Don't mess with chicks in Burberry paddings : Semantic change in hip-hop lyrics and its impact on mainstream American English

Abstract: Some people might regard the language of hip-hop as being crude, sexist and inappropriate. Nevertheless, hip-hop culture can also be considered as one of the underground sources of word-formation and language change in mainstream English. Young people have always been a source of language variation and lexical innovation whether we like it or not. This essay is focusing on three words frequently used in hip-hop lyrics, namely pimp, queer and chick. The aim of the study is to analyse the semantic change on these words as they are used in hip-hop music and find out whether hip-hop culture has had an influence on the mainstream usage of these words. The method used was to study the usage and frequency of these words in hip-hop lyrics and analyse whether there was a similar use in a large diachronic newspaper corpus of American English. The material was predominately found in The Original Hip-hop Lyrics Archive (ohhla.com) and The TIME Magazine Corpus (corpus.byu.edu). The results of this study show examples of semantic change in both hip-hop lyrics and mainstream American English and it is concluded that hip-hop culture has an influence on mainstream language above all among the youth.