12 uses
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Definition
relating to a city
- Surfer Dude or Valley Girl, the urban black language of hip-hop artists, or any of a dozen other regional or ethnic dialects that together constitute American English—some of them barely intelligible to one another?Introduction (48% in)
- While newcomers adopt Texanisms, urban natives are abandoning some—for instance, dropping the pen /pin similarity, even as it's becoming more common in the rest of the country.four — This Ain't Your Mama's South Anymore (96% in)
- Rural Texans may still say tin cints, but not urban Texans.four — This Ain't Your Mama's South Anymore (97% in)
- Those features, and many subtler ones, are the speech of the urban ghettos.six — Bad-mouthing Black English (5% in)
- But the younger the Springville African Americans they studied, the more the speech began to resemble urban black speech of today.six — Bad-mouthing Black English (31% in)
- These insights led Bailey and Cukor -Avila to conclude that urban black speech appeared to be diverging from rather than converging with white speech, as a result of the great black migration to the North.six — Bad-mouthing Black English (33% in)
- Whatever its evolution, urban black culture has from its earliest days had a profound influence on the popular culture of white America.six — Bad-mouthing Black English (40% in)
- ... I didn't want to sound 'lame' and, as I had observed 'on the corner,' most of the 'cool brothers' could 'talk the talk'—and those who exhibited urban eloquence never did so in standard English.six — Bad-mouthing Black English (48% in)
- He says that hip-hop guards its "street-conscious" identity, using "slang" to connect with African Americans but standard English grammar to appeal to the white audience: "Many hip hop artists know that white suburban fans are attracted to those artists that maintain a core Black urban audience.six — Bad-mouthing Black English (85% in)
- She believes that the kind of masculinity portrayed is especially appealing: "The urban black male represents someone who knows how to pick up women, who knows how to handle himself on the street, who perhaps knows how to handle a weapon and can take care of himself, and so for the white suburban male these kinds of symbols, this kind of way of walking or talking or dressing, can give one the trappings of a masculinity that doesn't perhaps exist in the safe white suburbs.six — Bad-mouthing Black English (91% in)
- Whatever the psychological motivation, the craze has shoveled a lot of urban black street talk into Mainstream American.six — Bad-mouthing Black English (92% in)
- Since skateboarders consider themselves "urban guerrillas" because they like to go out and skate everything in the street, some cities have banned the sport except in specially created parks.seven — Language from a State of Change (56% in)
There are no more uses of "urban" in Do You Speak American?.
Typical Usage
(best examples)