ABSTRACT
As mentioned in the introduction to this book, the inspiration for this research was a white upper middle class teenager from New York City whose language, dress style, and attitude revealed a deep psychological investment in the “gangsta rapper” image. I had known “Mike” (a pseudonym) since he was 6 years old, as a son of a close friend. I began observing his language practices in the early 1990s when he first seemed to gravitate towards Hip Hop, at age 13. Two years later I began a case study and interviewed Mike individually as well as in group settings with his friends. I was curious as to whether his case bore any similarity to that of “Carla,” a 13-year-old white girl who grew up in an African American community (Camden, New Jersey) and was thought to speak AAE. Was Mike able to use phonological as well as morphosyntactic markers of AAE? How did he acquire the linguistic features he was using and was he using them in systematic ways? Was Mike engaging in “language crossing” as described by Rampton (1995) or some other kind of language practice? These were all pressing sociolinguistic questions, but they required a greater degree of ethnographic explanation than an ordinary quantitative analysis would provide, which led me to try to understand more about Hip Hop culture.
