Transglossia and Music: Music, Sound and Authenticity

Abstract

This chapter looks at ways in which popular music-oriented resources are translingually created and reorganized by speakers. Popular music and its genres are crucial resources within popular culture, enriching the linguistic creativity of young adults in multiple ways. The speakers take up and recreate popular music resources such as song lyrics, music videos and artists’ images and styles for their own communicative purposes. This chapter also involves a discussion of the importance of the idea of authenticity for the sociolinguistics of popular music. Questions of authenticity have a particular significance in popular music: The question is not only whether cultural performances are seen sociolinguistically as authentic language use, but more importantly from the young adults’ perspective, what counts as an authentic form of cultural or musical expression.