Regionality in African-American Hip-Hop Communities. A Case Study of Philadelphia and New York

Master's Thesis from the year 2018 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,0, Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel, language: English, abstract: This thesis will address whether regional variation across members of the hip-hop community is measurable in terms of regionally distinct phonological and syntactical properties. As a starting point, New York City has been selected as it marks the origin of hip-hop. Philadelphia, as part of Labov's Mid-Atlantic region and Jones' self-coined 'Northeast region', which itself is said to be characterized by 'nonhomogeneity' (Jones 2015: 428), serves as a point of reference for the comparison of distinct regional features. Labov (2001: 121) also refers to the 'Philadelphia dialect area', which is clearly separated from New York in the North. The data for the analysis will be retrieved from randomly chosen songs performed by selected African-American hip-hop artists who are representative of their respective city and who can be considered authentic members of the local hip-hop community. Further information on the selection will be provided later on. First, the theoretical background to the study of this thesis will be provided, mainly refer-ring to the role of regionality in AAVE (as African American Vernacular English) by giving an overview of earlier and current research. Second, after narrowing down the selection of artists and their songs, the relevant phonological and syntactical features will be listed and explained before they are analysed for both Philadelphia and New York City. Finally, the results will be interpreted and discussed with respect to the guiding question of this thesis.