The 'hip-hop nation' is a multiethnic, transnational community that originates from and privileges urban African American experiences. Scholars have explored ways that non-African Americans worldwide use linguistic features of African American English (AAE) as a way of constructing hip-hop affiliated identities. The current paper ties these strands together in a study of the linguistic patterns of white Australian rapper Iggy Azalea, who makes use of AAE in her music, but not in other public speech. Our study presents a variationist analysis of copula absence in her lyrics. Findings show that her rates of this hallmark feature of AAE are extremely high, when compared to similar analyses of other rappers. We argue that her overzealous application of AAE features in her music, in order to create a specific linguistic style, enables a success that rests ultimately on the appropriation of African American language and culture, and the privilege that whiteness affords.
This article investigates the status of the low-back vowels in African American English in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where the vowels have been merged since at least the late 1800s. The low-back merger is currently spreading across much of the United States, but to date, its incidence in African American speech has been found to be limited. This article draws from a sample of 34 African Americans native to Pittsburgh. Using data from a word list along with an acoustic analysis of the low-back vowels in conversational speech from sociolinguistic interviews, this article shows that African Americans in Pittsburgh have merged the low-back vowels, thus sharing in this feature of the local phonological system. The article also explores the sociohistorical conditions that facilitated the spread of the merger from white to African American speech in the region.
This study considers the text of the Harry Potter novels to understand the way in which gender is represented. The analysis centers on the two sidekick characters, Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley, cataloging the way in which their direct speech is reported throughout the series. From a wide-lens perspective, verbs used for each of these characters are largely the same. However, a more fine-grained analysis reveals patterns of asymmetry that also reflect broader cultural ideologies about gender, reproducing stereotypical views about ‘essential’ differences between females and males for the millions of readers that comprise the audience of these fictional works.
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