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Hip‐Hop Language in Sociolinguistics and Beyond
Article in Language and Linguistics Compass · September 2007

DOI: 10.1111/j.1749-818X.2007.00021.x
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Language and Linguistics Compass 1 (2007): 10.1111/j.1749-818x.2007.00021.x
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Hip-Hop Language in Sociolinguistics
6 and Beyond
7
8 Cecelia Cutler*
9 New York University
10
11
12 Abstract
13 Hip-hop language (HHL) is a hot topic in academia. Sociolinguists have been
14 interested in its relationship to African American English as well as innovations
15 in terms of its grammar and vocabulary. A couple of questions connect research
16 from a number of related fields on HHL and culture: What does it mean to be
17 authentic in hip-hop culture in terms of language and other aspects of identity
18 such as one’s race, class, and connection to young urban Black Americans? How
19 do participants perform their hip-hop identity in terms of language? And how
20 do local hip-hop scenes use language to express local identities? This article
explores research on these topics as it pertains to HHL, also taking into account
21
a range of disciplines from cultural studies and philosophy to musicology, identi-
22 fying new trends and possible areas for collaboration, and highlighting areas that
23 are in need of greater attention. The article also touches on frameworks for
24 analyzing language use in general in such areas as ‘crossing’ and ‘styling’.
25
26
27
28
29 Introduction
30 Hip-hop culture has now been around for nearly three decades, moving
31 from urban neighborhoods in the Bronx across the USA and to other
32 countries around the world, but linguists have only begun to document
33 the language associated with it. Most of that work explores the relation-
34 ship of hip-hop language (HHL) in rap music lyrics to African American
35 English (AAE) syntactic, discourse, and lexical features (cf. Morgan 1993,
36 1996; Smitherman 1997; Alim 2002, 2004a; Edwards 2002).1 Less atten-
37 tion has been paid to HHL use in everyday interaction, the regional
38 language variation that local hip-hop scenes have spawned around the
39 USA and worldwide, the role of gender in hip-hop culture and language,
40 and processes of identity formation among hip hoppers. This article
41 explores what current sociolinguistic studies have to say about HHL in
42 some of these respects, also bringing in the perspective of relatively new
43 theoretical frameworks like ‘crossing’ and ‘language styling’ (e.g. Rampton
44 1995; Bell 2001; Coupland 2001). HHL and culture have furthermore
45 become the focus of a lot of academic work across a variety of disciplines,
© 2007 The Authors
Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
2 Cecelia Cutler
1 including musicology, cultural studies, and education. Thus, I also discuss

2 points of cross-disciplinary intersection related to concepts such as authen-
3 ticity and performativity, and how commonalities can be developed further
4 in the study of HHL.
5
6
The Language of Hip Hop
7
8 Is there a language associated with hip-hop and if so, what should it be
9 called and how does it compare to other varieties of English, especially
10 AAE? The research thus far seems to concur on a number of key points:
11 that the language associated with hip-hop is rooted in AAE communi-
12 cative practices (Smitherman 1997; Morgan 2001), that it is just one of
13 many language varieties used by African Americans (Alim 2004a), that it
14 is widely spoken across the country and is used, borrowed and trans-
15 formed by African Americans and non-African Americans in and outside
16 the USA (e.g. Bennett 1999; Bucholtz 1999; Cutler 1999; Morgan 2001;
17 Alim 2004a).
18 Researchers often use the term ‘language’ in a loose sense to describe
19 the linguistic variety associated with hip-hop and its relationship to AAE,
20 but the degree to which the linguistic features of HHL overlap with those
21 of AAE actually makes it difficult to argue that it constitutes a language
22 unto itself. Perhaps ‘language style’ is a more appropriate designation,
23 particularly in view of the fact that HHL is highly variable and transitory,
24 as Alim (2004a) and Morgan (1993) have pointed out.
25 Coupland (2001) has described styles as tools for ‘persona management’
26 (198) or ways in which people choose to present themselves in various
27 situations. Eastman and Stein (1993) further discuss the concept of
28 ‘language display’ in which members of one group employ linguistic cues
29 (styles) from another group in order to be seen as individuals with
30 attributes associated with that community of speakers (188). Whether a
31 style is typically associated with one’s own social group (in-group) or with
32 a group one does not belong to (out-group), its deployment sends a
33 message by indexing (pointing to) the conventionalized social meanings
34 associated with it (Coupland 2001; Irvine 2001). Thus, for example,
35 White hip hoppers may engage in a sort of ‘out-group’ usage of linguistic
36 elements of HHL to index the more masculine, ‘streetwise’ identities
37 commonly associated with young urban African American males (cf.
38 Cutler 2002a).
39
40
THE GRAMMAR OF HHL
41
42 A number of scholars have written that the grammar of HHL is essentially
43 the same as that of AAE (Smitherman 1997, 2000; Spady et al. 1999;
44 Rickford and Rickford 2000; Morgan 2001). Thus, we can expect to find
45 forms such as copula absence (We __ bad), double negatives (He do not
© 2007 The Authors Language and Linguistics Compass 1 (2007): 10.1111/j.1749-818x.2007.00021.x
Hip-Hop Language in Sociolinguistics and Beyond 3
1
1 know nothin’), completive done (‘She done did it’. meaning ‘She already
2 did it’.), and other AAE forms in rap lyrics and in the speech of hip
3 hoppers. In spite of the high degree of overlap between HHL and AAE,
4 however, the correspondence is not complete. Thus, for example, Alim
5 writes that ‘Hip Hop lyrics provide examples of habitual be before noun
6 phrases (e.g., “Dr. Dre be the name”) – an environment in which most
7 conversation-based AAVE2 studies did not note it’ (Alim 2005b).
8 Habitual be is classified as an AAE ‘aspectual marker’: just as tense
9 markers indicate when the action takes place, aspectual markers indicate
10 how the action takes place. Habitual be usually indicates action that is
11 repetitive or habitual as opposed to punctual or momentary. A sentence
12 such as ‘Keysha be trippin’’ (or overreacting) indicates that Keysha is
13 usually or always trippin’ – not that she is just trippin’ right now. Thus,
14 crucially, it does not have the same meaning as the sentence ‘Keysha is
15 trippin’’ or ‘Keysha trippin’’, implying right now. An example of be used
16 in its habitual sense is shown in (1), from the song ‘Queen Bitch’ off the
17 album Hardcore by female rapper Lil’ Kim.
18
(1) Roll with niggaz that be thuggin, buggin ‘Hang out with black men
19
who sell drugs, rob, etc., and act weirdly’
20
21 Some research on habitual be suggests that its use is on the rise among
22 young African Americans (Bailey and Maynor 1989; Josey 1999; Rickford
23 1999; Alim 2004a) and, furthermore, that its use is being extended
24 beyond habitual contexts. The use of habitual be with noun phrases (e.g.
25 She be the teacher) in particular has been described as a marker of identity
26 for young African Americans (Morgan 1993) and as one of the defining
27 features of HHL (Morgan 2001; Alim 2004a). Rap artists have reinforced
28 its use, and similar examples are easy to come by in the speech of deejays
29 and in rap music lyrics on commercial rap radio stations in New York
30 City like Hot 97, as in (2) – a from Busta Rhymes’ song ‘What it is’ off
31 the album Genesis (cited in Alim 2004a:398):
32
(2) This beat be the beat to rock for the street.
33
34 The research is still inconclusive as to whether the use of habitual be
35 with noun phrases as in (2) is an HHL innovation or whether it simply
36 went unnoticed in prior work on AAE. It is also not clear whether it
37 carries aspectual meaning and to what extent its widespread use in hip-
38 hop is having an impact on AAE. Alim (2004a) notes that ‘it is entirely
39 possible that members of the Hip Hop Nation . . . have made this form
40 much more acceptable by using it frequently’ (399).3
41 The copula or verb ‘to be’ can be optionally omitted in present tense
42 sentences in AAE (e.g. We __ bad! meaning ‘We are great/incredible’)
43 while maintaining the same meaning as a sentence with the full or con-
44 tracted copula (e.g. We are bad! or We’re bad!). In other words, a sentence
45 in which the copula is omitted will have the same meaning as a sentence
4 Cecelia Cutler
1 with the copula. An example from the song ‘Get em High’ on the album
2 College Dropout by Kanye West is shown in (3).
3
(3) And I won’t, give you that money that you __ askin fo’
4
5 Alim (2002) looks at copula variation in lyrics and interview data he
6 collected with two rap artists, Eve and Juvenile. His study shows that both
7 artists had higher rates of copula absence in their rap lyrics than in their
8 interview speech style – a fact he attributes to the importance of asserting
9 a ‘street’ identity in hip-hop culture. There were also differences in rates
10 of copula absence in the two artists’ interview speech: Eve’s rate of copula
11 absence in her interview data was very low, just 6%, compared to 56.6%
12 in Juvenile’s interview data. Alim attributes these differences to social
13 factors including gender, region of residence, social class, and educational
14 opportunities. Eve’s family was more stable and upwardly mobile and she
15 had positive school experiences. Juvenile apparently hated school, and he
16 was much more integrated into the street culture (Alim 2002:297–8).
17 Alim’s study points to the role of vernacular AAE style and stylistic
18 variation in symbolizing street credibility (the notion of ‘street credibility’
19 will be expanded on later in the article).
20 Cutler (2002a) examined the extent to which White hip hoppers demon-
21 strate knowledge of features like copula absence, finding that few used
22 this feature with any degree of regularity in their everyday speech. Out
23 of 12 White speakers studied, only one omitted the copula repeatedly and
24 in ways that we would expect to find among urban African American
25 male adolescents. Cutler also examined performance data from a White
26 MC (emcee) named ‘Eyedea’ who was competing in an MC battle. In
27 hip-hop culture MC battles are contests where rappers compete with
28 each other in the form of freestyle or spontaneous rap. The goal is for
29 each rapper to insult or dis his or her opponent with rhymes invented on
30 the spot about his or her opponent for a fixed length of time (usually
31 about a minute). Eyedea’s rate of present tense ‘is’ deletion during the
32 performance was 15% (n = 25) as contrasted to his everyday speech style
33 that contained no copula absence. An example of ‘is’ deletion from
34 Eyedea’s performance is shown in (4).
35
(4) So why ___ you walkin’ around lookin’ like that I wrecked you?
36
37 Eyedea’s ability to ‘turn on’ features like copula absence while perform-
38 ing points to the likelihood that many White hip hoppers are aware of at
39 least some features of AAE grammar and that they can use these features
40 stylistically to project themselves as linguistically savvy.
41
42
HIP HOP LEXICON
43
44 The most comprehensive linguistic studies of the lexicon of hip-hop can
45 be found in Smitherman (1994, 1997, 1998, 2000) and Major (1994).
1 Although many hip-hop terms are new, quite a few have a long history
2 in the Black speech community, while others are modifications of older
3 expressions. For example, we can see overlap between AAE and hip-hop
4 with regard to terms like ‘word’ or ‘word up!’ (an affirmative response
5 derived from the older expression – ‘yo word is yo bond’, a verbal expression
6 of commitment) or a ‘player’ (a man or woman who has many women/
7 men and plays them), as cited by Smitherman (1994). But, as Morgan
8 (2002) observes, hip-hop has redefined the latter term to mean someone
9 who has achieved fame and fortune, which in turn has given rise to the
10 term player hater to refer to envious people who criticize others’ success
11 (Morgan 2002:122). An example from the lyrics of B. I. G. Notorious from
12 the song ‘Playa Hater’ off the album Life After Death is shown in (5).
13
(5) You see, there are two kind of people in the world today
14
‘We have, the playaz, and we have, the playa haters’
15
16 Furthermore, Morgan (2002) distinguishes between words that have
17 existed in AAE with fixed meanings and hip-hop words that often build
18 on or change these meanings by adding suffixes (-est, -ous/-ious, etc.). Terms
19 like mack and mack daddy have a long history in AAE, referring to some-
20 one who pimps (sells women) or hustles sexual favors (cited in Major
21 1994; Smitherman 1994; Morgan 2002).4 However, mackadocious and
22 mackness are newer jip-jop terms, as they have picked up suffixes that add
23 to the original meaning, that is, ‘having power to control rather than just
24 hustling for sex’ (Morgan 2002:126). The rap group Brand Nubian use
25 mackadocious in their song ‘Straight Off Da Head’ from the album Every-
26 thing is Everything [shown in (6)].
27
(6) My head keep goin on ‘My brain keeps on working/thinking’
28
Rob deep from mackadocious . . . ‘Go right to the source of power . . .’
29
30 A number of online sources offer up ‘wiki’ style entries for old and
31
32
2 new expressions in hip-hop, for example, Urban Dictionary (http://
www.urbandictionary.com), and, one of the oldest online sources, the
33 Rap Dictionary (http://www.rapdict.org/Main_Page). Users can post
34 their own definitions for listings, rate definitions that others have posted,
35 or add new words. Both sites include example sentences or rap lyrics
36 containing the word or expression in question. For example, the Urban
37 Dictionary currently lists seven definitions for the term ‘crunk’, which
38 seems to have emerged from the rap scene in the Southern USA in the past
39 few years, meaning both ‘crazy’ and ‘drunk’ (http://www.urbandictionary.
40 com/define.php? term=crunk). The wiki model has opened limitless
41 possibilities for tracking the emergence and trajectory of hip-hop slang,
42 but still remains an underexploited resource in linguistic analyses of HHL
43 to date.5
44 The hip-hop lexicon is constantly being expanded with new expressions
45 while others fall out of use. As soon as new words and expressions appear
6 Cecelia Cutler
1 in rap music, they become available for anyone to use: they can ‘cross
2 over’ into the speech of White hip hoppers and the White mainstream
3 media. Two examples are ‘dope’ (meaning ‘cool’) and ‘wack’ (meaning
4 ‘bad’ or ‘stupid’), which went out of vogue in the 1990s as they entered more
5 common usage and were replaced by expressions like ‘tight’, ‘ill’, and ‘fly’
6 meaning ‘cool’; and ‘gay’, ‘weak’, and ‘lame’ meaning ‘stupid’. Recently,
7 expressions like ‘off the chain’ (meaning ‘really great’) and young men
8 calling each other ‘bitch’ as a slightly funny term of endearment have
9 become ubiquitous in common parlance. We see an example here in the
10 song ‘Dank’ from the album Pimpin’ On Wax by JT Money.
11
12 (7) Free world we __ off tha chain nigga – chain, chain
13
14
REGIONAL VARIATION IN HIP HOP LANGUAGE
15
16 There is an emerging awareness in the field of sociolinguistics about the
17 regional diversity of AAE (see, for example, Wolfram 2007) – an aware-
18 ness that has been spurred in part by the regional variation that is now
19 highly evident in rap music lyrics (Morgan 1993, 1996, 2001), although
20 not yet the subject of any large-scale empirical work. Regional hip-hop
21 scenes in Atlanta, Boston, Philadelphia, Miami, Los Angeles, Philadelphia,
22 St. Louis, Detroit, and Oakland have begun to establish their own highly
23 recognizable local language styles. The East Coast–West Coast rivalry in
24 USA rap that dominated the 1990s has receded, allowing for the previ-
25 ously marginalized Southern Rap scene to establish itself. The first ever
26 BET (Black Entertainment Television) Hip Hop Awards ceremony was
27 held in Atlanta, Georgia in 2006, symbolizing the rise of Southern Rap,
28 but no work to date has as yet come out of linguistics describing its features
29 and ideologies and how they contrast with those in other local hip-hop
30 scenes. Morgan (2002) identifies certain working class phonological
31 features like consonant cluster simplification and vowel length as markers
32 of regional differences. She describes the shortening of vowels, increase in
33 glottal stops and the reduction of consonants as marking the East Coast,
34 and vowel lengthening as marking the West Coast. A very short list of
3
35
36
some regional phonological and lexical features appears in Table 1.
Looking at hip-hop beyond the USA, linguists Androutsopoulos and
37 Scholz (2003) document its rise in Europe beginning with the appropri-
38 ation of American hip-hop followed by the eventual reterritorialization
39 and localization of hip-hop in various countries and regions. Interestingly,
40 authenticity in European hip-hop music, on hip-hop Web sites, and in
41 Internet chat rooms is established in part through the use of localized
42 dialectal forms sprinkled with English hip-hop terminology like ‘dis’, and
43 ‘flow’, and calques on English forms like ‘hot shit’ (heisser Scheiss in
44 German) and ‘in the house’ (meaning ‘exceptionally good’) – im Saal in
45 German or en la casa in Spanish (Androutsopoulos and Scholz 2003:474).
1 Table 1. Regional Forms in Hip-Hop Language.

2
3 Pronunciation Lexis
4
5 East Coast New York: glottalization of Philadelphia: da jawn, as in Give me
6 medial /t/, e.g. gettin’ [gε?εn] da jawn, meaning ‘Give me that
(Morgan 1993:15). thing’ (Alim 2004a:398).
7 mad, as in mad stupid, meaning
8 very stupid (Morgan 1993).
9 West Coast Vowel lengthening in words like Hella, as in hella stupid, meaning
10 didn’t [dI:n] and ghetto [gε:do] very stupid (Morgan 1993).
11 (Morgan 1998). Hyphy (pronounced high-fee [haIfi]),
Bay Area: man pronounced like meaning to get out of hand.
12 mane [me:n] (Alim 2004a:400).
13 South me pronounced like may [meI] Crunk meaning crazy and drunk
14 (Alim 2004a:394). (http://www.urbandictionary.com)
15 Midwest St. Louis: the vowels in here,
16 care, and air pronounced as the
vowel in her ([her], [ker], [er])
17 (Alim 2004a:400).
18
19
20
21 Local dialects by virtue of their marginalized, stigmatized status fill a role
22 similar to that of AAE in the USA (cf. Fenn and Perullo 2000; Mitchell 2000).
23 Androutsopoulos and Scholz (2002) provide the following example of an
24 Italian rap song that alternates between standard dialect and Roman dialect:
25
(8)
26
Italian (Roman dialect in italics) (English translation)
27
——————————————————————————————
28
vivo nell’asfalto e cerco soluzioni I’m living on the asphalt
29
and looking for answers
30
tocca d’esse-r mejo you have to be better
31
Un massiccio sa distinguere dell’importante a tough guy has to
32
know what’s important
33
si te la ‘mbastisci poi se sente vedi de sta bono if you make it bad you’ll
34
hear it, so be quiet
35
qualcuno stringe cose che non hanella sua mano Someone wants to do
36
things he can’t
37
quello che ti do, mò, vero funk romano what I’m giving you,
38
now, is real Rome funk
39
——————————————————————————————
40
41 Androutsopoulos and Scholz (2002:22) draw some important general-
42 izations about the language of European rap: (i) As a rule, European
43 rappers use their mother tongue. As for bilingual second and third gen-
44 eration migrants, they basically use the dominant language of the society
45 they live in; (ii) European rappers use the entire linguistic repertoire of
8 Cecelia Cutler
1 their respective speech community, including regional dialects, social

2 dialects, English elements and elements of various other foreign languages;
3 (iii) Rappers tend to use local or regional dialects only if they are still vital
4 and hold local prestige in a speech community; and (iv) In European
5 countries where migrant communities are large enough and already estab-
6 lished, rappers who have a migrant background themselves or socialize
7 with youth of migrant descent sometimes use (elements of ) migrant
8 languages as well as nonnative accents.
9 Hip hop scenes have emerged across Europe, Asia, African and the
10 Middle East. Hip-hop in Britain, also known as Brithop, was originally
11 influenced by the hip-hop scene in New York City and British rappers
12 often adopted American accents in the early years before they gained the
13 confidence to develop their own styles (http://en.wikipedia.org/). Brithop
14 is found chiefly in the main urban areas of London, Essex, Edinburgh,
15 Glasgow, Birmingham, Nottingham, Sheffield, Leeds, Swansea, and
16 Manchester and local dialectal forms are a prominent feature in much
17 of the rap coming from these areas.
18 France has witnessed the proliferation of local rap groups such as MC
19 Solaar, F. F. F., and Crew Assassin, particularly among the disenfranchized
20 North African and sub-Saharan African youth living in the outskirts of
21 Paris and Marseille. Although English expressions like ‘get down’ and
22 ‘dealer’ do show up in French rap, most artists rap entirely in French, in
23 contrast to the rock music produced in France, which is mainly sung in
24 English (cf. Cutler 2000). On the whole, these kinds of observations are
25 a useful starting point for further exploration of the interplay of regional
26 language varieties and established English hip-hop expressions in the
27 creation of local meaning, but more work needs to be done on areas
28 beyond Western Europe, particularly central and Eastern Europe, Africa
29 and the Middle East.
30
31
Hip-Hop as Identity Performance
32
33 It is widely believed in sociolinguistics that language plays an instrumental
34 role in the projection and creation of social identity (Labov 1972; Le Page
35 and Tabouret-Keller 1985; Eckert 1989; Bucholtz 1995). Recent work on
36 language styles and stylization looks at how individuals play with language
37 resources to construct and project distinctive configurations of the self.
38 Stylization refers to the ways in which speakers ‘creatively use language
39 resources often from beyond the immediate speech community such as
40 distant dialects’ (Bell 2001:147; cf. Bakhtin 1981). Researchers increas-
41 ingly are focusing on the ‘constructed’ and multifaceted nature of identity,
42 the agency of the speaker, and the use of language as a semiotic device to
43 signal stances, alignments, personas, and other modes of self-presentation
44 (Rampton 1995; Bucholtz 1999; Bell 2001; Coupland 2001; Irvine 2001;
45 Alim 2004a; and others). This focus falls in line with more general research
1 beyond the field of linguistics that conceptualizes social identity as

2 ‘performative’, capturing the idea that people use the semiotic resources afforded
3 by different styles of language, gesture, gait, clothing, hairstyles, accessories
4 and so on to create a variety of elaborate performances of social ‘selves’.
5 Queer theory has adopted the term ‘performativity’ to refer to the idea
6 that gender is instituted through a ‘stylized repetition of acts’ such as using
7 particular language forms, bodily gestures, postures, and movements
8 (Butler 1988:519). In other words, gender is a performed identity: the
9 way we talk, walk, dress, dance, etc., is all part of an elaborate, historically
10 and culturally rooted and somewhat coerced performance (Butler
11 1988:522). Following this line of reasoning, other aspects of identity
12 like ethnicity can be viewed as consisting of a number of performative
13 acts that are transmutable, learnable, and hence performable by anyone (cf.
14 Stolcke 1993). Ethnic markers including speech become stylistic resources
15 that any person can adopt to project a persona, or to signal stances towards
16 or alignments with another group.6
17 Hall (1995) observes that the use of linguistic practices associated with
18 a given ethnic group may be sufficient for an individual to pass as a group
19 member. Considerations such as passing, belonging, and alignment are
20 central to a number of sociolinguistic studies that have looked at the
21 White middle class response to rap, hip-hop, and HHL in the USA
22 (Bucholtz 1997; Jacobs-Huey 1997; Cutler 2002a, 2003). Here, we have
23 cases in which individuals are experimenting with ethnic and linguistic
24 symbols that are not a part of their cultural heritage: White participants
25 in hip-hop are often said to be performing a certain type of Blackness in
26 terms of their use of linguistic and other ethnic markers (Cutler 2002a).
27 Yet in most cases, White hip hoppers are not trying to pass as Black; rather
28 they are asserting various alignments – whether positive, negative or
29 ambivalent – towards African Americans, hip-hop culture, and mainstream
30 White culture. Their use of AAE dialect variants is complicated by the
31 fact that they are not native speakers of this variety (in most cases), nor
32 are they trying to be. Indeed, they also employ speech features that mark
33 them as White and/or speakers of regional varieties (Bucholtz 1997; Cutler
34 2004) alongside elements that reflect personal and attitudinal attributes.7
35
36
CROSSING AND STYLING
37
38 The language display of White hip hoppers points up the need for a
39 complicated conception of style that takes into account the multi-
40 dimensional aspects of personal identity management and self-projection.
41 Traditionally, sociolinguistic research has focused on the linguistic repre-
42 sentation of identities that speakers have routine access to. There is now
43 a growing body of work investigating people who style their speech in
44 unexpected ways (Hatala 1976; Labov 1980; Butters 1984; Hewitt 1986;
45 Ash and Myhill 1986; Rampton 1995; Bucholtz 1997; Cutler 1999;
10 Cecelia Cutler
1 Jacobs-Huey 1997; Ibrahim 1998). Rampton (1995) pioneered the study

2 of ‘language crossing’ – that is, the use of languages or language features
3 associated with out-groups other than one’s ‘own’ – as part of a complex
4 process of self-assembly. In his foundational work, Rampton described
5 the mixed use of Creole, Panjabi, and Asian English within multiracial
6 adolescent friendship groups in a working-class community in South
7 Midlands, UK. He found that the young people he studied used crossing,
8 in many but not all instances, as an antiracist practice that reflected an
9 effort to establish a new ‘de-racinated’ ethnicity.
10 When engaging in crossing, people signal various orientations towards
11 the groups whose voices they adopt, including but not limited to express-
4
12
13
ing alignment with the group being voiced (cf. Giles 1979; Bakhtin 1984;
Bell 1984; Soukup 2006; Hernández-Campoy, Cutillas-Espinosa and
14 Schilling-Estes 2006; Trester 2006). One example of crossing for purposes
15 other than adopting an affiliative stance occurs when racialized groups
16 ‘voice’ another group as a way to highlight and critique an asymmetrical
17 power relationship. Alim (2005b) shows how Black speakers in face-to-face
18 encounters with White police officers construct Whiteness via the per-
19 formance of ‘the Whitey voice’, a nasalized mimicry and mockery of White
20 American speech that symbolizes the asymmetrical power relationships
21 between Whites and Blacks in American society.
22 As noted above, the adoption of AAE and HHL styles by nonnative
23 speakers is not always indicative of simple alignment with the North
24 American Black community. Furthermore, affiliations may be adopted for
25 quite complex reasons. For example, Ibrahim (1998) shows how East
26 African students in a Canadian high school are grouped with Black Cana-
27 dians and subsequently take ownership of Blackness through AAE-styled
28 speech and affiliation with hip-hop. Learning to become Black in North
29 America means ‘learning Black English as a second language and taking
30 up and re-positing Black identities and cultural forms: Hip Hop and rap’
31 (Ibrahim 1998:ii). Being labeled Black – a category that has no meaning
32 in their homelands – effectively erases the most important aspects of
33 personal identity for these young people such as their nationalities, tribal
34 affiliations, religions, and languages. Significantly, hip-hop plays a role in
35 helping them to come to terms with being labeled Black with all of its
36 negative connotations in Canada. Yet, it also points to the commodification
37 of Black youth culture as a site where outsiders, East African youth,
38 White male youth (the primary consumers of rap music in the USA), and
39 others can pick and choose from a range of semiotic resources – including
40 stylized language – in order to perform their identities.
41
42
Hip-Hop and Authenticity
43
44 Authenticity is a theme that runs through many if not most studies of
45 hip-hop across the disciplines. It is also a concept that is central within
1 hip-hop culture, embodying the idea that people should be true to

2 their roots, and not ‘front’ or pretend to be something they are not
3 (Rickford and Rickford 2000:23). Authenticity in hip-hop is a compli-
4 cated construct that depends on many variables, but one component
5 involves socioeconomic, ethnic, and cultural proximity to the urban
6 African American community where hip-hop is created and disseminated,
7 that is, ‘the street’. Alim (2004a) makes reference to this when he writes
8 that the street is ‘the center of Hip Hop cultural activity’ (390). Establish-
9 ing a connection to the street is an extremely important part of how
10 Black American rappers establish their authenticity, and consequently
11 many White middle class hip hoppers try to play up their connections to
12 some imaginary ‘ghetto’ by forming crews and engaging in certain
13 ‘gang’ style activities or pretending they have no money (cf. Sales 1996;
14 Cutler 2002a).
15 From a linguistic perspective, research on authenticity has traditionally
16 focused on the ‘authentic speaker’ – an idealized speaker who perfectly
17 performs linguists’ notions of the essential features of a dialect or
18 speech variety (cf. Labov 1980). Thus, in early studies of AAE (e.g. Labov
19 1966), inner city male adolescent gang members were considered to be
20 the most authentic speakers of the dialect – an assumption that has
21 been questioned in recent years (cf. Butters 1984; Morgan 1994, 1996).
22 Questions arise when it comes to White speakers who appropriate
23 features of AAE or HHL in their speech. Can these individuals be
24 regarded as authentic speakers of AAE? Some sociolinguistic studies
25 have addressed this question (Hatala 1976; Labov 1980; Cutler 2002b;
26 Sweetland 2002), showing that certain individuals can and do pass for
27 native speakers of AAE.
28 The topic of authenticity has great potential for cross-disciplinary
29 exploration as it has implications not only for language and linguistic
30 affiliation, but also group affiliation more broadly, as well as self- and other
31 representation. The fields of cultural studies, philosophy, and ethnomusi-
32 cology have all produced a number of studies that explore authenticity in
33 rap lyrics and interviews with rappers (Fenn and Perullo 2000; Mitchell
34
35
5 2000; Androutsopoulos and Scholz 2003; Armstrong 2004; White 2004;
Gordon 2005; Hess 2005). Gordon, a scholar who works on race theory
36 and philosophy, critiques White, Black, and Latino adolescents, as well as
37 Black adults and academics, for legitimizing Black youth culture as the
38 locus of ‘authentic’ Black culture (2005). ‘The result has been the ascent
39 of Black youth as the authoritative voice of Black communities. The
40 legitimacy of this voice rests on its claims to authenticity’ (Gordon
41 2005:380). Extending his critique to academics’ treatments of hip-hop,
42 Gordon asserts that they often reduce all Black culture to Black youth
43 culture by focusing on ‘Black teenagers and older Black folk who behave
44 like teenagers as spokespersons of the rest of the Black community, or
45 better yet – communities’ (368). He writes that, ‘Black adolescents seem
12 Cecelia Cutler
1 to have become the wellspring of knowledge and creativity as though

2 tapped into the divine force of the gods – or at least ancestral voices of
3 resistance’ (Gordon 2005:368). This critique could also be extended to
4 linguistic analyses of the authentic speaker as someone who speaks the
5 vernacular as opposed to the range of voices that represent a speech
6 community. Essentialized or highly stereotyped depictions of Black culture
7 clearly cut across any number of disciplines, challenging researchers to
8 question constructs like the ‘authentic speaker’ and what we think of as
9 authenticity in hip-hop culture.
10 Examining and critiquing the construct of authenticity is a theme that
11 also runs through studies of hip-hop in musicology. Armstrong (2004)
12 explores authenticity in the lyrics and autobiographical statements of the
13 White rapper Eminem, identifying three kinds of authenticity: being true
14 to oneself, being true to one’s location or place, and being closely related
15 to and located in close proximity to an original source of rap. He writes
16 that Eminem is firmly grounded in these three kinds of authenticity as a
17 White kid who grew up in a Black ghetto neighborhood of Detroit. But
18 as a White person, he must do additional work to legitimize himself in
19 the eyes of his audience given that ‘the history of Black music has been
20 a continuous one of Whites’ lucrative expropriation of Black cultural
21 forms’ (Kelley 1999:9 cited in Armstrong 2004:4). Eminem legitimizes
22 himself by highlighting his race and espousing violent misogyny in his
23 lyrics, with the effectiveness of the latter strategy being grounding in the
24 ‘equation of pathological behavior with Black “authenticity” ’ (Goldblatt
25 11A cited in Armstrong 2004:344). Eminem’s highlighting his Whiteness
26 works because it serves as a way for him to acknowledge the truth about
27 himself (Armstrong 2004). This effectively immunizes him against charges
28 of inauthenticity insofar as acknowledging one’s background in terms of
29 race and class is a crucial part of how authenticity is constructed within
30 hip-hop (342–3).
31 White (2004) is a further exploration of Eminem’s authenticity, from
32 the perspective of media studies/cultural studies. The author argues that
33 Eminem is engaged in a form of racial burlesque or ‘Blackface’ similar to
34 that performed by nineteenth century Blackface minstrels. White claims
35 that Eminem establishes a relationship to constructions of authenticity
36 within hip-hop culture through his self-projection as ‘White trash’
37 (a disparaging term for a poor White person or poor White people)
38 and his relationship to a ‘post-industrial’ conception of White masculinity
39 embodying the notion that blue-collar White men have ceded their
40 traditional positions of power to women and non-Whites and are no
41 longer valued members of society (White 2006:71). This ‘White
42 trash’ identity connects him to Black people by suggesting that,
43 ‘Whites can be excluded and disenfranchised in much the same way as
44 other non-White communities and groups’ ( White 2004:72; cf. Calhoun
45 2005).
1 New Directions
2
3 There is still great potential for developing the links that exist between
4 sociolinguistics and other fields with regard to the themes discussed here
5 as well as many others. Language ideology, particularly the local meanings
6 of language choice and language variation in hip-hop scenes in different
7 parts of the USA, has received some treatment in linguistic anthropology
8 (Morgan 1993, 1996, 2002), but it is an area that holds great promise
9 for further cross-disciplinary exploration. There is also great potential
10 for connecting sociolinguistic examinations of language as a symbolic
11 resource in hip-hop culture to ethnographic studies of other forms of
12 identity display such as clothing, adornment, gesture, and hairstyles
13 (Eckert 1989; Mendoza-Denton 1996). Gender is also an understudied
14 topic in analyses of hip-hop culture and language although it is receiving
15 more attention now (cf. Haugen 2003; Morgan 2005; Diner 2006).
16 Finally, a number of important potential links have yet to be established
17 between linguistic studies of HHL and education. Alim (2003), Baugh
18 (forthcoming), Newman (2005), and Stovall (2006) point to the potential
19 of using of hip-hop and other elements of popular culture in order to
20 develop relevant curricula in the schools, but a greater focus on the ways
21 in which rap and HHL can be used to promote ‘critical literacies’ in the
22 urban schools and awareness of language diversity among teachers is needed.
23 Examining the research on HHL across a number of disciplines, there
24 appears to be great deal of focus on White participation in hip-hop and
25 the range of contradictions it raises, but not as much on Black hip hoppers
26 and rappers, the meanings of hip-hop for Blacks, the ways in which Blacks
27 orient themselves towards or away from hip-hop, the use of HHL in the
28 linguistic construction of identity among Blacks, or the tendency for
29 outsiders to essentialize or stereotype Black youth culture as urban, ghettoized,
30 and hip-hop affiliated. Alim (2002, 2003, 2004a), Newman (2001), and
31 Morgan (1993, 1996) are important exceptions, but more ethnographic,
32 variationist, and discourse analytic work is sorely needed in this area.
33 Marcyliena Morgan, who undoubtedly has the longest record of
34 ethnolinguistic research on HHL, founded the Hip-Hop Archive at
35 Harvard University and now is executive director of Stanford’s online
36
37
6 hip-hop archive (www.hiphoparchive.org). The archive includes a growing
bibliography (although the full references are often not available), a listing
38 of courses being taught around the USA on hip-hop, a list of conferences
39 and events on hip-hop, and a list of organizations and Web sites where
40 hip-hop research and activism is taking place in six ‘zones’ around the
41 USA (Atlanta, Boston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, and Philadelphia).
42 The archive has great potential for uniting people who do work on and
43 in hip-hop from community activists to university students and scholars.
44 In terms of media representations of HHL and AAE, sociolinguists still
45 have a great deal of work to do. In the aftermath of the Oakland School
14 Cecelia Cutler
1 Board’s aborted attempt to recognize AAE or ‘Ebonics’ as the language of

2 most of its students in 1996, efforts to improve prevailing attitudes towards
3 AAE have not made much headway (Baugh forthcoming). Although the
4 popularization of hip-hop culture has opened the door to hip-hop expres-
5 sions in advertising and the broadcast media (Green 2002; Lee 1998), not
6 enough focus has been given to the potential of hip-hop culture to
7 change the overwhelmingly negative attitudes towards AAE and African
8 Americans or to the role it may be playing in reinforcing such views.
9 Research has shown that Whites who listen to rap music are less racist
10 and more liberal than other Whites, although those who listen to violent
11 rap are reported to be more likely to stereotype and discriminate against
12 Blacks (Gilliam 2005:24). Gilliam also reports on studies that show that
13 Whites who listen to rap are generally found to be empathetic to Black
14 struggles, and may be predisposed to support race-based policies such as
15 affirmative action and increased employment for Blacks (Thompson and
16 Brown 2002 cited in Gilliam 2005:24). This sort of research is an important
17 starting point for future sociolinguistic work exploring language attitudes
18 and ideologies in hip-hop language.
19
20
Summary and Conclusion
21
22 Over the past two decades sociolinguistics has identified a language –
23 perhaps more accurately termed a ‘language style’ – associated with hip-hop
24 consisting of a range of phonological, grammatical, and lexical patterns.
25 Most of these are rooted in structures found in AAE, but others, especially
26 hip-hop slang terms, are unique and continue to evolve. In contrast with
27 research on AAE, which has focused on identifying consistent patterns
28 among speakers across the country, research on HHL has begun to explore
29 regional variation in USA cities where local hip-hop scenes are emerging.
30 Thus cities like Atlanta in the South, St. Louis in the Midwest, and Oakland
31 in California, now have their own pronunciation features and expressions.
32 After several decades of focusing on the linguistic features that define
33 social groups, sociolinguistics has become more interested in how speakers
34 use language to express a range of roles, identities and stances. They are
35 now looking more closely at how speech markers associated with social
36 classes and ethnic groups (such as AAE) function as stylistic devices that
37 speakers outside of those traditional social groupings use to project differ-
38 ent aspects of their personas and/or identities. When White teenage boys
39 sprinkle their speech with hip-hop slang they are often projecting a
40 ‘tough, streetwise’ persona. Thus, we see that language features function
41 much like other forms of identity display such as clothing, makeup, hairstyle,
42 gestures, attitudes, etc.
43 Authenticity is a focus of research on hip-hop culture as well as in
44 sociolinguistics more broadly. A number of studies have shown that
45 Whites can acquire and perform AAE like native speakers, but their
1 authenticity within hip-hop might still be questioned. Realness or

2 authenticity in hip-hop is predicated to a large degree on one’s connec-
3 tion to the urban Black experience forcing White middle class young
4 people to establish their authenticity in other ways. They often draw on
5 hip-hop language in symbolic ways, showing that they know how to use
6 it, but stopping short of making claims of in-group status. Authenticity in
7 the European rap scene centers around the use of local – often stigmatized
8 – dialectal forms interspersed with English hip-hop slang and even
9 foreigner languages like Turkish.
10 The study of hip-hop language has in many ways just begun. The
11 overwhelming focus has been on male participation, leaving room for
12 exploring how young female hip hoppers use language to project their
13 gender identities. The explosion of hip-hop scenes in urban centers across
14 the USA, Europe, Asia, African, Latin America, and the Middle East has
15 also opened the possibility for studying and comparing how young people
16 take the messages they hear and inscribe them with local meaning through
17 language, but more research is sorely needed on areas outside of North
18 America and Western Europe. Finally, researchers must bear the respon-
19 sibility of helping to shape national discourses about language and race.
20 The promotion and success of particular genres of rap music (principally
21 ‘gangsta’ rap) over the past decade has done a great deal to reinforce
22 negative stereotypes about African Americans and AAE. But the selling
23 power of hip-hop language and culture with messages that question the
24 status quo in the media and in advertising is a countervailing trend that
25 may ultimately help to change these negative stereotypes (e.g. Kanye
26 West’s televised comments about George Bush’s handling of Hurricane
27 Katrina). Sociolinguists can do their part by continuing to do research on
28 the vibrancy of and diversity within HHL and by promoting awareness
29 among teachers about HHL and how to integrate the study of language
30 diversity into their curricula.
31
32
Acknowledgments
33
34 I am indebted to Samy Alim, Marcy Morgan, Geneva Smitherman and
35 many others for their groundbreaking work on the language of hip-hop
36 culture and to the editors and anonymous readers for their helpful and
37 insightful comments on earlier drafts of this article.
38
39
Notes
40
41 * Correspondence address: Cecelia Cutler, Department of Linguistics, New York University,
42 726 Broadway, 7th Floor, New York, NY 10003, USA. Email: cececutler@nyu.edu.
43 1
Following Spears (1998) and Morgan (1998), I use AAE as a cover term for the collection of
44 standard and nonstandard or ‘vernacular’ varieties or dialects used by people of African American
descent in the USA.
45
16 Cecelia Cutler
1 2
AAVE or African American Vernacular English was used in studies prior to the 1990s. Since
2 then, the term AAE is more common and reflects the acknowledgment that the speech of
African Americans is more than a vernacular and consists of registers and styles that range from
3 the formal to the informal.
4 3
Alim is using ‘acceptable’ in the linguistic sense, meaning that habitual ‘be’ with noun phrases
5 is becoming a part of the grammar of AAE whereas before it was not (or at least was not
recognized by linguistics as such).
6 4
The term ‘hustle’ means to make money doing something questionable (urbandictionary.com);
7 to hustle for sex means to harass, flirt with, and/or seduce another person for sexual favors.
8
7
5
‘Slang’ is notoriously difficult to define and differentiate from nonslang lexical items (e.g.
9 Wolfram and Schilling-Estes 2006:71– 4). It is often used to refer to words and expressions that
come into fashion for a period of time and then disappear. However, some slang expressions
10 are actually quite long lived, and others can become so widely used that they become part of
11 the standard lexicon (e.g. ‘cool’).
12 6
While ethnicity and race are related concepts, ethnicity is rooted more in the idea of social
13 grouping, marked especially by shared religion, geography, language, or culture, whereas race
is rooted in the idea of shared genealogy/kinship (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnicity).
14 7
It is also important to point out that the Blackness they perform is Black adolescent culture
15 as opposed to generalized Black culture – a fact that is often overlooked in analyses of hip-hop
16 (Gordon 2005). See further discussion below.
17
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Hip‐Hop Language in Sociolinguistics and Beyond

Article in Language and Linguistics Compass · September 2007

Cecelia Anne Cutler

Corpus of New York City English (CONYCE) View project

Special issue of the CMLR, 2016 View project

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

1 including musicology, cultural studies, and education. Thus, I also discuss

1 Table 1. Regional Forms in Hip-Hop Language.

1 their respective speech community, including regional dialects, social

1 beyond the field of linguistics that conceptualizes social identity as

1 Jacobs-Huey 1997; Ibrahim 1998). Rampton (1995) pioneered the study

1 hip-hop culture, embodying the idea that people should be true to

1 to have become the wellspring of knowledge and creativity as though

1 Board’s aborted attempt to recognize AAE or ‘Ebonics’ as the language of

1 authenticity within hip-hop might still be questioned. Realness or

© 2007 The Authors Language and Linguistics Compass 1 (2007): 10.1111/j.1749-818x.2007.00021.x

Journal: Language and Linguistics Compass

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