Review of Pedro Álvarez Mosquera. Identidad y language crossing. El uso del inglés afroamericano por raperos blancos. (Bern: Peter Lang)

Abstract

[eng] Language crossing has been the object of recent interest in the field of sociolinguistics, especially following the pioneering work of Rampton (1995a, 1995b),1 who coined the term in his study of adolescents’ friendship groups in England to refer to “the use of language varieties associated with social or ethnic groups that the speaker does not normally ‘belong’ to” (1995a: 14). Studies of a similar nature had already appeared, looking at how language is affected in multiethnic contexts (Hewitt 1986; Gilroy 1987) and at the interaction between language and identity, also a recurrent and productive issue in the field of sociolinguistics (Le Page and Tabouret-Keller 1985; Zentella 1990; Butcholz 1999; Smitherman 2000; Morgan 2002; Fought 2006, to mention just a few). Prior to Álvarez-Mosquera’s monograph, studies on language crossing had focused principally on the crossing of adolescents and were mostly of a qualitative nature (Ramptom 1995a; Cutler 1999; Vermeij 2004). In this respect the current work is pioneering in that it constitutes a study of language crossing within the context of rap music between 1980 and 2000, and assumes both quantitative and qualitative perspectives. Using sociolinguistic parameters, among which ethnicity, language variety and chronology are of utmost relevance, the author investigates how white rappers in the USA make use of linguistic devices traditionally associated with African-American Vernacular English (henceforth AAVE), and thus belong to the domain of black rappers.2 This makes the study most innovative, and fills a gap in this burgeoning field of research.