Beyond language crossing: Exploring multilingualism and multicultural identities through popular music lyrics
Abstract
Popular songs are loaded with critical social, cultural and historical
information and provide blueprints for future semiotic practices. I
draw on notions of language as social practice and
poststructuralist performative identities to show how language
practices in popular music intersect with multicultural practices
and meaning making in fluid African multilingual contexts. I
illustrate how multilingual and multicultural practices bring into
dialogue the traditional and the modern, the rural and the urban,
and the interconnectedness in the translocal and transnational
cultural worlds. I unravel the layered and multidimensional
configurations of new forms of ethnicity and fluid social identities
and related multiple affiliations. Beyond the dualisms and timespace-age fixed language practices projected in many studies on
urban youth languages in Africa, I maintain that these languages
are connected to adult and rural languages. Otherwise, studies on
urban youth languages risk being uprooted from local sociocultural systems of meaning making, hence being a-cultural and
a-historical.