Elastic vernac: the (in) significance of indigenous languages in South African rap music

Journal of Language Identity and Education, 2010

Journal of Language and Literature, 2023

This paper explores how young people, especially Ghanaian hiplife musicians manipulate language through the usage of puns to convey messages without necessarily sounding discourteous. It focused on the communication of such words which are considered inappropriate and yet must be spoken of, and how young musicians of Ghana try to use these words in songs so they are not seen as sounding profane or disrespectful. To find out how this phenomenon takes place, a number of such linguistic items which give their songs an air of style were analysed in some selected Ghanaian songs. The researchers studied the usage of pun by Ghanaian songsters as a means of euphemising their speech. Related literature on the phenomenon was reviewed and the topic was examined through the lenses of Relevance Theory as a methodology for the study of stylistics. The data for this research was drawn from songs of young Ghanaian songsters and the research design was the content analysis. The research employs the descriptive qualitative approach in the analysis of data. The study was basically into the stylistic description of data in some selected Ghanaian songs, and the primary data was the internet where selected songs were downloaded for transcription. In this research, there emerged the term punophemisms to explain and define how pun can be used as euphemism.

Hip-Hop and Country musicians concurrently create culture while being affected by the specific subculture of their sociolects and communities. Within these specific speech communities, language is a vital part of constructing reality; of showing class values; and of defining who is 'in' and who is not -often in terms of being in opposition to and standing apart from mainstream society. Inclusion in the Hip-Hop and Country subcultures indicates a delineating boundary of authenticity, which clearly suggests that there are others who are therefore not 'authentic' and must be excluded. Members view their group as separate and work to maintain the boundary from the other, from the majority. In the sociolinguistic exploration of Hip-Hop and Country communities, there are five major themes that will be considered: Legitimacy, Commodification & Globalization, Boundary Margins, Sexuality, and Rebellion -giving prominence to the social context of language use rather than to purely lexical considerations within the two communities.

Language & Communication, 2017

In this special issue, we study language ideologies in musical practices. Our aim is to explore how language, music, and social ties are co-construed in the age of transnationalism. The authors examine globally distributed strands of music in diverse linguistic settings. Among these are reggae in Vanuatu, Nigeria, and Jamaica, rap in the Nordic countries, pop in Russia, global country music, and choral singing in Trinidad. The results of these studies shed new light on local appropriations of music and language in transnational cultural spheres and the discursive processes that shape them. In this introduction we present themes and concepts that are central to this volume and give an overview of the contributions. First, we discuss some conceptual and methodological challenges of sociolinguistics in the global era. Second, we discuss the interactive formation and conceptualization of social units that have no clear-cut ethnic or national connections. These are crucial to our understanding of ways of being in today's global world. As argued later on, language practices constituted on grounds of music constitute a pertinent example of these social units. Finally, before presenting the individual contributions to this issue, we make notes on the recurrent themes they display, such as transnationality, fixity, fluidity, and place. 2. Out of the utopian box Human collectives are not eternal or natural. They are culturally constituted, conceptually construed and maintained through words and discourse. This insight has become apparent in a global era where discourses from different spheres interact on a daily basis (see e.g. Beck et al., 2003; Giddens, 2002; Papastergiadis, 2000). Language scholars have recently started to focus also on the discursive constructions on language and to question the "methodological nationalism" in linguistics, i.e. the taking-for-granted notions of ethnic and national categories in relation to language (see e.g.

Abstract The aim of this research is to study textual and linguistic mechanisms by which singers of rap music realize their songs. In focus of this research are mainly young Albanian speakers that through their songs they show different levels of linguistic variety. In this study research are included these aspects of language (sounds, words, forms of words and their construction) that are considered essential to define language system and give this overview variety the status of a special variety in Albanian language. This research study is based on an assigned corpus of texts of this music style used in Prishtina. Via descriptive approaches are identified and described linguistic changes that characterize linguistic variety of Rap used in Prishtina. So, in this indirect manner is also seen the influence of linguistic of varieties. Whereas certain linguistic elements based on statistics approaches are also seen in density aspect of usage of these group of speakers. The results of this research taken from statistics data and their interpretation give us the answers of these cases. The artists of Rap music are considered artists of subculture that tell us about life difficulties and express them in a direct way for the audience. The art of music has a great importance to give the message to the public. The style of Rap singers is similar to that of gangsters and a language used in the street. The purpose of this study was to describe textual realization of this musical genre in Albanian language and the contexts of this language. Music has always been used as a mean to express cultural identity, individual beliefs and attitudes or an assigned group of people. The major method of this study will be quantitative and deductive. The corpus includes Rap music texts of different periods where can be seen great changes from a period to another. The other part of this study has to do with sociolinguistic discussion. To realize this part of study, different interviews with Rap artists were done and this idea was supported by audience design. Rap music texts will be done based on International Phonetic Alphabet to see some phonetic features. In this work are included two aspects in linguistic area. These two aspects are: phonetic aspect and lexical aspect. Regarding phonetic aspect “trock” and “moras” are discussed whereas in lexical one “slang” and the usage of foreign words in Albanian language rap music texts. Keywords: Interview, Transcriptation, Troc, Mora

Anthropology & Education Quarterly

International Journal of the Sociology of Language

This article explores hip hop music as a powerful tool for educational institutions to promote minority languages among teenagers living in multilingual contexts. It reports on an educational experience in secondary education that consisted of a series of rhyme workshops given by a guest hip hop artist in a secondary school in Catalonia, where two main languages (Spanish and Catalan) coexist in an unbalanced situation that favours Spanish for peer-communication. Drawing on two articulated pieces of fieldwork (the first one in the classroom and the second outside school with three students who were emergent rappers), the study shows a rift between language practices in the classroom and hip hop language practices in the teenagers’ lives. It also shows the powerful effect of bringing a professional musician into the classroom and how the school can have an impact on the language practices of the students outside school.

Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 2010

potential of relationality to capture the ambivalence of entities (e.g., the demonic dead in Chapter 6) and social relations (for example, children in Chapter 4) under different cultural purviews. For the Korowai, the demonic dead are both deceased dear kinspeople and visually terrifying killers. The multiple valences of social and semiotic entities themselves can become the basis for analyses of social bonds and semiotic units that avoid reductionism by highlighting potentially unstable collections of valences that sit squarely but uncomfortably-more or less-between an "us" and a "them." Though the Korowai may try to stabilize these ambivalences, Stasch is arguing that analysts of society must come to embrace them. And indeed, for scholars of contextualized events of interaction, Stasch's work will most certainly help integrate analyses of the gradient relationality emergent in discourse and events of semiosis to the ethno-theories of social life that guide action and inform experience, now with their gradience firmly at the fore.

Towards the turn of the 20th century, a new wave of hip hop music emerged in Nigeria whose sense of popularity activated, and was activated by, the employment of complex linguistic strategies. Indirection, ambiguity, circumlocution, language mixing, pun, double meaning, and inclusive pronominals, among others, are not only used by artists in performing the glocal orientations of their music but also become for them valuable resources in the fashioning of multiple identities. In this paper, I interrogate some of these linguistic markers, using four broad paradigms: " Signifying, " " slangifying, " " double meaning, " and " pronominals and ghetto naming. " Under each of these areas, I show how Nigerian hip hop music is creating—through the mediation of language—sub-identities and a new subculture for a generation of urban youth.