Checking Out The Vocal Color

There's a scene in the 1980 comedy Airplane! in which a middle-aged white passenger, played by Barbara Billingsley (of June Cleaver fame), politely offers to translate for some fast-talking young black men. ''I speak jive,'' she announces, using a then-popular term for African-American slang.

If Geneva Smitherman has her way, someday a lot more people will. Smitherman, a professor of English and director of the African-American Language and Literacy Program at Michigan State University, is the author of Black Talk: Words and Phrases From the Hood to the Amen Corner (Houghton Mifflin, $10.95). Her ''cultural dictionary,'' as she calls it, gives the ''foe- one-one'' (''(4-1-1 is) the facts, the information'') on old terms like ''ace boon coon'' (''best friend''), new ones like ''Oprah'' (''to dredge intimate facts from a person''), and ''crossovers,'' like ''livin high off the hog,'' which most people probably don't realize refers to the relative prices of ribs and pigs' feet and who can afford them. ''This is a vibrant, living language,'' says Smitherman, who has written six other books on African-American culture. ''It's not just street talk, curse words, or the language of the illiterate.''

Compiling the dictionary involved more than 15 years of cross-country research-and required painstaking attention to etymology. ''Aretha Franklin first used the ('60s) term '4-1-1' in a recording 12 years ago,'' says Smitherman of the now popular hip-hop phrase. ''All these little young people think they invented everything. I said: 'Check out the Queen of Soul.'''

Smitherman, who helps train Michigan police officers in cultural diversity, hopes that Black Talk will one day serve a higher purpose than that of a mere reference tool. ''The everyday language of a whole bunch of Americans is borrowed from black Americans,'' she says. ''If it were taught in schools, that would be acknowledged.''