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Interface between Sociolinguistics and Music
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Interface between Sociolinguistics and Music

A special issue of Languages (ISSN 2226-471X).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 March 2024) | Viewed by 9020

Special Issue Editors

Dr. Verónica Loureiro-Rodríguez

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Faculty of Arts, Department of Linguistics, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, MB R3T 2N2, Canada
Interests: language attitudes; language and identity; code-switching; lyrical code-switching; global hip hop
Prof. Dr. María Irene Moyna

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Global Languages and Literatures, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA
Interests: language change and variation; Spanish in the United States; address forms; compounding and word formation

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

This special Languages issue focuses on sociolinguistic analyses of language as used in recorded songs.  The goal of this volume is to further our knowledge and deepen our understanding of the role of language features in artists’ building of identities in performance. We welcome quantitative and qualitative sociolinguistic analyses of the production of a single artist (e.g., Jansen & Westphal 2017, Konert-Panek 2017, Loureiro-Rodríguez et al. 2018), or different performers (e.g., Trudgill 1983, O’Hanlon 2006, Duncan 2017). Submissions may focus on the production of phonetic variables (e.g., Trudgill 1983, Simpson 1999, Beal 2009; Gibson 2023), morphological features (e.g., Werner 2012, Moyna 2015), stylistic constructions and indexical expressions of authenticity (e.g., Eberhardt and Freeman 2015, Lin and Chan 2022,), or the role of code-switching (e.g., Lee 2004, Loureiro-Rodríguez 2017), among other topics. We welcome a diversity of approaches as well as submissions exploring under-researched musical genres and/or linguistic varieties.

We request that, prior to submitting a manuscript, interested authors initially submit a proposed title and an abstract of 400–600 words summarizing their intended contribution. Please send it to the guest editors ([email protected]) or to Languages editorial office ([email protected]). Abstracts will be reviewed by the guest editors for the purposes of ensuring proper fit within the scope of the special issue. Full manuscripts will undergo double-blind peer-review.

References:

Beal, J. C. (2009). “You’re not from New York City, you’re from Rotherham”: Dialect and identity in British indie music. Journal of English Linguistics, 37(3), 223–40.

Duncan, D. (2017). Australian singer, American features: Performing authenticity in country music. Language & Communication 52, 31–44.

Eberhardt, M., & Freeman, K. (2015). `First things first, I’m the realest’: Linguistic appropriation, white privilege, and the hip-hop persona of Iggy Azalea. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 19(3), 303–327. https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.12128.

Gibson, A. (2023) Pop English as a supralocal norm. Language and Society. doi:10.1017=S0047404523000131.

Jansen, L., & Westphal, M. (2017). Rihanna works her multivocal pop persona: A morpho-syntactic and accent analysis of Rihanna's singing style: Pop culture provides rich data that demonstrate the complex interplay of World Englishes. English Today, 33(2), 46–55. doi:10.1017/S0266078416000651. 

Konert-Panek, M. (2017). Americanisation versus Cockney: Stylisation in Amy Winehouse’s singing accent. In V. Kennedy & M. Gadpaille (eds.), Ethnic and cultural identity in music and song lyrics (pp. 77–94). Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.

Lee, J. S. (2004). Linguistic hybridization in K-Pop: Discourse of self-assertion and resistance. World Englishes, 23(3), 429–450. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0883-2919.2004.00367.x.

Lin, Y., & Chan, M. (2022). Linguistic constraint, social meaning, and multi-modal stylistic construction: Case studies from Mandarin pop songs. Language in Society, 51(4), 603–626. doi:10.1017/S0047404521000609.

Loureiro-Rodríguez, V. (2017). Y yo soy cubano, and I’m impatient. Frequency and functions of Spanish switches in Pitbull’s lyrics. Spanish in Context, 14(2), 250–272. https://doi.org/10.1075/sic.14.2.05lou.

Loureiro-Rodríguez, V., Moyna, M. I., & Robles, D. (2018). Hey, baby, ¿qué pasó?: Performing bilingual identities in Texan popular music. Language and Communication, 60, 120–135. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2018.02.009.

Moyna, M.I. (2015). Voseo/tuteo variation in Uruguayan popular songs, 1960-2010. Romanische Forschungen, 127 (1), 3–28.

Simpson, P. (1999.) Language, culture and identity: With (another) look at accents in pop and rock singing. Multilingua, 18(4), 343–367.

Trudgill, P. (1983). Acts of conflicting identity: The sociolinguistics of British pop- song pronunciation. In P. Trudgill (ed.), On Dialect: Social and Geographical Perspectives (pp. 141–160). Oxford, U.K.: Basil Blackwell.

Werner, V. (2012). Love is all around: A corpus-based study of pop lyrics. Corpora 7, 19–50.

Tentative Completion Schedule

Abstract Submission Deadline:  August 30th, 2023

Notification of Abstract Acceptance:  October 15th, 2023

Full Manuscript Deadline: March 31st, 2024 (Manuscript length: 8,000 – 10,000 words)  

Dr. Verónica Loureiro-Rodríguez
Prof. Dr. María Irene Moyna
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Languages is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • popular music
  • songs
  • lyrics
  • sociolinguistics
  • identity
  • performance

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Published Papers (6 papers)

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Research

34 pages, 1718 KiB  
Article
Lyrical Code-Switching, Multimodal Intertextuality, and Identity in Popular Music
by Michael D. Picone
Languages 2024, 9(11), 349; https://doi.org/10.3390/languages9110349 - 14 Nov 2024
Viewed by 616
Abstract
Augmenting the author’s prior research on lyrical code-switching, as presented in Picone, “Artistic Codemixing”, published in 2002, various conceptual frameworks are made explicit, namely the enlistment of multimodal and intertextual approaches for their methodological usefulness in analyzing and interpreting message-making that incorporates lyrical [...] Read more.
Augmenting the author’s prior research on lyrical code-switching, as presented in Picone, “Artistic Codemixing”, published in 2002, various conceptual frameworks are made explicit, namely the enlistment of multimodal and intertextual approaches for their methodological usefulness in analyzing and interpreting message-making that incorporates lyrical code-switching as one of its components. Conceived as a bipolarity, the rooted (or local) and the transcendent (or global), each having advantages in the negotiation of identity, is also applied to the analysis. New departures include the introduction of the notion of “curated lyrical code-switching” for the purpose of analyzing songs in which multiple performers are assigned lyrics in different languages, as a function of their respective proficiencies, as curated by the person or persons having authorial agency and taking stock of the social semiotics relevant to the anticipated audience. Moving beyond the negotiation of the identity of the code-switching composer or performer, in another new departure, attention is paid to the musical identity of the listener. As a reflection of the breadth of lyrical code-switching, a rich assortment of examples draws from the musical art of Beyoncé, Jon Batiste, Stromae, Shakira, BTS, NewJeans, Indigenous songsmiths, Cajun songsmiths, Latin Pop and Hip-Hop artists, songs composed for international sports events, and other sources. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Interface between Sociolinguistics and Music)
39 pages, 6630 KiB  
Article
‘No’ Dimo’ par de Botella’ y Ahora Etamo’ Al Garete’: Exploring the Intersections of Coda /s/, Place, and the Reggaetón Voice
by Derrek Powell
Languages 2024, 9(9), 292; https://doi.org/10.3390/languages9090292 - 30 Aug 2024
Viewed by 865
Abstract
The rebranding of reggaetón towards Latin urban has been criticized for tokenizing Afro-Caribbean linguistic and cultural practices as symbolic resources recruitable by non-Caribbean artists/executives in the interest of profit. Consumers are particularly critical of an audible phonological homogeneity in the performances of ethnonationally [...] Read more.
The rebranding of reggaetón towards Latin urban has been criticized for tokenizing Afro-Caribbean linguistic and cultural practices as symbolic resources recruitable by non-Caribbean artists/executives in the interest of profit. Consumers are particularly critical of an audible phonological homogeneity in the performances of ethnonationally distinct mainstream performers, framed as a form of linguistic minstrelsy popularly termed a ‘Caribbean Blaccent’ that facilitates capitalization on the genre’s popularity by tapping into the covert prestige of distinctive phonological elements of Insular Caribbean Spanish otherwise stigmatized. This work pairs acoustic analysis with quantitative statistical modeling to compare the use of lenited coronal sibilant allophones popularly considered indexical of Hispano-Caribbean origins in the spoken and sung speech of four of the genre’s top-charting female performers. A general pattern of style-shifting from interview to sung speech wherein sibilance is favored in the former and phonetic zeros in the latter is revealed. Moreover, a statistically significant increased incidence of [-] across time shows the most recent records to uniformly deploy near-categorical reduction independent of artists’ sociocultural and linguistic backgrounds. The results support the enregisterment of practices popularized by the genre’s San Juan-based pioneers as a stylistic resource—a reggaetón voice—for engaging the images of vernacularity sustaining and driving the contemporary, mainstream popularity of música urbana. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Interface between Sociolinguistics and Music)
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21 pages, 4258 KiB  
Article
Covering Blue Voices: African American English and Authenticity in Blues Covers
by Romeo De Timmerman and Stef Slembrouck
Languages 2024, 9(7), 229; https://doi.org/10.3390/languages9070229 - 25 Jun 2024
Viewed by 731
Abstract
Many musicologists and researchers of popular music have recently stressed the omnipresence of covers in today’s music industry. In the sociolinguistics of music, however, studio-recorded covers and their potential differences from ‘original’ compositions have certainly been acknowledged in passing, but very few sociolinguists [...] Read more.
Many musicologists and researchers of popular music have recently stressed the omnipresence of covers in today’s music industry. In the sociolinguistics of music, however, studio-recorded covers and their potential differences from ‘original’ compositions have certainly been acknowledged in passing, but very few sociolinguists concerned with the study of song seem to have systematically explored how language use may differ in such re-imagined musical outputs. This article reports on a study which examines the language use of 45 blues artists from three distinct time periods (viz., 1960s, 1980s, and 2010s) and three specific social groups (viz., African American; non-African American, US-based; and non-African American, non-US based) distributed over 270 studio-recorded original and cover performances. Through gradient boosting decision tree classification, it aims to analyze the artists’ use of eight phonological and lexico-grammatical features that are traditionally associated with African American English (viz., /aɪ/ monophthongization, post-consonantal word-final /t/ deletion, post-consonantal word-final /d/ deletion, alveolar nasal /n/ in <ing> ultimas, post-vocalic word-final /r/ deletion, copula deletion, third-person singular <s> deletion, and not-contraction). Our analysis finds song type (i.e., the distinction between covers and originals) to have no meaningful impact on artists’ use of the examined features of African American English. Instead, our analysis reveals how performers seem to rely on these features to a great extent and do so markedly consistently, regardless of factors such as time period, socio-cultural background, or song type. This paper hence builds on our previous work on the language use of blues performers by further teasing out the complex indexical and iconic relationships between features of African American English, authenticity, and the blues genre in its various manifestations of time, place, and performance types. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Interface between Sociolinguistics and Music)
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20 pages, 898 KiB  
Article
Singing to a Genre: Constraints on Variable Rhoticity in British Americana
by Rebeka Campos-Astorkiza
Languages 2024, 9(6), 203; https://doi.org/10.3390/languages9060203 - 31 May 2024
Viewed by 819
Abstract
This study focuses on accent shift or stylization to American English features in Anglophone pop-rock music and examines linguistic constraints alongside music-related considerations, as well as the effect of changes in musical genre on variable accent shift. The case study is the British [...] Read more.
This study focuses on accent shift or stylization to American English features in Anglophone pop-rock music and examines linguistic constraints alongside music-related considerations, as well as the effect of changes in musical genre on variable accent shift. The case study is the British band Mumford and Sons and their variable production of non-prevocalic rhotics as either present or absent. Mumford and Sons is of interest because they have displayed a change in their musical style throughout their career from Americana to alt-rock. The band’s four studio albums were auditorily analyzed and coded for rhotic vs. non-rhotic with aid from spectrograms. The linguistic factors considered were word class, preceding vowel according to the word’s lexical set, complexity of the preceding vowel, syllable complexity, stress, and location within the word and phrase. In addition, the effect of singing-related factors of syllable elongation and rhyming, and of the specific album, were also explored. Results show that rhoticity is favored in content words, stressed contexts, complex syllables, and NURSE words. This pattern is explained as stemming from the perceptual prominence of those contexts based on their acoustic and phonological characteristics. Results further show that syllable elongation leads to more rhoticity and that rhyming words tend to agree in their (non-)rhoticity. Finally, the degree of rhoticity decreases as the band departs from Americana in their later albums, highlighting the relevance of music genre for accent stylization. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Interface between Sociolinguistics and Music)
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19 pages, 837 KiB  
Article
Styling Authenticity in Country Music
by Valentin Werner and Anna Ledermann
Languages 2024, 9(5), 168; https://doi.org/10.3390/languages9050168 - 6 May 2024
Viewed by 2121
Abstract
Country music has become commercially successful both in the US and worldwide. It is perceived as a genre that values authenticity, which may be reflected in the choice of linguistic features, with (White) Southern American English (SAE) serving as the “default” variety. Given [...] Read more.
Country music has become commercially successful both in the US and worldwide. It is perceived as a genre that values authenticity, which may be reflected in the choice of linguistic features, with (White) Southern American English (SAE) serving as the “default” variety. Given the recent diversification of the genre, the question arises whether the use of SAE features is still considered obligatory as a kind of “supralocal norm”. This study compared the lyrics of 600 highly successful songs by male and female artists from White Southern, Black Southern, and White non-Southern backgrounds. The aim was to test (i) whether morphosyntactic SAE features are used to index authenticity in the sense of having become enregistered for this music genre and (ii) whether non-Southerners engage in the styling of relevant markers. It emerged that non-Southerners use more of these features than their Southern counterparts, providing preliminary evidence for “genre fitting” as a means of indexing authenticity. However, there is only one marker that qualifies as a core Country feature used across all artist groups, namely negative concord. As this item arguably is better categorized as vernacular universal, SAE morphosyntax appears to have largely lost its indexical function in Country, while accent features are still vital to establishing cultural authenticity. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Interface between Sociolinguistics and Music)
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21 pages, 12005 KiB  
Article
Meeting in the Middle: Sociophonetic Convergence of Bad Bunny and J Balvin’s Coda /s/ in Their Artistic Performance Speech
by Elizabeth Naranjo Hayes
Languages 2023, 8(4), 287; https://doi.org/10.3390/languages8040287 - 14 Dec 2023
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 2643
Abstract
The artistic performance of identity by top Latin music artists can be heard on many Top-40 US radio stations, since, as of July 2023, 20% of the Billboard Hot 100 is (Spanish language) Latin music. This study aims to determine the variants found [...] Read more.
The artistic performance of identity by top Latin music artists can be heard on many Top-40 US radio stations, since, as of July 2023, 20% of the Billboard Hot 100 is (Spanish language) Latin music. This study aims to determine the variants found in the pronunciation of coda /s/, a robust phonetic differentiator of regional and social dialects, in the top songs versus in the spontaneous speech of the two top Latin music artists in the global market. Are Bad Bunny and J Balvin holding to the pronunciation of their respective regional variety in their artistic performance speech (APS, my term) or are they shifting to a different pronunciation? What motivations might cause a difference in the pronunciation of their APS and spontaneous speech? Bad Bunny and J Balvin’s pronunciation of coda /s/ is analyzed in depth as sociophonetic data: their performances of songs from 2018 to 2020 that charted at the top of the Hot Latin Songs Billboard chart as well as on The Billboard Hot 100 chart, and their spontaneous speech from their most-viewed Spanish-language interviews and Instagram Live recordings on YouTube recorded between 2018 and 2020. Bad Bunny overwhelmingly used deletions (∅) in his spontaneous speech—which is typical of an island Puerto Rican—but used a statistically significant amount of maintenance of the sibilant [s] and its aspirated variant [h] in his APS (p < 0.0001). J Balvin primarily used [s] in his spontaneous speech—which is typical of Medellín, Colombia—but used about 50/50 [s] and (∅) in his APS. They are both shifting to a different pronunciation in their APS and converging towards each other, and the difference is statistically significant (p < 0.0001). This dialect convergence could be the beginning of an identity-based pan-Latinx dialect leveling that is, on the one hand, the “in-crowd” pronunciation with covert prestige but, on the other hand, is part of the formation of an evolving multi-regional connector variant diffused through popular music and pop culture. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Interface between Sociolinguistics and Music)
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