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You ain't no Human

What is the need of "no" here?

isn't it already meaning same without "no"?

Usernew
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Grv10India
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  • Related: ell.stackexchange.com/questions/8405/aint-and-negatives?rq=1 – pyobum Dec 06 '15 at 12:06
  • This is regional dialect or transplanted regional dialect. It would be possible for a person speaking this dialect to say "I ain't got no money, I ain't never had no money." to mean that he has been scraping by for as long as he can remember. (I never tire of this example -- which I'm repeating from someone who told it to me.) It is considered "substandard/colloquial". – TimR Dec 06 '15 at 15:20
  • The double negation is the special characteristic of this substandard variant. Without the "no" this language would not sound authentic. At a house wall: We don't want no piece of the cake, we want the whole bakery. – rogermue Dec 06 '15 at 16:04
  • Yup, there ain't no need for no "no" here. But you can have one anyway in some varieties of English (but not formal standard English). – Araucaria - Not here any more. Dec 06 '15 at 17:20
  • @rogermue There's no such thing as a substandard variant. At all. Ever. – Araucaria - Not here any more. Dec 06 '15 at 17:21

2 Answers2

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It emphasises a negation.
It's a double negative. The use of negatives in this way is called a Negative Concord.

Schwale
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As has been mentioned in the comments, "ain't" is non-standard English. It is therefore informal. Some dialects (such as the Southern dialect of American English) use "ain't". These dialects (including Southern) also use double-negatives as intensifiers instead of as logic puzzles.

In the original poster's example, the word "no" acts as a determiner. It therefore affects the meaning of the sentence.

The following sentence means "You are not in the category called 'human'" or "Some part of you is not made of human tissue, or is not organized the way human tissue is organized":

You ain't human.

The following sentence compares "you" to each possible individual human, and concludes that you are not one of them. It also clarifies that "you" is singular:

You ain't no human.

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Jasper
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  • Thanks :) , How we can say this formally? – Grv10India Dec 06 '15 at 18:10
  • @Grv10India -- It depends on what you mean. You might say, "You are an angel", or "You are despicable", or "That was a super-human effort". "You're an angel" and "You are such a devil" are informal. "You must be a robot" is informal, unless "you" literally are a robot. – Jasper Dec 06 '15 at 19:15