Sixteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

Rap, the most popular music genre in France, reflects linguistics issues agitating French society: foreign words are present in nearly every French rap song, to the point that the Arabic “wesh” has not only become part of the rap jargon but is also sometimes used to define pejoratively the racialized suburban youth. The most successful artists like PNL and Nekfeu include a vast array of foreign languages in their lyrics such as Lingala, Rromani and Japanese. This paper interrogates the functions of foreign languages in French rap. While some scholars have investigated on borrowings to English and Arabic in French rap, this study highlights the meaning of language diversity in the context of a highly referential and cryptic music/literary genre. Borrowings allow us to rethink artists’ relationship with migration and media in a globalized market. To grasp the debates on identity, globalization and language in France, one must scrutinize the linguistic phenomenon at play in French rap. If foreign languages participate to encrypting and we-coding the lyrics, I argue that they are also indicative of migration (dialectal Arabic and Lingala) and mediatization (English, Spanish, Nouchi) flows specific to French society, as well as the permanence of regional (Occitan) and trans-European (Rromani) languages that allow artists to claim a local identity embodied in the figure of the marginal. Thus, through brand-dropping and intermedial references to foreign cultural products, French rappers perform a “third space” of hybrid French identity locating them within the translocal hip hop communities.