The Role of Code-Switching in Rap and Hip Hop Culture

While Hip-Hop is a relatively new cultural movement that is largely prevalent all over the world now, it originates in much earlier Black North American history as far back as the era of enslavement. It is still misunderstood as solely a form of music although it is rather an entire culture consisting of dance, "deejaying", and visual art (usually in the form of graffiti) in addition to rap. However, in the larger culture of hip-hop, rap is the linguistic code that is used in an artistic manner to convey messages, often in figurative and poetic forms. It was common to use Ebonics, or African American English, as the primary linguistic code in rap as it is the form of English that was predominantly used in North America when modern rap came into being. At one time, it was the code used to address the Black population in the United States to ignite socio-political protests and marches, but over time has evolved to include other linguistic codes and has become a means to communicate many subjects outside of politics. Though African American vernacular is still a major constituent of modern rap and is seen as the "standard language" for English rap, there is a great deal of code-switching that occurs including not only the switching from language to language, but also switching from vernacular to intellectual vocabulary in rap. Code-switching is defined as the "use of two or more languages by the same speaker within the same turn/utterance.” While code-switching in conversation is a natural phenomenon that occurs largely between bilingual or multilingual individuals, it is a very different phenomenon when it occurs in rap. In her essay titled Multilingualism, Ethnicity and Genre in Germany's Migrant Hip Hop, Jannis Androutsopoulo claims that "internal code switching" or switching linguistic code within a stanza is a rare occurrence and does not have as much prevalence as "external-code switching" in which there is a clear structure to the alternation of