“‘ОППЫ НЕ ПОНИМАЮТ НАШ LINGO’: THE ROLE OF ENGLISH BORROWINGS IN CONVEYING TABOO-RELATED MEANINGS IN RUSSIAN HIP-HOP MUSIC”

Abstract

Born in marginalized communities of the South Bronx, hip-hop music often addresses highly sensitive topics in its lyrics. Inspired by American rappers, hip-hop artists all over the world, including Russian rappers, started to address sensitive topics in their songs. In Russia, rappers cover taboo topics more indirectly because of the strict government censorship on what can be said in the media. Within this context, one of the linguistic tools frequently used by Russian rappers to address taboo topics is borrowing taboo-related words from English. The present study examines the role of such English borrowings in covering taboo-related meanings in Russian hip-hop music, based on the artistry of the Russian rapper nicknamed MAYOT. To conduct the analysis, I compiled a corpus of 33 songs (around 4500 words total) by MAYOT across 3 albums from 2020, 2021, and 2022, which I then annotated using tags for borrowed/non-borrowed taboo words, taboo/non-taboo borrowings, and four semantic fields of taboos, including Drugs, Violent and Criminal acts (VC), Sex, and Profanity. I discovered that even though the total number of non-taboo borrowings was larger than the number of borrowed taboo words, the mean number of borrowings per taboo-related semantic field was on average 3 times more than that of non-taboo. I also discovered that MAYOT only expressed 25% of taboo meanings with borrowings whilst using other linguistic tools such as regionalisms, euphemisms, and jargonisms to rap about taboos in Russian. Another discovery was the uneven distribution of taboo words across different semantic fields. It turned out that the words from the domains of Drugs and VC were more likely to be borrowed than the ones from the fields of Sex and Profanity. Finally, contrary to what I hypothesized, the number of taboos and borrowings in MAYOT’s songs did not increase with each subsequent year. The results of this study help us understand what taboo topics seem to be most sensitive within Russian culture, and how Russian rappers deal with censorship of taboo discourse through their linguistic choice to borrow taboos from English.