Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

Nationalism, Identity and Popular Culture 67
reggae rhythms, Hawaiian chanting, and subversive rapping in the English
and Hawaiian languages’ (Akindes, 2001: 91), links the Pacifi c to the
United States, while French-infl uenced parts of the Pacifi c, such as French
Polynesia (Tahiti) and New Caledonia link the Pacifi c to the French circuit.
Certainly, there is now ‘scarcely a country in the world that does not feature
some form of mutation or rap music, from the venerable and sophisticated
hip-hop and rap scenes of France, to the “swa-rap” of Tanzania
and Surinamese rap of Holland’ (Krims, 2000: 5).
Les patnais vont chiller ce soir: Urban Codes in the
Francophone World
The French language hip-hop scene has been one of the most signifi cant
for the past 20 years, a complex interlocked circle of fl ow that links the
vibrant music scenes in Paris and Marseille in France; Dakar, Abidjan and
Libreville in West Africa; and Montreal in Quebec. Hip hop in France
developed in the banlieues – the suburban housing projects where many
poor, and fi rst and second generation immigrant populations live. Here,
in multiethnic mixes of people of Maghreb (Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco),
French African (Mali, Senegal, Gabon), French Antilles (La Martinique,
Guadeloupe) and other European (Portugal, Romania, Italy) backgrounds,
hip hop emerged as a potent force of new French expression. Rap in France
‘uses a streetspeak version of French that includes African, Arab, gypsy
and American roots and is viewed with disapproval by traditionalists for
its disregard for traditional rules of grammar and liberal use of neologisms’
(Huq, 2001: 74). While Paris became a centre for many movements
and crossings of French language musicians, dancers and artists, the
southern port city of Marseille looked more resolutely southwards. Typical
of the movement was the popular Marseille group IAM, who developed
an ideology that Prévos (2001: 48) calls ‘pharaoism’, thus both linking to
the Arabic background of many French immigrants and, as Swedenburg
(2001: 69) argues, giving ‘Egyptianist Afrocentricity a Mediterranean
infl ection, asserting a kind of “black Mediterranean”’.
The rap scene in France, as Huq (2001: 81) describes it, ‘stands out as the
ideal soundtrack to accompany the post-industrial, post-colonial times
ushered in by the new millennium, in which the new tricolore (the French
national fl ag), is black, blanc, beur’. 1 While the many fl ows of immigrant
infl uence into France have thus greatly affected French hip hop, the
‘diasporic fl ows’ (Prévos, 2001: 53) of hip hop back into the wider
Francophone circle of infl uence have in turn changed the music and linguascapes
of other regions of the world. In Libreville, Gabon, rappers mix
English, French and local languages such as Fang and Téké. English, as
Auzanneau (2002) explains, is never used on its own, but always in conjunction
with French, while vernacular languages may be used on their