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
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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.
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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.
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Orthography and the Sociolinguistics of Writing
Mirka Honkanen
Orthography is not a neutral tool for representing language in writing. Spelling is a linguistic variable capable of carrying social meaning, and orthographies are technologies embedded in larger societal structures. Spelling plays a role in the construction of national and other social identities, the delimitation of languages, the authentication and stigmatization of speaker groups, standardization, and the written representation of paralinguistic features. In these and further ways, orthography is a topic of high sociolinguistic relevance. After written language had long received less sociolinguistic attention than speech, there is now a growing body of sociolinguistic research into spelling variation and orthography as a socioculturally situated practice.
Sociolinguists investigate the social role of orthographies and spelling choices. When orthographies are developed for previously unwritten languages, decisions have to be made not only regarding phonemic representation but also between creating distance from and closeness to related languages. Orthography becomes a highly debated topic also when spelling reforms are proposed; different ideological, aesthetic, financial, educational, and sociopolitical arguments are typically brought forth. Standardized spellings are seen by language users as granting languages and speakers authority. When non-standardized spellings are used in transcripts of speech, they have been shown to assign sociolinguistic stigma to the speakers represented. Non-standardized spellings are used in different less than fully regulated orthographic spaces, such as digital writing, company and personal names, literary texts, subcultural publications, advertising, and private writing. Sociolinguistic studies on spelling often rely on data from digital communication such as text messaging or social media interactions. Such studies not only describe and classify different kinds of non-standardized spellings but also increasingly establish quantitative tendencies, explore correlations with macro-level sociodemographic factors, and show the potential for respelling to construct identities, personae, and meaning at the micro level of the utterance. Spelling can index identities and stances, act as a contextualization cue, and represent prosodic and dialectal features.
