Semantic Paths and Ideological Drifts of Woke English: From Alabama to Elon Musk, Passing Through Gethsemane

Abstract

The paper analyses, from a diachronic and sociolinguistic point of view, the semantic evolution of the term woke and the expression stay woke, and presenting their origin, with a dating proposal, following their diffusion, which sees first a semantic narrowing in African-American communities and then an opposite phenomenon, with new political and social meanings. A possible influence of the parallel expression stay awake, in the context of religious preaching, is discussed, and the media success linked to the Black Lives Matter movement, up to the current semantic reversal, spread by the American Right, for which woke gets a strongly negative meaning, associated with woke ideology, wokeism and wokeness.