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Hybrid languages and styles in Chicanx hip hop on YouTube: A corpus sociolinguistics approach

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Zoom

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Honors Program

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(718)262-5279

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Dr. Matt Garley from the Department of English will present Hybrid languages and styles in Chicanx hip hop on YouTube: A corpus sociolinguistics approach

Multilingual communities often mix and hybridize language varieties in speech and writing, which is often called code-switching, code-mixing, or style-shifting. But when languages are in such close contact, is it really possible to hold on to the idea that these are separate languages? In this talk, I examine a large (over 500,000 words) corpus collected from the comments sections of 21 YouTube music videos published between 2010-2020 featuring multilingual lyrics produced by Chicanx hip hop artists. The study focuses on several key questions: what is ‘different’ about this discourse compared to monolingual English and Spanish discourse? How do fans and commenters use written resources from both languages to participate in the discourse? Finally, I consider how newer approaches to multilingualism, like translanguaging and codemeshing, can be implemented in large corpus studies of multilingual discourse.

Matt Garley is a sociolinguist, and his scholarly work focuses on quantitative (corpus) and qualitative analyses of language contact and orthography (writing systems), particularly in the domains of youth culture, subcultures like hip hop and cyberpunk, and computer-mediated communication (internet language). He is an Associate Professor specializing in Linguistics in the Department of English at York College/CUNY and doctoral faculty in Linguistics at the Graduate Center/CUNY. He holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with certificates in Computational Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition and Teacher Education, and has previously worked at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS) School of Language & Literature (2013), and the Murray State University Department of English and Philosophy (2013-2014). Matt is originally from New Mexico, and holds a B.A. in Foreign Languages (German) and Government with a supplemental major in Linguistics and minor in Global Political Economy from New Mexico State University in Las Cruces.