Aspects of Spoken Language in the Romanian Contemporary Music
Aspects of Spoken Language in the Romanian Contemporary Music

Summary/Abstract: From a sociolinguistic perspective, the language that teenagers use seems to be more complex, in the sense that it combines both the literary and the coloquial styles, the first one promoted by the pre-universitary and universitary educational systems, through all their fields, and the latter used by the close ones. The urban side of oral language is used by youngsters, among other things, to verbalize music, more exactly, to produce lyrics which accompany the musical background of songs, music being present in almost any activity involving the young generation. From the various musical genres—pop, rock, ethno and so on—we have chosen hip-hop, since it has the most generous lyrics from a quantitative point of view which offer an extensive linguistic analysis. Therefore, the lyrics belonging to bands such as BUG Mafia, La Familia and Paraziţii, bands chosen for this analysis, shock through the colourful language, which lacks any prejudice. Slang is rather abundant, especially the gross or vulgar language, used in order to express their protest against a society which is not really prudish, but also to indentify their friends from the hood, who are left out by society. Among all the aspects of the Romanian language present in modern rap music, we might remember the lexical ones, the excess of Anglicisms mixed with neologisms or technical terms, the phonetic aspects, the apocope, the elision or the syncope. All these characterise the coloquial style and add rhythm and rhyme when attached to structured syntactic utterances. Anyhow, all these are atributes of the „hood language”, promoted by youngsters nowadays, either due to their feeling of being left out, or due to a rebelious attitude.

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