City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works Publications and Research York College 2019 Choutouts: Language Contact and US-Latin Hip Hop on YouTube Matt Garley CUNY York College How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/yc_pubs/251 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact:
[email protected] Choutouts: Language contact and US-Latin hip hop on YouTube Matt Garley This paper presents a corpus-sociolinguistic analysis of lyrics and com- ments from videos for four US-Latinx hip hop songs on YouTube. A ‘post-varieties’ (Seargeant and Tagg 2011) analysis of the diversity and hybridity of linguistic production in the YouTube comments finds the notions of codemeshing and plurilingualism (Canagarajah 2009) useful in characterizing the language practices of the Chicanx community of the Southwestern US, while a focus on the linguistic practices of com- menters on Northeastern ‘core’ artists’ tracks validate the use of named language varieties in examining language attitudes and ideologies as they emerge in commenters’ discussions. Finally, this article advances the sociolinguistics of orthography (Sebba 2007) by examining the social meanings of a vast array of creative and novel orthographic forms, which often blur the supposed lines between language varieties. Keywords: Latinx, hip hop, orthography, codemeshing, language contact, language attitudes, language ideologies, computer-mediated discourse. Choutouts: contacto lingüístico y el hip hop latinx-estadounidense en YouTube. Este estudio presenta un análisis sociolingüístico de letras de canciones y comentarios de cuatro videos de hip hop latinx-esta- dounidenses en YouTube.