Entry · catalog no. 0495
bad mouth
/ /ˈbæd ˌmaʊθ/ /BAD-mowth
verb · south · 1940s
✓ Verified
1.
To speak against someone — to run them down behind their back, or curse their name.
“Don't bad mouth the man in his own house.”
Origin & Attribution
West African, carried into Black American speech through Gullah. It is a direct calque — a word-for-word carry-over — of the Mande construction, Mandinka da-jugu, literally "bad mouth," meaning to abuse or insult; the Hausa mugun baki works the same way. This is one of the clearest surviving pieces of African grammar in American English, and standard dictionaries list it as ordinary English slang with no note of where the phrasing came from.
1940s
Attested in African American speech as a calque of West African "bad mouth"
1970s
Documented by David Dalby as an African survival in American English
2000s
Fully general in American English, its origin forgotten
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The South
south · 1940s
Spoken by
south
$BADMOUThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Steady85 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
60/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1941
in the culture
Recorded here
2026
point of first record
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
Hear it spoken
By region — how it actually sounds
@nolakid
New Orleans, LA
@htxdri
Houston, TX
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Citations & Sources
■
David Dalby — "The African Element in American English," in Rappin' and Stylin' Out (ed. Thomas Kochman) — book chapter · 1972
submitted
■
+ Cite a sourceJoseph Holloway and Winifred Vass — The African Heritage of American English — book · 1993
submitted
See also