"Black English and rap music: a comparison" by Mike Daley
York University May 14, 1998

"Rap's forebears stretch back through disco, street funk, radio D.J.s, Bo Diddley, the bebop singers, Cab Calloway, Pigmeat Markham, the tap dancers and comics, The Last Poets, Gil Scott-Heron, Muhammed Ali, a cappella and doo wop groups, ring games, skip rope rhymes, prisons and army songs toasts, signifying and the dozens..."(Toop 1984:19)

David Toop's litany of some of the cultural antecedents of rap music highlights the rich traditions that have underpinned African-American society for decades. One of the common threads running through his list is the central role of Black English, the mode of verbal expression particular to North Americans of African descent. Toop recognizes that Black language is a primary symbol of cultural identity and a generative source of much of the African-American expressive culture in existence, and is thus central to the structure and style of rap music. Rap music has its beginnings in inner-city Black neighborhoods, and though the role of Chicano musicians in the early history of rap is beginning to be recognized (see Flores 1996, Del Barco 1996), its most prominent exponents have been African-American for the most part. Therefore, it seems axiomatic that rap music is intimately tied to the sounds, syntax and rhetorical practices of Black English. A number of descriptions of rap make note of this connection and it is widely accepted as a truism. To my knowledge, however, the connection between rap music and Black English has never been thoroughly explored. My task in this paper, then, is to survey some of the existing research on Black English and to work though the assumed connections between that linguistic realm and the musico-linguistic one of rap music.

I might trace my interest in the question of Black English's role in rap music to my own position as an outsider to African-American culture and to my ongoing interest in the intersections of language and music. My outsider role causes me to find Black English and rap equally foreign to my experience, so I see research on the intersection between the two as potentially useful.

There is another goal of this research, one that is connected to my interest in musical texts and their grammars. I have long contemplated a hypothesis that some of the characteristic sonic aspects of rap music might have some roots in the syntax and phonology of Black English. That is, the organizational principles that guide the construction of Black speech might be abstracted to structural rules; these rules may also be found to be applicable to the grammars of rhythm, phrasing, timbre and intonation in rap music. Similarly, certain sounds appear more commonly in Black English than in Standard English, for various reasons which I will detail later; it would follow logically that the same principles could apply to rap. For example, certain instrumental timbres might be favoured because they align with the sounds of Black English. Possibly the most productive intersection of Black English and rap can be found in the area of segmentation. In a previous paper (Daley 1997) I noted some similarities in the segmenting of a rap performance and in Standard English speech. At that time, I had not yet researched the prosody of Black English. I am certain that the application of that research to the comparison would enrich the discussion, but to date I have not been able to find a study of Black English prosody, at least in the areas of speech rhythm and intonation1 . So my present work must be limited mostly to pronunciation and syntax.

Contesting definitions

This introduction may give the impression that Black English is a monolithic, easily defined linguistic entity. Nothing could be further from the truth. The history of Black English, its origins and sources, is as contested as its present role in education. The fervent debate that has recently accompanied the Oakland Unified School District Board of Education's 1996 decision to treat Black English, or "Ebonics", as a second language (for the purposes of Standard English education), has illustrated some of the conflicting definitions and agendas that surround the issue of language. And as in any cultural arena, language is intimately tied to identity. Just as the history of Black people in America has resonated with the sometimes opposing forces of assimilation, Black pride/re-Africanization, and integration, Black language is used and evaluated in a number of divergent ways. These varying uses correspond to different socio-economic classes, geographic areas, and political orientations. For example, some African-Americans use a variety of Black English exclusively. Others, who might see the term "Black English" itself as a reductionist, essentialist term, use Standard English exclusively. As Ronald Williams has pointed out, some Standard English speakers claim themselves as Black English speakers for a variety of reasons (Williams 1976:13)2. Yet others might alternate between Black English and Standard English3, performing a kind of code-switching depending on the context of the discourse4.

I am aware that the objectification of "Black English" effaces the range of linguistic practices across African-American culture. Therefore, for the purposes of the present work, I will attempt to keep the definition of Black English rather open-ended and fluid. I begin with Geneva Smitherman's vague definition of Black English as "Euro-American speech with an Afro-American meaning, nuance, tone, and gesture (Smitherman 1977:2)." This short definition leaves many questions in its wake. One wonders what Smitherman means by "meaning, nuance, tone and gesture." "Meaning" alone creates a fair number of problems, because although Black English does contain some English words which have uniquely Black meanings, the vast majority of words and phrases are semantically identical to their Standard English counterparts. Statistically speaking, variant meaning plays a very small part in Black English. The other parameters, nuance, tone and gesture, seem to refer to the phonology of Black English, though the ways in which these traits are African-American is not explained within the short definition.

Smitherman's definition does not include the syntax of Black English, which regulates the distribution and ordering of words and phrases, though she later states that "[l]inguistically speaking, the greatest differences between contemporary Black and White English are on the level of grammatical structure (ibid.:18)."

Black English and Standard English

As Black English is often described in opposition to its counterpart, Standard English, it is important to try to make sense of what is meant by "standard" in this context. This is not a straightforward exercise. Dictionary definitions of English often make mention of "The King's (or Queen's) English" as the correct version of English. This is a holdover from the times when English usage was explicitly dictated by the state. The relationship between political power and control over "correct" language remains, though. English in reality is an equivocal range of practices; absolutely "correct" English does not exist except where it has been decreed as such by those in power.

Elizabeth Closs Traugott further defines standard languages in opposition to vernaculars: while vernaculars are spoken forms, defined stylistically, standard varieties are written as well as spoken. They are codified as grammars, they have accepted lexicons, and they are used as media for legal, pedagogical and academic expression (Traugott 1976:76). Of course, this definition is hardly free of the entanglements of power relations. It could even be interpreted as claiming an a priori suitability of Standard English for such matters. This is not the case, and as Traugott later points out, Black English is fast becoming a standard form (1976:78).
The consensus among most commentators on Black English is that it is a vernacular language in its own right, not a dialect of Standard English. It is autonomous, systematic and consistent, like any language. The fact that Standard English and Black English speakers can understand each other for the most part does take the language status away from Black English; Swedish and Norwegian are classified as separate languages, even though their respective speakers can generally understand each other. As well, caution must be taken in the way Black English is described in relation to Standard English. The differences between the two languages are all too often described in terms of omissions or absences. This consciously or unconsciously contributes to a popular perception of Black English as deficient and inferior. Because of this problem, some writers have suggested that Black English should be studied without reference to Standard English; others, like William Labov (1972:28) assert that such an endeavour is "not realistic", as the differences between the two languages are slight compared to their similarities.

A debate continues as to whether Black English should be considered as a creole on a continuum alongside Standard English or as a separate language with some features in common with Standard English. As Traugott points out, "[p]edagogically it may be beneficial to consider the continuum option as an aid to transition for schoolchildren, but psychologically the idea of a separate system helps to forge cultural and ethnic identity and counterbalances the deficit theory" (Traugott 1976:61).

The study of Black English

Black English is estimated to have 18 to 20 million living speakers (the statistic does not indicate whether this includes sometime speakers of the language), and it is most common among the lower economic strata of urban and rural dwelling African-American people in the United States. There are cases where Euro-Americans and other non-Black speakers have adopted Black English, and these people tend to live within or near otherwise Black communities. Middle-class Black speakers tend to use Standard English (Dillard 1975:9).

Since the 19th century, Black varieties of English have been discussed in popular circles, and academic work has continued since the 1930s. The first prominent study of Black English was undertaken by Melville Herskovits in 1945 (Herskovits 1967[1945]). Since that time, the inaccurate popular view that Black English was a corruption of Standard English has been refuted by linguistic research, though commentary during the Oakland Ebonics debate has shown that this myth still has some vocal exponents. One point of debate since the beginnings of Black English research has concerned the origins of the language. Ronald Williams (R. Williams 1976:10) summarizes three positions on the history of Black English: The Anglicist claims that Black English is composed of linguistic holdovers from the speech of English colonists. This position has been thoroughly discredited by recent research. The Creolist maintains that Black English is derived from a prototype creole language, itself derived from a pidgin African/English mix, and that the present language is the product of a steady movement towards Standard English. Finally, the Synchronic position claims that the description of Black English can proceed without reference to its history. Probably the most common position at present is the Creolist one: I will expand upon this conjectured history in brief.

Creoles and pidgins

The date of arrival for West African pidgin English is unknown; Dillard speculates on an arrival between 1619 and 1692. Pidgins are provisional languages which are commonly used for trade between speakers of different languages. They tend to have reduced vocabularies5, and phonetically speaking they use only the sounds which are common to both languages. Pidgins tend to make ingenious use of limited structures to express complex relations, rather than using complex sentence structures or extensive vocabularies. In syntax, pidgins tend to coordinate elements rather than utilizing subordinating structures; events are juxtaposed without connective words, rather than hierarchicized6. Power relations are operative in the development of pidgins as well; they involve a dominant, or superstrate, linguistic group as well as a subordinate, or substrate group. Pidgins in the pure sense are nobody's native language. Their purpose is to facilitate contact between incompatible languages, and they are generally replaced after the first generation of interlinguistic contact with a creole language.

Creoles are typically native languages, usually developed by the children of pidgin speakers. Black English is thought to have started out as a creole but it has become increasingly "decreolized" through extensive contact with a superstrate linguistic group. That is, over time it has been progressively modified to resemble the socially dominant language, Standard English. Nonetheless, many qualities of the creole language remain in Black English.

Black English syntax

Like its pidgin and creole forebears, Black English has a comparative infrequency of complex subordination. Active sentences predominate (i.e. "Bill kissed Mary", not "Mary was kissed by Bill"), and iteration of the subject (John, he left) is a common feature. While creoles tend to omit plural marking (i.e. "Four mile"), the transition to the Black English vernacular created a use for the plural -s as a generalized marker for a number of plurals, thus "childrens" and "mens".

The structure of the copula (a connecting word, especially a part of the verb to be, such as "is" or "are"), is one of the best-known features of Black English. The creole tends to omit the copula, as in "She a teacher", but it has been added again through the decreolization process. When "be" is used, it tends to indicate continuous activity, rather than a momentary state.
Tense in Black English is indicated by context (either the context of the immediate sentence or of the entire conversation), rather than with an "s" or "ed". This can be seen as a holdover from the pidgin language, which used limited vocabulary and inflection to express a great variety of meanings.

Black English phonology

The phonological differences between Black English and Standard English are quite extensive. At the level of the phoneme, two variations are common in Black English, involving the voiced and voiceless [th] sounds. Voiceless [th] is often replaced by the voiceless dental stop [t] of the voiceless labial fricative [f] - "thick" becomes "tick" and "tooth" is pronounced as "toof". Voiced [th] is frequently replaced by the voiced dental stop [d] - "this" may be pronounced as "dis" - or by the voiced labial fricative [v] - "brother" might be pronounced as "bruvver". Also, the velar nasal [ng] is often replaced by the dental nasal [n] when it is in the terminal position; thus "ringing" is pronounced "ringin" - the same phoneme receives a different pronunciation in the same word by virtue of its position. A well-known feature of Black English is the phenomenon of terminal consonant cluster simplification, a general tendency to reduce consonant clusters at the ends of words to a single consonant. William Labov also makes the important point that the consonants most affected by these phonological processes are also the consonants which make up the majority of Standard English inflections. Therefore, the changes in the sound structure affect the grammatical structure as well.

The phonology of Black English, and the reasons for its characteristics, are the subject of ideologically loaded debate among scholars of the language. William G. Moulton, in his "The Sounds of Black English", maintains that "many of the obligatory pronunciation idiosyncrasies of Black English are optional features of casual speech in Standard English (1976:151)." This is a dangerous position for Moulton to take, because it reinscribes stereotypes of Black English as a lazy, inept version of Standard English, and, by proxy, of African-Americans as lazy and inept as well. Selase Williams' research into the sounds of Black English (1993) is much more affirming and Afrocentric; it is also quite plausible, though this thread of scholarship needs continuation.
Williams asserts that many of the most characteristic features of Black English may, in fact, be Africanisms. He suggests that these Africanisms may have remained undetected because the most visible aspect of the language, the vocabulary, is largely shared with Standard English; this is why distinctly Black English features tend to be judged as distortions of Standard English. Williams goes on to hypothesize that linguistic variation in Black English communities may constitute reflexes of various African source languages, assuming that an enslaved group will incorporate some of the enslaver's language, while retaining the syntactic, phonological, and semantic substance of its original language. In the testing of his hypothesis, Williams takes the variant pronunciations of the terminal position [th] as a case study. He crosschecks phonological data from ten important West African source languages, and finds that word-final consonant clusters are virtually non-existent in these languages. The ways in which various African languages would cope with the [th] phoneme vary somewhat between the substitution of [t], [d], or [f]. That is, the word "with" could be pronounced variously as "wit", "wid", or "wif". Williams suggests that these pronunciations are a direct continuity of African source languages, and that the areas of the U.S. most associated with each variant can be connected to an African mother language. He backs up this surprising claim somewhat with data from the journals of slave traders, though its finality should not be overstated.

Black English semantics

An interesting context of Black English is the phenomenon of "fine talk". This is the use of inflated, posturing word choices for ordinary situations. An example from Geneva Smitherman (1977:34) is: "Naw, it ain true. He being fictitious." From A Tribe Called Quest, we have "If only you could see through your elaborate eyes" (line 27, "Bonita Applebum"). Smitherman sees fine talk as a slavery-era method for disguising English discourse from white ears, by coding language in slightly malapropistic "fancy" words. This brings us to the area of Black English semantics.

Black semantics exists in a dynamic state. Meanings of phrases and words will change and shift over time, rather more quickly than in other languages. This is due to the particular social history of Black English. Especially in the twentieth century, non-Black speakers have periodically appropriated choice Black expressions for use in Standard English. The result of this is the gradual falling into disuse of the expression within the Black community, to be replaced by new, exclusively Black expressions. In recent years, Black English words and phrases have come to be very popular among white and Latino North Americans; as a result, the rate of semantic change in Black English has increased and many expressions have a much shorter 'shelf life'. Historically, the need for Black English speakers to have exclusive use of certain meanings may be traced back to slavery, where a kind of secret language was extremely useful for communication7. As large sectors of the Black population continue to live in informal segregation and alienation vis a vis their non-Black neighbors, this linguistic strategy continues to be of value, and thus remains as an integral part of Black English.

As well, it must be noted that Black English speakers often appropriate Standard English words, but give them a Black semantic interpretation, which will serve to increase the range of possible referents. A characteristic of pidgin languages, as noted above, is the tendency to use a small lexicon for a large variety of meanings. Black English speakers use such words within both white and Black fields of meaning. The particular meaning of a given word at any one time is determined by context.

Black semantics are highly context-bound. A notable example, and one which will be applicable in a study of rap lyrics, is the use of profanity. It is used in both negative and positive ways, depending on context. Sometimes it has no "meaning" at all, and functions as a kind of rhythmic/semantic filler in speech contexts. Smitherman gives an example of "multiple subjective association process" in the use of the word "nigger/nigguh". She lists four possible meanings of the words, depending on context:

1. personal affection or endearment
2. culturally Black, identifying with and sharing the values of black people, as opposed to "African-Americans", which has a more middle-class connotation
3. expression of disapproval for a person's actions
4. identifying Black folks - period (Smitherman 1994:62)

Anthropologist Claudia Mitchell-Kernan further comments on the context-bound meaning of "nigger": "The use of 'nigger' with other black English markers has the effect of 'smiling when you say that.' The use of standard English with 'nigger,' in the words of an informant, is 'the wrong tone of voice' and may be taken as abusive (Mitchell-Kernan 1973, 328)."

NWA's "Fuck tha Police" uses "nigga" primarily in the spirit of Smitherman's second meaning of the term, referring to "culturally black", urban, working class people:
Fuck tha police
Comin straight from the underground
Young nigga got it bad cuz I'm brown...
Searchin my car, lookin for the product
Thinkin every nigga is sellin narcotics...
A young nigga on a warpath
And when I'm finished, it's gonna be a bloodbath

And Ice-T's "Straight Up Nigga" makes the distinction between "nigga" and "African-American" explicit:
I'm a nigger, not a colored man or a black
or a Negro or an Afro-American - I'm all that
yes, I was born in America too
but does South Central look like America to you?

Alternately, Ahmad's nostalgic "Back in the Day" uses "nigga" more as a term of endearment, corresponding to Smitherman's second meaning of the term:
I remember
When I just a little niggerole
I looked up to my bigger bro
Begged if I could kick it so...
Y'all remember way back then, when it was 1985
all the way live, I think I was about ten
One of those happy little niggaz singin the blues
That be always tryin to bag with the shag and karate shoes

close window

www.mikedaley.net