Multilingualism and Identity : Polish and Russian Influences in German Rap
Aleksej Tikhonov · Multiethnica Journal of the Hugo Valentin Centre · 2020
Since 2019, Capital Bra is the most streamed German musician, one of the top five most streamed German musicians internationally and the only German artist in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries who has produced all in all twelve number one chart hits during one year in Germany, Austria and Switzerland (Schmidt 2019, Skrobala 2019).This article uses a corpus with approximately 100,000 tokens (word forms, punctuation, digits and abbreviations) of lyrics from the albums of four German rappers with a Polish or Russian background for an analysis of the multilingual relationships in such musicians' lyrics and how their Slavic vocabulary may integrate into the German language.The results reveal surprisingly large dimensions of multilingual interdependence, including incorporation of vocabulary from English, Arabic and Turkish, as well as the grammatical handling of the Slavic first learned language (L1) in multilingual context.An additional point of the study is the stylometric clustering of the lyrics with the free programming environment for statistical computing called R, which shows relationships between texts and rappers.