ABSTRACT
Let us begin with a brief initial explanation of the frame imposed on this discussion by the chosen title. Taken from the lyrics of the title song of Nigerian Hip Hop artist 2-Shotz’s 2005 album Nna-Men, the lines “You no fi t yarn foné pass American/so I choose to do am Naija style” represent a number of identityrelated claims. First, it asserts both complementarity and optionality of “foné” and “Naija style” rapping in one and the same vein. But there is a sense in which the choice of Naija style results from a subtle admission or suggestion of American ownership of foné and a conscious decision to diverge and then settle for a Naija alternative. In the lexicon of Nigerian Pidgin, foné is the label for a prestigious Standard English variety oft en used to describe the highly educated or native-speaker-approximating performance of a nonnative speaker. In other words, native speakers are not described in this term. Th is is an interesting yet contradictory other-ascribed value considering that the language of much U.S. rap is described as a non-Standard variety of American English that lacks capital in Bourdieu’s (1991) terms within the context of U.S. politics. On a hierarchy of languages (Blommaert, 1999, p. 431) and such hierarchies are more oft en than not managed by the ideological North, Nigerian Pidgin, a South language variety, would occupy a slightly lower stratum than AAVE based on the latter’s sheer privilege of location in the North. One signifi cant addition to make to this is the glaring postcolonial dimension entailed by varieties of English and the politics of that relationship and how that frames a discussion of Hip Hop and identity.
