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In the English language, the word "nigger" is an ethnic slur, usually directed at black people. The word originated as a neutral term referring to people with black skin,〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=nigger (n.) )〕 as a variation of the Spanish and Portuguese noun ''negro'', a descendant of the Latin adjective ''niger'' ("black"). It was often used disparagingly, and by the mid-twentieth century, particularly in the United States, its usage became unambiguously pejorative, a racist insult. Accordingly, it began to disappear from popular culture, and its continued inclusion in classic works of literature has sparked controversy. In the contemporary United States and United Kingdom, using the word is taboo, and it is often replaced with the euphemism "the N-word". "Nigga" is sometimes used among African Americans in a non-derogatory sense or as a term of endearment. ==Etymology and history== (詳細はLatin ラテン語:''niger'' (black) (pronounced which, in every other grammatical case, grammatical gender, and grammatical number besides nominative masculine singular, is ''nigr-'', the ''r'' is trilled). In the Colonial America of 1619, John Rolfe used ''negars'' in describing the African slaves shipped to the Virginia colony.〔 (Book review)〕 Later American English spellings, ''neger'' and ''neggar'', prevailed in a northern colony, New York under the Dutch, and in metropolitan Philadelphia's Moravian and Pennsylvania Dutch communities; the African Burial Ground in New York City originally was known by the Dutch name "Begraafplaats van de Neger" (Cemetery of the Negro); an early US occurrence of ''neger'' in Rhode Island, dates from 1625. An alternative word for African Americans was the English word, "Black", used by Thomas Jefferson in his Notes on the State of Virginia. Among Anglophones, the word ''nigger'' was not always considered derogatory, because it then denoted "black-skinned", a common Anglophone usage.〔''The Oxford English Reference Dictionary'', second edition, (1996) p. 981〕 Nineteenth-century English (language) literature features usages of ''nigger'' without racist connotation, e.g. the Joseph Conrad novella ''The Nigger of the 'Narcissus''' (1897). Moreover, Charles Dickens and Mark Twain created characters who used the word as contemporary usage. Twain, in the autobiographic book ''Life on the Mississippi'' (1883), used the term within quotes, indicating reported usage, but used the term "negro" when speaking in his own narrative persona. During the fur trade of the early 1800s to the late 1840s in the Western United States, the word was spelled "niggur", and is often recorded in literature of the time. George Fredrick Ruxton often included the word as part of the "mountain man" lexicon, and did not indicate that the word was pejorative at the time. "Niggur" was evidently similar to the modern use of dude, or guy. This passage from Ruxton's Life in the Far West illustrates a common use of the word in spoken form—the speaker here referring to himself: "Travler, marm, this niggur's no travler; I ar' a trapper, marm, a mountain-man, wagh!" It was not used as a term exclusively for blacks among mountain men during this period, as Indians, Mexicans, and Frenchmen and Anglos alike could be a "niggur". Linguistically, in developing American English, in the early editions of ''A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language'' (1806), lexicographer Noah Webster suggested the ''neger'' new spelling in place of ''negro''.〔〕 By the 1900s, ''nigger'' had become a pejorative word. In its stead, the term ''colored'' became the mainstream alternative to ''negro'' and its derived terms. Abolitionists in Boston, Massachusetts, posted warnings to the ''Colored People of Boston and vicinity''. Writing in 1904, journalist Clifton Johnson documented the "opprobrious" character of the word ''nigger'', emphasizing that it was chosen in the South precisely because it was more offensive than "colored." Established as mainstream American English usage, the word ''colored'' features in the organizational title of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, reflecting the members' racial identity preference at the 1909 foundation. In the Southern United States, the local American English dialect changes the pronunciation of ''negro'' to ''nigra''. By the late 1960s, the social change achieved by groups in the United States such as the Civil Rights Movement (1955–68), had legitimized the racial identity word ''black'' as mainstream American English usage to denote black-skinned Americans of African ancestry. In the 1990s, "Black" was displaced in favor of the compound blanket term ''African American''. Moreover, as a compound word, ''African American'' resembles the vogue word ''Afro-American'', an early-1970s popular usage. Currently, some black Americans continue to use the word ''nigger'', often spelled as ''nigga'' and ''niggah'', without irony, either to neutralize the word's impact or as a sign of solidarity.〔Allan, Keith. The Pragmatics of Connotation. Journal of Pragmatics 39:6 (June 2007) 1047–57〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「nigger」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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