2025-04-05, Marked speech, borrowed grammar

# I. Introduction: The Withholding Grammar of the Present Contemporary English, particularly in its American institutional and digital forms, is undergoing a profound shift in how it handles agency, relation, and responsibility. This shift is not superficial. It is not a matter of jargon, slang, or changing taste. It is structural. It reflects the adaptation of language to conditions in which speaking clearly, personally, or relationally is increasingly disincentivized, politically, economically, and algorithmically. Two dominant grammatical modes now shape this linguistic field. The first is what I might call dead institutional English: a procedural, passive, agentless grammar used by governments, corporations, universities, and platforms. This language appears in public apologies, press releases, moderation statements, and official reports. It is structured to perform responsiveness while deferring causality, to acknowledge harm without naming a subject, to describe action without ethical presence.

The second mode is what I'll refer to here as meme grammar: an affectively saturated, format-driven, stylistically flexible vernacular that circulates primarily on digital platforms. It thrives on rhythm, irony, disidentification, and exaggeration. It is structurally agile, often emotionally direct, and culturally powerful. But it, too, often evades relation, not through passivity, but through simulation. Its liveliness is frequently borrowed. It performs presence using grammar extracted from living linguistic traditions, most notably African American Vernacular English (AAVE), diasporic creoles, and Indigenous languages, without retaining their histories, constraints, or obligations.

These two grammars, detached bureaucracy and stylized mimicry, may appear to be in tension. One is dry and procedural. The other is emotionally vivid and fast-moving. But both, in different ways, function as responses to a deeper crisis: the failure of dominant English to hold relational accountability under the pressures of a platformized, post-representational public sphere. In the space where relation should be named, we now find either euphemism or echo.

This paper names this condition linguistic extraction: the process by which grammatical forms built under conditions of historical pressure, forms that encode survival, positionality, and ethical presence, are lifted from their contexts and circulated as aesthetic devices within a system that does not require speakers to be present, or even to be real.

## The Argument I'll argue that this is not simply a question of style, or even of appropriation in the cultural sense. It is a question of grammatical infrastructure, and how that infrastructure is being reorganized in the wake of political, technological, and epistemic collapse.

I'll draw on theorists of language, affect, and relation to map this terrain:

From Victor Klemperer, I take the insight that authoritarian regimes rewrite agency through vocabulary and through syntax, using grammar to erase responsibility while maintaining the illusion of order.

From Hortense Spillers and Sylvia Wynter, I understand how dominant grammars are built to encode the speaking subject of whiteness as the norm, relegating other speech, particularly Black and creolized grammars, as marked, illegible, or excessive.

From Lauren Berlant, I frame dominant English as a genre of the impasse, a way of deferring confrontation by performing procedural feeling.

From Édouard Glissant and Trinh T. Minh-ha, I approach linguistic opacity as a right to refuse transparency under conditions of extraction.

From Wendy Chun and Tung-Hui Hu, I consider how platform infrastructures reshape grammar into a tool of frictionless circulation, a sentence optimized for engagement, not relation.

## The Structure The paper unfolds in seven sections:

Dead English explores the grammar of institutional detachment: its reliance on passive constructions, agentless verbs, and procedural tone.

Meme Grammar maps the emergence of digital vernaculars that simulate aliveness by borrowing affective and rhythmic patterns from historically situated grammars.

Linguistic Extraction examines how AAVE, creole, and Indigenous syntactic forms are circulated as style, while their speakers are penalized or ignored.

Platform Infrastructure analyzes how digital systems reward aestheticized simulation and penalize grammatical opacity or difference.

Speaking While Marked outlines what it means to inhabit language ethically, with attention to one’s inheritances, borrowings, and position.

Opacity and Refusal argues for the preservation of untranslatable grammars and the rejection of performance as a substitute for relation.

Conclusion offers no new grammar, only a call for accountable speech: to remain inside the sentence long enough to be answerable for it.

This is not a call to purity, nor a rejection of aesthetic play. It is a recognition that some grammars carry relation, and others simulate its trace. It is a recognition that under conditions of collapse, how we sentence the world matters, and that some grammars make room for responsibility, while others only make room for retweets.

# II. Dead English: The Grammar of Institutional Detachment The institutional sentence, whether it comes from a university, a corporation, a platform, or a government agency, follows a recognizable pattern. It is structured to appear informative while avoiding the specificity that would permit response. This language is designed to evade legibility in any relational sense.

A familiar example:

“We take these concerns seriously. Steps have been taken to address the issue.”

This construction appears neutral. It acknowledges the existence of concern, signals that action is underway, and uses a tone of procedural gravity. But its grammar removes all meaningful agency. Who took the steps? What were they? Whose issue is it? What was done? Every verb is softened, every subject obscured. The sentence completes a communicative obligation without producing an ethical position.

This is what I call dead English: language that maintains grammatical form while voiding relational function. It is language that circulates without presence.

## I. Passive Voice and the Evacuation of Agency In linguistic terms, the passive voice allows the speaker to emphasize the object of an action while omitting the subject. “The window was broken” tells us what happened, but not who did it. While the passive is not inherently deceptive, it has legitimate uses, its overuse in institutional communication is a deliberate strategy.

In American public life, this strategy is visible across domains:

Police departments refer to shootings as “officer-involved incidents.”

Companies describe layoffs as “a restructuring decision.”

Universities describe racism as “a climate issue that emerged.”

In each case, the grammatical structure shifts focus away from responsibility, transforming choices into conditions, and actions into processes. The subject is either absent or generalized beyond recognition. The sentence performs concern without requiring the institution to locate itself within the event it is describing.

## II. Klemperer and the Grammar of Authoritarian Drift Victor Klemperer, writing under Nazi rule, observed that the German language of the regime was defined by its syntax as much as by its slogans. In The Language of the Third Reich, he documents how even ordinary citizens began to adopt a grammar of passivity and abstraction, learning to describe events as if no one were responsible for them.

Klemperer’s central claim, that grammar does ideological work, is echoed in the institutional English of the present. In both cases, what is at stake is how language structures the speaker’s relation to the world.

When institutions speak in agentless phrases, they are not only avoiding blame. They are modeling a way of being: to respond without appearing, to act without being seen, to address without acknowledging.

## III. Risk Management as Linguistic Style The formal features of dead English are shaped by ideology and by legal and technical systems of liability. Organizations use language to minimize exposure. This is especially evident in public apologies and statements following controversy:

“We understand that harm may have occurred, and we are working to ensure this does not happen again.”

This is a sentence designed to manage risk. The harm is hypothetical (“may have occurred”), the actor is passive (“we are working”), and the future is gestured toward in vague terms. The sentence offers recognition without redress. It does not invite conversation. It closes it.

Such language does not emerge solely from legal departments. It is now the default communicative tone of entire sectors. It has become a genre, in the sense that Lauren Berlant uses the term: a socially legible form that organizes affect and expectation in times of crisis. In this case, the genre is that of the procedural apology: a scene in which nothing can be said clearly, because everything might be used against you.

## IV. Automation and the Standardization of Detachment Digital platforms have formalized this grammar through automated systems. When a user is suspended, or a post is removed, the language is often generated algorithmically:

“Your content was removed for violating our Community Guidelines.”

This sentence follows the same grammatical logic: action is described without a visible agent, the reason is procedural, and the appeal mechanism, if one exists, offers no dialogic space. The user is spoken to, but not in relation. The platform’s speech is executable, not conversational.

This is what Wendy Chun has called the logic of programmability: a mode of governance in which responsiveness is simulated, but not real. The platform speaks as if it is present, but it is structurally absent. The sentence becomes a confirmation that a process occurred.

## V. Internalization of the Detaching Voice What began as a strategy of institutions is now a tone available to all. As users become fluent in the genres of procedural communication, they begin to adopt the same grammatical forms in their own speech:

“I understand how this may have impacted others.”

“Boundaries were crossed.”

“Mistakes were made.”

These are not insincere statements. Often, they are attempts to speak responsibly. But they are modeled on a grammar that prevents attachment, a grammar designed to avoid confrontation, soften conflict, and perform awareness in lieu of accountability.

The result is a culture in which even those who intend to be present adopt a language designed to depersonalize their presence. The speaker becomes grammatical residue.

Dead English is not the only grammar in circulation. It operates alongside another mode: fast, compressed, emotionally legible, and often richly expressive. This is the realm of meme grammar, and while it appears to oppose institutional detachment, it frequently relies on the same mechanisms: the removal of relation, the aestheticization of presence, and the evasion of consequence.

# III. Meme Grammar as Simulation of Aliveness Alongside the procedural flatness of institutional language, a second dominant form has emerged: fast, expressive, and culturally saturated. Commonly called "meme speak" or "internet voice," this grammar functions through format repetition, irony, and stylized affect. It thrives on relatability and circulation. Its most visible forms include:

Elliptical constructions: “me, an intellectual,” “not me crying over a spreadsheet”

Hyperbolic affect: “screaming / crying / throwing up,” “i fear she’s slaying again”

Fragmented format mimicry: “no one: / me:”

Stylized quotation: “it’s giving,” “he understood the assignment,” “go off king”

This language is not ungrammatical. It follows rules, many of which are borrowed from or inspired by living vernacular grammars, particularly AAVE, queer Black English, diasporic Englishes, and Indigenous speech patterns. It borrows vocabulary and grammatical rhythm: habitual aspect (“he do be vibin”), intensifiers and repetition, verb omission, and tonal switching for emphasis or comedic effect.

At a glance, meme grammar appears to be the opposite of dead English: where institutional language erases affect, meme grammar exaggerates it. Where official statements flatten agency, meme grammar stylizes it. But the appearance of expressiveness in this case often conceals another form of detachment. For all its emotional noise, meme grammar rarely establishes relation. Its affective tone, like the institutional passive, rarely anchors presence in a real position.

## I. The Function of Meme Grammar Meme grammar’s function is to circulate. As Ilana Gershon has shown in her work on digital discourse, the unit of internet speech is the post, a communicative object meant to be recognizable, repeatable, and formatted for platform visibility.

In this context, grammar becomes modular. A tweet, a caption, a video comment need not carry propositional clarity; it must only fit a format. The meme grammar sentence succeeds when it reminds the reader of another sentence they’ve seen before.

This is how meme grammar performs presence without requiring the speaker to be present. It produces the affect of relation, feeling known, seen, or amused, without the conditions of mutuality, continuity, or response.

## II. Simulation Through Extraction Much of meme grammar’s vitality is drawn from its use of forms that originated in specific speech communities: Black, queer, and diasporic. These grammars were developed in historical conditions of exclusion, surveillance, and social constraint. Their syntax and pragmatics are shaped by relational density, ways of encoding experience, irony, critique, and mutual legibility in language that was never meant to be heard by dominant institutions.

AAVE, for instance, uses:

Habitual be (“she be working late”) to mark consistent behavior

Double negatives and aspectual emphasis (“ain’t nobody got time”) to compress affect and frequency

Rhythmic parallelism, tonal contour, and call-and-response as pragmatic cues

When these forms are lifted into meme grammar by speakers without shared context, they do not carry their original function. They carry only their aesthetic residue. A grammatical feature designed for in-community legibility becomes a performance of style.

As Baudrillard writes in Simulacra and Simulation, the final stage of simulation is the sign “which bears no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum.” Meme grammar reaches this stage when it circulates borrowed syntax without context, without memory, without responsibility.

The sentence “it’s giving colonizer vibes” may be funny, even incisive. But it can also function as an aesthetic performance of critique that removes the speaker from the scene of implication.

## III. Opacity, Translation, and the Right to Refuse This process of syntactic mimicry echoes what Édouard Glissant calls “the violence of transparency”, the demand that the other make themselves legible within the dominant grammar in order to be understood. Meme grammar often inverts this dynamic: it takes the forms that were historically refused entry into dominant English and turns them into affective commodities.

What is extracted here is not information. It is tone, a way of sounding “real” or “funny” or “relatable” that no longer points back to its source.

Glissant advocates for opacity as a relational right: the right not to be translated into terms that erase difference. Trinh T. Minh-ha makes a similar claim: “to speak is to both say and unsay, to make appear and to refuse capture.” Meme grammar, in contrast, translates without permission, and speaks in borrowed tones without remaining answerable for their use.

## IV. The Problem Is Not Play, But Displacement To be clear, this is not a condemnation of vernacular innovation or internet creativity. Many speakers using meme grammar also speak from within the communities whose grammars they are drawing from. And borrowing, in itself, is not extraction, language is inherently intertextual.

The distinction lies in positionality and consequence. When grammatical features are lifted into dominant speech contexts without relational responsibility, they become part of a stylistic economy, not a communicative one. The borrowed grammar gives the speaker the feel of cultural specificity without the cost of being specific.

In doing so, meme grammar enables a speaker to seem critical, funny, or vulnerable, while still remaining structurally anonymous.

This is what connects meme grammar back to dead English. They are grammatical siblings: one wears detachment like a suit; the other like a joke. But both remove the speaker from the obligations of relation.

To understand why these forms are common and increasingly inescapable, I'll turn to the infrastructure that produces and rewards them. What makes simulation more legible than presence? What makes detachment more platformable than relation?

IV. Linguistic Extraction: From Rhythm to Raw Material

Language circulates, but not all circulation is neutral. In platform culture, some grammars move faster than others, and some are stripped clean of the histories that made them intelligible in the first place. When the grammar of a marginalized speech community becomes detached from its social, political, and ontological context, when it is reduced to style, to rhythm, to “a vibe”, we are no longer witnessing cultural exchange. We are witnessing linguistic extraction.

This section names and traces that process. It argues that extraction is not limited to words or slang but extends to the formal structures of grammar: syntax, rhythm, aspect, pragmatic cues, and positionality. These are removed from the living grammars that generated them, formatted for visibility, and circulated by dominant speakers as usable affect. The result is a linguistic economy in which the expressive labor of historically marginalized communities becomes a renewable resource, and in which relational speech is reduced to raw material for digital performance.

## I. From Living Grammar to Aesthetic Object Let us begin with the question: what makes a grammar “living”? In this context, a grammar is living because it remains embedded in a social world, in systems of meaning, accountability, inheritance, and mutual recognition. AAVE, for example, is not simply a set of phonological and syntactic rules. It is a system of pragmatic nuance, relational intelligence, and historical memory.

Geneva Smitherman and John Rickford, among others, have documented how AAVE encodes time, frequency, and agency through aspectual markers and tonal shifts that have no direct equivalents in standardized English. “He be trippin’” does not mean “he is currently upset,” but “he acts that way regularly”, a habitual marker, not a present-tense report.

When non-Black speakers adopt such constructions for comic effect or stylistic edge, the sentence often circulates without its semantic architecture. The habitual becomes a quirk. The double negative becomes a punchline. The pragmatic force becomes affective décor.

This is extraction at the level of grammar. The sentence survives. Its function does not.

## II. Creole Grammar and the Syntax of World-Building A similar process applies to creole and pidgin grammars, which are often misrecognized in public discourse as “broken English.” In fact, these grammars are synthetically complex, evolved under conditions of colonial imposition, forced migration, and intergenerational resilience.

In Jamaican Patois, for instance, markers like done (completive aspect), a (progressive aspect), and go (irrealis or future) create a sophisticated system of temporal navigation. These structures are not simply different from standard English, they are ontologically distinct. They encode relationships between time, action, and personhood that emerge from different histories.

When these grammars are mined for tone or rhythm, used by non-Caribbean speakers to sound emphatic, humorous, or unbothered, their temporal structures are discarded. The speaker lifts the intensifier but not the temporal logic. What remains is an echo, audible, catchy, and contextless.

Glissant would call this the colonization of rhythm. A violence of relation severed and flattened into style.

## III. Indigenous Grammar and the Refusal of Passive Speech Many Indigenous languages, such as Lakota, Anishinaabemowin, or Kanyen’kéha, operate on grammatical systems that do not presume separability between speaker, land, and action. These languages often feature:

Verb-centric morphology, where entire sentences are formed around a single verb

Embedded agency, where action implies a network of relations, not isolated causality

Context-bound deixis, where spatial and ethical positioning are inseparable

These features make passive voice difficult or even impossible to express naturally. You cannot say “mistakes were made” in Lakota without immediately implying who, in relation to whom, in what rhythm, toward which consequence.

When fragments of Indigenous grammar or metaphor are imported into English, land-as-body, verb-as-being, language-as-circularity, they are often used as poetic devices, dislocated from the epistemological commitments that animate them. The grammar becomes a mood, a gesture, a soft aesthetic of alternative worlding, even while the languages themselves remain suppressed, underfunded, or mocked.

This is not homage. It is the conversion of ontological structure into literary texture.

## IV. Style Without Relation What links these forms of extraction is a broader transformation in how grammar is treated: as a source of expressive value for circulation.

Under this model:

“It’s giving” becomes a flexible prefix, stripped of its Black queer genealogy

“Slay,” “no one: / me:,” and “go off” become syntactic buttons to press, not signals of relation

Fragments of diasporic Englishes become ready-made formats, available to anyone who can perform the tone, regardless of history or position

This is not remix. Remix implies knowledge of source, adaptation with response. This is aesthetic displacement: the production of communicative affect without social debt.

In this model, grammar is not taught, earned, or received. It is extracted, flattened, repurposed, and sold back into circulation, where it can be consumed by users who would punish the original speakers for speaking that way in courtrooms, classrooms, or workplaces.

## V. Extraction Is Structural, Not Accidental This is not simply a matter of users “stealing” language. It is a systemic pattern, structured by the affordances of platforms, the logics of racial capitalism, and the long histories of linguistic colonialism. As Lisa Lowe has shown, the liberal systems that claim to protect speech often do so while controlling whose speech is intelligible, and whose grammar can be entered into the record.

As Sylvia Wynter argues, the category of “Man”, the speaking subject of Western humanism, is defined by the ability to speak in a grammar that signals reason, universality, and transparency. All other grammars are marked as excessive, emotional, impure, or poetic. And yet, it is precisely these “marked” grammars that are now harvested for style, in a system that makes them valuable only when detached from the speakers who maintain them.

This is what makes linguistic extraction a cultural and ontological process. It is the severing of language from world, sentence from responsibility, rhythm from relation.

The extraction of grammar is not just theft. It is also replacement: of the relational with the affective, of the accountable with the performative. It is the use of other people’s linguistic survival to animate a dominant language that no longer holds presence on its own.

To understand why this extraction is so efficient, and so often invisible, we must examine the infrastructures that reward it. Let's look at the logics of platforms, where grammar becomes optimization, and presence becomes a metric.

# V. The Platformized Sentence Digital platforms are not neutral spaces for communication. They are environments built to maximize engagement, visibility, and circulation, and in doing so they exert pressure on the form and function of language itself. Under these conditions, the sentence becomes a platform artifact: shaped less by the needs of human dialogue than by the metrics and mechanisms of algorithmic reward.

This section examines how contemporary English is further transformed, formalized, compressed, and aestheticized, under the logics of platform capitalism. It argues that the success of both dead English and meme grammar lies in their stylistic features and in their ability to function within infrastructures that prioritize signal over relation, engagement over depth, and responsiveness over answerability.

## I. The Sentence as Unit of Circulation Platforms incentivize language that performs well within algorithmic systems. This means language that is:

Compressed (e.g., within character limits)

Format-driven (e.g., memeable, screenshot-friendly)

Highly affective (e.g., “relatable,” “cringe,” “based,” “unhinged”)

Decontextualizable (able to stand alone or be easily remixed)

The sentence in this environment is no longer a unit of thought. It is a unit of performance. As Ilana Gershon observes, social media discourse tends to prioritize the recognizable over the original, the shareable over the meaningful. In such a system, grammar is refashioned into gesture, a way to move affect rather than communicate position.

This is not incidental. The infrastructures of the internet favor language that moves fast and sticks lightly. As Tung-Hui Hu notes in A Prehistory of the Cloud, data architecture is designed around principles of packet switching: break the message into chunks, discard what’s unnecessary, route for speed. Language increasingly follows suit. The platform sentence is modular, designed for recombination.

## II. Dead English as Institutional Optimization In official platform communications, moderation notices, terms of service updates, transparency reports, we see a familiar grammar: the bureaucratic proceduralism of dead English, now formatted for API delivery.

“Your post was removed for violating our guidelines.”

“We take these issues seriously.”

“Our team is working to improve your experience.”

These are grammatically correct sentences, but structurally void. They are designed to complete a compliance cycle: message sent, box checked, exposure minimized. The sentence becomes interface, not speech. It signals that something has happened, not what or why or to whom.

This is what Wendy Chun refers to as “programmable habits”: forms of communication that simulate responsiveness while eliminating the possibility of response. You can receive the message. You cannot reply to it.

## III. Meme Grammar as Algorithmic Optimization Meanwhile, meme grammar is optimized for virality. It is modular, stylized, often emotionally exaggerated, and designed to provoke a recognition response: “same,” “lol,” “I feel seen.” On platforms like TikTok, Twitter, and Instagram, meme grammar appears in captions, comments, stitched videos, and repeated formats. It is a grammatical vernacular tailored to algorithmic amplification.

This is not accidental mimicry. The platforms themselves reinforce these forms. Phrases like “it’s giving,” “this ain’t it,” or “no one: / me:” function as engagement triggers, preformatted openings for social participation. As users adopt these structures, they are rewarded with visibility. As visibility increases, the grammar is further reinforced.

This recursive loop creates what I might call syntactic branding: a style of speaking that aligns the speaker with a specific affective register and demographic code, often drawn from appropriated grammars, now flattened into formats.

These grammars are not just extracted. They are then rebuilt as user interface components.

## IV. Extracted Grammar and the Flattening of Risk One of the effects of this system is the flattening of speaker risk. In traditional dialogue, speech opens the speaker to potential consequence. But on platforms, grammatical performance can be disconnected from speaker position, allowing users to simulate intimacy, critique, or vulnerability without being accountable to anyone specific.

The irony-laden sentence, the stylized complaint, the performative “call-out”, these circulate as tone rather than act. As José Esteban Muñoz writes in Disidentifications, performance can be a survival strategy, but when taken up without risk, it can also become cover, a way to mimic stakes without inhabiting them.

Thus, both dead English and meme grammar become defensive grammars of strategic detachment. One deflects critique through opacity; the other defuses it through style.

## V. Platform Punishment and Linguistic Profiling While appropriated grammars circulate freely, original grammars often trigger suppression. Content written in AAVE is disproportionately flagged by moderation algorithms as “hostile,” “unintelligible,” or “non-standard.” Posts in Indigenous languages are often marked as spam or nonsense. Diasporic Englishes are penalized in captioning systems, translation software, and automated subtitles.

As Sarah T. Roberts has shown in her work on content moderation, the infrastructures of platforms are not agnostic. They encode and reproduce racialized language hierarchies, rewarding dominant users for stylistic mimicry while punishing minoritized users for authentic speech.

This is what makes linguistic extraction more than cultural misrecognition. It is enforced at the infrastructural level. It is embedded in machine learning training sets, in moderation protocols, in API limits and search prioritizations. The grammar of relation becomes a liability; the grammar of simulation becomes a feature.

The platformized sentence is the endpoint of a long process: the reprogramming of grammar to serve circulation over relation, pattern over presence, performance over response. It is a sentence that moves easily, but lands nowhere.

And yet we still speak.

What would it mean to speak while knowing this? To use a grammar that remains situated, answerable, and marked?

That question belongs to the speaker who refuses both innocence and disappearance.

# VI. Speaking While Marked: Toward a Critical Linguistic Practice To speak while marked is not to invent a new grammar. It is to refuse to speak as if one is unmarked. It is to recognize that all speech happens from somewhere, that every sentence carries positional baggage, historical residue, and social inheritance. In the wake of collapse and extraction, where dominant English simulates presence through procedure or style, speaking while marked is a practice of remaining situated, even, especially, when the platform, the institution, or the genre demands detachment.

This section does not propose a linguistic code or corrective rule. Instead, it names a mode of attention: a critical orientation toward grammar that treats speech as a relational act. It asks what a sentence enacts, what it makes possible, who it makes disappear, and what it inherits.

## I. No Neutral Grammar Standard English positions itself as transparent: a neutral vehicle for meaning, a universal medium. But as Sylvia Wynter and Hortense Spillers both demonstrate, standard English is historically tied to the construction of the human-as-white-male-speaking-subject. Everyone else enters language as deviation: too much emotion, too many pronouns, too little clarity, too much culture.

Wynter teaches us that “Man” is a genre of being. And grammar, as a technology of that genre, reproduces who gets to appear as intelligible, legible, rational. To speak standard English without attending to that history is to inhabit its violence by default.

Speaking while marked begins with the refusal of this fiction. It acknowledges that grammar is a structure of presence, and it matters how you appear in it.

## II. Situated Grammar A speaker’s grammar carries their position, social, racial, linguistic, historical, whether they name it or not. AAVE, for instance, is not a set of quirks or errors. It is a grammar with specific functions: habitual aspect, negation intensification, copula deletion, pragmatic cueing. These are relational technologies, developed under conditions where directness was penalized, surveillance was constant, and speech had to work fast.

To borrow this grammar without standing in relation to its constraints is mispositionality. It is using someone else's map to perform your own arrival.

To speak while marked means acknowledging where your grammar comes from, and where it does not. It does not require confession or self-disclosure. It requires accountability to lineage.

## III. Response, Not Performance Much of digital and institutional English operates through performance, the sentence as affective object, designed to provoke reaction or manage perception. But speaking while marked means shifting from performance to response: being answerable.

In Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake, this is described as “wake work”: a practice of remaining present in the afterlife of catastrophe, of holding open the possibility that something might be said and seen.

A responsive grammar does not hide behind euphemism or irony. It names agency. It allows for contradiction. It seeks clarity in order to remain reachable by those it might impact.

“I failed to respond.”

“We harmed someone by doing this.”

“I said this. I meant it. I was wrong.”

“This sentence does not finish the work.”

These are grammars of presence. They do not perform accountability. They instantiate it.

## IV. Opacity as Responsibility Opacity, as Glissant defines it, is not vagueness. It is the refusal to translate oneself into the terms of dominance. To speak while marked is to know when not to explain, when to protect the illegibility of a grammar that is not for public consumption.

The refusal to footnote one’s culture is not a failure of clarity. It is an ethical withholding. A way of saying: this grammar is not up for extraction.

Opacity, then, is not the opposite of presence. It is a mode of holding space for relation without offering it up for conversion.

## V. Practical Features of Speaking While Marked Speaking while marked is a practice. It is not always graceful. It may involve:

Naming subjects clearly instead of relying on passives

Avoiding generalized or procedural phrasing when harm is involved

Refusing to borrow grammar for affective performance without acknowledging its source

Not softening accountability through bureaucratic tone

Retaining grammatical forms that mark identity, even when they appear "unprofessional"

Staying present in the sentence, even when presence is costly

It is a kind of ethical syntax: attentive.

## VI. Limits and Risks There is no ideal speaker. To speak while marked is not to transcend complicity. It is to remain aware of it. One may still get it wrong. One may still perform, still appropriate, still simulate. But the difference lies in whether the speaker treats language as something they own, or as something they are responsible to.

As José Muñoz reminds us, there is no utopian grammar, but there is utopia in the break, in the moment where speech falters and something else, responsiveness, accountability, presence, gets through.

To speak while marked is to remain in the world without grammatical shelter. It is to insist that the sentence not be frictionless. That it not be pure. That it not disappear who is speaking.

It is to say: this is a position, carried in a voice. This is a grammar I carry. And I do not arrive here alone.

# VII. Conclusion: No Pure Voice, Only Accountable Speech This paper has argued that contemporary English, particularly as shaped by American institutions and digital platforms, has undergone a structural shift. The dominant forms of English now in circulation often function to evade accountability. Procedural language removes agency through passive construction and vague formalism. Meme grammar simulates presence by borrowing the affective grammar of others, often detached from context and consequence. Both modes allow speech to move without requiring the speaker to remain in relation.

I’ve described this condition as linguistic extraction: the transformation of grammar from a structure of meaning and relation into a resource for performance. Extraction occurs at the level of vocabulary and slang, and in the circulation of grammatical forms developed in contexts of constraint, particularly Black, Indigenous, and diasporic grammars. These are languages that hold social memory, carry relational obligations, and offer alternative ontologies. When these grammars are detached from the histories that produced them and redeployed for stylistic effect, the result is displacement.

I’ve also shown that platforms do not merely host this process, they enable and accelerate it. Through algorithmic ranking, moderation protocols, and data architectures optimized for engagement, platforms reward grammar that is legible, emotional, and portable, even if it is relationally hollow. Language that is situated, complex, or opaque is more likely to be penalized or excluded.

Under these conditions, speaking in a way that resists simulation and detachment requires more than stylistic restraint. It requires positional awareness: understanding the history of the forms one uses, remaining answerable for one’s presence in language, and refusing to adopt grammars that perform intimacy or critique without cost.

This is what I have called speaking while marked. It does not mean avoiding error, or claiming purity. It means recognizing that speech is not neutral, that grammar is not universal, and that relation is not a mood. It is a structure that must be named, held, and sometimes protected from the systems that seek to convert it into content.

There is no new grammar that solves this. There is only the ongoing work of speaking from where one is, with awareness of what is being borrowed, what is being hidden, and what is being risked. That work is not finished by saying something. It begins with how we say it, and who we remain accountable to after it’s said.