The Quadrilingual Vocabulary of French Rap

Abstract

Rap lyrics are a hybrid of improvised speech and carefully written poetry. As such, they offer many contradictions when submitted to linguistic analysis. They present two kinds of language that are often seen as antithetical when developing a corpus to be studied. The words the rappers utter are neither pure verse nor prose but instead, an imitation of speech set to music. This simulation of verbal communication betrays a meta-linguistic tendency and manifests a willful desire for symbolic speech. It is from this angle that the linguist must approach hip-hop music. It is not only what is said, but also how what is said represents the person who says it. The purpose of this study is to analyze the vocabulary of French rap and to deduce its greater symbolic meaning. I will show how the words chosen by the lyricists reflect the hybridization of society through a complicated mixture of four different kinds of linguistic utterances: standard French, French slang, American slang and the various langues de bled.