Introduction
Music and language have a manifold relationship: Language is a
crucial part of many musical forms and practices, while musical features are
seen in language as well. They share contexts, spaces and histories in many
sociocultural expressive forms. Links between language and music have been
explored by scholars in various contexts. For example, Jackendoff and Lehrdahl
adapted Noam Chomsky’s linguistic generative approach to music. While this
aimed at finding a common theoretical approach, studying “universal musical
grammar” and a formal description of musical understanding, the approach does
not seem to be very influential today. In recent decades, and especially since
the beginning of the twenty-first century, sociolinguistic accounts of popular
music have become quite common, such as hip-hop (Alim 2006; Alim, Ibrahim and
Pennycook 2009; Terkourafi 2010) or reggae and dancehall (Devonish 1996, 1998,
2006; Devonish and Jones 2017; Farquharson 2005; Hollington 2016, 2018; Jones
2019). Exploring various connections of language and music as social practices
opens up a large field of possibilities and perspectives.
This is where the present volume comprises and ties in chapters
that seek to look at various intersections and connections of language and
music. Different accounts shed light on language variation, the use of Creole
language in music, language ideologies, authenticity, language and identity,
the ethnography of communication, multilingualism and language contact,
language attitudes, linguistic creativity and transnational flows. Instead of
concentrating on a specific music genre, this volume presents a colourful
collection of different practices in various music genres and styles, as well
as in different parts of the world. The shared focus of this book is that each
contribution sheds light on one or more aspects of (a) contact language(s) and
the ways linguistic practices feature in and impact on various music styles.
Numerous creolized cultures, as well as societies characterized by
linguistic pluralism and contact, have yielded rich musical practices in which
contact languages are used. In many cases, music, as a social and cultural form
of expression, has constituted a domain in which contact languages have gained
prestige, preserved historical linguistic forms and served as strong markers of
identity. Especially in colonial and postcolonial contexts, contact languages
referred to as Creole have usually been regarded as low prestige varieties with
little power, especially in official and political domains. Here, music has
offered spaces in which Creole languages could not only flourish but also be
celebrated as cultural heritage. Despite these important aspects, no
book-length volume on the interplay of contact languages and music exists to
date. This volume presents a number of original case studies from mainly
anglophone Caribbean and African contexts that have not been discussed in
previous works. It also explores some other contact varieties in francophone
and lusophone contexts. Additionally, this volume aims at filling the
aforementioned research gap by providing insights into a number of Creole
language and musical practices from Jamaica to São Tomé, and from Louisiana to
Trinidad and Tobago. Apart from documenting and analysing the use of contact languages
in music practices, the volume seeks to explore, in particular, questions of
identity and authenticity, which are addressed by the various contributors in
their respective chapters with regard to methodological, theoretical and
ideological standpoints and perspectives:
- How
is the intersection between contact languages and music deployed by
artistes to construct and negotiate various identities?
- How
do the intersectionalities between contact languages and notions of race,
authenticity, class and nationality “play out” in music?
- How
are linguistic performances in music by second-language speakers of
contact languages assessed and evaluated as authentic by first-language
and second-language speakers?
- What
is the basis of the evaluations made by audiences at home and abroad about
the authenticity of contact languages as second languages in music?
