ABSTRACT
Despite its focused scope and context (styled HHNL/AAE used among white adolescent Hip Hop youth in the US), the research presented here has some important implications for the field of sociolinguistics with respect to language and identity, theoretical constructs like “style,” and the status of African American English in the US. Sociolinguists have increasingly turned their attention towards questions of identity and how this is manifested in terms of the linguistic features speakers use dynamically and variably to signal different aspects of their identities: ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, membership in various communities of practice, etc. More recently, scholars have begun to describe identity as fluid, hybrid, and differentiated even at the level of micro-interaction. The research presented here displays this pattern by showing how white adolescent Hip Hop youth use HHNL/AAE in ways that obscure their ethnic/racial origins and challenge conceptions of who uses these varieties. The ability of people to reinvent themselves and break free of their class, ethnic, gender, and sexual identities is said to be a distinctive fixture of our “post-modern” age. White Hip Hop youth are part of this long-standing trend in adopting speech patterns that index African American identity, and although they generally use HHNL/AAE in emblematic and non-systematic ways that do not signal full identification with AAE speakers, it can still be argued that this practice has symbolic value as a form of resistance vis-à-vis the racial and ethnic categories ascribed to them and as an agentive declaration of personal choice in the projection of identity.
