<p>Some people might regard the language of hip-hop as being crude, sexist and inappropriate. Nevertheless, hip-hop culture can also be considered as one of the underground sources of word-formation and language change in mainstream English. Young people have always been a source of language variation and lexical innovation whether we like it or not.</p><p>This essay is focusing on three words frequently used in hip-hop lyrics, namely pimp, queer and chick. The aim of the study is to analyse the semantic change on these words as they are used in hip-hop music and find out whether hip-hop culture has had an influence on the mainstream usage of these words.</p><p>The method used was to study the usage and frequency of these words in hip-hop lyrics and analyse whether there was a similar use in a large diachronic newspaper corpus of American English. The material was predominately found in The Original Hip-hop Lyrics Archive (ohhla.com) and The TIME Magazine Corpus (corpus.byu.edu).</p><p>The results of this study show examples of semantic change in both hip-hop lyrics and mainstream American English and it is concluded that hip-hop culture has an influence on mainstream language above all among the youth.</p>
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA/oai:DiVA.org:vxu-2358 |
| Date | January 2008 |
| Creators | Exenberger, Margareta |
| Publisher | Växjö University, School of Humanities |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, text |
| Relation | LÄRARUTBILDNINGEN, ; |
Page generated in 0.0016 seconds