Speaking Rap: Claves sociolingüísticas y etnográficas desde el modelo de Hymes en el rap social español (1994-2021)

Abstract

The main objective of this research is to generate a relevant knowledge about one of the most significant artistic and discursive manifestations in the international urban context of recent decades: critical perspective’s rap and the cultural matrix that encompasses it, Hip Hop, in the context of its birth and professional development in Spain (1994-2021). Emerging as a subcultural and marginal movement in the periphery of New York in the early 1970s and rapidly became into a mass phenomenon in the North American community, its influence began to be felt in our country in the 1980s, in a society that had recently emerged from Franco's obscurantism and yearned for new ways of cultural escape. Throughout these almost three decades, rap has consolidated itself as a key tool for understanding the different country's cultural and political transformations. Its discourse is related to and involved with issues of social significance and is constructed in opposition to a hegemonic identity configuration (and therefore linguistic and ideological) within Spanish society. The irruption of rap and Hip Hop in the United States coincides in time with the change of academic paradigm in the so far structuralist and asocial linguistic studies. An important number of authors began to theorize about language under premises that went beyond its formal aspects to emphasize the contexts and sociological variables (sex, age, place of origin, social class, or educational level) that provide meaning to the different ways of inhabiting the world. These are reflected through specific linguistic uses, such as those that define social rap, often far from the standard and ignored or stigmatized by the bodies that regulate and maintain that power of the norm. The research is thus anchored in this multidisciplinary epistemological approach that interweaves precepts from sociology, linguistics, ethnography of communication as well as literary, cultural and media critique from different focuses of scientific irradiation to define this complex relationship established between rap, language, and society. For this characterization of the phenomenon, we start from the SPEAKING methodological model proposed by Dell Hymes (1974) where all the elements necessary to understand the communicative exchange are gathered. A corpus of a thousand and twenty-three songs was then pre-selected, of which one hundred and twenty (belonging to almost fifty rappers) were duly analyzed under this SPEAKING model. Through its analytical categories, we define the scene (physical and sociological) from where rap is constructed and projected, the relationship that is established between all the participants of the community that incur in this communicative exchange, its most marked thematic and discursive axes, how these are structured and distributed in a rap text-song, the mechanism of interdiscursivity (ID) as a key resource for identifying the ideological and referential patterns of their discourse, as well as the (socio)linguistic phenomena they make use of according to the different levels of language analysis (and which make up what has been called the Hip Hop Language, HHL) that allow us to identify both the specific communicative competence that defines rappers in Spain, and the social conventions to which this genre is attached.