A significant sociopolitical event in New York City led to the emergence of the hip-hop musical genre, which is now a critical part of global popular culture and the performance landscape. In general terms, hip-hop, and in particular rap, can be understood as a form of spoken word or rhymed storytelling, accompanied by music. In the 1970s, the construction of the Cross-Bronx Expressway (1948–1972) effectively displaced many residents from the South Bronx, an area where residents were already faced with high levels of unemployment and poverty. These social conditions led to the birth of hip-hop as a performative genre that provided a space for the marginalized to express their voice. These non-mainstream origins and the limited political and societal power that accompanied these conditions led to hip-hop being seen as a form of resistance. Since these times, hip-hop has broken into the mainstream and is now a multi-billion-dollar part of the music industry.
While hip-hop has grown as a genre of music and popular culture, so too has its reach on the global scale. Initially, this meant moving beyond New York, where different variations in African American English were incorporated along with more localized social and political concerns. Later, hip-hop began to spread around the world with a particularly unique ability to cross social, cultural, and geographic boundaries, as well as sociolinguistic boundaries. Emerging in various locations, it has proved its capacity to become translocal, taking on distinctly local features in a process of establishing authenticity inclusive of slang, dialect, accent, and phonological features as well as cultural markers and references to local political and social agendas. Hip-hop’s movement around the world has seen the emergence of important work on varieties of hip-hop. The underlying thesis here is that the localization of hip-hop is not merely global hip-hop adding in a few local features, but that it is always local, particularly in its linguistic features and general thematic and topical concerns.
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Hip-Hop Language and Linguistics
Andrew S. Ross and Elina Westinen
Article
Raciolinguistics
Jennifer Phuong, María Cioè-Peña, and Arianna Chinchilla
Raciolinguistics, or the study of language in relation to race, is an emergent field primarily stemming from U.S. academia and centering critical theories, including educational and applied linguistics. There currently exists a debate as to whether the theories that undergird raciolinguistics should be the grounding for a field (i.e., raciolinguistics) or a theoretical underpinning (i.e., raciolinguistic perspectives/ideologies) of applied linguistics and sociolinguistics, particularly works that are rooted in the embodied experiences of racialized people. H. Samy Alim, John R. Rickford, and Arnetha F. Ball edited a volume that brought together scholars whose works address the intersection of race and language to consider raciolinguistics as a field. Still, others believe it is necessary to understand phenomena that go beyond named languages while still rooted in hierarchical conceptualizations of race. As such, Nelson Flores and Jonathan Rosa have introduced and continue to build on a raciolinguistic perspective by rooting contemporary phenomena in colonial histories. Using this lens, they position language evaluations and assessments of racialized people as extensions of colonial racial projects rooted in dehumanization and commodification. Since then, scholars from multiple fields have engaged with raciolinguistics and raciolinguistic ideologies to explore language and race using a variety of methods (e.g., discourse analysis, mixed methods), contexts (e.g., diverse places and participants), scales (e.g., policy, interpersonal interactions), and institutions (e.g., healthcare, education). Regardless of the specific framing of raciolinguistics, the field and perspective both foreground racial and linguistic justice.
Article
Translanguaging
Ricardo Otheguy and Ofelia García
Translanguaging frames the study of bilingualism within theoretical and applied linguistics in a way that transcends the speaker’s separate codes or languages, named or not. These codes or languages are regarded as possessing a social ontology but not a cognitive linguistic one. While linguistic features such as (depending on the theory) phonemes, morphemes, sentences, lexical and grammatical signs, constructions, rules, checks, movements, derivations, and so on can legitimately be seen as cognitively real by their different proponents, their allocation to different languages or codes cannot. The separate allocation of these linguistic features to separate codes or languages is of considerable social relevance to the individuals and communities said to be using them, but should not be uncritically translated into representations of two separate grammars. Under translanguaging, named languages (Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese, English, Hindi, Quechua, Spanish, Swahili, Yoruba, etc.) exist only as sociopolitically institutionalized constructions, not as objects endowed with psycholinguistic reality.
The term translanguaging makes reference to the following 10 interconnected and mutually supporting proposals: (a) a broadly conceived pedagogical alternative to the strict language separation typical of many language education programs; (b) a denial of the dual correspondence hypothesis about the repertoire of bilinguals, under which the sociocultural conception of bilinguals as having two separate languages is assumed to reflect a dual cognitive representation; (c) the adoption of an alternative representation involving a unitary repertoire of linguistic features, under which a single inventory of lexical and morphosyntactic units best describes the psycholinguistics of bilingualism; (d) an integrated view of bilingual speech performance, under which speakers pick and choose from their unitary repertoire the lexical and morphosyntactic features appropriate to the moment, the context, and the interlocutor; (e) the denial that this process of selection sometimes constitutes normal or unmarked language use but other times involves mixing or switching between languages or codes; (f) the necessary rejection, if the above are to be implemented, of the idea that only the language practices of speakers with institutional power in Western societies are normal and universal; (g) the related recognition that named languages have gone hand in hand with the historical process of colonial expansion and nation-building, which relied on named languages to establish its system of control, including particularly the control of minoritized speakers, especially minoritized children in school; (h) the related critique of the abyssal thinking that has prevented scholars in Europe and the United States from seeing what lies across the abyssal line dividing the geographic and philosophical North from the modes of knowledge of the South; (i) the adoption of the scholarship of the Global South, dealing with the transformation of pedagogical practices to recognize the dynamic bilingualism of language learners, replacing in many settings the now outdated notion of additive bilingualism; and finally and perhaps most importantly, (j) the affirmation of a view of schooling for fluent or emergent bilingual students that focuses not exclusively on the teaching and assessment of named languages but of communicative capacities broadly conceived that reflect the autochthonous practices of bilinguals and their communities.
Article
Register and Enregisterment in Germanic
Jürgen Spitzmüller
Enregisterment denotes the sociolinguistic process within which specific forms of speaking, writing, or signing are subsumed by a social group into a coherent, distinctive whole (a language, a dialect, a standard, a slang etc.), which is often also given a label (such as Viennese, Spanglish, chatspeak, youth slang, officialese) and associated with specific contexts of use, media, groups of users, purposes, and ends, which are expected to be “typical” with regard to these forms. The product of such a process, an allegedly distinct set of communicative means that is associated (indexically linked) with assumed contexts and hence evokes specific expectations as far as their use is concerned, is called a register, register of discourse, or register of communication.
According to the sociolinguistic theory of enregisterment, registers are interpretive or ideological concepts rather than ontological facts; that is, there is often not much empirical evidence that these forms of communication are really used in the exact way, as distinctively, or as coherently as the register allocation would suggest, but nevertheless there is a shared belief throughout the relevant community that this is the case. Since such shared beliefs do have an impact on how people categorize the world they find themselves in, however, registers are not dismissed as “false beliefs” about language, but are rather seen as a core ingredient of the social use of language, particularly in relation to processes of social positioning, and of alienation and social discrimination, as well as the construction of social identities. Furthermore, many scholars have pointed out that enregisterment is not merely a “folk-linguistic” phenomenon (as opposed to allegedly “nonideological” forms of inquiry practiced by linguistic experts), since enregisterment processes are often propelled by linguistic scholars, and registers (such as “ethnolects” or “netspeak”) sometimes even derive from academic discourse.
Since the concept has gained great prominence in contemporary sociolinguistics, registers and enregisterment have been widely researched in Germanic languages, most notably English but also other Germanic languages such as German, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian. Enregisterment processes have been identified with regard to multiple historical and contemporary dimensions with which registers are being linked, among them nation states (language standardization and pluricentric standard variation), regions (regional and urban varieties), gender (e.g., “female speech,” “queer slang”), class (e.g., received pronunciation), age (e.g., “youth slang”), media (e.g., “netspeak”), profession (e.g., “officialese”), and ethnicity (e.g., “ethnolects”).
Article
Writing Systems in Modern West Germanic
Martin Evertz-Rittich
The writing systems of the modern West Germanic languages have many features in common: They are all written using the Modern Roman Alphabet and exhibit a certain depth, that is, in addition to the pure grapheme–phoneme correspondences, prosodic, morphological, and syntactic information that is systematically encoded in their writing systems. A notable exception is the writing system of Yiddish, which is not only written with an alphabet evolved from the Hebrew script but is also almost completely transparent.
Except for Yiddish, all writing systems of modern West Germanic languages use graphematic syllable and foot structures to encode suprasegmental properties such as vowel quantity. Paradigmatic relations are represented by morphological spellings (especially stem and affix constancy). Syntagmatic relations are expressed, for example, in compound spelling, which adheres to the same principles in all writing systems under discussion.
The writing systems of modern West Germanic languages have been studied by grapholinguists in varying depth. While German is probably the best researched writing system in the world, some writing systems, such as Luxembourgish, await thorough grapholinguistic investigation.
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Construction-Based Research in China
Xu Yang and Randy J. Lapolla
Research on construction-based grammar in China began in the late 1990s. Since its initial stages of introduction and preliminary exploration, it has entered a stage of productive and innovative development. In the past two decades, Chinese construction grammarians have achieved a number of valuable research results. In terms of theoretical applications, they have described and explained various types of constructions, such as schematic, partly variable, and fully substantive constructions. They have also applied the constructionist approach to the teaching of Chinese as a second language, proposing some new grammar systems or teaching modes such as the construction-chunk approach (构式-语块教学法), the lexicon-construction interaction model (词汇-构式互动体系), and trinitarian grammar (三一语法). In terms of theoretical innovation, Chinese construction grammarians have put forward theories or hypotheses such as the unification of grammar and rhetoric through constructions, the concept of lexical coercion, and interactive construction grammar (互动构式语法).
However, some problems have also emerged in the field of construction grammar approaches. These include a narrow understanding of the concept of construction, a limited range of research topics, and a narrow range of disciplinary perspectives and methods. To ensure the long-term development of construction-based research in China, scholars should be encouraged to make the following changes: First, they should adopt a usage-based approach using natural data, and they should keep up with advances in the study of construction networks. Second, they should broaden the scope of construction-based research and integrate it with language typology and historical linguistics. Finally, they should integrate cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary research findings and methods. In this way, construction-based research in China can continue to flourish and make significant contributions to the study of grammar and language.
Article
Negative Polarity Items in Chinese
Bo Xue and Haihua Pan
Negative polarity items (NPIs) are well known for their limited distribution, that is, their negation-implicating contexts, the phenomenon of which has attracted much attention in generative linguistics since Klima’s seminal work. There is a large amount of research on NPI licensing that aims to (a) identify the range of potential licensors of NPIs, also known as Ladusaw’s licensor question; (b) ascertain the semantic/logical properties shared by these licensors; (c) elucidate the licensing dependency, for example, whether the dependency between an NPI and its licensor involves a structural requirement like c-command, and (d) shed light on the nature of polarity-sensitive items in natural languages and, more generally, the architectural organization of the syntax–semantics and semantics–pragmatics interfaces.
Theories of NPI licensing on the market abound, ranging from Klima’s affectivity to the influential Fauconnier–Ladusaw downward-entailingness (DE) as well as some weakened versions of Ladusaw’s licensing condition like (non-)veridicality and Strawson downward-entailingness. These theories are primarily concerned with pinpointing the logical properties of NPI licensors and elucidating the dependency between a licensor and its licensee. Broadly speaking, NPIs are assumed to be in the scope of some negative element. On the licensor side, various logical properties have been identified, resulting in a more fine-grained distinction between different negative strengths including downward-entailing, anti-additive, and anti-morphic. Moreover, a diverse class of NPIs has been uncovered and differentiated, including English weak NPIs like any/ever, for which simple DE would suffice, and stronger NPIs like in years/the minimizer sleep a wink, which are more selective and correlate with a stronger negative strength, namely, anti-additivity. Further theoretical developments of NPI licensing shift to the nature of NPIs and their communicative roles in a discourse, unearthing important properties like domain-widening in need of semantic strengthening (with its recent implementation in the alternative-and-exhaustification framework), which advances the understanding of their polarity-sensitive profiles.
Chinese NPIs include renhe-phrases (similar to English any) and wh-items, and minimizers, all of which are also confined to certain negative semantic contexts and not acceptable if they occur in simple positive episodic sentences without Chinese dou ‘all’. Descriptively, among canonical affective contexts(those including sentential negation, yes–no/wh questions, intensional verbs, if-clauses, imperatives, modals, adversative emotive predicates, adverb dou ‘all’, and the exclusive particle zhiyou ‘only’), renhe-phrases, and wh-items can be licensed by sentential negation, yes–no questions, intensional verbs, if-clauses, imperatives, modals, and the left restrictor of dou ‘all’, whereas minimizers like yi-fen qian ‘one penny’ display a more constrained distribution and can only be licensed by sentential negation, yes–no rhetorical questions, concessive if-clauses, and the left restrictor of dou.
There are at least two research questions worth exploring in the future. First, the affective contexts licensing Chinese renhe-phrases, wh-items, and minimizers are not totally the same, with minimizers being more constrained in their distribution. What could explain the unique behavior of Chinese minimizers? Why are these minimizers deviant in modal contexts and in need of the likelihood reasoning? Second, the affective contexts licensing Chinese NPIs do not totally overlap with those licensing English any. What could explain the divergent distributions of NPIs cross-linguistically?
Article
Critical Applied Linguistics
Alastair Pennycook
Critical applied linguistics is a field of inquiry and practice that connects questions of power and inequality—domination (constraining possibilities), disparity (inequitable access), discrimination (ideological exclusion), difference (cultural distinction), and desire (social preference)—to applied linguistic concerns. It brings together common applied linguistic interests such as classroom utterances, translations, conversations, genres, second-language acquisition, and media texts with critical sociological engagement with ideology, neoliberalism, colonialism, gender, racism, sexuality, and so on. While critical applied linguistics may therefore suggest certain domains of inquiry—language and migration, workplace discrimination, anti-racist education, and language revival, for example—it also insists that all domains of applied linguistics—classroom analysis, language testing, sign language interpreting, and language and the law—need to take into account the inequitable operations of the social world, and to have the theoretical and practical tools to do so effectively. Critical applied linguistics can also be understood as the intersection of a range of related critical projects, from critical pedagogy, critical literacies, and critical discourse analysis to critical approaches to language policy, critical language testing, and critical language awareness. As a domain of applied work, critical applied linguistics seeks not just to describe but also to change inequality through forms of research, pedagogy, and activism.
Article
Language Crossing and the Global Southern Gaze
Cristine Severo, Sinfree Makoni, and Ashraf Abdelhay
The notion of language crossing is discussed from the perspective of Southern language practices and epistemologies. The notion of language is expanded to include the voices and metalanguages of subjects who were historically invisibilized and silenced, with a focus on Southern contexts that underwent processes of colonization and liberation, specifically Africa. This also includes speaking across the human/nonhuman dimension. Language crossing not only is a contemporary and Northern practice but also includes a complex set of arrangements, alliances, and negotiations inscribed in the meaning-making process that cannot be reduced to the modern ideas of linguistic, national, or ethnic borders. By drawing on the decolonial sociolinguistic critique of language and linguistics, the concept of crossing is revised and elaborated in light of the insights from certain African sociolinguistic situations. Southern perspectives of language crossing should be able to include the role of objects, animals, nature, and humans in language practices. The following questions are addressed: (a) What does language crossing look like when viewed from the global South/s? (b) What can those who study language crossing learn from the perspective of a global Southern gaze? (c) What can African multilingualisms teach us about the situated dimensions of the notion of language crossing? The conclusion argues that language crossing in Southern contexts is connected to issues of legitimacy, authenticity, and belonging that characterize a sense of community, which is a complex and context-based notion. This means that different peoples, individuals, or groups may have different understandings of what counts as communication and language use. By crossing the disciplinary Northern boundaries toward an approach that dialogues with Southern voices and experiences, the political nature of the notion of boundary is problematized.
Article
Language Ideologies
Susan Gal
Language ideologies are representations about the nature, structure, and use of linguistic forms in a social world. These understandings are never only about language. They are politically positioned, morally and aesthetically loaded evaluations of the situated linguistic practices to which a social group attends. Language ideologies are evident in practices and in embodied dispositions, or may be implicit in textual form and in material infrastructures. Sometimes they are explicit in discourse. Language ideologies are indispensable in social life because they mediate between aspects of language and other sociocultural phenomena such as identities, interactional stances, and hierarchies of cultural value.Speakers must draw on their presumptions about language and speech to interpret talk and thereby engage in everyday interactions, including child socialization, political debate, ritual speech, intellectual exploration, and governance. Language ideologies have considerable sociopolitical and historical consequences as metacommunications that frame the meaning of enregistered signs-in-use. Mediatingsemiotically between linguistic practices and social as well as linguistic structures, ideologies shape the direction of linguistic and social change. Semiotic concepts of indexicality, differentiation, rhematization, fractality, and erasure are essential in analysis. Language ideologies are evident in communities of all kinds. Scholars, too, have ideological presuppositions which orient their research and have political consequences. A study of a social group's language ideologies is indispensable in projects of language documentation, revitalization, poetics, and multilingual sustainability.
