gon

Gon is how "going to" actually sounds in fast speech, written down. "We gon be fine" reads exactly as said: the going to compressed to one soft syllable. It is a feature of African American Vernacular English and Southern US speech. Linguists document it as working grammar, a future marker as real as gonna.

The ladder is worth seeing whole: going to became gonna, and gonna wore down to gon. Its close cousin finna covers the about-to-happen future, while gon stays general: "she gon call you" promises a call without saying when.

In writing it appears with and without the apostrophe, gon and gon', in lyrics, subtitles and texts alike. Song titles carried the spelling into the mainstream decades before texting picked it up. It reads as speech on the page, which is exactly what it is.

Gon is speech first and spelling second: a pronunciation spelling of the reduced future marker in African American Vernacular English and Southern US English. Linguists document gon as part of AAVE's tense system, and the scholarly literature on AAVE verbal markers treats it as grammar with rules, not casual error.

The spelling has been mainstream for decades. The earliest date we can fully verify is 1996, when Mary J. Blige's "Not Gon' Cry" put it in the title of a number-one R&B single. 3LW's "Playas Gon' Play" followed in 2001, and Kendrick Lamar's "Alright," built on the phrase "we gon be alright," became a protest chant in 2015. The Oxford English Dictionary keeps an entry for the form, with a paper trail reaching into the 1800s behind its login. So the exact first written use stays unclear.