Languages of Global Hip Hop

Abstract

In popular music studies, hip hop stands out among musical genres for its diverse linguistic practices.The creativity with which many rappers combine the resources of languages, dialects and slang available to them is not just an expression of artistic flair but also, as popular music researchers have been arguing since the mid-1990s, a dramatisation of mixed identities which seeks to turn national musical cultures into transnational musical spaces in contexts around the world.Tony Mitchell (1998: 41), for instance, points to "local indigenizations of the global musical idiom of rap" and, in particular, to examples of "resistance vernaculars", which take up local concerns, such as the marginalisation of the French banlieues or the colonial oppression of the Maori people.Sociolinguistics has also, and for the same reasons, developed an enthusiastic interest in hip-hop.The global hip hop discography is rich with case studies revealing the politics of language choice, and how language policy and the market may constrain or facilitate rappers' decisions; it provides a whole new corpus of evidence for the study of "code-switching," that is, the act of switching between languages within a single utterance.Jannis Androutsopoulos, among the contributors to this collection, developed a framework for studying vernacular hip-hop in Europe in a well-known article with Arno Scholz (2003).Another sociolinguist, Alastair Pennycook (2007), sees the localization strategies of hip hop as examples of emerging "global Englishes," which challenge the older paradigm of the spread of English as evidence of global cultural homogenisation.H Samy Alim (2009: 106), similarly, perceives hip-hop youth as participating in a global style community "through their use of multiple language varieties and styles."Languages of Global Hip Hop takes this literature as a point of departure, and would be of use to popular researchers from many disciplines who are interested in the same issues.Marina Terkourafi, a linguist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, has developed this collection out of a workshop on Languages and Hip Hop Culture in a Globalizing World that she organised at her home institution in 2007.Contributors to this and a follow-on workshop at the Sociolinguistics Symposium in Amsterdam make up many of the chapters in this book, which is arranged as a succession of case studies from Germany, France, Egypt, Hungary, South Korea, Greece, Cyprus and the USA.The Greek and German linguistic areas are particularly well showcased, appearing in two and three chapters respectively.Almost every chapter is concerned

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