Lise Winer

The lyrics of Hip-Hop raps in Quebec, specifically in the city of Montreal, are an interesting site for examining the relationship between macro-level language planning policies designed to promote and maintain a particular kind of standard French, and the actual micro-level practices of language use by grassroots rappers who both normalize and challenge these policies. Our data corpus consists of multilingual rap lyrics from Montreal and, in process, from Toronto. Rappers in Toronto use an English lyric base, while in Montreal the base language is usually French (standard Quebec, non-standard Quebec, and France French) with a good deal of Haitian French Creole and other languages as well; both scenes include African-American Vernacular English and Jamaican English Creole as important components. Members of this team, Mela Sarkar (Principal Investigator), Bronwen Low, and I, along with a crew of student and community research assistants, have obtained a 3-year SSHRC standard research grant for the study of multilingualism and identity in this area.

Low, B., Sarkar, M. & Winer, L. “Ch’us mon propre Bescherelle”: Challenges from the Hip-Hop nation to the Quebec nation. Journal of Sociolinguistics. (2008)

Sarkar, M., Winer, L., & Low, B. “Pour connecter avec les Peeps”: Québéquicité and the Quebec Hip-Hop community. In M. Mantero (Ed.) Perspectives on Language Studies: Identity, Culture and Discourse in Educational Contexts. Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing, 2007, pp. 351-372.

Sarkar, Mela & Lise Winer. Multilingual Code-Switching in Quebec Rap: Poetry, Pragmatics, and Performativity. International Journal of Multilingualism, 2006, 3(3):173-192.