Ain’t is possibly the most-maligned word in the English grammar guides. Even though many other contractions are now acceptable in all but the most formal writing, ain’t is still frowned upon in all but the most informal writing, and sometimes even there. But that hasn’t stopped it. Not only has ain’t not disappeared; it has even expanded its reach in recent years.
Let’s start at the beginning: Ain’t has been part of English for about 400 years. It was originally a contraction for am not and are not and was written an’t and a’n’t.
In their book Origins of the Specious: Myths and Misconceptions of the English Language, Patricia T. O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman, summarize ain’t’s history, and speculate on how it fell from grace:
By the early 1700s, it was also being used as a contraction for is not. And by the 1800s it was used for have not and has not, too, replacing an earlier contraction, ha’n’t. As ain’t took on more meanings, it drifted farther and farther from its roots. Contractions like can’t and don’t had clearly traceable parentage, but ain’t claimed to have so many parents that it seemed illegitimate. No wonder language authorities turned up their noses. Since the late nineteenth century, they’ve considered ain’t a crime against good English. (1)
In fact, another source even argues that the modern contractions haven’t and hasn’t were created anew to replace the ha’n’t contraction that turned into ain’t and became unacceptable. (2)
The stigmatization of ain’t is a pity, because without ain’t, there’s a gap in our system of contractions. When you negate the present tense of be and your subject is a pronoun, you usually have a choice between contracting the pronoun and the verb or the verb and the negative word. For example, you can write we’re not or we aren’t, they’re not or they aren’t, and you’re not or you aren’t. The lone exception is I, where your only choice in standard English is I’m not.
In the late 1800s, even as critics of ain’t were beginning to speak up, ain’t began to move beyond the verbs be and have and into the territory of the third major auxiliary verb in English: do. Listen to this example from 1881, which I found in the Corpus of Historical American English, from Joel Chandler Harris’s first collection of Uncle Remus stories: “Brer Rabbit look all roun’, he did, but he ain’t see no dinner.”
In standard English, the phrase ain’t see would be did not see or didn’t see. Of course, if you’re familiar with Brer Rabbit and Uncle Remus, you know that these stories were adapted from stories told by slaves, and that the English in them is a variety of African American English. The use of ain’t in place of didn’t has by and large been limited to African American English, (3) and even there, according to a 1994 study, (4) it’s much less common than using ain’t for negative forms of be and have.
The fact that ain’t can function as a negated form of be, have, or do has led some to propose (5) that in African American English, ain’t is better analyzed as a single, all-purpose negator, for singular or plural; for first, second, or third person; for present tense and past. However, that 1994 study, by Tracey Weldon, rebuts this claim. In Weldon’s speech samples, when ain’t is a negation for be, it’s always in the present tense. It never fills in for wasn’t or weren’t. The same goes for when ain’t is a negation for have. In Weldon’s samples, and in my corpus searches and personal experience, it always fills in for hasn’t or haven’t, never for hadn’t. For do, Weldon notes, ain’t always functions as a past tense, never a present tense, like the ain’t see in the Brer Rabbit example. For the present tense, she says, don’t is virtually always the preferred contraction in African American English.
However, that was 20 years ago, when the World Wide Web was only a few years old, before Google, and before the easy availability of online language corpora. These days, if you search in the Corpus of Historical American English for examples of ain’t followed by the plain form of a verb, you can see that its frequency jumps in the 2000s with a handful of verbs: know, want, and say. The same search in the Corpus of Contemporary American English brings in almost 200 examples from between 1990 and 2012, like this one from 2008: “I love her, but I ain’t wanna get married.” In that example, ain’t is replacing don’t.
Weldon’s study was also published years before the advent of social media, which has vastly increased the amount of informal and spoken English that gets put into searchable text. Today, you can search through archived tweets from Twitter’s seven years of existence, and find example after example of ain’t in place of don’t, like these:
Oh thanks but I ain’t want a carmel apple. I want a red candy apple!
I ain’t know what to do
I ain’t see my boyfriend until AT LEAST next week
Whatever the reason for the widespread disapproval of ain’t, its bad reputation is a fact, so I don’t recommend it for formal writing, except for well-known sayings such as It ain’t over till it’s over, You ain’t seen nothin’ yet, and Say it ain’t so. Still, the gradual creeping of ain’t through the negated English auxiliary verbs is fascinating to observe.
This piece was written by Neal Whitman, who has a PhD in linguistics and blogs at literalminded.wordpress.com.
Notes:
- 1. Patricia T. O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman. 2009. Origins of the Specious: Myths and Misconceptions of the English Language. p. 49.
- 2. Barbara M. H. Strang. (1970). A History of English. p.151. Cited in Walker 2005.
- 3. James A. Walker. 2005 The ain’t constraint: Not-contraction in early African American English. Language Variation and Change, 17 (2005), 1–17.
- 4. Tracey Weldon. (1994). Variability in negation in African American Vernacular English. Language Variation and Change 6:359–397.
- 5. Charles E. DeBose. (1994). A note on ain’t vs. didn’t negation in African American Vernacular. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 9:127–130. Cited in Walker 2005.