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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 1053

Part of Session 119: Prefixing lingualism (Other abstracts in this session)

Various voices in monolingual rap

Authors: Szabó Gilinger, Eszter
Submitted by: Szabó Gilinger, Eszter (University of Szeged, Hungary)

The present paper, as part of an ongoing doctoral research, departs from the lyrics of five Hungarian hip hop bands and using discourse analysis it unveils the different voices and their meanings in the lyrics. Hip hop has been described by many authors as a space for multilingual practices. The bands, however, I have been working with, display different patterns of multilingualism, bilingualism and monolingualism from the ones eminent in hip hop studies. What I claim in this paper is that based on the ideological stance of the band vis-à-vis nation, gender and rap music, the voices they use in their artistic creation produce quite diverging meanings in different contexts. The voices create an indexical relationship to a style, an image, an ideology, but what that style, image or ideology is “doing”, or, in other words, what the meaning of the voice is emerges in the context of the song, album and band. The “same” code-switched sequences or borrowed words give rise to very different interpretations, depending on the actual meaning they acquire and, at the same time, construct. The meanings I found in the lyrics of some bands, systematically erase linguistic boundaries, whereas some other ones foreground difference. Some make use of varieties of the same language, others, however, multiply voices by highlighting distinct languages. What is quite typical of the hip hop scene though is that these processes of highlighting are not necessarily available for everybody, neither among the artists, nor in the audience. One of the key issues I would like to focus on, therefore, is the layered nature of emerging meanings through various voices in monolingual and multilingual rap.