ABSTRACT
Rap lyrics in Sweden have become increasingly multilingual in the past twenty years. In this chapter, Karin Nykvist provides insights into contemporary Swedish hip-hop and its use of multilingualism. In her analysis of Swedish rap poetics, Nykvist shows how hip-hop lyrics turn to multilingual aesthetics in order to destabilize and question ideas of national identity and to deconstruct the monolingual ideals that those ideas are founded on. She demonstrates how the political performance of multilingualism in contemporary hip-hop lyrics disturbs and alters notions of the Swedish language, as well as the idea and ideology of Swedishness itself. The works analysed in the article cover rap lyrics by the groundbreaking group The Latin Kings in the 1990s, the female rapper Feven, and the contemporary male rapper Erik Lundin.
