Regional Variation in West and East Coast African-American English Prosody and Rap Flows

Abstract

Regional variation in African-American English (AAE) is especially salient to its speakers involved with hip-hop culture, as hip-hop assigns great importance to regional identity and regional accents are a key means of expressing regional identity. However, little is known about AAE regional variation regarding prosodic rhythm and melody. In hip-hop music, regional variation can also be observed, with different regions’ rap performances being characterized by distinct “flows” (i.e., rhythmic and melodic delivery), an observation which has not been quantitatively investigated yet. This study concerns regional variation in AAE speech and rap, specifically regarding the United States’ East and West Coasts. It investigates how East Coast and West Coast AAE prosody are distinct, how East Coast and West Coast rap flows differ, and whether the two domains follow a similar pattern: more rhythmic and melodic variation on the West Coast compared to the East Coast for both speech and rap. To this end, free speech and rap recordings of 16 prominent African-American members of the East Coast and West Coast hip-hop communities were phonetically analyzed regarding rhythm (e.g., syllable isochrony and musical timing) and melody (i.e., pitch fluctuation) using a combination of existing and novel methodological approaches. The results mostly confirm the hypotheses that East Coast AAE speech and rap are less rhythmically diverse and more monotone than West Coast AAE speech and rap, respectively. They also show that regional variation in AAE prosody and rap flows pattern in similar ways, suggesting a connection between rhythm and melody in language and music.

Ambitionz az a Ridah: 2Pac's changing accent and flow in light of regional variation in African-American English speech and hip-hop music

“…The present article is concerned with regional variation in African-American English (AAE) -specifically regarding its East Coast and West Coast regiolectsin the context of hip-hop culture. It examines AAE regiolects in a hip-hop context because the concepts of regional affiliation and identity are central to hip-hop culture, and because hip-hop aficionados -or "heads" (Alim, 2015) -purposely use their own regional accents of AAE to express their regional hip-hop identity (Forman, 2002;Gilbers, 2015Gilbers, , 2018aGilbers et al, 2019a;Hess, 2009;Morgan, 1993Morgan, , 1998Morgan, , 2001Morgan, , 2002. In light of this, and considering the longstanding rivalry between the East Coast and West Coast hip-hop communities, one can expect that speakers of these dialects immersed in hip-hop culture are more likely to use markedly regional accents than those who are not, making them optimal candidates to assess regional accent differences.…”

“…Regional differences that in retrospect were already apparent from the earliest studies on AAE were dismissed as incidental or irrelevant (Wolfram, 2007;Wolfram & Kohn, 2015). More recently, however, it was found that there are in fact regional differences between varieties of AAE spoken in the United States (e.g., Blake & Shousterman, 2010, Carpenter, 2004Childs & Mallinson, 2004;Childs, 2005;Cutler, 2007Cutler, , 2014D'Andrea, 2005;Gilbers, 2015Gilbers, , 2018aGilbers et al, 2019a;Green, 2002;Hinton & Pollock, 2000;Jones, 2015Jones, , 2020Mallinson & Wolfram, 2002;Mallinson, 2006;Morgan, 2001;Pollock & Berni, 1997;Rowe 2005;Wolfram, 2003).…”

“…Because of this, a "drive to distinguish and articulate linguistic characteristics to represent major cities and regions on the East and West Coasts" (Morgan, 2001, p. 188) emerged when hip-hop was exported across the country and new hip-hop speech communities were formed. Members of the hip-hop community are in fact highly aware of phonological differences between regional dialects of AAE, and they make active use of their regional accent features to distinguish regional differences, for instance East Coast AAE from West Coast AAE (Gilbers et al, 2019a;Morgan, 2001Morgan, , 2002.…”

“…As the East Coast and West Coast accents of AAE have not been directly compared to each other very often, little is currently known about how the East Coast and West Coast AAE accents differ from each other. What we do know is that compared to East Coast AAE, West Coast AAE prosody is characterized by significantly more rhythmic variation and higher degrees of pitch fluctuation (Gilbers et al, 2019a). Moreover, Morgan (1993Morgan ( , 1998Morgan ( , 2001Morgan ( , 2002 reports that in West Coast AAE, intervocalic /t/ is flapped, whereas in East Coast AAE it is glottalized.…”

“…The materials, data, and several methodological tools described in this section are available at https://osf.io/dzc3s (Gilbers et al, 2019b).…”