Address terms in Grime

No British genre better highlights the effects of globalisation than Grime music: an amalgam of Garage, Jungle, Hip Hop and Dancehall which emerged from pirate radio stations in East London in the early 2000s. Through Grime, the artists (known as MCs), who are often youths from marginalised, multi-ethnic areas, discuss the hardships of their upbringing. 

I set out to analyse how Grime MCs addressed and referred to other people in their lyrics, in the hope of understanding what defined their interpersonal relationships: familiarity (mutual knowledge of personal information), solidarity (mutual rights and obligations) or affect (mutual like or dislike).

I extracted and coded 589 nominal address and reference terms from 27 Youtube videos by six MCs: 2 from London, 2 from North England and 2 from Cardiff, with approximately 100 terms per MC. All terms were coded for three categories: (1) the addressee or referent  (peer, police, rival, friend, family, artist, female, or other; (2) the emotional context: negative, positive, derogatory or neutral; (3) kinship (kinship, non-kinship or voluntary kinship, meaning using a kinship term for someone who is not a blood relative, such as using bro (‘brother’) to refer to a friend.

106 different terms emerged, with the most frequent showing that all six MCs draw on the same cultural influences. The first group of frequent terms is man, don, mandem, blud and brudda, which all have Jamaican Creole roots. The second group are British or American English terms: fam, mum, and guys, while the third group of terms are affiliated with Hip-Hop: dawg, cuz, nigga.

Delving deeper, I found that negativity was common in the MCs’ lyrics, as in “Blud, I’ll get physical for you”. In fact, of 130 address terms, only seven were non-negative. This is partly explained by the tradition of boasting in Hip-Hop, where MCs use insults to win lyrical battles against opponents. This negativity indicates that affect is not central to their relationships, but what about familiarity and solidarity?

Voluntary kinship terms were also frequent and, interestingly, were often used in negative contexts, such as “Bury your spleen fam”. Sociologists argue that when we face instability, we create fictive ties with others to create a safer world. MCs may therefore use kinship terms to address and refer to non-family members to show that they belong to the Grime community. However, these terms are simultaneously placed in a negative context so that the MCs can engage in lyrical competitions of honour. Given that they use these terms for people they do not know, familiarity doesn’t seem to be the most defining feature of their relationships.

Every MC had a slightly different style, with some drawing more on Jamaican Creole terms whilst others focused on terms from Multicultural London English. MCs in Cardiff were more likely to use British or American English terms, whereas those from London included more Hip-Hop terms. However, there were also nationwide patterns: for example, all six MCs used MLE terms like man and fam, and they addressed and referred to the same people, such as rivals and the police. Even though MCs in the Grime community do not know one another, or necessarily like one another, these patterns in their address and reference system suggest that solidarity is crucial for their interpersonal relationships. It signals that they are part of a wider cultural in-group which unites adolescents from marginalised multi-ethnic areas. I conceptualise this as an imagined community, in the sense of Benedict Anderson (2006, Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London: Verso Books). The system certainly reflects hostility, hypermasculinity and individual expression, but it is ultimately based on shared grievances that come from their social neglect. The comradeship expressed in their lyrics allows them to turn their negative experiences into a positive celebration of their existence.

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Adams, Zoe (2018) "I don’t know why man’s calling me family all of a sudden”: Address and reference terms in grime music. Language and Communication 60: 11-27.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2018.01.004


This summary was written by Zoe Adams

Talking/in/inG in Manchester

In British English, there are two main ways of pronouncing the suffix -ING (in words like talking or going): [ɪŋ], ‘ing’, with a velar nasal sound following the vowel, the way it’s usually said by BBC newreaders, and [ɪn], ‘in’, which is what most British people also say in informal speech. In Manchester, and other places in Northwest England, there is another pronunciation, [ɪŋg], ‘inG’, with two distinct sounds following the vowel. Erik Schleef and Nicholas Flynn wanted to find out if Mancunians ascribe different meanings to these three different pronunciations.

go-ing somewhere in Manchester?
or go-in?
or go-inG?

They recorded two male and two female voices three times, each with one of the three different pronunciations: ‘ing’, ‘in’ and ‘inG’.  These were then used for an online survey within the Manchester community, which asked listeners to rate the different voices they heard in terms of ‘attributes’ like superiority, friendliness, education, etc.  Of course, the listeners were unknowingly listening to the same speakers.

In general, the listeners thought ‘ing’ speakers sounded more confident, posher, better educated and more hard-working than the ‘in’ speakers, as well as more energetic than those using ‘inG’ (although less so than the ‘in’ users). ‘ing’ was thought to signal more prestige and superiority and was also rated as the most dynamic of the three pronunciations. ‘in’ was considered more casual, younger and less educated.  ‘inG’ emerged as having its own unique social meaning:  the ‘inG’ users were rated as much more uptight, formal and non-energetic than speakers who used the other two pronunciations.

Schleef and Flynn divided the respondents of their survey into two distinct age groups, over-22s and under-22s (based on the idea that UK students leave university and enter the ‘adult’ world at the age of 22), and this produced some other interesting results.  For example, the over-22s thought that ‘ing’ speakers sounded the poshest, most articulate and most reliable, whereas the under-22s thought that ‘ing’ speakers and ‘in’ speakers were similar in relation to articulateness, and that ‘ing’ speakers sounded more common than ‘inG’ speakers, who they rated as the poshest and most reliable. 

These interesting differences could be explained by the two age groups being in different ‘lifestages’. For example, ‘ing’ is the ‘standard’ British pronunciation, the form that is more usual and expected.  Adults are at a lifestage where conforming to community standards is necessary to succeed in life and so sounding ‘standard’ is important.  The standard form also indicates a polite and caring attitude on the part of the speaker towards their listener as it is the expected form: adults are at a lifestage where they are often in a carer role and thinking more of others’ needs.

In contrast, the under-22s are at a lifestage, often described as ‘adolescence’, which involves disassociating themselves from their parents and deliberately diverging from adult norms and standards.  This may help to explain why they don’t agree with the over-22s that ‘-ing’ is the poshest of the three pronunciations.  Their rating of ‘-inG’ as the most formal could also be influenced by the fact that young people have less experience of formal speech situations than adults.  They could simply rate ‘-inG’ as the poshest form as this best reflects the suffix’s spelling and they instinctively think of the written form as formal.

Schleef and Flynn are keen to point out that these explanations are mainly conjecture but it’s definitely worth thinking about...or thinkin’ about...or even thinkinG about!

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Erik Schleef and Nicholas Flynn (2015). Ageing meanings of (ing). Age and indexicality in Manchester, England.  English World-Wide 36(1): 48–90. doi. 10.1075/eww.36.1.04sch􀀆

This summary was written by  Gemma Stoyle

Uptalk?

One of comedian Adam Hill’s better-known skits is about the way it sounds like every sentence an Australian says sounds like they are asking a question – apparently, they have so little confidence in themselves, that they have to hedge their bets. You can see a clip here.

However, as funny as this observation is, is this really why people tend to use a higher pitch at the end of a sentence? This is just one question that Erez Levon decided to find out.

Known as High Rising Terminals, or HRTs, this rise in intonation that occurs at the end of phrases is well-documented across various dialects of English, including the aforementioned Australian English, as well as in Canada and the US. It is used to perform multiple functions in the discourse, including showing that the speaker has not yet finished their turn, and marking in-group solidarity. However, there has been considerably less documentation on its pragmatic function in UK dialects.

Using a mixture of qualitative and quantitative methods, Levon looked at recordings from forty-two of his undergraduate students, to see how often this feature was used, and in what contexts. The students were asked to do twenty to thirty minutes of recordings in small groups – some of which were mixed sex, some of which were not. The recordings were then transcribed, and the instances of HRT annotated and then coded by speaker.

There was a huge variation in how many HRTs participants used; some only used the feature as few as 64 times, some as many as 317. Across over 7,000 instances of HRTs, Levon found some interesting patterns. For one, contrary to stereotypes, everyone in the group used HRT, regardless of gender. While the usage rates ranged from 3.5% of phrases up to 41.2%, there was no one who never or always used it. Furthermore, whilst women regularly used them regardless of the gender composition of the group, men used them considerably more in mixed-sex settings. In fact, men used them more even than the women did in these groups – something that may surprise those who associate it with female speech.

Men and women were also significantly more likely to use the feature in the context of describing something or recounting a narrative when in these groups, as opposed to giving a fact or opinion. They were also both far more likely to use HRT on information that was new to a conversation, rather than going over something that was already a given.

So then I discovered a formula ^{to figure out any prime number!}

When Levon did his qualitative analysis, however, he found some even more fascinating data. There was definitely a gendered difference in the way that men and women employed HRTs in a narrative.  Women used HRT to lessen their threat to other people wanting to participate in the conversation, but they also used it to maintain control of the narrative. Men, meanwhile, used HRT to signal useful and interesting information in their narrative, and so control the spotlight on themselves, so to speak.

Of course, there were some omissions from the study – there were no non-white, lower class, or LGBT participants, who of course often differ from their straight white middle-class peers in the way they use such features.  Indeed, the gendered aspect of its use could be very different amongst LGBT participants, and hence worthy of further study. What is clear though, is that Adam Hills is wrong – people don’t use HRTs because they are uncertain. If anything, they indicate just how certain they are!

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Levon, Erez (2016). Gender, interaction and intonational variation: The discourse functions of High Rising Terminals in London. Journal of Sociolinguistics 20 (2), 133-63.

doi.10.1111/josl.12182

This summary was written by Marina Merryweather