Selena Phillips-Boyle

RESEARCH ALL UP IN YOUR GRILL Chesley studies the vocabulary of hip-hop.

Hip-hop teaches youth a new vocabulary

The thesaurus isn’t the only tool students can use to increase their vocabulary — all they need to do to add some new words to their repertoire is turn their iPod to some hip-hop music.

A recent study by visiting University of Alberta linguistics professor Paula Chesley shows that listeners of hip-hop music are learning a new vocabulary. A group of 168 undergraduate students at the University of Minnesota were asked to define 64 African-American English vocabulary words such as “chedda” and “ballin” in a slang context. They were also surveyed on their social ties with African-Americans, their music preferences, and their knowledge of African-American pop culture.  It was discovered that the more hip-hop music one listened to, the better their understanding of African-American English.

“African-American English is a separate, although somewhat socially stigmatized, legitimate dialect from a linguist’s viewpoint,” Chelsey explained. “Their grammar is regular, they have vocabulary and different sounds. For us, it’s just another dialect in English.”

Chesley was interested in studying this phenomenon after observing her younger family members speaking African-American English, despite living in a mainly white community.

“I realized that they would use a lot of vocabulary items from African-American English and they’re living in these communities that are 97 per cent white,” Chelsey said. “But they would listen to a lot of hip-hop music, so I wondered if they were picking up on these from hip-hop music because it is really quite omnipresent in the US.”

From the group of 168, two of the participants were identified as either bi-racial or African American. Their results were excluded to lessen the chance that their vocabulary items were learned from everyday life.

By removing the possibility of familial ties as a factor of vocabulary learning, the study suggests that this type of learning is distinguishable from second-language classroom learning due to an inherent social aspect.

“(Language learning) is totally different in a classroom setting compared to the learning that is going on in the wild,” Chesley said, adding that people memorize lyrics and watch music videos as a form of social acceptance. 

The fast-paced tempo, presence of background music, and unavailability of lyrics in album liners make hip-hop lyrics particularly difficult to understand. However, the ability to listen to songs repeatedly on players like iPods and YouTube have made African-American English more accessible to younger generation, according to Chesley.

Although the broad integration of African-American English may seem to be a fairly recent trend, Chesley said that hip-hop has had a consistent influence on mainstream culture in the past. 

“I definitely think that hip-hop is a huge part of youth culture,” Chelsey said. “There have always been African-American music genres that have deeply influenced mainstream or white culture genres.”

However, Chesley suggested that the influence of stars such as Jay-Z and Kanye West are understood best by younger generations.

“When I talk about this research to people over 40, they don’t get it really. It’s a huge part of present day North American youth culture.”

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