Imma show you cats where it’s at

So Mark Liberman at Language Log has inspired me to try and do some informal urban slang documentation. Who knows, but I guess surprisingly not too many people are doing this so even my humble efforts may prove useful to someone out there. Any cogent comments as to whether or not you think I’m full of it would, of course, be most appreciated.

Anyway, I thought I’d start with one of my personal favourites, Imma (variants include I’m a, I’ma and I’m-a). I’m not really sure about what exactly is going on here, but there are a lot of possibilities. First is that it might be some kind of alliterative analogy related to ‘gonna’, a natural companion to Imma. But then, in other instances, the -a suffix seems to be some kind of bound clitic form of ‘going to’. Cf: Big Tymers’ Get High

Well I’ma smoke (I’m gon’ smoke)
Until I choke (until I choke)
And I’ma drank (I’ma shole drank)
Until I can’t (until I can’t)

Also, in Get It Poppin’ by Fat Joe, the chorus runs:

I’ma get get get it poppin’ boy (whatcha gon’ do) I’ma get get get it poppin’

Notice that in both of these songs there is a poetic alternation between Imma and I’m gon’ (or whatcha gon’), without any actual difference in meaning. These cases almost look like a case of metathesis with the a moving from its original place at the end of ‘gonna’ and tacking itself on the end of ‘I’m’. This is contradicted, however, by the classic Imma gonna construction, which seems to have been around for longer. It also seems to be associated more with a rural, ‘folksy’ style of speaking, as opposed to the ‘urban’ style of Imma alone. The earliest canonical instance I can find of Imma gonna is in Jimmy Buffett’s classic burlesque of Jamaican patois, Volcano:

Now I don’t know
I don’t know
I don’t know where I’m a gonna go
When the volcano blow

However this is not to say that the Imma gonna construction is not used in contemporary urban speech - in fact it appears in free alternation with Imma alone. An excellent example of this is in GangStarr’s excellent B.Y.S., where he warns “MC’s who front: ‘ma gonna bust your shit”, but later in the same song says that, “all you phony ass rappers Imma’ bust your shit”.

I believe that the potentially older Imma gonna is particularly telling when attempting to discover the etymology for this phrase. If you break it down, it separates into ‘I’m (a) going to’, in everyday speech. Whither that pesky a you might ask? Well Imma gon’ go out on a limb here, and speculate that this mysterious a may well be a relic of the archaic verbal prefix a- (e.g. “Here we come a-wassailing…”), fossilised in such familiar terms as “a-rise”, “a-wake”, and “a-bide”. The fifth OED entry for ‘a- prefix‘ is particularly telling. In part, it says that a- was

. . . used in the north as sign of the infinitive = to. In ado, early northern Eng. at do.

So basically, I think that more than likely Imma is a parallel construction, unconsciously a partial return to this older form of progressive/motion towards (is that accusative? I’m not very good at case) marking.

Next week, an in-depth analasys of an extreme contraction - Nah’ mean?