From the Past to the Future: The Relationship between Linguistics and Rap Lyrics
Day and time: Friday (March 20) · 09:15–10:45
Location: Info Center
Format: Talk
From the Past to the Future of Relationship between Linguistics and Rap Lyrics
Presented by: Anne Gensane, Andrzej Napieralski, and Alena Podhorná-Polická
The computational analysis of rap lyrics marks a decisive step in renewing linguistic methodologies applied to contemporary cultural productions. From the past to the future of the relationship between linguistics and rap lyrics, this connection proves to be remarkably strong and fertile: rap offers linguistics an unprecedented field for exploring creativity, variation, and innovation, while linguistic analysis provides new insights into the expressive and structural richness of rap language. This presentation builds on more than fifteen years of research devoted to the creation and annotation of RapCor, a computerized corpus of francophone rap lyrics and metadata. The recent development of the project represents a major turning point: in one hand, creation of a bio-bibliographical database (open to transdisciplinary collaboration) and, on the other hand, the the launch of two corpora (accessible through Sketch engine): 1) RapCor Boosted v1 (for French, in January 2025) and of Czech RapCor boosted v1 (for Czech, in April 2025) that are built semi-automatically from Genius.com data. The francophone rap lyrics corpus is 66 times larger than the original corpus of manual transcripts (based on booklet versions of texts) and use the specialized linguistic annotation tagset. All this “boosted” corpora creation, extensible to other languages, enables us in the future to a large-scale exploration of linguistic phenomena that were previously difficult to observe in smaller rap lyrics datasets.
Within this framework, a new international project brings together researchers from France, Poland, and the Czech Republic to examine English borrowings in trilingual rap. Based on a corpora of 100 lyrics in each language, selected from the most streamed albums of 2024, the study explores how borrowed verbs function as markers of linguistic creativity and identity construction within hip-hop discourse. By combining morphological, phonetic, syntactic, and semantic analyses, the research identifies distinct adaptation strategies that reveal how each language negotiates contact with English—through full integration, hybrid formations, semantic shifts, or playful resemanticization. These cross-linguistic patterns underscore the flexibility of the rap lexicon and the role of artists as agents of linguistic change in urban and artistic contexts.
Beyond describing borrowing mechanisms, the study addresses broader epistemological and methodological questions related to neology, variation, and multilingual creativity in rap. It argues that computational tools such as RapCor make it possible to observe lexical innovation on an unprecedented scale, transforming rap into a genuine laboratory of linguistic and cultural experimentation in the era of digital globalization.
