Translanguaging and Reflection on Language Realities in the Lyrics of German Rap Artists with an East Slavonic Background in the 21st Century
Translanguaging and Reflection on Language Realities in the Lyrics of German Rap Artists with an East Slavonic Background in the 21st Century

Summary/Abstract: Multilingual diversity in German rap music has been marginalized since the 1990s. In the late 2010s German-Ukrainian-Russian rapper Capital Bra drew much attention to rap in Germany after making 13 number-one chart hits in 12 months, becoming the most popular German artist of the 21st century. Despite this fact, research on linguistic diversity in rap has yet to be conducted. A corpus of lyrics from 400 songs by three German-East Slavonic rappers – Antifuchs, Capital Bra, and Olexesh – forms the basis for the analysis. The songs are from the 2010s and early 2020s and total a count of 230,349 tokens. All three rappers are of Ukrainian, (Ukrainian-)Russian, or (Kazakh-)Russian origin. The lyrics are analysed with qualitative and quantitative methods of corpus-linguistics to find out how relevant languages and translingualism are for the rappers and how they perform translingualism in their lyrics.

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