This article looks at the web comments to two music videos posted on YouTube in 2014. One video features the song 'Sangre Maya', performed by Pat Boy and El Cima, two Maya rappers from the Yucatán peninsula of Mexico, whereas the other song is called 'Rap de la Tierra' and is performed by Luanko, a Mapuche rapper from Santiago in Chile. These youngsters, who along with Spanish use Yucatec Maya and Mapudungun respectively in their songs, are prime examples of the increasing adoption of indigenous languages in modern music genres and the embeddedness of musical production in digital media with a view to promoting it. First, I briefly discuss significant developments of institutional language policy and planning aiming at the recognition of linguistic and cultural diversity in Mexico and Chile as well as grassroots initiatives that exploit new technologies and rap music for language revitalisation purposes. Drawing from discourse analysis and language ideologies I then look at a selection of comments that these two relatively successful songs (with over 170,000 views at the time of writing) have generated on YouTube and discuss the emerging topics triggered by these two video clips. I will argue that the overwhelmingly positive comments to the songs and, particularly, to the choice of indigenous languages for rapping, strengthens the ongoing revalorisation process of Yucatec Maya and Mapudungun and works towards their destigmatisation, especially among youths. Furthermore, I will show how the discursive space generated by these web comments and the language ideologies therein become an arena for broader social debates which index the subordinated social position of indigenous peoples in Latin American societies.
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YouTube comments and language ideologies: destigmatising indigenous languages through rap musicThis article looks at the web comments to two music videos posted on YouTube in 2014. One video features the song 'Sangre Maya', by Pat Boy and El Cima, two Maya rappers from the Yucatán peninsula of Mexico, whereas the other song is called 'Rap de la Tierra' and is performed by Luanko, a Mapuche rapper from Santiago in Chile. These youngsters, who along with Spanish use Yucatec Maya and Mapudungun respectively in their songs, are prime examples of the increasing adoption of indigenous languages in modern music genres and the embeddedness of musical production in digital media with a view to promoting it. First, I discuss significant developments of institutional language policy and planning aiming at the recognition of linguistic and cultural diversity in Mexico and Chile as well as grassroots initiatives that exploit new technologies and rap for language revitalisation purposes. Drawing from language ideologies I then look at a selection of comments that these two relatively successful songs (with over 170,000 views at the time of writing) have generated on YouTube and discuss the emerging topics triggered by these two video clips...