Research Seminar Series 2023

Time: 4-5 pm, Friday 10 November

Location: 12SW 558 or via Zoom:  https://macquarie.zoom.us/j/88546604589?pwd=cFVqbmdCb2hvT04yRTliN1B6VVJtUT09 Password: 798325

Ladz in the hood: Features of Pasifika English in drill rappers from Western Sydney?Joshua Penney

Despite the existence of well-established Pasifika communities in Australia, there has been no examination of the English spoken by members of these communities in the sociolinguistic literature. Yet we know from previous studies, particularly from a small body of literature on Pasifika English in New Zealand, that Pasifika varieties of English may exhibit key differences from ‘mainstream’ local varieties (e.g. Starks et al., 2015; Szakay & Gibson, in press). Recently drill rap, a sub-genre of hip hop, has emerged as a new force in the Australian musical landscape, with many drill rappers of Pasifika heritage. The most prominent of these drill groups is ONEFOUR, a group of Samoan-Australian men from the western suburbs of Sydney, who have achieved ground-breaking success as well as a level of infamy previously unseen in Australian popular music. In this talk, we present a case study of these Pasifika speaker/rappers to examine whether there is evidence of features of Pasifika English in their speech. The results suggest that these speaker/rappers index their Pasifika identities by employing markers of Pasifika English that show a level of divergence from mainstream Australian English.

Starks, D., Gibson, A., & Bell, A. (2015). Pasifika Englishes in New Zealand. In J. P. Williams, E. W. Schneider, P. Trudgill, and D. Schreier (Eds.), Further studies in the lesser-known varieties of English (pp. 288–304). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Szakay, A., & Gibson, A. In press. Māori and Pasifika Englishes in New Zealand. In R. Hickey (Ed.), New Cambridge History of the English Language, Volume VI (Africa, Asia, Australasia and the Pacific). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bio
Dr Joshua Penney is a lecturer in phonetics and speech science in the Department of Linguistics, Macquarie University and a member of the Centre for Language Sciences. His research interests are in sociophonetic variation, (multi)ethnolects, sound change, and voice quality/phonation, with a particular interest in the coda voicing contrast in English.