African American English and Rap Music, Guide, Progetti e Ricerche di Lingua Inglese

Scarica African American English and Rap Music e più Guide, Progetti e Ricerche in PDF di Lingua Inglese solo su Docsity! AFRICAN AMERICAN ENGLISH AND RAP MUSIC SESTINI BEATRICE INDEX. 1. Introduction 3 2. Historical and cultural context 3 3. Dialect and vernacular as concepts 5 4. Overview of the most important features of AAVE 6 4.1 Material 6 4.2 Phonological features 6 4.3 Grammatical features 7 4.4 Lexical features 8 5. Hip Hop/Rap and AAVE 8 6. Conclusions 10 7. Bibliography 10 American society was also influenced by an ideological movement known as Négritude. It could be understood as pride in “blackness” and its traditional African values and culture, not in the fact of having dark skin. This concept was born from a shared experience of discrimination and oppression to black people by white people, and it is an attempt to eliminate stereotypes and create a new black consciousness. This “flow of pride” by Black Americans was influenced by other African American movements, like the Harlem Renaissance (also known as the “New Negro Renaissance”); and was the foundation of some Civil Rights moments, like the Black Power movement and the Black Panther Party; besides helping with the fight against segregation systems. These moments were crucial to fight racism in America and around the world. This “black pride” touched and reached every single field that surrounded African Americans, like music, as it is going to be seen in the next pages when the features of the dialect are presented. 3. DIALECT AND VERNACULAR AS CONCEPTS. Focusing on linguistics, humans do not have the same perception of the English language that they had 500 years ago. Languages are always evolving over the ages, always changing and innovating. Old English started to evolve until it became Modern English, or Standard English (SE); and SE continues evolving day-to-day to different dialects. As Chris Baldick says, dialects are “distinctive varieties of a language, spoken by members of groups, nations, or social classes. They differ from one another in pronunciation, vocabulary, and (often) in grammar”. Some dialects in America are Chicano English, Cajun Vernacular English, or African American Vernacular English (AAVE), which is going to be the main focus of this essay. Taking this into account, AAVE is therefore considered a dialect, spoken by African Americans in the United States of American as its name shows. It is spoken by Black Americans in a “close” environment, as William Labov says in his Dialect Diversity in America, “with family, friends, and peers in intimate situations where minimal attention is given to speech”. Moreover African Americans changed their social status from being “nothing” when they arrived to be nowadays more than 13% of the population of a country with more than 328,000,000 people; and the great majority of them speak or understand this dialect. The spread of the use of the dialect is helped by the music industry, especially rap music. 5 Music is one of the biggest, not to say the biggest, transmitter of ideas worldwide: ideas are expressed through language; languages transport meaning; and meaning is spread by voices. Voices that carry accents and dialects with them. Hence, rap music is the main authority when talking about AAVE spreading. 4. OVERVIEW OF THE MOST IMPORTANT FEATURES OF AAVE. In this section, I will give an overview of the most important phonological, grammatical and lexical features of AAVE in comparison to Standard American English (SAE). 4.1 Material In order to increase the chances of finding AAVE features, I have investigated some lyrics of contemporary rappers: Snoop Dogg, Kanye West, The Beastie Boys, and Eminem. Snoop Dogg, whose real name is Cordozar Calvin Broadus, Jr. was born in 1972 in California. He released his first album in 1993, and is, in addition to being a famous rapper, also a well-known producer and actor. Snoop Dogg was formerly known as Snoop Doggy Dogg, but changed his stage name in 1998. Kanye West is a black rapper from Chicago, Illinois, who started producing rap music in the 21st century. Despite being a newcomer in the music industry, he has already won nine Grammys and possesses his own record company. Marshall Bruce Mathers III, more known as Eminem or Slim Shady, is a white rapper from Detroit, Michigan, which is the most racially segregated cosmopolitan area in the United States. Eminem has sold millions of albums, won several Grammys and owns his own record company. The Beastie Boys is a hip hop group from New York City, which consists of white members Michael "Mike D" Diamond, Adam "MCA" Yauch, and Adam "Ad-Rock" Horovitz, and since the 1990s, the DJ for the group has been Michael "Mix Master Mike" Schwartz. Their first rap album was the best selling record in its genre of the 1980s. 4.2 Phonological features. The firts tendency that I want to speak about is in several of the lyrics and it was deletion of unstressed initial syllables: ◦ I know you ‘memba me (Snoop Dogg: “Those gurlz”) 6 ◦ …like she talkin’ ‘bout me (Kanye West: “Homecoming”) One feature that was difficult to find was the dropping of post-vocalic /r/, which was nevertheless found in some of the songs: ◦ Well it’s the supa dupa Snoopa (Snoop Dogg: “Let it out”) ◦ I’ma be that nigga for [fo] life (Kanye West: “Never let me down”) Other characteristics of AAVE that were rare were reduction of word-final clusters, and omission of /l/ in contracted forms, which was quite difficult to discern, yet found in a few of the lyrics: ◦ …she got so cold [col] (…) platinum and gold [gol]… (Kanye West: “Homecoming”) ◦ Wait [wei]…baby girl I’m the great [grei] (Snoop Dogg: “Those gurlz”) Word clusters were assimilated in several cases, mostly with expressions like y’all and I’ma. Some examples are: ◦ So y’all copped the LPs and y’all fiends got dealt (Kanye West: “We major”) ◦ I’ma handle it (Snoop Dogg: “Why did you leave me”) 4.3 Grammatical features. Both Kanye West and Snoop Dogg use structures that lack the copula. Copula deletion indicates present tense, in contrast to invariant be, which represents repeated action. This means that the actions are not recurring or repeated, but could be fixed in time. ◦ They just like you, they wanna’ rap (Kanye West: “Homecoming”) ◦ You a freak… (Snoop Dogg: Sensual seduction”) The auxiliary be is also quite often absent in the lines formed in the progressive, as is shown by the following examples: ◦ She lookin’ at my stones like ‘damn is he rich?’ (Snoop Dogg “Those gurlz”) ◦ …what niggas tryin’ to do… (Kanye West: “Homecoming”) In addition, examples of phrases in which the singular form of the verb be, such as is, is used 7 Hip Hop is AAVE. This not the complete truth. It surely adopted almost all its grammar from AAVE, but there are some aspects that need to be kept in mind. For instance, “users of hip-hop language tend to be members of certain social groups, while AAE users spread across all demographic groups throughout the United States” (Amberg). Moreover, AAVE exists since ages, whereas Hip Hop language does so only since the eighties. Hip Hop language is also used only in certain contexts, such as DJing, MCing or dancing. H. Samy Alim found an example in which the syntax of Hip Hop language and AAVE do not correspond. This is the case with invariant be before noun phrases (e.g. “Dr. Dre be the name”), which is found quite often in Hip Hop lyrics, whereas it is hardly noted in “conversation-based AAVE studies”. Furthermore, Hip Hop language is far more innovative than AAVE. New words are invented in song lyrics, which are then adopted into AAVE everyday speech. Rapper E-40, for example, is one of the biggest innovators in the Hip Hop show business. He came up with expressions such as communicator (meaning “cell phone”) or to underdig, which basically means “to understand”. These words then found their way into everyday language of AAVE speakers and Hip Hop fans. All in all, we can say that Hip Hop language can be seen as a subordinated area of AAVE. 6. CONCLUSIONS. We have seen that the lyrics of African American popular music can be a valuable source of information about AAVE. We have analyzed, those that in my opinion, are the most important features of AAVE in relation to some rap songs of Snoop Dogg and Kanye West. The results is that the language of most rappers is AAVE we can affirmed that it has been demonstrated that the results of such a study, can lead to a greater understanding of both AAVE speech and the artistic use of AAVE in forms of musical expression. 7. BIBLIOGRAPHY. Alim, Samy H. 2006. Roc the mic right: The language of hip hop culture. New York: Routledge. Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G., & Tiffin, H. (2007). Post-colonial studies: The key concepts. Routledge. Bailey, Guy, and Natalie Maynor. 1989. The divergence controversy. American Speech. Bender, Emily. 2000. Syntactic variation and linguistic competence: The case of AAVE copula absence. Doctoral dissertation, Stanford University, Stanford, California. 10 Crystal, D. (2007). How Language Works. Penguin UK. Green, L.J. (2002). African American English: A Linguistic Introduction. Cambridge University Press. Lipski, J.M. (1993). Y’all in American English: From Black to White, from Phrase to Pronoun. English World-wide, 14. Rickford, John R. 1998. Phonological and grammatical features of African American Vernacular English (AAVE). In Rickford 1999. Schneider, Edgar W. 1983. The origin of the verbal - s in Black English. American Speech. The Rap Dictionary [Online] Available from: http://www.rapdict.org/ChiTown. Thomas, E. (2007). Phonological and Phonetic Characteristics of African American Vernacular English. Language and Linguistic Compass. Wikipedia Beastie Boys [Online] Available from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beastie_Boys Wikipedia Eminem [Online] Available from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eminem Wikipedia Kanye West [Online] Available from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanye_west Wikipedia Snoop Dogg [Online] Available from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snoop_Dogg Y’all. (2020, March 23). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y%27all 11