Features of African American Vernacular English in Snoop Dogg’s Rap Lyrics

Seminar paper from the year 2016 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,0, , course: Varieties of English: New Englishes, language: English, abstract: First of all, this term paper will give some general information about the variety African American Vernacular English itself, its origins and who the speakers of AAVE are. Furthermore, it will give an overview of some features of AAVE and finally the analysis of two of the features on different rap songs from the famous rapper Snoop Dogg. The first feature that I will be looking at is zero copula and the second feature is the omission of the third-person singular –s in the present tense. In this term paper I will investigate the occurrence of these two features in Snoop Dogg’s lyrics from his first album “Doggystyle” and his latest album “Bush” and if they decreased or increased with time. Since music plays such a huge part in African American culture it should be possible to see these features of AAVE in the lyrics. The analysis will contain 16 rap songs from Snoop Dogg’s first album Doggystyle from 1993 and 10 rap songs from his latest album Bush from 2015. English is a language with many varieties and also one of the most spoken languages in the world. The varieties of English are results of colonial expansion and may differ from each other in terms of pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar. African American Vernacular English (AAVE) is the variety that people associate with as the language used by the black community. The additional term vernacular refers to the speech style in everyday communication and differentiates black African American Vernacular English speakers from black speakers of Standard English. Especially in rap and hip-hop music the number of black performers is very high since it was introduced as a new music genre. The style of language that is used in hip-hop lyrics is highly influenced by the African Americans. AAVE is a variant of English that you can hear every day on the radio or television for example and that also makes it so interesting to analyze its use, features and origin.