Entry · catalog no. 4252
mines
/ /maɪnz/ /MYNZ
pronoun · Black American, nationwide · 1900s
✓ Verified
1.
The possessive pronoun corresponding to mine — that book is mines — formed by the same -s that ends hers, ours, yours and theirs.
“Don't touch that, it's mines.”
Origin & Attribution
Black American speech, nationwide, urban and Southern-based. Walt Wolfram, writing on the grammar of urban African American Vernacular English, describes the regularization of mine to mines as robust across most varieties of AAVE, more typical of preadolescent than older speakers and possibly age-graded. The American Heritage Dictionary records the same feature, noting that the irregular standard pattern has been regularized by adding -s to mine. The point is worth stating plainly: hers, ours, yours and theirs all end in the same sound, and mine is the odd one out. Mines removes the exception. It is rule-following, not rule-breaking. It is also not unique to Black speech and should not be presented as though it were: the Oxford English Dictionary records mines as chiefly Scottish from 1661 onward, and it turns up in Grenada and in 1940s Hawaii. The AAVE form is a convergent, independently productive regularization, not a borrowing.
1661
Earliest OED citation, Scots, spelled myns — an unrelated parallel development
1956
Recorded in American Speech from Providence, Rhode Island
2004
Wolfram documents it as a robust AAVE feature
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide / diaspora
Black American, nationwide · 1900s
Spoken by
Black American speakers nationwide, especially children and adolescents
$MINESThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Enduring126 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
50/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1900
in the culture
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
@auntiereg
Atlanta, GA
@deltasoul
Memphis, TN
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Citations & Sources
■
Walt Wolfram, The grammar of urban African American Vernacular English, in A Handbook of Varieties of English vol. 2 (Mouton de Gruyter)
2004
■
+ Cite a sourceThe American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 4th ed.
2000
See also