They already simplified the pronunciation, to make it slide off the mouth more easily. Which, if you’ve ever studied linguistics (or learned Sindarin, like a nerd), you already know humans everywhere do. Words which involve tongue gymnastics always get slimmed down. The Black version of this term, “finna,” does the same by removing the harsh consonants, leaving a more liquid form.

This process of converting existing phrases into neologisms matters. It’s the difference between describing how people already talk, and prescribing how people should talk. And this is always about power. In both Plato’s Athens, and Vergil’s Rome, powerful people tried to institute rules about how “real” Greek or Latin, respectively, could be spoken. These rules weren’t idle. In both cases, these rules were invented to weed out foreigners.

In exactly the same way, rules about “correct” English are designed to exclude Blacks, immigrants, and teenagers. Until you learn the code of powerful people, these rules insist, you have no right to participate, so shut up. This includes my tweeter, a Black woman enforcing a rule against Black English. My classmate who hated “ain’t” didn’t love grammar for grammar’s sake. Her main goal was to pass as an adult.

I’ve written about this before, and recently, too. Real English is always positional. Anybody pitching hard-and-fast rules doesn’t really want to police English, they want to police people, and protect a hierarchy, where they see themselves at or near the top. Anybody who thinks “finna” is fake English, but is okay with tech neologisms like “spam” and “google,” is enforcing a stratification of which groups get to invent words.

Somehow, “permitted” groups always look like me.

Claims about what makes “real words” are never, fundamentally, about words. They’re about what constitutes a real person, a person permitted to participate in public discussion and upwardly mobile economics. Attempts to silence fake words are attempts to disqualify people, and people groups, from community life. And they protect the arguer’s sanctimonious self-image, at somebody else’s expense.