Jan Skordos

African-American Vernacular English within American 'Gangsta Rap' Jan Skordos

Seminar paper from the year 2009 in the subject American Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2,7, University of Münster (Anglistik/Amerikanistik), course: Proseminar American English, language: English, abstract: This abstract shall give another piece of the puzzle to what is considered to be African-American Vernacular English. With scientific aid of well-known concepts by linguists such as Green in particular but also Wolfram, Schilling-Estes, Mufwene and Poplack we want to focus on specific grammatical features of AAVE and to what extend these can be recovered in the Hip-Hop subgenre of American West Coast Gangsta Rap. A small but significant text corpus of four representative songs (added to the appendix in the shape of lyrics) cover the source for a quantitative and qualitative evaluation. The given text shall give a short overview about the origin and different theories on AAVE first and will further on primarily adapt the characteristic linguistic features L. Green and Wolfram & Schilling-Estes worked out and apply them to our little song text corpus.