How Iggy Azalea mastered her ‘blaccent’

allthingslinguistic:

An interesting analysis on the extent to which Iggy Azalea uses accurate African American English in her rap songs, which also doubles as a decent introduction to the grammar of AAE:

But if she’s an appropriator, Azalea is at least not a sloppy one. 

The “blaccent” controversy, as the rapper Eve called it, recently attracted the attention of linguists Maeve Eberhardt and Kara Freeman, who listened to and analyzed Azalea’s entire discography. […]

As with the dialects of any other group, such as the Pennsylvania Amish or the Cajun in Louisiana, AAE possesses its own subtle patterns of grammar and phonology, distinct from the kind of English heard on the evening news but no less difficult to get right. This is not something that outsiders can replicate easily. […]

According to this new study, Azalea’s songs reflect a far deeper, more sophisticated understanding of how black rappers speak. “We find her using this nuanced representation of African American English,” says Eberhardt, an assistant professor of linguistics at the University of Vermont. “She does it very well. She uses the features in the right places and in the right contexts.”

Even if her mimicry is offensive, the research appears to confirm something Azalea has been saying all along. Call her culturally naive or overzealous, but she has been an earnest student of at least some aspects of rap. […]

The research finds that her lyrics also demonstrate styles of grammar that are common in AAE, but hard for outsiders to pick up on. Here are three examples.

— Tricky usage of “ain’t”: This word is well-known as a substitute for “are not” or “is not”: “I ain’t going there,” for instance, or “He ain’t your friend.” But the linguists find that Azalea deploys “ain’t” in a rarer way, to indicate past events that never happened. She says things like “He ain’t even graduate.”

— Remote past “BEEN”: Azalea also correctly uses a grammatical construction that linguists call “remote past BEEN,” which indicates that a situation has been continuing for a long time. This is a feature that speakers of standard English often misinterpret. In 1975, Stanford’s Rickford, then at the University of Pennsylvania, gave a survey to black and white English speakers. Among the questions was this one:

Someone asked, “Is she married?” and someone else answered, “She BIN married.” Do you get the idea that she is married now?

To most of the white people in the study, that sentence meant that the woman was once married but not anymore. To nearly all of the black people, it meant that the woman had been married for a while and continued to be married.

Azalea correctly uses this expression in her song “Lady Patra.“ The meaning here, with stress on the word been, is that Azalea has long been rich, not that she lost a fortune and regained it:

Paper planes, roger that, 10-4
Got money, been had it, still gettin’ more

There are so many interesting bits I wish I could just excerpt the whole thing, so definitely just go read it. 

(Source: allthingslinguistic, via allthingslinguistic)

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    Wow wtf is this Barri you can’t even spell white passing
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