You're viewing YouTube in. You can change this preference below ||||| Philadelphia’s CBS 3 investigated the origins of the term “jawn” in a super educational segment that aired on Monday night. 
 
 This interesting analysis of “jawn” was part of the station’s nightly series, “Good Questions,” hosted by local anchor Nicole Brewer. The question of the night this time: “What is jawn?” 
 
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 Good question. Before querying the people of Philly about “jawn,” Brewer immediately qualifies the report by stating, “If you’re from Philly, especially born and raised, you probably know the answer, right? But maybe you’re wondering how it got started.” 
 
 According to people on the streets of Philly, “jawn” is basically just a noun. Some very specific responses: 
 
 “Jawn. It means anything you want it to mean.” “It’s like a noun. Like a person, place or a thing.” “It’s a thing.” “It’s a Philly thing.” 
 
 
 
 Anything can be a “jawn.” In her breakdown of the term, Brewer exclaims at one point, “You can even eat a jawn.” 
 
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 Of course, we can’t just leave it at that. Taylor Jones, a linguistics Ph.d. candidate at U. Penn, explains: “‘Jawn’ is something that as far as we can tell originated from the word ‘joint.’ It goes back to at least the 1980s.” 
 
 It’s a good question for anyone who’s a Philly transplant or clueless non-local. CBS’s “jawn” report shows a clip from Creed where Tessa Thompson’s character briefly dissects its meaning to Michael B. Jordan’s character. 
 
 
 
 “Very interesting!” says one anchor, to finish off this equally entertaining and wince-inducing segment. ||||| This collection ocuments websites and social media related to authors, playwrights, and other literary figures and organizations which complement and enrich existing literary collections held in Special Collections. This collection includes sites related to University of Delaware Library holdings in American literature; Irish literature; and theater. ||||| The Grammy Awards were on CBS last night, but in Philadelphia the real prize was what was on the local news afterward. The station promoted it throughout the evening: As part of Nicole Brewer‘s new Good Question series, she explored the existential question that’s been bothering all Philadelphians for centuries: “What is jawn?” 
 
 The report went on pretty early in the broadcast, which started late because the Grammys went over. The news opened with weather (naturally), then reported on the LSD busts at Villanova and the norovirus outbreak at Ursinus. After a Grammys recap, Brewer’s report on jawn was next. 
 
 CBS 3 hasn’t put the segment online, but here’s a short recap: Brewer went out on the streets to ask Philadelphians what “jawn” means. As we all know, it’s most likely a corruption of “joint” and can basically mean any object, person or place. Brewer talks to a Penn linguistics Ph.D candidate who explains that the move from “jawn” to mean a cool thing (as in “That’s the Joint”) to mean anything is called semantic bleaching. Neat! 
 
 Also, Brewer discussed the idea of a “side jawn.” Yes, this is someone you sleep with who isn’t your primary partner. 
 
 While jawn can mean anything, it can still be used incorrectly — or at least in a way that sounds ridiculous. When Brewer asks Philadelphians to use the word in a sentence, the two white dudes she interviews come up with “it’s raining like a jawn outside” and “my pockets are full of jawn.” Fortunately, the black woman she interviews gives a proper usage of it in a sentence: “Did you see that jawn right there?” We knew it. 
 
 CBS 3 shook up its newsroom over the summer. People like Chris May, Kathy Orr and Beasley Reece all departed in one day, while longtime staffers like Carol Erickson and Pat Ciarrocchi left the station. The station appears to be trying to get younger and hipper in an attempt to reach more viewers. The “Good Question” segment, which Brewer began doing in late January, is one of those segments. It seems to have worked a little, if online chatter is any indication. 
 
 Despite reports to the contrary, “jawn” is not dead despite its extended appearance in Creed last year. I base this on anecdotal evidence, but it’s pretty strong: All of my girlfriend’s students at a middle school in Chester use it frequently. 
 
 People are trying, but that jawn can’t be killed. 
 
 Follow @dhm on Twitter. ||||| In Philadelphia, “jawn” can mean just about anything. Aïda Amer 
 
 Taylor Jones, a Ph.D. student at the University of Pennsylvania, was unfamiliar with the bizarre stew of linguistic quirks in Philadelphia when he first started school there. An army brat, it seems like Jones grew up everywhere but eastern Pennsylvania. But one of his first interactions with legendary Penn linguist Bill Labov started him on the road to understanding his new city. 
 
 “My introduction to graduate work was being asked about ‘jawn,’” says Jones. 
 
 As with its architecture, Philadelphia’s accent, syntax, and vocabulary are rarely discussed outside of the city. Words, phrases, and structures have just about the same geographical span as a peanut chew or a Tastykake. Linguists have long been fascinated by the peculiar mid-Atlantic mutations of words such as “water” and “creek” (in Philadelphia parlance, “wooder” and “crick”) and an unusual lexicon that includes words such as “hoagie” and “jimmies” (a sub sandwich and sprinkles, respectively), but nothing has captivated them quite like “jawn.” 
 
 The word “jawn” is unlike any other English word. In fact, according to the experts that I spoke to, it’s unlike any other word in any other language. It is an all-purpose noun, a stand-in for inanimate objects, abstract concepts, events, places, individual people, and groups of people. It is a completely acceptable statement in Philadelphia to ask someone to “remember to bring that jawn to the jawn.” 
 
 It is a word without boundaries or limits. Growing up in the suburbs just west of the city, I heard it used mostly to refer to objects and events. In the 2015 movie Creed, a character asks a sandwich maker to “put some onions on that jawn.” But it can get much more complex. It can refer to abstract nouns such as theories; a colleague of Jones routinely refers to “Marxist jawn.” It can also refer to people or groups of people. “Side-jawn,” meaning a someone with whom the speaker cheats on his or her significant other, “is a uniquely Philly thing as far as I can tell,” says Jones. “And not something you want to be.” 
 
 “Jawn” can be singular: “pass me that jawn.” It can be plural, and in a couple of different ways. “Jawns” is fine, but you can also modify “jawn” elsewhere. “You can say ‘jawns,’ but more often it’s going to be, like, ‘Where’d you get them jawn,’” says Jones. It can be negative or positive or neutral depending on context. 
 
 It is a magical word, and did not come about in a vacuum. The rise of “jawn” dovetails with breakthroughs in the study of American linguistics itself. What we know about our ever-evolving speech patterns can, in part, be seen through this one weird word. 
 
 Citizens Bank Park could also be called a jawn. Jessica Rossi/CC BY-SA 2.0 
 
 So let’s start at the beginning: Where does “jawn” come from? 
 
 “The consensus is that it came from ‘joint,’ and from New York,” says Jones. Ben Zimmer, a linguist and language columnist who’s written and talked about “jawn” before, agrees, writing in an email that “‘jawn’ evidently developed as a Philly variant of ‘joint’ in the ’80s,” following the release of the popular 1981 single “That’s the Joint” by Funky Four Plus One, an early hip-hop group from the Bronx. 
 
 This infuriates Philadelphians, who generally are very proud of their city and culture and most certainly do not want to think that one of their city’s most distinctive words might have a New York origin. Jones told me that he once expressed the New York consensus theory on the local Philadelphia CBS affiliate and “people were furious, writing angry tweets.” Sorry Philadelphians, but the linguists are pretty sure “jawn” comes from New York. Luckily, it’s far outstripped its roots since its move south. 
 
 The word “joint” has a much older set of meanings. Originally from the Latin iunctus, it was Old French that turned it into “joint,” meaning a connection or association, multiple things coming together, a juncture. The definition broadened in the American South around the time of emancipation, with the prominence of “juke joints,” bars and clubs that served as safe spaces for black Americans to come together and hang out. The concept of a joint as a place expanded a bit, and is still in use today; think of a pizza joint. 
 
 The Liberty Bell. Public Domain 
 
 There are a few other meanings of “joint,” the drug slang being the most common. Since “joint” was used already as a place, and specifically, in the minds of some Americans, a disreputable place, it came to be used for other disreputable places: betting parlors at first, then opium dens. The opium joint led to the word becoming kind of a general purpose slang in the drug world for paraphernalia, and by the 1950s the word was firmly and commonly understood to refer to a cigarette-like roll of marijuana. 
 
 Funky Four Plus One’s use, though, is one of the earliest recorded uses of the word as a kind of general, positive term. Calling something “the joint” means it’s something you like, something that you connect with, and a slight tweak of that to “my joint” means that it’s something that you cheerfully embrace as yours. 
 
 In Philadelphia, a phenomenon occurred, first with the word “joint” and later with its mutation “jawn,” known in the linguistic community as “semantic bleaching.” The term refers to a word that originally has one or a small number of specific meanings, but then eventually loses the shades of meaning and becomes something much more broad and general. An example would be “awesome,” which originally meant “inspiring awe or fear,” and was used more often to refer to scary things rather than good things. 
 
 Usually semantic bleaching works like that, little chips at a word’s original meaning. But “joint/jawn,” in Philly, has come to be so broad as to encompass basically anything. 
 
 Sorry Philadelphians, but the linguists are pretty sure “jawn” comes from New York. 
 
 There are a few instances where “jawn” can be used but “joint,” in, say, New York, cannot. “In Philly you can say ‘I have a lot of jawn to do for school,’” says Jones. “You can’t say in New York, ‘I have a lot of joint to do.’” Neither Jones nor I have ever heard “joint” used to refer to people or groups of people; typically it’s for objects or items. “Joint” is like a lesser “jawn.” It tries, but it has limits. 
 
 Thanks to a few key linguists, we have some actual hard data on the very important era in Philadelphia when “jawn” began to take hold. Bill Labov, starting in the 1970s, began to make systematic recordings of speakers in Philadelphia, a project that would eventually become the Philadelphia Neighborhood Corpus. It is, as the site says, “by far the largest single sociolinguistic corpus of any speech community.” Neighborhood by neighborhood, person by person, linguists blanketed Philadelphia and recorded thousands of hours of Philadelphians speaking. 
 
 One such recording, from 1981, is of paramount interest to Jones and other jawn-philes. A young black male from a West Philly neighborhood was recorded using what’s probably an in-between point in the evolution of “jawn.” He used the word “joint,” but the ways in which he used that word are completely in tune with the way “jawn” is used in Philadelphia today, much more broad than the way “joint” was used in New York either then or now. “He used it to mean a bag, like a bag of chips; a physical place; a variety of different women, like Puerto Rican joints versus Irish joints; and his own genitalia,” says Jones. 
 
 This meaning of joint was at least understood by the interviewer, who didn’t have to, you know, stop this guy and say, “Wait, what the hell are you talking about,” so it’s possible that this insanely thorough semantic bleaching took hold a little while before the interview, sometime in the late 1970s. 
 
 Race also plays a big role in the word’s evolution and usage. White Philadelphians, notes Jones, are quick to note that they too use the word “jawn,” and that it’s a Philly thing and not just a black Philly thing. The data from the Philadelphia Neighborhood Corpus is a little outdated, Jones thinks, to make a definitive statement either way, but he opined white Philadephians seem to use it in a more limited way, not really exploring its full breadth and range. 
 
 Not so with the city’s black population. 
 
 The advent of African-American Vernacular English, or AAVE, dovetails with “jawn” in some pretty important ways. Until the 1960s and early 1970s, the way black Americans speak was seen as simply an incorrect version of standard, meaning white, American English. One of, perhaps the most, important pioneer who broke down that assumption in the linguistic community was Bill Labov. (He did not respond to a request for an interview; Jones, who has studied with him, says he’s “enjoying his retirement.”) 
 
 In 1969, Labov published a revolutionary paper, “A Study of Non-Standard English,” which argued that the way black Americans speak, with some slight geographic variation, is an English dialect that mathematically follows the same rules as any other English dialect. The alterations from standard American English are consistent and can be understood by any speaker, and the history of black people in this country provides a historical basis for isolation, which can produce these kinds of systematic changes in language. In other words, the way black people speak isn’t wrong or lesser; it’s just a different dialect, as legitimate as any other. It’s hard to overstate the importance of that study. He called it BEV, Black English Vernacular, at the time, but it’s now known as AAVE. 
 
 Labov’s work provoked an explosion of interest in AAVE in the 1970s, and though New York became perhaps the most important study location, it was Philadelphia, where Labov worked, that created the Corpus, the best collection of AAVE recordings in history. And it was right around then that Philadelphians started saying “jawn.” 
 
 The word “joint” has been modified more than once; in Washington, DC, there’s a version that sounds more like “jont” or “jahnt,” and in Memphis, there’s one that’s somewhere between “jaint” and “jeent.” But in Philadelphia, the change from “joint” to “jawn” followed a few pretty standard AAVE rules. 
 
 It is a completely acceptable statement in Philadelphia to ask someone to “remember to bring that jawn to the jawn.” 
 
 The vowel sound in “joint” is a diphthong, meaning it’s two smaller vowel sounds that act like a single vowel sound. “The first vowel in ‘oi,’ for most people, is the same vowel in ‘jawn,’ an ‘aw’ sound,” says Jones. I stopped him here: Isn’t that first part of that vowel more like “oh”? Isn’t the diphthong a combination of “oh” and “ee”? Joh-ee-nt? 
 
 Nope, says Jones. “In IPA,” the International Phonetic Alphabet, which transcribes sounds as letters, “it’s represented as ‘aw’ ‘ih,’” he says. “It feels like it’s ‘oh’ ‘ee,’ but phonetically, that’s not actually how we tend to pronounce it. If you take measurements of people’s speech, it tends to be something closer to ‘aw’ and to ‘ih.’” Okay then: Jaw-ih-nt. 
 
 Another element: “African-American English often, but not always, does a thing where final P, T, and K become a glottal stop,” says Jones. Glottal stops are pretty hard to hear; they’re not all that common in American English, though they’re extremely common in British English. It’s kind of a very soft consonant made by the closing of your throat. The classic example is the sound in the middle of the word “uh-oh.” Many Brits, and some New Yorkers, will also throw a glottal stop in the middle of words like “button” and “mountain,” so the former becomes “buh-uhn.” 
 
 Eliminating the final consonant and turning it into a glottal stop is something that happens in AAVE with certain combinations of sounds; you can hear it here when noted Canadian idiot Nardwuar asks rapper Travis Scott how he keeps his pants up. His answer? “Belt.” 
 
 You can hear in the song “That’s the Joint” that, sometimes, the first part of that vowel sound is lengthened in enthusiasm. It’s more like “jaaawwwwweent.” And because so much of that word is now taken up by the “aw” sound, and the final consonant is basically negated because it’s now a glottal stop, the diphthong is now more like a monophthong. Hence: “joint” becomes “jawn.” 
 
 View of Center City from Philadelphia Museum of Art steps. Jeffrey M. Vinocur/CC BY 2.5 
 
 But why did this happen in Philly? Why is Philly, of all places, home to this most bizarre of words? 
 
 “That’s the $64,000 question,” Jones laughs. Asking a linguist “why” anything happens is usually a quick way to elicit a shrug. Jones, more than most other linguists I’ve talked to, seems interested in the “why,” but is equally powerless to find an answer; “how,” “what,” and “when” are much more concrete beginnings of questions for linguists. But there are some theories. 
 
 The specific lengthening of “aw” in Philadelphia is possibly because of the one major similarity that Philadelphia has with New York, linguistically: “ah” sounds are often changed to an exaggerated “aw,” in words like “caught.” (New Yorkers are more extreme, with their “cauu-ffee,” but Philadelphians do this, too.) Further south, in DC and Memphis, the New York influence is lessened, and so while they also changed the sound of the word “joint,” they did it in different, more Southern ways. 
 
 A possibility is that the mutation happened in such an extreme way because Philadelphia is, in some ways, an extreme kind of place. A feature from 538 placed Philadelphia as the fourth-most racially segregated major city in the country, behind only Chicago, Atlanta, and Milwaukee. Jones says that it’s possible that Philadelphia’s segregation encouraged the changing and adoption of “jawn;” black Philadelphians and white Philadelphians don’t mingle nearly as much as, say, black New Yorkers and white New Yorkers, so a word created or altered in the black community can develop without outside influence. 
 
 Certainly, says Jones, the white and black dialects in Philly are diverging in very specific, notable ways. You can hear it in a word like “bag,” which white Philadelphians will sometimes pronounce more like “byeag,” an almost nasal, Midwest-y kind of sound. Black Philadelphians are moving more toward an “eh” sound for that vowel, so “bag” is more like “beg.” Or “backpack” becomes “beckpeck.” That change isn’t unusual in itself—those two movements are the most common changes from the standard vowel in “bag,” across the country—but the fact that white Philadelphia picked one movement and black Philadelphia picked another is just more evidence of the effect segregation has on linguistics. 
 
 Jones does say, though, that when segregation creates words like “jawn,” they usually don’t happen alone. Typically you’d find a whole class of words with similar histories, and there aren’t really any companions to “jawn” in Philadelphia. The word “point,” for example, isn’t pronounced “pawn” in black Philadelphia. 
 
 But it is possible that the meaning preceded the sound: As evidenced by that 1981 West Philly speaker, “joint” already had a meaning specific to Philadelphia, a unique feature within the various black communities in the city. So when the sound mutation happened, it only affected that one word, because only that one word was unusual enough to mean something different in Philly than it meant in New York or DC. “Jawn” isn’t “joint” pronounced with a Philly accent. Jawn is a whole world, unto itself. 
 
 This story was updated on October 10, 2018, with a new illustration and minor edits. ||||| Resignation can be either a terrible thing or one that provides great peace. When it comes to jawnsploitation, we’re leaning towards the latter camp. A reminder: Just like that beloved indie act that you remember seeing in a small room that now sells out Union Transfer before you can even gather the scratch to score a ticket, jawn no longer belongs to you. We advise you to keep this in mind as you read Atlas Obscura‘s piece “The Enduring Mystery Of ‘Jawn’, Philadelphia’s All-Purpose Noun.” What separates this one from other recent pieces also trying to unravel the, well, jawnness of jawn is how it throws the time-honored NYC vs. Philly battle into the mix, speculating that the word is a variation on the New York-centric “joint.” Ahem: 
 
 Ben Zimmer, a linguist and language columnist who’s written and talked about “jawn” before, agrees, writing in an email that “‘jawn’ evidently developed as a Philly variant of ‘joint’ in the ’80s,” following the release of the popular 1981 single “That’s The Joint” by Funky Four Plus One, an early hip-hop group from the Bronx. This infuriates Philadelphians, who generally are very proud of their city and culture and most certainly do not want to think that one of their city’s most distinctive words might have a New York origin. Jones told me that he once expressed the New York consensus theory on the local Philadelphia CBS affiliate and “people were furious, writing angry tweets.” Sorry to Philadelphians, but the linguists are pretty sure “jawn” comes from New York. Luckily, it’s far outstripped its roots since its move south. 
 
 Sigh. Can’t we just have one thing that is truly our own? Besides cheesesteaks and shame that is.
– If you've ever spent much time in Philadelphia, you've probably heard the word "jawn." But what does it mean? Local news station CBS 3 asked just that in February, and Atlas Obscura digs even deeper with local linguist Taylor Jones to get to the bottom of the "enduring mystery." Turns out that part of what makes the word so tricky to explain, and thus replicate elsewhere, is its nebulous nature—because "jawn" appears to be unlike any other word in any language, and is a stand-in for pretty much any noun, even abstract ones. As Atlas Obscura puts it, "It is a completely acceptable statement in Philadelphia to ask someone to 'remember to bring that jawn to the jawn.'" But its incredible flexibility means it's not always used in a flattering way. Think "side jawn," or a person someone is, ahem, seeing on the side. Unfortunately for many native Philadelphians, the closest word linguists have found in the evolution of "jawn" appears to be "joint," which has its roots in New York when Bronx hip hop group Funky Four Plus One released hit single "That’s The Joint" in 1981. "Sigh," laments the blog Philebrity. "Can't we just have one thing that is truly our own? Besides cheesesteaks and shame that is." Philadelphia magazine, meanwhile, notes that the word made an "extended appearance" in Creed last year, and that it's far from dead: "I base this on anecdotal evidence, but it's pretty strong: All of my girlfriend's students at a middle school in Chester use it frequently." Still confused? So are the commenters on this Jezebel thread, one of whom asks: "So it’s like 'smurf'? I've smurfed the smurf into the smurf and now the smurf is smurfing and crying on the floor. But with jawn. Something like that?" (Have you heard how Norwegians use the word "Texas"?)