Remixing critical discourse analysis and contact linguistics: Bidirectional contact-induced influences on Montreal urban vernacular in rap — The Association Specialists
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  2. SESSION 5: Discourse analysis
  3. Remixing critical discourse analysis and contact linguistics: Bidirectional contact-induced influences on Montreal urban vernacular in rap

Remixing critical discourse analysis and contact linguistics: Bidirectional contact-induced influences on Montreal urban vernacular in rap (20244)

Emily Brooke Leavitt 1
  1. Université de Sherbrooke (Québec), Montreal, QUEBEC, Canada

The linguistic situation in Montreal connected to sociodemographic shifting and the introduction of contact languages via immigration places contact-induced change at the forefront of public discourse, as demonstrated by recent reactions (such as Paillé, 2022) to 2021 census data publications. Such change has in fact been documented by the authors of recent sociolinguistic research who have revealed that contemporary urban vernacular in Montreal is currently undergoing a process of diversification (Blondeau, 2020; Blondeau & Tremblay, 2016; Leavitt, 2022). Montreal vernacular is gaining a distinctive multilingual character which represents a major divergence from traditional Quebec French vernacular. In the present paper, we propose a mixed methods study of bidirectional contact-induced influences on Montreal rap combining critical discourse analysis of media representations and corpus analysis of empirically validated instances of contact-related linguistic outcomes within Montreal vernacular represented through rap lyricism. We focus on a sample of articles published in four daily Montreal journals (Le Devoir, La Presse, The Gazette & Le Journal de Montréal) concerning the Montreal hip-hop group Dead Obies’ language practices, specifically labeled franglais, which we compare to results of a micro-corpus analysis of the group’s song lyrics. Following Thibault’s (2011) morpheme-level approach to comprehensive lyrical analysis of Acadian hip-hop, we focus our corpus analysis on the complete lyrics of the song “Montréal $ud” produced by Dead Obies in 2013 on their homonymous album (Dead Obies, 2013). Results from initial distributional analysis of the 367 instances of bidirectional contact phenomena reveal contradictory evidence regarding considerable preoccupations identified within media discourse concerning structural erosion caused by the incorporation of English-language elements into French recipient structure. Further morpheme-level lyrical analysis will be conducted to yield quantitative and descriptive contact phenomena data which we will compare to the results of our critical discourse analysis of media commentary on Dead Obies’ rap lyricism.

  1. Blondeau, H. (2020). Pratiques langagières et diversité culturelle chez de jeunes Montréalais: le français dans la métropole. In K. Reinke (Ed.), Attribuer un sens. La diversité des pratiques langagières et les représentations sociales (151-176). PUL.
  2. Blondeau, H., & Tremblay, M. (2016). Le traditionnel et l’émergent: l’apport de jeunes Montréalais issus de l’immigration au français vernaculaire. Cahiers internationaux de sociolinguistique, 10(2), 19-45. https://doi.org/10.3917/cisl.1602.0019
  3. Leavitt, E. B. (2022). De la variation linguistique dans le rap québécois. Une étude sociolinguistique [Master’s thesis]. Concordia University, Montréal. Spectrum. https://spectrum.library.concordia.ca/id/eprint/991396/1/Leavitt_MA_S2023.pdf
  4. Paillé, M. (2022, March 1). Données linguistiques douteuses. Le Devoir.
  5. Thibault, A. (2011). Un code hybride français/anglais? Le chiac acadien dans une chanson du groupe Radio Radio. Zeitschrift Für Französische Sprache Und Literatur, 121(1), 39–65. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41348194
  6. Dead Obies. (2013). Montréal $ud. Third Side Music; Bonsound.