This book examines language and identity among White American middle and upper-middle class youth who affiliate with Hip Hop culture. Hip Hop youth engage in practices that range from the consumption of rap music and fashion to practices like MC-ing (writing and performing raps or "rhymes"), DJ-ing (mixing records to produce a beat for the MC), graffiti tagging, and break-dancing. Cutler explores the way in which these young people stylize their speech using linguistic resources drawn from African American English and Hip Hop slang terms. She also looks at the way they construct their identities in discussions with their friends, and how they talk about and use language to construct themselves as authentic within Hip Hop. Cutler considers the possibility that young people experimenting with AAVE-styled speech may improve the status of AAVE in the broader society. She also addresses the need for educators to be aware of the linguistic patterns found in AAVE and Hip Hop language, and ways to build on Hip Hop skills like rhyming and rapping in order to motivate students and promote literacy.

This book examines language and identity among White American middle and upper-middle class youth who affiliate with Hip Hop culture. Hip Hop youth engage in practices that range from the consumption of rap music and fashion to practices like MC-ing (writing and performing raps or "rhymes"), DJ-ing (mixing records to produce a beat for the MC), graffiti tagging, and break-dancing. Cutler explores the way in which these young people stylize their speech using linguistic resources drawn from African American English and Hip Hop slang terms. She also looks at the way they construct their identities in discussions with their friends, and how they talk about and use language to construct themselves as authentic within Hip Hop. Cutler considers the possibility that young people experimenting with AAVE-styled speech may improve the status of AAVE in the broader society. She also addresses the need for educators to be aware of the linguistic patterns found in AAVE and Hip Hop language, and ways to build on Hip Hop skills like rhyming and rapping in order to motivate students and promote literacy.

New York City English is one of the most recognizable of US dialects, and research on it launched modern sociolinguistics. Yet the city’s speech has never before received a comprehensive description and analysis. In this book, Michael Newman examines the differences and similarities among the ways English is spoken by the extraordinarily diverse population living in the NY dialect region. He uses data from a variety of sources including older dialectological accounts, classic and recent variationist studies, and original research on speakers from around the dialect region. All levels of language are explored including phonology, morphosyntax, lexicon, and discourse along with a history of English in the region. But this book provides far more than a dialectological and historical inventory of linguistic features. The forms used by different groups of New Yorkers are discussed in terms of their complex social meanings. Furthermore, Newman illustrates the varied forms of sociolinguistic significance with examples from the personal experiences of a variety of New Yorkers and includes links to sound files on the publisher’s site and videos on YouTube. The result is a rigorous but accessible and compelling account of the English spoken in this great city.

With an eye to the playful, reflexive, self-conscious ways in which global youth engage with each other online, this volume analyzes user-generated data from these interactions to show how communication technologies and multilingual resources are deployed to project local as well as trans-local orientations. With examples from a range of multilingual settings, each author explores how youth exploit the creative, heteroglossic potential of their linguistic repertoires, from rudimentary attempts to engage with others in a second language to hybrid multilingual practices. Often, their linguistic, orthographic, and stylistic choices challenge linguistic purity and prescriptive correctness, yet, in other cases, their utterances constitute language policing, linking 'standardness' or 'correctness' to piety, trans-local affiliation, or national belonging. Written for advanced undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers in linguistics, applied linguistics, education and media and communication studies, this volume is a timely and readymade resource for researching online multilingualism with a range of methodologies and perspectives.

Academic Paper from the year 2018 in the subject Literature - Modern Literature, grade: 1,7, University of Heidelberg (Anglistisches Seminar), course: PS II Race and Racism in Contemporary American Literature, language: English, abstract: This term paper takes a look at how cultural appropriation works in the context of African-American music in general and rap music in particular. Relevant parts of Hari Kunzru's novel "White Tears" will be analyzed in order to understand the motivations and intentions that the two white twenty somethings have in their respective approaches to music that was made before they were born and to a subculture they never participated in due to their social backgrounds. The conclusion of this term paper then answers the following question: Was Carter right to reject the white rapper's business proposal? Especially in a society like the United States with its long history of racial and cultural contacts and clashes, the appropriation of items from different cultural backgrounds is a strongly contested issue. The intensity of recent mainstream debates concerning the professional sport franchises of the Cleveland Indians or the Washington Redskins and their respective marketing of Native American culture is proof of that. When cultural appropriation is used as a vehicle of capitalism, it becomes debatable. Hari Kunzru's novel "White Tears", published in 2017, deals with exactly these topics when portraying the business ventures of two young white music producers and their shared search for vintage sound in modern day New York City. In an early scene of the book, Seth and Carter, the producer duo, meet with representatives of a major label and their artist, a famous white rapper. Having heard of their vast archives of rare vintage sounds and their classic methods of production, the mainstream artists offers them the opportunity to work on his newest project, a tribute to all African-American music that was recorded prior to his birth in the Nineties. When Carter dismisses the project on the grounds of false cultural appropriation, he leaves his business partner as confused as the reader of the novel, since there is no further explanation offered and the plot continues.

Interest in language play and linguistic creativity has increased in recent years, and the topic has been taken up from a variety of perspectives. In this book, disparate approaches to the topic are brought together, demonstrating that a number of phenomena whose similarities might not have been immediately recognized, have an academic home under the umbrella of language play and linguistic creativity. The contributions to this collection illustrate the variety of questions that can be asked regarding the social, cognitive, emotional, political, and cultural mechanisms and significance of innovative linguistic practices and point to new directions of inquiry. Furthermore, the work exemplifies a variety of ways in which this research can be carried out, as well as the range of contexts in which it might be investigated, including second language classrooms, online settings, and workplaces. Taken together, the chapters serve to illustrate the range of work that we will be accepting in the Language Play and Creativity series; viewed individually, each makes a unique contribution to some aspect of our understanding of creative language use.

This collection showcases the unique potential of stylistic approaches for better understanding the multifaceted nature of pop culture discourse. As its point of departure, the book takes the notion of pop culture as a phenomenon characterized by the interaction of linguistic signs with other modes such as imagery and music to examine a diverse range of genres through the lens of stylistics. Each section is grouped around thematic lines, looking at literary fiction, telecinematic discourse, music and lyrics, as well as cartoons and video games. The 12 chapters analyze different forms of media through five central strands of stylistics, from sociolinguistic, pragmatic, cognitive, multimodal, to corpus-based approaches. In drawing on these various stylistic frameworks and applying them across genres and modes, the contributions offer readers deeper insights into the role of scripted and performed language in social representation and identity construction, thereby highlighting the affordances of stylistics research in studying pop cultural texts. This volume is of particular interest to students and researchers in stylistics, linguistics, literary studies, media studies, and cultural studies.