Language Ideologies in Music: How Transnational Genres Redefine Social Bonds
Language ideologies in music
What this special issue explores
This collection investigates how language ideologies operate within musical practices. The goal is to understand the ways language, music, and social bonds are constructed together during an era of increasing transnational connection. Contributors examine globally widespread music styles in diverse linguistic contexts — including reggae in Vanuatu, Nigeria, and Jamaica; rap across Nordic countries; pop in Russia; global country music; and choral singing in Trinidad. The findings reveal new insights into how music and language are adapted locally within transnational cultural spaces, and how the discursive processes behind these adaptations take shape.
Moving beyond conceptual boxes
Human collectives are neither eternal nor natural. They are built culturally, shaped conceptually, and sustained through language and discourse. This observation has become especially clear in a globalized world where discourses from separate domains intersect daily. Language scholars have recently turned their attention to how language itself is talked about discursively, questioning what has been called “methodological nationalism” in linguistics — the habit of treating ethnic and national categories as unquestionable when it comes to language.
One early critique came from Mary Louise Pratt in her work Linguistic Utopias (1987). She argued that within the “linguistics of community,” the imagined communities of nations — as described by Anderson (1985) — are taken for granted and often form an unspoken foundation for the study of language. Anderson had shown that national communities depend on writing and print capitalism, and these forces normalize the idea of social units as limited, bounded, and sovereign. Pratt claimed that this utopian vision of the nation as an “island” is mirrored in linguistics’ imagined object of study — the speech community. The study of synchronic language systems, she wrote, hinges on imagining island-like, isolated, and sovereign speech communities. The distance between langue and parole, between competence and performance, equals the gap between the imagined speech community’s homogeneity and the fractured reality of linguistic experience in modern stratified societies. Although the stratification of societies has arguably become even more complex since Pratt’s text appeared, we still need studies that make visible how categories such as “language” develop interactively rather than in isolation. One way to avoid thinking of language as a fixed system within bounded communities is to study language in contexts that do not rest on fantasies of island-like, homogeneous social units grounded primarily in ethnicity or nationality. For this reason, the present collection studies social forms not traditionally viewed as cultural or territorial islands: music styles.
By examining language and language ideologies in cultural practices built around global music genres, the interaction of discourses and practices from different territorial spaces becomes visible. Salsa communities in Europe, for instance, display elements considered “Latin” interactional patterns alongside discursive practices tied to the countries or cities where the communities are actually based (Schneider, 2014). When participants choose particular language codes or linguistic features, they do not necessarily defer to pre-given and inherited ethnic or national categories. These categories do exist, but other factors matter, too. Among the relevant forces that can shape language practices in music are ideals of cultural creativity, concepts of local authenticity, global ideological “scapes” (Appadurai, 1996), capitalist interests, and the often paradoxical relationships between these forces. All of these interact with what has conventionally been called the “authentic speech” of communities or subgroups — Pratt’s “subutopias” (1987, 55).
Music styles generally cut across cultures, discourses, and states, and they are rarely framed within national ideologies. Studying language in music therefore offers a way to understand the complex cultural embeddedness of language, its links to local histories, transnational arrangements, socioeconomic conditions, and cultural concepts. This work is a small step outside the box of linguistic utopias.
Language and music in transnational times
The curiosity about language and music is not new. Linguists interested in grammar, for example, have drawn parallels between tonal structures and grammatical ones (Lerdahl & Jackendoff, 1996). Earlier sociolinguistic work on language and popular music tended to focus on North America, with an emphasis on race and youth cultures (Alim, 2003; Cutler, 1999; Ibrahim, 1999). More recent publications have given us valuable insight into identity strategies and linguistic hybridity, especially in hip hop, and increasingly from other parts of the world (Alim et al., 2008; Androutsopoulos, 2003; Pennycook, 2003; Terkourafi, 2010). Nevertheless, the conceptualization of the social units formed by music styles had not taken center stage. We contend that these units are vital for understanding social life under the conditions of global cultural ties.
It is worth pointing out that “music” itself is a Western construct. Described from a technical etic perspective, one might assert every cultural community has music. But ethnomusicologists have shown that many non-Western language communities lack an emic term corresponding to “music” (Nettl, 2015, 20–30). Emic ideas vary dramatically. Middle-class Americans tend to think of music positively but, at least theoretically, not as essential to life (Nettl, 2015, 23). This view stands in contrast to many non-Western communities, where sonic and bodily rituals are inseparable from cultural worldviews and knowledge systems. Under globalization, older and more recently introduced musical concepts are often kept semantically separate, as seen, for instance, in the distinction between hapia ipakana (“songs from before”) and khao ipakana (“white songs”) among people of the Papua New Guinea Highlands, where khao “white” refers to white people (Gillespie, 2010).
As globalization has spread, a notion of music connected to Western ideas of self-expression and consumption has gained wide acceptance. The link between music, modern consumerism, and global capitalism cannot be overstated. In contemporary life-worlds, the music industry plays a central role in creating music, reproducing its associated styles and identities, and shaping transnational discourses and networks. Local traditions of music-making or music-listening interact with the capitalist exploitation of cultural forms, especially when recordings make music widely available. This double nature helps explain why music so often takes on transnational forms. How the record companies of today operate may change in the future — with YouTube stars now dominating the charts — but the transnational spread of music seems to be tied to capitalist success, for companies seek to expand markets and thus to expand access. This dynamic contributes to the widespread presence of English in popular music. The music industry also helps define cultural values. “Cool” and “desirable” in popular music culture are synonyms for “profitable” from the companies’ angle. Yet, paradoxically, “cool” also frequently appropriates discourses of resistance to mainstream capitalist consumption (on “hip” and “cool” in US culture, see Frank, 1997; Leland, 2004).
Music styles can form the basis of coherent face-to-face communities in the sense of “communities of practice” (Eckert & McConnell-Ginet, 1992; Meyerhoff, 2003). But there is more to them — even though they lack the institutional sanction or reification of the imagined communities we call nation-states, communities that music styles tend to cross because of the transnational reach of musical genres. No single approach works for studying language in this kind of situation (Pennycook, 2003, 514–515). Looking closely at practices of “styling” and “crossing,” Hill (1999, 543) argued that when language use extends beyond determinable speech communities — “ramifying outward through mass-media tokens of styling exploited in youth-oriented marketing, and showing up in surprising places both in geographical and social space as well as in the space of genre and register” — we “must attack the problem of the precise situatedness of such phenomena.” Even if we cannot yet pin down their “precise situatedness,” we can be sure that music styles have reality. They have cognitive substance, and they co-construct transnational networks of people who share tastes. They come with particular cultural values, identity frameworks, material practices, and discourses on social positioning, style, and politics. Music styles, as they are understood in Western cultures, represent a type of social relation anchored to specific social stances. And, in line with approaches in linguistic anthropology, we do not view language choices in music as “inauthentic,” but rather as indexically linked to the social discourses that give rise to them (Bauman & Briggs, 1990; Pennycook, 2003, 529).
Sociality as a concept
Language, music, and social worlds often merge to form recognizable cultural formations. The question is: what is the best term for describing the “something” that these formations create? In framing this collection, we prefer the term sociality.
The word has been used across a variety of academic fields, but our particular sources of inspiration come from linguistics (Enfield & Levinson, 2006; Goddard, 2013) and sociocultural studies (Schneider, 2012; Hankins & Stevens, 2013). “Sociality” dodges entanglements with nations, institutions, standard languages, or other sociocultural constants (Long & Moore, 2014). That makes it possible to include the traditional sociolinguistic categories — age, gender, nationality — wherever relevant, but also to move beyond them, describing musically centered socialities in all of their specific complexity: verbal practices and language ideologies in genres ranging from reggae to country to rap; the constellations linking musicians, producers, and audiences; and the interplay between different styles. The configurations we describe as socialities are more “switch on/switch off” than national or ethnic identity. The concept gives us a picture of a flexible, less located form of social being, and opens up better analytic access to the fleeting nature of meaning-making processes.
Focusing on the “social” dimension reminds us of how shared, socially charged processes co-produce linguistic patterns, cultural concepts, and ideological beliefs. It lets us show how people create sense out of their social worlds via linguistic and other semiotic means — assembling communal concepts and practices or taking them from elsewhere and bending them to local uses. In the broadest sense, socialities enable what Agha (2007, 10) called “semiotic encounters”: any sign phenomenon bridging one person to another, whether face to face or not. The term also recalls Appadurai’s (1996) “scapes,” though music styles do have specific origin sites and local communities. Because transnational networks appear in particular territories, music styles can anchor the emergence of new, local social orders.
Place, fixity, and fluidity in a transnational world
There is an interesting connection between how people think about place and how they construct fixed identities. The feeling of being located somewhere in space — of rootedness — may be a critical part of understanding who you are, including the verbal practices you most engage in (on language and space, see Auer & Schmidt, 2010). The relationship between language and place has become more complicated due to global communication. Some have argued that “the link between language, place, and identity is broken and that people need to establish links that work for them” (Heller, 2010, 5). Noting the connection between fixed identity and the sense of place leads to a question: can essentialist social identities tangled up with language ever be built without tying them to some place? Traditional diaspora and de-territorialized migrant communities usually maintain a place they treat as their place of origin, no matter how mythologized (Clifford, 1994), and the names given to languages are frequently combined with names for place and for speech community.
When studying socialities created through music styles, it is worth examining underlying discursive oppositions: fixation on fixity, normativity, and authenticity versus fluidity, difference, and hybridity (Otsuji & Pennycook, 2010), and how these dichotomies depend on each another. To get traction in globally connected discourses, performers and audiences draw contrasts between what is considered local or ethnic fixity, and the stuff of global flows. In this collection, older histories — of nations or local groundedness — are still central. And these strike balances with what is considered fluid, a term that in present usage tends to tie to international, non-national zones.
The term “globalization” is itself ambiguous. It can mean simply “available everywhere,” but often it implies ideological assumptions of Anglo-American culture as more “advanced.” In the context of music, this also triggers discursive resistance to Anglo-American dominance. Constructing fluidity against a background of perceived fixity can be expressed linguistically through anti-normative speech, mixed codes, or novel vocabulary. That pattern shows up, for instance, in Danish rap and Finnish hip hop discussed in this issue (Staehr & Madsen and Westinen). Conversely, assembling local styles based on such transnational influences can bootstrap stronger fixities. We can see that process wherever globally-marketed music in English crosses local horizons and gains native meanings — far-flung Englishes in Caribbean music (Farquharson, Wilson), or the transformation of reggae into an expression of ni-Vanuatu belonging (Levisen), or Nigerian Pidgin standing for local connections in a Lifeday community enabled by reggae travel (Mazzoli). Another type spans Duncan’s observation that a localized accent in country music — the “Southern US sound” — wraps the transnational genre in an international brand of genuine roots, even when the singer grew up expecting something else.
Artists can also invest whole language systems with such fixity–fluidity positions. Alenshinskaya and Gritsenko show how in Russian pop music lyrics, post–Soviet allusions tense with up-to-the-minute English.
The articles are theoretically heterogeneous; for instance, their conceptualizations of language ideology vary, ranging from treating it as discourses about language to including social orientations and concepts embedded within language itself. Yet all papers explicitly or tacitly engage with perspectives operating at different scales—from local to national and global—and show how diverse discourses interact to generate new meanings and, in some cases, new social boundaries or local identities.
The first two contributions, by Farquharson and Wilson, offer insight into language ideologies and language choice in colonial and postcolonial settings. They also reveal that transnational ties within music socialities do not necessarily depend on the US-based music industry. In “Linguistic ideologies and the historical development of language use patterns in Jamaican music,” Farquharson concentrates on historical language ideologies as manifested through language use and commentary on language in Jamaican music. He describes a shift toward employing Jamaican Creole in music, a change driven by the growing nationalist momentum in the periods just before and after independence—the emergence of a discourse in which local language expresses local belonging (or fixity), though that discourse is itself in constant flux. This fluidity obviously involves multiple discourses, as colonial, local, national, and transnational religious discourses interact. Faithfully tracing discursive developments demonstrates the relevance of history if we wish to grasp the social meanings of categories and attitudes. In Wilson’s “Conflicting language ideologies in choral singing in Trinidad,” the focus is on the sociality of a music genre with colonial roots that remains tied to non-Caribbean, especially European, musical forms. Nevertheless, choral singing endures in Trinidad and enjoys an unexpected popularity. Wilson’s article identifies and explains the language ideologies surrounding performance in this genre by uncovering the beliefs held by choral singers, conductors, and audiences regarding language use in Western classical music performances in Trinidad. Significantly, in Trinidad an English Creole is spoken alongside an emerging variety of Standard English that has gradually supplanted British Standard English as the norm carrying overt prestige. The study illuminates the complexities of language ideologies in postcolonial societies, where local and historical authenticity, transnational ties, religious ideologies, residual conservatism, and the rise of national styles all interact.
In both Duncan’s article and the piece by Alenshinskaya and Gritsenko, English-language popular music styles are portrayed as global forms of professional authenticity that interact with national and local ideologies of authenticity. Alenshinskaya and Gritsenko’s “Language practices and language ideologies in the popular music TV show The Voice Russia” examines the choices of English and/or Russian (and/or other local languages) in communicative practices as they appear in the popular TV show Golos (The Voice—Russia). The study draws on official video recordings of the show, the contents of relevant forums, and interviews with contestants and coaches, illustrating that multiple motives drive language choices on Golos. These motives relate to the different orientations of artists and audiences toward global and local scales, which come into conflict through ideologies of nationalism and professionalism. The melodic and rhythmic compatibility of music and lyrics also emerges as an additional factor shaping language choices. In “Australian singer, American features: Performing authenticity in country music,” Duncan carries out phonetic analyses of a corpus of country songs, showing that both Australian and American country singers use phonetic features of Southern US American English to perform authenticity within the genre. The consistency in music production—which in some cases contrasts with the same singers’ use of phonetic features in interview speech—exemplifies how local working-class features gain prestige and, indeed, become enregistered as a kind of transnational standard within the genre’s context. This connects to the construction of a particular ‘country musician’ identity that is achieved linguistically and depends on ties to a spatially grounded kind of authenticity—Southern US American working class.
As noted earlier, the two papers from northern Europe address appropriations of global ‘flows’ into the local and national—namely, discourses of resistance and diversity from rap/hip hop socialities that enter the national contexts in which these musical productions arise. Both texts introduce mixed language use as an expression of this appropriation. Stæhr and Madsen’s article, “‘Ghetto language’ in Danish mainstream rap,” discusses the role of the contemporary Copenhagen vernacular known as ‘ghetto language’ in Danish rap. While Copenhagen adolescents previously seemed to favor monolingual and standard linguistic practices in their rap music, the authors observe a new trend in Danish mainstream rap that adopts vernacular forms and thereby aligns with ‘trends’. The authors question the notion of language as a differential entity, but they do not see the deconstruction of language as a consequence of the appropriation of flow. Rather,
conservative national discourses of homogeneity and fixity can present themselves as inclusive; rappers may feel compelled to embed their hybrid language use in standardized language cultures, for instance by creating dictionaries for their (mainstream) listeners. Westinen brings another example of how national discourse interacts with ideologies from rap socialities. “Rapping the ‘Better folk’: Ideological and scalar negotiations of past and present” draws on insights from the sociolinguistics of globalization and discourse studies, centering on Finnish rap that tackles the official but often tension-ridden Finnish–Swedish bilingualism in Finland. Overall, the resources used in the analyzed song construct socio-temporal frames—global, national, local—of meaning-making, where elements from hip hop’s resistance discourses are appropriated into a national frame, which nonetheless remains essential for interpreting the meaning and symbolism of language.
The two concluding articles investigate the formation of new local identities, with transnational music styles playing a central role. In “Language nativization and ideologies in Ajégúnlè (Lagos),” Mazzoli examines how Nigerian Pidgin is construed as an identity marker of a new sociality in this suburb of an African megacity. Drawing on an ethnographic study with members of the Performing Musicians Employers’ Association of Nigeria, Mazzoli analyzes the choice of Nigerian Pidgin as a group language and its intersections with ancestral and colonial languages. Additionally, the musicians view their music and language as embodying a transatlantic cultural expression found in black hip hop and reggae, along with their message of empowerment. In “The Social and Sonic Semantics of Reggae: Language Ideology and Emergent Socialities in Postcolonial Vanuatu,” Levisen explores the significance of reke ‘reggae’ in the development of new local socialities in Vanuatu, a postcolonial nation-state in the Pacific. A youthful population fashions new forms of local belonging from the fragments of kastom, ‘traditional culture’, and reggae music has come to play an important role in this process. Levisen employs semantic analyses to discuss the relevance of the interactive links between global and local scales, between more fixed, traditional meanings and transnational discourses. Prominence is given to the relationship between Bislama, the creole language spoken in urban Vanuatu, and the keywords of reke. This demonstrates that language ideology research can gain by integrating keyword studies into its methods and theoretical framework, thereby obtaining a deeper understanding of how different scales interact.
The collected studies in this special issue begin their inquiry from different music styles rather than from otherwise defined social communities. The contributions address multiple perspectives on music across various locations worldwide, focusing on the linguistic practices involved in creating, performing, making sense of, and consuming music. The phenomena examined encompass phonetic choices, grammatical innovation, semantic appropriations, code choice, and discourse about such choices, which ultimately render these practices socially accountable. This special issue offers new perspectives on the relationship between social and linguistic units in a world where utopian islands may persist within fractured and globally connected life-worlds.