Tutnese (also known as Tut and Tutahash) is an
argot
A cant is the jargon or language of a group, often employed to exclude or mislead people outside the group.McArthur, T. (ed.) ''The Oxford Companion to the English Language'' (1992) Oxford University Press It may also be called a cryptolect, argo ...
created by
enslaved African Americans based on
African-American Vernacular English as a method to covertly teach and learn spelling and reading.
Language rules
In Tutnese,
vowel
A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (leng ...
s are pronounced normally,
but each
consonant
In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are and pronounced with the lips; and pronounced with the front of the tongue; and pronounced wi ...
is replaced with a different syllable. The linguistics journal ''
American Speech
''American Speech'' is a quarterly academic journal of the American Dialect Society, established in 1925 and currently published by Duke University Press. It focuses primarily on the English language used in the Western Hemisphere, but also publis ...
'' published the following table detailing syllables that replace consonants in Tutnese:
A different set of syllables for the Tutahash language game had appeared in ''
The New York Times Magazine
''The New York Times Magazine'' is an American Sunday magazine supplement included with the Sunday edition of ''The New York Times''. It features articles longer than those typically in the newspaper and has attracted many notable contributors. ...
'' several decades earlier, and the author noted the similarities between Tutahash and the "Double Dutch" language game, which he claimed to be the third most widely spoken language game in the United States when he was writing in 1944, but he also indicated several differences between the two, detailed in the following table:
Double letters in a word, rather than being repeated, are preceded by the syllable ''square''
or ''squa'' to indicate doubling. For doubled vowels, the prefix becomes ''squat'' instead—thus, ''OO'' would be spoken as ''squat-oh''.
For example, "tree" becomes ''"Tutrugsquatee"'' and "I took a walk to the park yesterday" becomes "''I tutsquatohkuck a wackalulkuck tuto tuthashe pubarugkuck yubesustuterugdudayub''."
While spaces between words are always ignored, at least one "dialect" of the language requires that the first syllable of the name of any given punctuation mark be spoken, thus a
full stop (period) is ''Per'', a question mark is ''Que'' (''Kway'' or ''Kay'', varies), and a comma is ''Com''.
History
Enslaved African Americans were not permitted to read or write, and could be severely punished if they were discovered to be literate. African Americans in the southeastern United States created Tutnese to covertly teach spelling and reading.
Some used it in the presence of authority figures, such as slave masters or police.
After
the abolishment of slavery it became legal for freed
African-Americans
African Americans (also referred to as Black Americans and Afro-Americans) are an ethnic group consisting of Americans with partial or total ancestry from sub-Saharan Africa. The term "African American" generally denotes descendants of enslav ...
to learn to read and write, thus Tutnese fell out of practice for many. Since one of the main reasons Tutnese was created was for enslaved African Americans to learn to read and write, over time the language naturally was spoken by fewer people.
In the mid-1990s, Gloria McIlwain published an academic article and a book on the Tut language. In 2021, Tutnese gained traction on social media platforms, including
Discord
Discord is a VoIP and instant messaging social platform. Users have the ability to communicate with voice calls, video calls, text messaging, media and files in private chats or as part of communities called "servers".The developer documenta ...
,
Google Classroom and
TikTok
TikTok, known in China as Douyin (), is a short-form video hosting service owned by the Chinese company ByteDance. It hosts user-submitted videos, which can range in duration from 15 seconds to 10 minutes.
TikTok is an international version o ...
. For some social media users, learning Tutnese was a way perpetuate African American traditions and culture. The social media discourse around Tutnese also saw debate over
gatekeeping
A gatekeeper is a person who controls access to something, for example via a city gate or bouncer, or more abstractly, controls who is granted access to a category or status. Gatekeepers assess who is "in or out", in the classic words of manage ...
the language game, with some advocating for its being shared only in closed groups among African Americans whose ancestors were enslaved in the United States while others promoted public sharing of the game and its rules to reach as many African Americans as possible.
There is a version used in some parts of the United States called Yuckish or Yukkish, which uses more or less the same constructs.
Literary mentions
In
Ernest Thompson Seton's book ''Two Little Savages'', the protagonist, Yan, learns the "Tutnee" language game from another boy at camp and tries to teach it to his friends Sam and Giles. Seton presents Tutnee alongside many Native American stereotypes but does not mention its African American origin.
Maya Angelou mentions learning Tutnese as a child in ''
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
''I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings'' is a 1969 autobiography describing the young and early years of American writer and poet Maya Angelou. The first in a seven-volume series, it is a coming-of-age story that illustrates how strength of charact ...
'', the first volume of her series of autobiographies. She and her friend Louise "spent tedious hours teaching ourselves the Tut language. You (yak oh you) know (kack nug oh wug) what (wack hash a tut). Since all the other children spoke Pig Latin, we were superior because Tut was hard to speak and even harder to understand. At last I began to understand what girls giggled about. Louise would rattle off a few sentences to me in the unintelligible Tut language and would laugh. Naturally I laughed too. Snickered, really, understanding nothing. I don't think she understood half of what she was saying herself, but, after all, girls have to giggle..."
See also
*
Gibberish (language game)
*
Leet
Leet (or "1337"), also known as eleet or leetspeak, is a system of modified spellings used primarily on the Internet. It often uses character replacements in ways that play on the similarity of their glyphs via reflection or other resemblance. ...
*
Pig Latin
Pig Latin is a language game or argot in which words in English are altered, usually by adding a fabricated suffix or by moving the onset or initial consonant or consonant cluster of a word to the end of the word and adding a vocalic syllable ...
*
Rövarspråket
*
Verlan
() is a type of argot in the French language, featuring inversion of syllables in a word, and is common in slang and youth language. It rests on a long French tradition of transposing syllables of individual words to create slang words. The wor ...
References
{{reflist
Language games
English-based argots