International Hip-Hop
I have always been interested in linguistics and cultural anthropology. Whenever I meet somebody, I'm always itching to ask them about their ethnic background. I attribute this to my childhood in Plano, Texas, where I grew up surrounded by [the children of] people who spoke languages from across the globe. My closest friends are very diverse. Two are Chinese, one is Telugu, one is a Jew from the Soviet Union, and one is half Sri Lankan Malay and half Sri Lankan Moor. According to Wikipedia, there are only 46,000 native speakers of his dad's mother-tongue!
This interest has profoundly shaped my taste in music. I grew up listening to only a smattering of western classical and bollywood songs, so my 7th grade French teacher showing us Elle me dit triggered my fascination with linguistically diverse music. Around the same time, a friend showed me Logic's Bounce, and I discovered hip-hop. I find that Hip-hop is a particularly interesting way to experience a language, so I want to present a collection of songs from my library that showcase this.
Tamil
Tamil is my mother-tongue, so naturally I had to have it come first. I'm including two videos, since I couldn't decide which one to keep. Just like me, both songs are from the Tamil diaspora.
The first song is 'Madai Thirandhu' by Yogi B and Natchatra. It's combines a cover of Ilaiyaraaja's song of the same name with rap in Tamil and English. Released in 2006, it's widely regarded as one of the first Tamil hip-hop tracks. The artists are Malaysian Tamils.
The second song is "Thaniya" by Yaaru. It's much more recent and much less famous, but it's one of the best tracks to come from the surprising number of Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora rappers in Europe. If you listen closely, you can hear certain hallmarks of Sri Lankan Tamil, like என்ட (enda) instead of என்னுடைய (ennodaya) and the pronunciation of future-tense verb endings as 'ehn' instead of 'eyn' (ex: varuven, 'I will come').
Samoan
The Samoan people, and the Polynesian people in general, fascinate me. Just by looking at the stars, their ancestors were able to navigate the open oceans and travel from southeast Asia all the way to Easter Island and Hawaii. Their languages are characterized by a lack of consonant clusters and heavy use of glottal stops. You can hear that in this in "Alala I Lalo" by Jay Shootah.
Arabic
To English speakers, Arabic can sound very "guttural". I think it's because of the 3 phonemes ق (Qaf), ع (‘Ayn), and ء (Hamza). Qaf is pronounced by touching the very back of your tongue to the roof of your mouth, blocking air and building pressure, and releasing. 'Ayn seems to be pronounced by speaking in the back of your mouth rather than the front. Hamza is just a glottal stop. My Palestinian friend showed me "Fi Harb" by Shabjdeed, and you can hear all three sounds in it. I also really love the instrumental.
Chinese
Chinese has a relatively small, fixed set of syllables. Unlike English, these syllables sound distinct and don't slur together. Each syllable may also mean different things when spoken with different tones, which adds another dimension to how Chinese hip-hop sounds. I've been listening to "穷孩子" by 龍胆紫/PurpleSoul a lot recently, It reminds me of 90's East Coast hip-hop. There's plenty of other good songs in its album.
Marathi
I had to choose two songs for Marathi too, because I couldn't decide which one I wanted to share more. Marathi is arguably the most phonetically interesting Indian languages because it contains so many phonemes that aren't found in many other languages:
- Most Indo-Aryan languages like Hindi-Urdu have aspirated versions of some consonants, like k, g, t, th, d, dh, p, and b. Marathi extends the concept of aspiration to the nasal and liquid consonants m, n, l, v, and z.
- Instead of pronouncing the v consonant like English and Hindi-Urdu, v in Marathi is pronounced more like a cross between o and w.
- Marathi also has voiceless, voiced, and aspirated alveolar affricatives. Think 'ts' in 'cats' or 'ds' in reads'. The word for spoon in Marathi, pronounced 'tsumtsaa', sounds nothing like an Indo-Aryan language.
- Marathi has unique consonant clusters, particularly the feminine/plural genitive case marker -chya. Paired with a word that ends in n, you can even get -nchya endings, like in svapnanchya (स्वप्नांच्या), meaning 'of dreams'.
- Finally, Marathi has a voiced retroflex lateral flap, represented by ळ. This is different from Tamil's (ழ்) and Malayalam's (ഴ) retroflex approximant, which is a sustained version of the tongue-flick required by Marathi.
You should be able to hear all these different types of sounds in the two songs below. The first song is "RLT" by Shreyas, The Siege, Vedang, and Devonian, which only has a criminal 3.6k views on youtube. It is a (quite seamless) mix of Hindi-Urdu and Marathi, and I've been listening to it nonstop recently. Shreyas and Vedang might be some of my favorite Indian rappers.
The next song is "Uddhat" by Shreyas and Vedang. Unlike the last one, this one is less 'melodic' and more 'jagged'. It's fully in Marathi, and I feel like it illustrates the language very well.