Hip hop identity in a township reality. - Poppunt

Another disparity with ingroup code-switching (and that goes together with the
latter point) is that crossing does not arise in all kinds of situations. The violation
that goes together with the social boundary crossing produces special moments and
activities when the imperative rules of daily social order are loosened and when
normal social relations could not be taken for granted (Rampton, 1998b: 271).
Those kind of moments can be defined as being ‘liminal’, a concept worked out by
Victor Turner in his book ‘The ritual process’ (1969). Some examples of these
special moments and activities are: games, the context of performing art, delicts
and transgressions, joking abuse, self-talk, response cries, and cross-sex
interaction (Rampton, 1998b: 298) The norms of ordinary conduct are invalid at
those moments, they are suspended. To clarify this, we will illustrate this point
regarding the phenomenon of ‘carnaval’ in Belgium (these festivities are comparable
with the American Mardi Gras). During a certain period of the year (end of
February, beginning of March) people dress up in all kinds of things (for example
men can become women and the other way around) and they can give comment on
all sorts of things without getting punished for it. A whole crowd will form up a
parade that walks through the city streets, together with floats that are especially
made for the occasion by the ‘carnaval’ clubs. In that way, people can make fun of
wrong decisions politicians made the previous year, they make allusions to things
that are taboo normally, and so on. In normal daily life, these things would be seen
as impolite, rude, or simply not done. But at the time of ‘carnaval’, people are
allowed to have this kind of ‘indecent behaviour’ for just a short period of time. Of
course, these sorts of events are highly ritualised and it must be said that crossing
can also arise in a simple/potential breach of conduct that is not so long and
abrupt (as the other examples demonstrate). Ritualisation is not an empirical
characteristic that distinguishes crossing from code-switching. Ritualised language
use is not confined to people who are using a language that is not considered to
belong to them. Bilinguals also code-switch in these kind of activities (Rampton,
1998a: 271-272) and ritualisation can also occur in one language, take jokes as an
example.
In the preceding part we have seen that ingroup code-switching does not require
full proficiency in the codes that were used. A certain level of competence is
required though. In crossing, this competence can be even more minimal. One
should think then that the interactional character of ingroup code-switching is
more diverse. This does not necessarily have to be so. Auer (cited in Rampton,