A Study Of Language Features In Rap Lyrics

Rap or Hip-hop music — born in the rough and tumble of America's predominantly black inner city neighborhoods — is one of the most successful musical styles in popular culture today. But music is just one face of the Hip-hop phenomenon. Hip-hop has also had a significant impact on American slang by the usage of the Rap lyrics. As a language variety, the combinative product with Rap music and American slang — Rap or Hip-hop slang, is used by isolated and diverging groups of people, the language itself becomes isolated and divergent.Language can be regarded as a communicative medium and carrier of culture. Such a departure from majority language usage is, of course, a natural consequence of cultural differences. However, little research has been done in the field of this jumped-up language variety for its special combination with the black music culture. Most sociologists, linguists and psychologists believe that such divergent language development is often a kind of passive resistance to subjugation, oppression or cultural aggression. Rap slang becomes a means of self-differentiation that helps forge group identity, solidarity and ethnic pride. In the case of African-Americans, this language variety has survived and thrived through the past three decades also as a result of group societal marginalization — through segregation, discrimination and often self-imposed social separation.Consequently, an exploratory research on this topic is carried out according to the relationships between language, thought and culture by certain qualitative research methods from the perspective of sociolinguistics.To explain how American slang in Rap lyrics is spoken and written in present-day America, the thesis undertakes a comprehensive linguistic description of the characteristics of Rap slang. More specifically, the thesis explores how American slang has changed in the past thirty years with the help of Rap music, and how Rap music has influenced the spelling andgrammatical changes in the language. The research indicates slang's whole attitude is "keep it simple". It is proposed that the changes reflect the social values, moral standards, people's thought modes and social psychology of Afro-American society.The following study concentrates on the "analysis of the relationship between American slang and Rap music from the perspective of sociolinguistics. By analyzing the development of a special language variety in a fashionable music culture, the thesis discusses the slang users' inner state of mind with the development of the music culture from the perspective of socio-psycholinguistics, which comes to the conclusion that the combination of music and language is endowed with much more social values and functions, and holds the great potential to influence and improve human thoughts and language teaching.In addition, the research is also based on the author's knowledge of slang words and phrases along with the myriad of Rap songs as sources of material. Since Rap lyrics are the primary source of examples, a few music groups' and DJ's (Disc Jockey) and MC's (Master of Ceremony) albums are most frequently quoted throughout the thesis. Hereby, at the end of the thesis, a discography is set up as the major data collection resources besides the bibliography.The above analysis shows that there exists close link between slang and society. Slang words can be better understood combining with Rap music and more effectively used from the perspective of sociolinguistics. The language development of slang will be a fashion due to people's mental unity of crowds, instinct of self-expression and vanity of faddism.