I was wondering what the linguistic status was of the American English word gonna. Is it slang? Is a colloquialism? Is it standard English yet? And will it someday become standard English?
The reason why I ask, is because I don’t know what Americans would do without it. It is a necessary fixture in our language. It might be hard for you British and Australian dopers to realize. But it is hard for Americans to say “going to”. So we usually say “gonna”.
In fact even when I hear recorded American speech from long ago, I invariably hear them say “gonna”. I don’t know how far back it goes. But I wouldn’t be surprised if it goes back practically to the beginning. (You know, just because it wasn’t recorded early on, doesn’t mean people weren’t using it.)
So what is its status? And what is its future? Surely I am not the first person to wonder this.
It’s just a slurred/elided pronunciation of “going to.” Considered colloquial. Not something you’d use in formal writing, but a word/phrase which you may want to transcribe phonetically to effect a conversational, casual tone. If you accept the Scottish dialect, it goes back to at least 1806.
If you were a Martian (which I am, so I get to speak on this), and you were compiling a grammar of Earth-speak, you’d write up a formal description of its use, and be puzzled about why we insist on writing it “going to”. You’d probably also be confused about why we keep poo-pooing it as a construction, even though we all use it every day.
“Gonna” follows its own pretty specific grammatical rules, and is not just a contraction of “going to”. And calling it “vulgar” is, frankly, a bit insulting.
That’s all I have for y’all.
Now you’ll have to excuse me, I’m gonna the store.
Yes, this is important to note, and “gonna” can actually disambiguate between two meanings of “going to,” being used to describe a temporal relationship, as opposed to a spacial one. So, “I’m gonna feed the dog” can only mean that I, in the future, will feed the dog. While, “I’m going to feed the dog” can mean that, as well as “I am going [away from here] to feed the dog.” So “I’m [going to] feed the dog” vs “I’m going [to feed] the dog.”
As one of the board’s outspoken “linguistic freethinkers” my response is foreordained.
I agree completely with John Mace.
There are several layers to English. At one extreme, there’s the formal pedantic fussiness that allows nothing in the language that Fowler wouldn’t accept in the 1920s. You’d only ever see required that in certain academic writing today, although individuals may choose to adopt this mode. Gonna will never be seen here except within quotes.
The next level is standard English, which I’ve defined frequently as the language as written by “good” writers, i.e. those professionals who produce newspapers, magazines, books, and equivalent works. Gonna might be seen here as irony or as a deliberate attempt to imitate spoken language. I see no trend whatsoever that would make it standard in the future.
I normally would use colloquial only to refer to speech, but it can be applied to written language as well. It allows less standard forms and far more leeway in every aspect of construction. Most message boards are colloquial. The use of gonna would be accepted and natural.
There’s no difference between “going to” and the slurred “gonna” in everyday speech and in most dialects. To me, pulykamell is simply wrong. His “going to” is a completely different usage than gonna, and few if any native speakers of the language would find them interchangeable.
I blame English teachers for so totally botching how the English language works that people can come out of school and even ask the question in the OP. Everybody should have a basic enough understanding of the varieties of English that they should know there’s no one answer, only several depending on context.
Hell, that isn’t even the extreme end of the spectrum. I still hear people repeating crap like “don’t end sentences with a preposition,” and that’s something even Fowler didn’t object to.
Going to [intended action] is essentially a different word than going to [traveling toward]. Gonna can be used for the former, but never the latter. It doesn’t matter that a different word happens to be a homophone of going. Introducing it fogs the issue; it doesn’t belong in this discussion.
That’s correct. It’s just a clarification for those keeping score that “gonna” does not equal “going to” in all instances. It’s not simple elision of those two words–it’s only in the future context that it works. This is a point that is brought up in linguistics, so I thought it would be appropriate to share here, since we’re talking about"gonna."
Now you’re fogging the issue. That “gonna” can be substituted for one usage of “going to” but not the other is exactly what **pulykamell **said, and exactly the point.
