Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

Nationalism, Identity and Popular Culture 77
local linguistic performance and a global cultural performance, they give
it a style that changes its status. And particular language styles, particular
language varieties, are taken up in order to perform certain effects.
Language styles are practices that are performed as part of larger social
and cultural styles. Language styles within hip hop are therefore precisely
part of the process of change, making new language and new language
mixes available to others, as well as taking up those styles that are deemed
to have a particular street resonance.
Auzanneau (2002) argues that the language choices that the rappers in
Libreville made were clearly intentional. Although at one level these language
choices may therefore be viewed as refl ecting local diversity, at
another level they are also intentionally producing local diversity. Rather
than merely reproducing local language practices, language use in hip hop
may consequently have as much to do with change, resistance and opposition
as do lyrics that overtly challenge the status quo. This is particularly
true of musicians such as rap artists, whose focus on verbal skills performed
in the public domain renders their language use a site of constant potential
challenge. The importance of this observation in terms of understanding
popular cultures, languages and identities is that it gives us an insight into
the ways in which languages are used to perform, invent and (re)fashion
identities across borders. Thus, in performing their acts of semiotic reconstruction,
it is no longer useful to ask if Rip Slyme are using Japanese
English to express Japanese culture and identity as if these neatly preexisted
the performance, or whether Too Phat are native speakers of a nativized
variety of English, as if such nationally constructed codes predefi ne
their use, or whether Tasha’s bilinguality is unrepresentative of language
use in Korea, as if national language policy precludes alternative possibilities,
or whether GHOST 13’s lyrics refl ect local language mixing in
Zamboanga, as if language use was so easily captured and represented.
When we talk of such popular language use, we are talking of the performance
of new identities. To be authentic in such contexts is a discursive
accomplishment, rather than an adherence to a pregiven set of characteristics
(Coupland, 2003; Pennycook, 2007). And, like popular culture, these
new identities are performances that are always changing, always in fl ux.
Once we understand languages from a local perspective – once we see
language ideologies as contextual sets of beliefs about languages, as
cultural and political systems of ideas about social and linguistic
relationships – we will realize that the ways in which languages are used
and thought about are never just about language but also about community
and society. Language ideologies are about what it means to be a
person in a particular context (Woolard, 2004). The performative nature of
hip-hop lyrics, therefore, may not only refl ect local language conditions
but may both actively resist current ways of thinking and produce new
ways of thinking about languages and their meaning. Rap, Auzanneau