CLIC Speaker Abstracts

Samy Alim (English, Duke University): "'My Steez, My Steelo': An Interdisciplinary Exploration of the Language, Poetics, and Speech Styles of the Hip Hop Nation," February 19, 2004 at 4PM (Reading Room - Haines 352).

My ethnographic research of the Hip Hop Nation in the US shows that Hip Hop Heads place tremendous emphasis on the creativity and distinctness of one’s style, or as some Hip Hop Heads say, “steez” or “steelo.” As Wu-Tang Clan rapper Raekwon explains, linguistic style is critical for a Hip Hop MC: “Style, you know what I mean, you just gotta be original. You gotta be able to say things, you know, automatically that people don't normally say. You gotta design your own flow, you know what I mean? Because it's so many people out there with different type of flows, but if you make your own flow up, that makes you more original and makes you one of the more outstanding MCs” (Alim, 2004).

This presentation will examine Hip Hop Nation Language (HHNL) from broad discourse-level phenomena to specific feature-level analysis, within the dual perspective of ethnography and sociolinguistic variation. I will begin with a broad description of HHNL, which is a variety of African American Language (AAL), describing Hip Hop cultural modes of discourse from freestylin to battlin in the cipher. Moving more closely to stylistic variation in spoken speech, I will then present several original studies that demonstrate the ways in which Hip Hop artists vary their speech style and why. I will be addressing questions such as: What factors are relevant to the styleshifting of rappers like Eve and Juvenile? What is the role of community membership, of “the streets,” and of the communicative context? Who is the rapper’s primary audience? How does the rapper’s style differ from lyrics and ordinary conversation, and why?

From the study of Hip Hop artists, I will move to an analysis of a local, street-level African American Hip Hop Speech Community. This section of the presentation will look closely at the speech style of African American male and female youth, and how their speech styles vary based on their interlocutor’s race, gender, and level of familiarity with Hip Hop Culture. The results show that all three factors are significant indicators of styleshifting, and more detailed analysis shows the interaction of these factors as speakers shift through the stylistic spectrum. I will be addressing questions such as: How does one’s speech style differ when speaking to a Black, female non-Hip Hopper versus a White, male Hip Hopper? What accounts for the change in style? What is important here – specific linguistic features or discourse-level phenomena? Does race really matter? What about gender and cultural familiarity? More importantly, how and when do these factors matter? What are the roles of identity, ideology and consciousness?

The study has implications for Hip Hop scholarship, sociolinguistic variation, methodological and theoretical issues in the study of style, as well as educational implications for African American youth and other speakers of nation languages.