The appropriation of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) is well documented across media including music (Eberhardt & Freeman, 2016), advertising (Roth-Gordon et al., 2020), and film (Bucholtz & Lopez, 2011). More recently, scholars have also documented the commodification of AAVE in social media (Ilbury, 2019).

Taking this as a point of departure, this paper explores recent developments in the appropriation of AAVE features and their subsequent ‘recontextualisation’ (Bauman & Briggs, 1990) as elements of an “internet vernacular” in Western social media. To do this, we analyse prevalent metalinguistic discourses of linguistic appropriation in a corpus of 300 English-language videos that contain related hashtags (e.g., #AAVE, #GenZLanguage) on TikTok.

We first consider the linguistic features of AAVE that are said to typify this ‘internet vernacular’. We find that, overwhelmingly, users focus on lexis and phrases that originate from AAVE and the queer community (‘slay’, ‘serving cunt’, ‘she ate it up’), as opposed to phonological or grammatical features. We then consider the framing of AAVE as an ‘internet vernacular’ and ‘Gen Z language’. Through this analysis, we identify two main competing metapragmatic discourses. On the one hand, a concern mainly from Black creators regarding the indexical ‘erasure’ (Irvine & Gal, 2000) of AAVE as a variety of English habitually spoken by African Americans. And, on the other, an argument mainly made by White users who frame the recontextualisation as a natural process of ‘diffusion’. We critically examine these discourses by employing a raciolinguistic lens (Rosa & Flores, 2017) arguing that, in the participatory contexts of social media, the circulation of such discourses and practices pose an issue for the sociolinguistic vitality of AAVE and its enregisterment as a ‘Black variety’ of English.

Concluding, we argue that understanding the appropriation and recontextualisation of AAVE is necessary in exploring contemporary patterns of youth interaction.