Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

Nationalism, Identity and Popular Culture 75
object here and point out that this is not a ‘true creole’, and given the long
battle to establish the legitimacy of creoles, there may be good reason not
to open the doors to all comers. Nevertheless, if we follow Mufwene’s
(2001: 10) lead ‘to identify primarily those varieties that have been identifi
ed as “creole” or “patois” by nonlinguists’, we may be able to take seriously
the notion that the transgressive language uses of rap – mixing and
borrowing, using language from wherever, deliberately changing the
possibilities of language use and language combinations – may be seen
as creolizing practices.
In other words, the hip-hop practices of créolité may be a force in the
production of linguistic diversity both in terms of diversity within languages
and in terms of the creation of new languages. While Chavacano in
the Philippines or the creoles of the Caribbean may be older and different
in a number of ways, to reject the Turkish-German-English creole of Berlin
hip hop would be to overlook the ways in which languages are created. If,
as many people rightly are, we are concerned about the decline of languages
in the world (Skutnabb-Kangas, 2000), we might then see hip hop
not, as conservative critics would suggest, as an engine of linguistic degeneration,
but rather as a potential driver towards diversity. This may be
both in terms of what Halliday (2002; and see Pennycook, 2007) has termed
semiodiversity – the diversity of meaning within languages – and in terms
of glossodiversity – the diversity of languages themselves. And if, as
Mufwene (2001) argues, there is no reason to discount creoles from the
purview of world Englishes, then a Turkish-based creole, with German
and English relexifi cation, might just have to be considered as one of those
Other Englishes, as one of the many global Englishes.
Challenging Language Realities
The mixed codes of the street, and the hypermixes of hip hop, pose a
threat to the linguistic, cultural and political stability urged by national
language policies and wished into place by frameworks of linguistic analysis
that posit separate and enumerable languages (Makoni & Pennycook,
2007). As Jacquemet (2005: 274) puts it, we need to not only understand
contact linguistics but to ‘examine communicative practices based on disorderly
recombinations and language mixings occurring simultaneously
in local and distant environments. In other words, it is time to conceptualize
a linguistics of xenoglossic becoming, transidiomatic mixing, and communicative
recombinations’. Hip-hop language use can therefore be read
as resistant or oppositional not merely in terms of the lyrics but also in
terms of language choice. Keeping it linguistically real is often a threat to
those who would prefer to keep it linguistically pure. For many communities,
using a variety of languages, mixing languages together, is the norm.
The notion that people use separate and discrete languages is a very