Ashley Ghodsian, Maddie Kostant, Kat Escobar, Maxime Guerra
Much of the previous work that has studied African American Vernacular English (AAVE) has focused on either native speakers of AAVE or native speakers of Standard American English (SAE) who adopt certain language features of AAVE into their speech (a phenomenon known as “language crossing”). This study investigates the adoption of AAVE features into the language of individuals who speak English as a second language (hereafter, “L2”). We hypothesized that our L2 speakers would exhibit language crossing into AAVE in a manner similar to that of native SAE speakers’ crossing, but may have different (likely unconscious) motivations for doing so. Specifically, we expected that any language crossing into AAVE by our L2ers would not only be motivated by an attempt to index proximity to Blackness (as with non-Black, native SAE speakers) but also by a desired proximity to an international conception of “American-ness,” and that this indexicality would differ for men and women as has been observed for native AAVE speakers. We analyzed the English-language interviews of two fluent, L2 English-speaking hip-hop artists who sing in Spanish in order to understand both the rates at which and the act sequences in which they adopt features of AAVE, and found evidence in favor of our hypothesis.
Introduction and Background
The origin of hip-hop and rap stems from the oral practices of enslaved Africans that were brought over to the Americas. Its style of deliverance is meant to embody the roles of the storyteller and culture historian that resemble those in traditional African society (Álvarez-Mosquera, 2015). One of the most integral aspects of hip-hop is its use of AAVE to index African-American culture.
Given the level of prominence that hip-hop has attained in global popular culture, music, and language and its considerable exposure in global media (Tamasi & Antieau, 2014), non-Black hip-hop artists whose native variety of English is Standard American English often end up adopting and appropriating aspects of AAVE (Chun 2001). Rampton (2020) has coined this phenomenon “language crossing.” Language crossing occurs when speakers borrow features from dialects that do not “belong” to them and is particularly problematic when the language being “crossed” into is socially marginalized. Because hip-hop is so closely associated with African-American culture, non-Black artists are left to differentiate themselves from the social expectations of their own culture and reinforce their authenticity as hip-hop artists through the use of crossing into AAVE (Álvarez-Mosquera, 2015).
This study builds on all of the aforementioned previous research into language crossing by investigating the non-native use of AAVE in specific language communities with whom it had yet to be explored. Also notably, this study builds on the work done by Britt & Weldon (2015), who found that African-American women who natively speak AAVE use linguistic features more similar to those of SAE compared to their male counterparts. Exploring these gendered differences was also relevant to our project design.
As such, this project aimed to answer the following research questions: (1) In what speech contexts and with what goals—conscious or otherwise—do non-Black hip-hop artists who are L2 English speakers adopt features of AAVE into their speech? And (2) How does said feature adoption vary depending on the speakers’ genders? As previously mentioned, L2 English speakers are a speech community whose potential appropriation of AAVE has yet to be investigated. We hypothesized that like non-Black native SAE speakers, our L2 speakers would exhibit language crossing into AAVE, but that they may have had different (again, likely unconscious) motivations for doing so. Namely, we expected that any language crossing into AAVE by our L2ers would not only be motivated by an attempt to index proximity to Blackness (as with non-Black, native SAE speakers) but also by a desired proximity to an international conception of “American-ness” altogether. Following Britt & Weldon’s findings, we also anticipated that this indexicality would differ for men and women, as it does for those who are native AAVE speakers.
Methods
As previously mentioned, we analyzed the English-language interviews of two fluent, L2 English-speaking hip-hop artists who sing in Spanish to investigate our claims: J Balvin, a Colombian reggaeton artist, and Rosalía, a Spanish pop artist. Two interviews were analyzed for each artist, one in which they primarily discussed topics such as their global success and interactions with famous American celebrities, and one in which they focused on their cultural and/or family backgrounds. For both J Balvin and Rosalía, their “success” interviews were chosen to be The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, a major American late-night talk show that both artists had attended, as a method of controlling for the interviewer. The “personal” interviews were harder to control for in the same way. J Balvin’s was hosted by the YouTube channel HardKnockTV and Rosalía’s was hosted by Billboard Music’s YouTube channel. Crucially, neither of the “personal” interviews was as nationally televised in the U.S. as the “success” interviews were, and they were both centered more around personal content.
For each interview, we noted each instance in which the artist adopted at least one phonological or morphosyntactic AAVE feature and observed the frequency with which they were adopted in relation to the speech context (e.g., establishing comradery with the interviewer, discussing their childhoods, etc.). Many of the features of AAVE that this study investigates have already been widely studied by linguists. As such, we primarily followed a list of features presented by Walters (1992), found in Figures 1 and 2 below, which includes AAVE phonological features as well as AAVE morphological and lexical features. In order to minimize possible confounds, any features of AAVE that overlapped with aspects of the speakers’ L2 English dialect coming from their L1 Spanish (e.g., dropping of a final ‘g’ in verbs ending in ‘-ing’) were not considered in our analysis.
The results in the following section are analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. The quantitative analysis considers the features of AAVE used per minute by each artist (measuring by the rate of feature adoption as opposed to considering a net total measurement is motivated by the fact that each artist’s respective videos were not equal in duration), and the qualitative analysis explores select examples of AAVE usage and aims to explain them within the lens of the conversational contexts they were used in in order to relate them back to the research question and hypotheses. We counted each syntactic, phonological, and lexical feature as one (1) instance of AAVE. For example, in his “success” interview, J Balvin produced the sentence “Yo, give it up for his Spanish!” We counted the lexical item [yo] as one feature, and the phrase [give it up for] as a second.
Results
We found that both J Balvin and Rosalía adopted features of AAVE more frequently during their “success”-oriented videos than during their “personal” interviews. Specifically, J Balvin adopted AAVE features at a rate of 3.42 features per minute during the “success”-oriented interview, compared to 0.75 features per minute during his “personal” interview. Rosalía adopted AAVE at a rate of 0.78 features per minute during her “success” interview, compared to 0 features per minute for the “personal” interview.
J Balvin utilized AAVE features throughout his “success”-oriented interview. However, he only used AAVE a few times during his “personal” interview: once when establishing comradery with the interviewer, and once when he described moving to New York and the inspiration he drew from the city’s hip-hop culture. Examples from J Balvin’s “personal” and “success” interviews can be seen below. AAVE features are highlighted using bold font:
Personal
Talking about moving to New York
5:08: And that was the vibe that I was looking for.
Success
Talking about style for Guess magazine
4:09: You know, sort of Miami vibe
4:13: Shout-out to Miami.
Rosalía did not use AAVE features as frequently as J Balvin for both interview types. However, there was still a disparity between the results for her “personal” and “success” interviews: while she did adopt AAVE features in the “success” interviews when talking about her new album, “Motomami,” Rosalía did not adopt any AAVE features at all during her “personal” interview. An example from her “success” interview is shown below, again with AAVE features highlighted in bold:
Success
Talking about success of new album, “Motomami”
1:54: ‘Cause I feel like Motomami’s an energy.
Our quantitative results are illustrated in Figure 3 below:
Additionally, we did not count AAVE lexical items that have entered the Standard American English (SAE) lexicon such as “gonna,” “wanna,” and “you know” toward our tallied per-minute totals for each artist. This was a subjective decision that we made based on our prediction that the use of these terms is not generally used by SAE speakers to index social identity in the same way that strictly-AAVE terms are.
Discussion
As mentioned, J Balvin used AAVE features more frequently in both of his interview types than Rosalía did, and both of them adopted AAVE more frequently in their “success” interviews than in their “personal” interviews. These findings are in line with our hypothesis, which predicted that both artists would use aspects of AAVE in contexts for which they have an incentive to communicate their connection to an “American” identity. Additionally, the overall difference between J Balvin’s and Rosalía’s utilization of this variety is in line with Britt & Weldon’s (2015) observations of native AAVE speakers’ gendered differences. It is important to note that these are only numerical comparisons, and we cannot assert any statistical significance.
Fortunately, the “success”-oriented interviews for J Balvin and Rosalía covered similar topics, including friendship (with both the interviewer and U.S. celebrities), major performances and releases, fashion, and the artists’ success with English-speaking audiences. The “personal” interviews generally explored the artists’ childhoods and family backgrounds, the artistic inspirations they drew from their home cultures, and their immigration stories. The thematic similarities between the two “personal” interviews and the two “success” interviews, respectively, allowed us to analyze them together.
The fact that J Balvin used AAVE throughout his “success” interview, which only covered topics related to his success in the U.S., while he only used AAVE in the “personal” interview when discussing moving to New York provides evidence that he crosses into AAVE when trying to communicate his proximity to “American-ness.” Additionally, our findings that Rosalía did not use AAVE features as frequently as J Balvin for both interview types is in line with the aforementioned gendered differences observed among native AAVE speakers. However, this could also be due to the fact that Rosalía’s English is not as strong as J Balvin’s, and thus she may not be as confident in switching between English varieties. At the same time, there was still a disparity in the results for her “personal” and “success” interviews: while she did adopt AAVE features in the “success” interviews when talking about her new album, “Motomami,” Rosalía did not adopt any AAVE features during her “personal” interview. This may be because her “personal” interview did not cover any topics related to the U.S., and focused mainly on her inspiration from Spanish culture. Therefore, unlike in J Balvin’s interview, in which he talked about moving to the U.S. and New York’s hip-hop culture, Rosalía did not have any incentive to index proximity to “American-ness” based on the thematic components of her interview.
Conclusion
In conclusion, we found that both J Balvin and Rosalía adopt features of AAVE more frequently when they are talking about their international success and topics related to the United States. These results provide evidence that L2 English speakers adopt features of AAVE in order to index a connection to a global conception of “American-ness.” However, despite our study corroborating our hypothesis, there were several limitations: (a) Rosalía’s English is not as fluent as J Balvin’s; (b) we only worked with a small sample size; and (c) the categorization of act sequences and features is inevitably subjective (e.g., the way we differentiated topic types into “success” versus “personal”; ambiguous lexical items that we encountered such as “gonna,” “wanna,” and “you know” that are now a part of the Standard English lexicon). Additionally, it is worth noting that Rosalía and J Balvin are celebrities; their results are not necessarily representative of all L2 English speakers since they have a particularly strong incentive to connect to Americanness (it is essentially their job to do so if they want to break into the American market).
Finally, although we did observe a gendered difference in the frequency of adoption by J Balvin and Rosalía, the Britt & Weldon study that found gendered differences for native AAVE speakers measured this difference in terms of manner (primarily, phonetic), not in terms of frequency. However, since our study was forced to disregard much of the phonetic information from J Balvin’s and Rosalía’s interviews in order to minimize confounds with their L1 accents, we were unable to conduct a similar analysis. As such, we cannot definitively state that our results align with those of Britt & Weldon (2015).
In the end, our research suggests that L2 English speakers use AAVE features to communicate a connection to the “American identity,” and calls for a future, more robust experiment.
References
Álvarez-Mosquera, P. (2015). Underlining authenticity through the recreolization process in rap music: A case of an in-group answer to an identity threat. Sociolinguistic Studies, 9(1), 51.
Britt, E., & Weldon, T. L. (2015). African American English in the middle class.
Chun, E. W. (2001). The construction of white, black, and Korean American identities through African American Vernacular English. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 11(1), 52-64.
Rampton, B. (2020). Crossing. The International Encyclopedia of Linguistic Anthropology, 1-5.
Tamasi, S., & Antieau, L. (2014). Language and linguistic diversity in the US: An introduction. Routledge.
Walters, K. (1992). Supplementary materials for AFR 320/LIN 325: Black English. Master’s thesis, University of Texas at Austin.
