Carrie Gillon: Hi, welcome to the Vocal Fries Podcast, the podcast about linguistic discrimination. 

Megan: I'm Megan Figueroa.

Carrie: And I'm Carrie Gillon.

Megan: I have a bit of a cold, so.

Carrie: Yeah. So it's going to sound a little different than our actual episode. 

Megan: Yes, it was cold-free through the episode. In our episode, we have another music episode for everyone today, it's very exciting. 

Carrie: Yes, it's fun.

Megan: Yeah. Oh, thanks to everyone for the massive amount of sharing that happened with the Philly episode. 

Carrie: Well, we actually made it to like legitimate media. [crosstalk] Shit got real.

Megan: Yeah, like the PhillyVoice, I don't know and our guest, Betsy got invited to do radio shows. 

Carrie: Yeah, we even got asked to get her information like, "Hey, can you hook us up?"

Megan: All of this tells me that Philadelphians really do love themselves and I love it.

Carrie: Yes, they have a lot of Philly pride. 

Megan: Yeah, it's great.

Carrie: It's cool. 

Megan: Yeah. And then we made it across 100,000 downloads with the episode. 

Carrie: Yeah, we did.

Megan: That was exciting.

Carrie: Feels kind of semi-legit.

Megan: Yeah. So congratulations to us.

Carrie: I wish I had like a mini champagne bottle and just pop. 

Megan: Yes. Oh my God, what about Tom Haverford and Parks and Rec, that is the application that he downloaded on his iPhone, the noise.

Carrie: Oh, right. I completely forgot about that. 

Megan: Yeah. Well, while we're doing this kind of thanking, shall we thank our new patreon? 

Carrie: Yes, that's exactly what I was going to do. So, thank you, Olaf Roden, who we talked about on our last episode. He emailed us but we ought to thank him properly for being [crosstalk] our new patreon.

Megan: Yes, thank you so much.

Carrie: And if you want to become a patreon, you can join at patreon.com/vocalfriespod.

Megan: Yes, remember that. This is just a side hustle. 

Carrie: Very, very much so.

Megan: Yes. So we appreciate any help. 

Carrie: Yes. We also had some interesting feedback from the last episode that I think we do you want to address. So one of them, he gave us four stars. 

Megan: Some never understand.

Carrie: And still was like, "You guys are too political."

Megan: Yeah. Obviously, a first-time listener, right?

Carrie: Clearly because that's you think equally as political since day one. So just in case this is your first episode, yeah, we have a political view. We don't reveal every single political viewpoint that we have, but obviously, anything to do with language, we are going to express it. And I don't know. I don't know how you go through any sociolinguistics and not come out having, I guess what would be considered a leftist viewpoint.

Megan: Yeah, the review suggests so that we live in a left-wing bubble in our real podcast world. 

Carrie: Yeah. And I just want to say, I go on Twitter all the time, I'm not in a bubble. I see what people say. I just don't agree with that and it's okay. And if we express our political opinion, that's also okay. You don't have to listen if you don't like it.

Megan: I sometimes wish I lived in a bubble but I don't.

Carrie: It's impossible. How can anyone claim that liberals live in a bubble right now?

Megan: It's true. 

Carrie: It's impossible.

Megan: You're in fucking Phoenix, which is one of the largest cities in the country and it's not like I'm living in a place where I can stay away from people. So there's no bubbling happening here. But yes, we're not talking about capital punishment and what are other things that might like...

Carrie: Abortion.

Megan: Abortion, you know?

Carrie: I think there's all kinds of stuff we could talk about that might piss people off. 
 
Megan: Yeah, exactly.

Carrie: If you're worried about us caring about people getting paid enough, I don't know what to tell you, dude. We're not for you. 

Megan: Yeah, exactly. If it were up to me, there'd be a universal basic income so, listen.

Carrie: Yeah, bare minimum.

Megan: Yeah. Bare minimum. So, sorry, not sorry. Also thanks for the four stars.

Carrie: Yeah, we'll take the stars. But we're also going to tell you, your opinion does not matter when it comes to that. If your opinion had to do with the way that we were giving linguistic information, I would be much more open to it because I do want to be maximally understandable. And I know that we sometimes use jargon, I tried to stop ourselves and explain. But I don't know if we always do it. So like that kind of commentary, I'm open to it. But like about politics stuff, I just don't care. Especially when we're on the right side of history.

Carrie: Whatever that means.

Megan: Yeah, whatever that means. At least, I won't die regretting how I felt about linguistic discrimination.

Carrie: Yeah, I don't think that that's going to be on my list of regrets now. Let's talk about that paper about how pro-drop languages being less educated. 

Megan: So whenever you hear that, by the way, you think about being less educated, racist.

Carrie: Yeah, I mean, this is 100% racism. And so people are mocking linguists for being upset but, I mean, we're allowed to be upset if you don't even ask a linguist to help you. But also, if you're saying racist shit, we're allowed to be upset. So pro-drop language is a language that allows you to drop subject pronouns like Spanish.

Megan: Like Spanish. One of the three most spoken or four most spoken languages in the world...

Carrie: Yeah, it's up there. It's definitely up there. Yeah, so can you give an example with your actual good accent versus mine?

Megan: Oh, yes. And so you can say, to say "I eat," you can say "yo como" and the yo is the I, and como is "I eat." But the O at the end of como actually says the I part for you, so you can just say, como means I eat. You can drop the yo, you don't need it because comer is to eat it. Anyway, it's conjugations. You probably learned it in your French or Spanish class in high school. 

Carrie: Although not all languages that drop pronouns like that have conjugation or what we call agreement in linguistics.

Megan: That's true and those are languages I do not even know a linguistic understanding of. 

Carrie: So it's actually pretty common in the world's languages and this is one of the things that people were complaining about is like which languages did you choose? What was your requirements like your criteria for choosing those languages because, yeah, you can pro-drop in say, Japanese. It only works in certain environments but you can totally do it. And there's no [crosstalk]...

Megan: Mandarin generally requires the verb basically.

Carrie: Right. Again, there has to be certain situations where it works and others where it doesn't. English too, frankly. You could just be like, don't wanna, gotta go. So it happens a lot in speech. It can happen in text as well but it's usually more like informal text. Like if you are writing a paper, you wouldn't do it at all. And it seemed to be that this person was choosing, or these people were choosing examples where it's only written and that's only part of language. The most important of language is speech or sign. Obviously, sign was not involved in this research at all. 

Megan: Thankfully for sign, actually. Getting out of this racist to stay away from this one.

Carrie: But anyway, there are lots of things wrong with it. Like the methodology is super problematic. All they needed to do was ask a linguist like almost any linguist would do.

Megan: I guess this is maybe a syntactician's world. So a syntactician is someone who is interested in looking at sentences and how they're combined at different levels in four different languages and whatever. 

Carrie: Yeah, syntacticians or typologists would be the two top ones. But almost any linguist would have enough information to tell you, "What are you doing?"

Megan: Yeah, actually I'm a poor linguist at times because I was like hearing everyone being upset. I was like, "Okay, I'll just skim it," and I was like, okay, pro-drop, I don't care." I don't want to read about pro-drop but then like I saw the word individualistic and collectivism and I was like, "Racist. Whoah!" And then I went back and I was like, "Oh, this is what they're doing." So like even if you're not interested in linguistics when you see those words, it's kind of like a red flag to be like, what am I looking at?

Carrie: I'm always suspicious when you make these grand claims that are basically Sapir-Whorfism. Like if your language has property X, that means that your culture has property Y. That is so unlikely. Like it is so unlikely that you should automatically be, hmp!

Megan: Yeah.

Carrie: So doesn't even matter what it is. So if it's like future tense, so David Chan's[?] I remember this one. So David Chan[?] was making these claims and he was like being much more careful actually. I can't remember the exact claim but something to do with future tense and whether you save money. So if you're language has future tense, you save money or you don't. I can't remember which way it went. 

Megan: I'm rolling my eyes.

Carrie: Right. Sorry, I mean it's actually really complicated because what counts as a future tense, like that's a whole can of worms that he didn't seem to fully understand. Now, he got a lot of flak from linguist and what did he do? He worked with linguist and proved himself wrong. That is the definition of science, man. 

Megan: Yeah, I know. I have a lot of respect for that. And it's sad that I have a lot of respect for it because it should be a given.

Carrie: It should be but it's not. 

Megan: But it's not.

Carrie: I mean, even with and linguistics too, not everybody does a good job of disproving themselves. So I do think we should give him kudos. Oh, and one last thing. I almost forgot. Veneman[?] emailed us to tell us that he has his own podcast called Mental Notions and he talked about our podcast on it. And the reason why I wanted to bring it up is because he talks about singing and he talks about overtone in singing which is like a way of making it sound like you are creating two notes at the same time. Maybe you are creating two notes at the same time, I do not understand. It's a really interesting phenomenon and I'll try to remember to post something about it. But the reason why he talked about it is because according to him, you use vocal fry to get the overtone.

Megan: And just another reason why vocal fry is the best. It's versatile.

Carrie: It's definitely versatile.

Megan: It's out there doing its job. That's all I have to say. It's a workhorse. What a workhorse.

Carrie: Yes, indeed.

Megan: Oh yeah, shall we get on to our conversation with Dr. Matt Garley?

Carrie: Yes. It's a cool one and we get to talk about Spanglish and more which is my favorite. 

Megan: Yes.

Carrie: All right. 

Megan: Today, we have with us Dr. Matt Garley who is an assistant professor in the Department of English at York College CUNY with an affiliation at the Graduate Center CUNY, and he holds a PhD in linguistics with a specialization in sociolinguistics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He investigates varieties of English, the linguistics of hip-hop culture, the linguistics of computer-mediated communication, and writing systems. One of the areas he specializes in is the linguistics of hip-hop. And he has done work on Spanglish and rap and we were really excited to have him here to talk about just that. So thank you for being here, Matt.

Carrie: Yeah, thank you.

Matthew Garley: Thank you. Thank you for having me. It's great to be on the show. 

Megan: Yeah, we're really excited because I think I just got reminded about a Facebook or something that it was like a year ago and we had our other music episode. Well, not a year ago.

Carrie: No, not a year ago.

Megan: It wasn't? Okay. But anyway, it was a really popular episode and someone actually just tweeted at us recently. What was it, Carrie? What rap did they say we should do?

Carrie: Quebecois[?] rap.

Megan: Yeah, they're like, "You should do an episode in Quebecoi rap." And then we're like, "Well, there's an episode coming up, it might be of interest to you anyway."

Matt: Awesome. Yeah.

Megan: So this is definitely something that people are interested in just because everyone loves music. 

Matt: Well, I hope so. Yeah.

Megan: Actually, so we've talked about Spanglish before but I just wanted for you, just in case, people haven't listened to those episodes to give us a quick like definition of what Spanglish is.

Matt: Right. So that's definitely kind of a complex question. 

Megan: Yes, yes, absolutely.

Matt: So what people tend to popularly refer to as Spanglish I think as a sociolinguist, around grad-school era, I would have given a definition like something more akin to like code-switching between Spanish and English, and the same sort of linguistic event or in the same utter ends or the same discourse event, I guess you could say. Specifically, that sort of code-switching as a community practice where it reaches a fairly common level, something like that. Nowadays, I've been getting more into sort of the translanguaging sort of definitions of things. 

Code-switching has been used in so many different ways and so many different fields that it's definitely become kind of a complex term to use there. So really, it would be using some Spanish-like languages and some English-like languages together in a discourse event. That's I guess my best definition of Spanglish. Yeah.

Megan: Yeah. And code-switching has kind of lost its meaning because journalists that aren't linguists have taken it and like run with it. So, [crosstalk] everything is code-switching these days.

Matt: Yeah.

Megan: So it's something like using Spanish and English together in a discourse. Sometimes it might be just words from Spanish or English. Sometimes it's like phrases, right? It could even be sentences.

Matt: Yeah. Absolutely. And there could be words created through the influence of one language on the other or one different multiple varieties of each language on each other and all of this sort of stuff. So it's just a very linguistically mixed sort of situation. 

Megan: Oh, and that's a good point because sometimes it manifests as saying a word, you use a Spanish lexical or a Spanish word, but it actually comes out with English pronunciation. That's something that could be code-switching.

Matt: Or vice versa. Yeah. And I've seen a couple of examples of that in the sort of YouTube comments I've looked at.

Megan: Oh.

Carrie: Interesting.

Megan: What does it look like? So, now you say YouTube, does that mean that you look at this music, you watch it on YouTube and then you see how people interact with it in the YouTube comments? 

Matt: Yeah, that's the gist of it. That's sort of the main site where I'm looking at linguistic behavior is. It's a combination of the lyrics themselves and fan reactions on YouTube and on genius.com. It's a crowdsource lyric site where fans can annotate lyrics with commentary, with translations, with interpretations and there's a comment section at the end of every song's lyrics and fans can sort of argue about what was this translated correctly or did they actually mean this? Or did you mishear this lyric, or this or that, or the other.

Carrie: Very, cool.

Megan: Yeah, I'd never heard of genius so that's really cool. How is Spanglish being used in hip-hop and rap today?

Matt: Right. So, I guess Spanglish is used in hip-hop in a lot of different ways. Perhaps not that surprising but it depends on who's using it and who their audience is as a lot of things and sociolinguistics depend on. This is a very audience-focused thin. And I think that one of the things I study is the diverse sort of ideological implications and the sort of ways in which the use of Spanish and Spanglish in hip-hop play around with confront and sort of engage with the larger ideologies surrounding Spanish in the US. The sort of linguistic ideologies that you hear a lot from, say, politicians when Newt Gingrich back in 2007 something like that said, or heavily implied that Spanish when discussing bilingual education, he talked about Spanish as the language of living in a ghetto.

Megan: Jesus, I miss that.

Matt: Oh, and then he gave this really very poorly pronounced apology in Spanish which is really a treat to watch. 

Newt Gingrich: We should replace bilingual education with emergence- with immersion in English so people learn the common language of the country and so they learn the language of prosperity, not the language of living in a ghetto. Now Fin De Semana Pasado, he say, "Uno's comentarios que reconozco produjoran un mal sentimiento entre la comunidad Latina."

Matt: The linguistic ideology surrounding Spanish in the US context, really interact a lot with ideologies about Latinos in the US, right? 

Megan: Yeah. Definitely.

Matt: With the Latinx people in the US, and there's work on the Latino threat narrative, for example. And you see this with a lot of the discourse surroundings, say the migrant caravan or with a lot of the things the president has been saying, all the way through the campaign and beyond, right? So there's this idea of  Latinx people being a threat in the US and that they're threatening. And with this, comes linguistic ideologies that Spanish is threatening and incomprehensible. Or if Spanish is a good thing, it's for the purposes of business and sort of this idea of language from above and language from below. 

Where language from above means, and this is from Bent Preisler's work. Language from above is sort of the nice spiffy version of the language that you want to learn for business purposes for international communication so you go on vacation to Spain and all of this sort of stuff. And the idea of a language coming in from below is when it comes into youth language, slang, or all of these contexts that are not somehow validated by the larger ideological system.

Yeah, so when I look at hip-hop and I look at Spanglish or Spanish in hip-hop, that language is very much coming into the US context where English is de facto, sort of the dominant language in that very much from below sort of way. This is not the Spanish that you go to university to learn or that the Real Academia Espanol is particularly concerned with or anything like that. Or they might be concerned with it but they're certainly not promulgating it in any particular way.

And so I guess to get back to your original question. The way that Spanish is used in hip-hop depends on who it's used by because I've studied Spanish and Spanglish as it's used by Latinx rappers but also as it's used by non-Latinx rappers. And the context of that use can definitely have some effects there. So in many cases, it might be used to emblematically sort of affiliate a rapper who is Latinx with the Latinx community. And I've investigated the connections of Latinx rappers using Spanish or Spanglish to this notion of like Latinada, the idea that they're claiming that cultural identity.

And at the same time, when non-LatinX people use Spanish or Spanglish in hip-hop, a lot of the times, the interpretation gets a little bit difficult. It becomes much more specific to a case-by-case basis. One rapper might be using it in a way in a verse that's sort of like addressing a Latino woman in some sort of propositioning kind of way. Or another rapper might use it to sound more authentically, I guess, gangster. Just simply because of that, I guess the interesting thing that I found or that I've been thinking about lately, at least, is that we have this broader Latino threat narrative in the US. And that can do a lot of damage to the sort of way that Latinx people in the US are perceived. 

At the same time because hip-hop, as Russell Potter says, sort of deforms the rules of intelligibility and hip-hop language is a resistance vernacular. Hip-hop is a space where linguistic rules and linguistic norms are sort of rewritten and often turned on their head. That idea that Spanish is a threatening or incomprehensible language becomes useful. It has a lot of utility in the hip-hop space for promoting an authentic or a street image that was threatening, all of a sudden, isn't a bad thing. But it's part of what at least some hip-hop is trying to do. So using Spanish in that context can actually be a very effective sort of move. 

And then, looking at the YouTube comments, you can see whether this is taken up by the audience as sort of a cool thing a good thing, or not such a good thing. And when you're talking about a non-Latinx person or a non-native speaker using Spanish, and then you get audience members who do speak Spanish and say, "Well, this is just ridiculous." That's what [inaudible] [crosstalk].

Carrie: Yeah.

Megan: But does it also depend on what kind of non-Latinx person you are because there are non-Latinx people who would be Spanish speakers, Spaniards, people from the Philippines. 

Carrie: Oh, absolutely.

Megan: So if they use it, is it seen still as acceptable, or whatever non-, Does their use fall into more like the Latinx version, or does it not happen at all, or what? 

Matt: So that's a good question. I don't know for sure because I haven't looked at, say Filipino-American rappers, or even I'm not aware of Spanish-American rappers. I know that there's Spanish rap as in rap from Spain, but I haven't looked into that that much. My work is focused mainly on the US context to this point. So what I'm talking about non-Latinx rappers using this, by and large, I'm talking about African-American rappers who are not Afro-Latino or Afro-Latinx because that exists as well. And not every Latinx rapper would be completely fluent in Spanish either.

Megan: Right. That is the context we live in in the US if you're Latinx is that your Spanish is probably somewhere on a spectrum of non-existent to a fluent speaker. And I'm thinking if black hip-hop and hip-hop artists and rappers are using Spanish, a lot of times, they might grow up or be in neighborhoods that are pretty populated with Latinx people, right? So I could see how it could be an individual basis where you're like, "Oh, well, of course, so-and-so is using Spanish. He grew up in Washington Heights or whatever."

Matt: Yeah. And looking at different rappers who fall into that category, you can see, for example, there's The Game. The Game is a rapper from LA who does use Spanish in not a native-speaker sort of way, but it's definitely in a fluent comfortable sort of way. And it's definitely something that I don't think comes from taking classes but comes from growing up in LA around people who speak Spanish and learning it from friends, that sort of thing. And his performance, and so the track that I'm thinking of is, it's The Game and Skrillex, the dubstep guy. The track is called El Chapo.

Music: "El Chapo. I am the door... El Chapo."

Matt: All the way through he pronounces El Chapo, which is...

Megan: Yeah.

Matt: But he's really sort of in that, he's taking on the persona of the notorious sort of cartel figure. And that is a very big way the sort of continuation of what came out in the 90s with like Kool G Rap when rappers started doing this sort of Mafioso thing where the gangster to emulate, in this case, or in that case, in the 90s was sort of like The Sopranos era, Mafioso and all of that sort of thing. So nowadays, that figure is the cartel boss. And so Spanish comes into that and there are some interesting lyrics as part of that track too where he's really switching back and forth between Spanish and English. Or I guess one could also say he's sort of translanguaging with an enlarged repertoire of forms and linguistic resources that sort of cross into what we would call Spanish, what we would call English, and really different varieties of those. So African-American English, LA African-American English, border Spanish, California Spanish, all of these sorts of things come in. 

Megan: Can you explain because I bet not everyone knows what translanguaging really means?

Matt: This is something that I didn't really encounter too much in grad school. So it's something that I've started to understand over the last year or two. It comes from the work of several people, notably Ofelia Garcia and it came out of, in some ways, the field of education. And the idea that traditional views of bilingualism were really reductive especially looking at, say, heritage speakers or situations like that, people who had grown up speaking a language but never quite grown up around a language say, but never quite achieved what people would recognize as a sort of fluent or academic competency in that language. When you talk about bilingualism where there are these separate rarefide languages, these are all ideological constructs, and languages exist along continua. 

And I would say that the idea of translanguaging is that rather than imagining that a bilingual speaker has two or a multilingual speaker has more than two grammars that are sort of separate in the brain somewhere and they have multiple linguistic systems, each speaker, and this is my understanding of it. I could be a little bit off so people can, you know, at me or whatever. Instead of having these multiple grammars in these multiple systems that linguistic
performance comes from a unified system in each speaker. And that unified system is basically, you could see it as an enlarged repertoire where people are drawing on different linguistic resources that they've learned, but it is essentially one system. So, it would in that case, make more sense to characterize and this goes back to when we were talking about Spanglish to characterize Spanglish as Spanglish and not as an alternation between Spanish and English, right?

Carrie: Yeah, right.

Megan: Or like bad English or bad Spanish.

Matt: Right. Well, those are right out being a linguist, you know?

Megan: Yeah. Yeah, we would never say that. You're right, he's right that there's like a difference between believing that there are two separate systems and one cohesive or interactive system.

Matt: Or the idea that these systems could be somehow subpar or like you said, bad English, bad Spanish, all of that.

Carrie: Yeah, like not complete. That's a problem in education are like, "Oh, you're semi-lingual." Terrible word of these kids going to school, "They're not good at English or Spanish, there's semi-lingual." So having this idea that it's 
one unit, it makes sense and it seems less fucked up.

Matt: Yeah, for sure. So I've been sort of shifting the way that I look at things little by little to that sort of translanguaging point of view. Even though the idea of alternation between different codes is what I sort of learned during my graduate school era. And I spent a whole lot of time in my dissertation working out the difference between code-switching and borrowing and all of these different language contact phenomena. I am seeing more and more use and sense in the translanguaging sort of lens or that view of things. Yeah.

Megan: Do you think that they're ever could just be borrowing though like someone who has very little contact with Spanish but enough to borrow a few words, or is it always just going to be translanguaging no matter what?

Matt: I mean, when we talk about borrowing, we often talk about it on the scale of languages. If a speaker borrows a word for the first time, let's say from Spanish. So no speaker of what would be recognized as English has ever borrowed this word from what would be recognized as Spanish before. That speaker is essentially, to me, doing that translanguaging or code-switching using that in large repertoire to pull a resource into a different context. But in terms of linguistic borrowing where you could have someone who people would recognize as a monolingual English speaker, let's say, someone from the rural Midwest who hadn't moved around a lot and hadn't really come into contact with other languages, no shade on the rural Midwest, or anything. I lived there for a while. But imagine this hypothetical monolingual English speaker. That person could still go to their say, a local Mexican restaurant and order a burrito rather than a wrap or something like that. So that word... 

Megan: Excuse me, a wrap. That's hilarious. No, I get it. Totally good. That's so funny.

Matt: So, well, that word originated in Spanish that speaker would get that word from other people who would be recognized as speakers of English. So that would be sort of that borrowing without translanguaging situation.

Megan: Okay, okay. I get it now. Thank you, thank you for that.

Matt: No problem. No problem.

Megan: Going back to The Game, I wonder what the comments look like. So what are the perceptions of his use of Spanish?

Matt: In the comments for this track El Chapo that I looked at, you've got a lot of people who will say, "I don't speak Spanish but this is really cool." So here's one of these. "This is one of those songs where you don't even know Spanish but it sounds dope so you listen."

Megan: Yes.

Matt: And somebody responds, "Not for me. I'm Mexican. I understand every word. LOL." Somebody else says, "But it's not Spanish." So, there's this linguistic gatekeeping that you still see.

Megan: Oh, no, no. Yeah. Now this is what I bump up against a lot as someone who was born to a native Spanish-speaking father. I'm not a native Spanish speaker.

Matt: You too, huh? 

Megan: Yes. Okay, so that happened to you?

Matt: Yep. 

Megan: Wow. Hi.

Matt: My dad grew up bilingual and I did not grow up speaking Spanish. I grew up in Las Cruces, New Mexico. So I was around Spanish a lot, much of my family spoke Spanish. My grandparents spoke English with a pronounced accent but I didn't grow up speaking Spanish. I kind of learned it a little bit later in college and through personal study and stuff like that and I'm still not fluent.

Megan: Was that withheld from you like it was me for like Americanization or simulation reasons?

Matt: Yeah, that's a really common sort of thing in the Southwest.

Carrie: Yeah, it's I mean, it's common in many areas because yeah, it doesn't even matter what the language is. The third generation tends not to speak that language.

Matt: Right. And my dad's side has been from New Mexico since way back, let's say. And so it's hard to count generations in that way. But yeah, generations since the annexation of the Southwest by the US. 

Megan: So I've noticed as a linguist, I'm like, okay, I try to be like, hey don't discriminate against people and their language use. But I get so much pushback from Latinx people that speak Spanish because they are like, "No." They're really into purity of Spanish, some of them. 

Matt: Absolutely. 

Carrie: Yeah. Again, that's a common thing. 

Megan: Yeah, well, it makes me sad because it's really evident lately because the word Latinx getting into the dictionary, people are like, "I can't say it because it's not in Spanish grammar." So the idea of purity and Spanish is really, really evident to me lately because of this word gaining traction in the mainstream. But yeah, I'm not surprised that you come across a lot of comments that are like, no.

Matt: Yeah. But people are saying, "Well, this isn't really Spanish," and somebody says, "I'm from Spain and there are some words, I don't understand" with a laughing emoji.

Megan: Oh no, different dialect.

Carrie: Yeah, that's a dialect. 

Matt: Right. And then and then somebody follows up with, "[speaking foreign]"

Carrie: Can you translate for the non-Spanish here? 

Matt: Yes. I'm from Argentina and these are all Mexican insults and then they give pinche cabrón, which is typically a Mexican sort of insult or swear if you're working in a restaurant kitchen or something, that's the first one you learn, all of that sort of stuff.

Carrie: Does it have a translation or at least an equivalent?

Matt: Cabron is like a big goat but it means bastard, something like that. But it can be like bastard in certain dialects of English. It can be either an insult or a term of endearment.

Carrie: Right. Yeah. Thank you.

Megan: And pinche is pinche. What is pinche? I don't know.

Matt: It would be like damn or fucking or something like that. I don't know.

Megan: It's like fucking. Fucking is how [inaudible] [crosstalk].

Matt: As an intensifier, right?

Carrie: Yeah.

Matt: And then the final comment was, "It's hood Spanish, that's why there is a student from Spain in my class and he has no idea what they're saying."

Carrie: Oh, that gets interesting.

Megan: Deep stuff. So as if the student from Spain is the one who knows what?

Matt: Right.

Megan: He knows what Spanish is. Wow. Okay.

Matt: When looking at these from an ideological point of view and considering the ideologies about Spanish in the US, the ideology is about Spanish in the sort of Spanish-speaking world within and beyond the US. There's a lot to unpack in even just this short bit of comments because while I was saying all that great stuff about hip-hop language being a resistance vernacular and it's a place where you can play with language and a place where linguistic skill is valued and you might find these sort of countercultural ideologies and things to turn these ideologies on their heads, there's still a lot of language purism. There's still a lot of standard language ideology and all of these things that it's really really evident how deeply ingrained this is in...

Megan: All of us.

Matt: I mean, not just the US, but most of the people in the world, I would say. 

Carrie: So then I have to wonder, let's talk about a few Latinx people and their use. So who's a good example that we can talk about? Who's someone that you look at?

Matt: Okay. So one of the people that I look at is Bodega Bamz here in New York. He's from Spanish Harlem. He's a Puerto Rican and Dominican heritage. He's the co-founder of the Tan Boy's movement/brand. And here's his quote about that. This is an interview from Complex. "Tan Boys is a movement of Latinos who are proud and powerful individuals who want to put our culture back on the forefront of this music. It's a worldwide thing. It's not a rap group. Any Latino who's proud and powerful individual. Any Latino who ain't a hater, any Latino who's about off lifting his culture is a Tan Boy. You're born with that, it's in your DNA." And so that's from his Complex interview. So, he has this video called Don Francisco.

Music Video: "Yeah, my skin tan, my fade low. My eyes green for those pesos. Eat chicharrón sin huesos. I'm Pit-bull and I'm Tego. With the hoes like Don Francisco."

Megan: Oh yeah. And I'm just like, did he said chicharron? 

Matt: Yeah.

Megan: Okay, sorry. I'm just like yeah, I could see how he could be connecting with Latinx listeners.

Matt: And he does use it I think a lot more emblematically. He rarely spits an entire verse in Spanish like some rappers like Snow Tha Product from LA. The pattern of Spanish use in her tracks tends to be more, here is a verse that would be more recognizably English, and here's a verse that would be more recognizably Spanish, and that sort of thing and kind of juxtaposing them. Bodega Bamz is doing a lot more sort of single-word or phrase emblematic stuff and it's always sort of these Latinx cultural references. He talks about platanos or plantains. He talks about chicharrón sin huesos. He talks about chancletas in one song. So it's always these things that are like cultural touchstones of what's perceived to be Latinx culture. But he's also obviously like really proud of this and all this sort of stuff. 

Looking at the comments on Bodega Bamz's track, "Yo, Bodega, talking that talk, son." "Yo, Bamz, we need you in Houston soon, my dude." "Goalie, greasy, grimy, que bonita bandera monito, all day, any Latin flag." So that's one comment right there where it switches back and forth between English and Spanish. It's affirming, Bodega Bamz thing. And this any Latin flag thing goes into another sort of thing that I'm very interested in. There's been a lot of debate within and outside of I would say the Latinx community in the US that says, "Okay. So to what extent is there this pan-Latin identity?" Or to what extent are we talking about Mexican-Americans, Puerto Ricans Dominicans-American all of that sort of stuff? Are these different identities? Are they one overarching identity? Is it multiple struggles? Is that one struggle? Obviously, the answers got to be somewhere in the middle, but [crosstalk] we're in the middle.

Megan: Yeah, I want to say both, right? 

Matt: Yeah, it's both, right? But where in the middle is that? So this is something that comes up in the comments a lot. This idea of either, and you see it both ways, right? You see people who are like, "I'm Mexican but I love this Puerto Rican rapper, or I'm from Argentina and I think this is great. A lot of people who are in Latin America listening to these tracks, for example. But then you also have people who are like we saw earlier the gatekeeping, "That's not Spanish. This is just Mexican stuff, or this is just Puerto Rican stuff, or whatever." And somebody else writes, "Dropping off some Caribbean love. [foreign]." All right, so someone else writes, "This shit is moi[?] fuego," which could be essentially a monolingual English speaker as well. 

Megan: That's one thing I could definitely say.

Matt: Those are items that are accessible to the monolingual speaker. But if that's a monolingual English speaker, then they are resonating with the track and trying to play along. They're doing what they can do in terms of adding in some Spanish to their thing.

Carrie: So are there any white non-Latinx hip-hop artists or rappers doing this as well, or is it everyone else? 

Matt: That's a good question. I'm not aware of any, but one of the first tracks that got me considering these ideological questions is by a white rap group featuring a Mexican American rapper named Sick Jacken. So Sick Jacken was part of Psycho Realm which was sort of I guess you could say first or second way of Southern California-based Latinx hip-hop in the US where you had Cypress Hill being really big and things like that. So, Sick Jacken. And so the song is- The group is called La Coka Nostra. They put out an album called The Brand You Can Trust and they have this song. This is an example of a storytelling-type rap song where the rapper is sort of recounting a story of something that happened. It's basically about these three white guys that are hanging out in a limo and going through the hood in LA. And they're looking for cocaine as it so happens. And so, they're doing all their parts in English, and the song is called Brujeria or witchcraft. But the white rappers are not really rapping in Spanish at all. 

Music: "...12th and Alvarado, pull over by the wall.
I'm a jump out the cab and cop this eight ball.
Le vendí polvo a los güeros..."

Matt: And then it goes into the chorus with the guest rapper, Sick Jacken. The chorus is 100% in Spanish and it's in Border Spanish with a lot of slang.

Music: "...I'm a jump out the cab and cop this eight ball
Le vendí polvo a los güeros, están locos los cabrones, son los más cocodrilos del ghetto. What'd he say?
Serio pedo con el clavo de yeyo, gringo periquero con el chavo primero. What the fuck is he talking about?
Dicen que se llaman la Coka Nostra, saco un ocho, luego piden otra bolsa
Le pone a esa madre hasta que el vato choca..."

Matt: He's talking about they're selling cocaine and coke dealing and all this sort of stuff. But he's using all of this slang like cocodrilos, which is a play on the Spanish word for crocodiles but with cocaine. And he talks about a key of yeyo, all of this sort of stuff 100% in Spanish. And then the verse after that is one of the white rappers, Slaine reacting.

Music: "You so fucking crazy, I'm freaking, let's vanish.
I don't even know if what he's speaking is Spanish,
Puerto Rican, Japanese, Korean, or Haitian.
We stick out like a sore thumb being Caucasian.
Chill the fuck out, Slaine."

Carrie: Oh, my god.

Matt: So this is the song that I just came across. It's not 100% one of my favorite songs or anything but I was like, "Huh, this is interesting because
this is when I started forming these ideas about Spanish being useful in hip-hop precisely because it's perceived as a threatening language." Precisely because it's perceived as threatening and incomprehensible and other. And so in this track, it helps tell that story of these white boys who are scared in the hood, trying to pick up their eight ball of coke. And this Mexican-American rapper is playing the part of the sort of threatening and incomprehensible other. And then, the white guy is freaking out because he doesn't understand Spanish. 

So, this Spanish is used in this tracking, not really to be understood. It's used there in the same way you might see, I don't know if you're watching one of those many shows that came out after 9/11 that we're dealing with Middle Eastern terrorists and things. And then you're watching the show and then there are characters on there interacting with Americans. And then when you see the subtitles, incomprehensible, you know?

Carrie: Yeah. 

Matt: Right? Whenever someone speaking Arabic or pretending to speak Arabic or whatever, it's just incomprehensible. So this idea of Spanish as this threatening, incomprehensible other is really what I think that I've been working towards for a while in terms of looking at this in the context of hip-hop. 

Carrie: And that's purposeful like Sick Jacken, his participation in this is purposefully like he knows what he's doing with this. And that's kind of different than how Bodega Bamz is using it. He's using it as a reclamation, or identity. 

Matt: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. So he's definitely claiming that identity. And that's something that a lot of Latino rappers do with it. And I think Sick Jacken does too in a lot of his solo work. But really, in this track, he's a guest rapper on this track. He's co-constructing this thing and he benefits. If somebody has mostly listened to white rappers or whatever, and they pick this up and they're like, "Oh, wow. I don't know what he's saying but it sure sounds cool." And then they might go pick up a Sick Jacken CD. I mean if this was 1998 or something. People don't use CDs anymore, do they? He might go watch a Sick Jacken video on YouTube and then watch an ad, right? 

Carrie: Yeah. Exactly. Yes. Oh, those pre-millennials. What are they called? Oh, those Gen Z's?

Matt: I've heard of xennials.

Carrie: Oh, xennials, I've heard that too. Yeah. 

Megan: Like, do you have any examples of Latinx hip-hop artists or rappers that... I keep saying or. Is that like correct?

Matt: Rappers or artists, do you mean?

Carrie: Yeah, like is that?

Matt: Hip-hop artists and rappers, right. Hip-hop artists could include DJs and producers and [crosstalk]. And if we're going back to your original four pillars, b-boy break dancers, b-girl break dancers, and graffiti artists. But really, when we're talking about language, we're talking about rapping. So yeah, rappers is good.

Carrie: Okay. So thinking about Latinx rappers, now that you said that though, I'm wondering, have you ever looked at any female rappers just like Snow? 

Matt: Yes, Snow Tha Product. Yeah, so that's one that I've looked at a bit and I can talk a bit about her if you'd like.

Carrie: She's Mexican-American, right?

Matt: She is, yeah. And she's sort of a little harder to locate and pin down geographically because she's from, I want to say Northern California or she was born in Northern California, spent time in Southern California, and then moved to Texas. So she's sort of been all over the main parts of the US that have large Mexican American populations. I mean, a lot of the US has large Mexica- American populations.

Carrie: Yes, but the larger.

Matt: Yeah, call it El Norte. Snow Tha Product is from San Jose California,  moved to San Diego and then later Dallas-Fort Worth.

Megan: And she's a native Spanish speaker. 

Matt: Yes. Yeah, definitely. I think she's someone who most people would say sort of grew up bilingual. She's a second-generation Mexican-American. Various biographies online have her parents being from Michoacán and Zacatecas. So here's a quote from her from an interview she did on popsugar.com. "Whenever artists like myself try to break away from that, don't look at me as a female rapper. Don't look at me as a Latino rapper, just look at me as a rapper. Our own community starts to be like, "Why aren't you rapping?" So you can't win either way. Now, it's going to take away my Mexican card but when you're kind of assessing the whole situation like I'm still here, I'm still on, si habla espanol pero, with no help at all, I'm going to have to take a little broader and represent everyone, you know." So definitely has done some thinking about these different identities and how they intersect with being a rapper and all this sort of stuff. 

Megan: Yeah, and it's just highlighting how complicated it is for us non-rappers too. I read it. It's definitely kind of like an encapsulation of the issue that probably most Latinx people in the US deal with probably every day at least. I don't know. I think about it often but yeah.

Matt: Absolutely. So her video, the one that I talked about the most is called AyAyAy!

Music: "...My momma kicked me out 'cause I was partying like YOLO.
Woke me up for church, I was hungover, she's like "Oh no"
Gave my ass a bucket, trapeador and got the Cloro.
Pitbull jacked my mom, since I was a baby, she's yelling, "Como?!"

Matt: And then it goes into this whole big, long, rant in her mother's voice essentially. It's her rapping but she's doing it with the persona of her mother with the big ol' screed she gets on Sunday morning when she's hungover and needs to clean up the house or whatever.

Music: "... Todo lo que compro te doi, ponte a limpiar
Pantalones rotos y ya ponte a lavar
Aqui no tienes voto, carnal, ponteme al par
Aqui no comen si no se acomiden..."

Matt: She does a lot of songs in English but she also raps in Spanish. She does a lot of guest rapping and even singing in Spanish. 

Carrie: I have to wonder when it comes to listener reaction to her, is there like on top of what you would get for Bodega Bamz is their sexism just piled up on there too, do you see any of that?

Matt: Given that she's a woman who is online, yes. Unfortunately, yes. Yeah, but there are a lot of people who also are very probably, overly, positive about her online because she's also a woman online. So not overly positive. I don't mean it that way.

Carrie: No, I get it like trying to...

Matt: So there's a lot of people who are very affirming in a way of saying, "Oh, she's beautiful or whatever." So the comments I have from hers are, "[foreign]" So somebody's saying, "I like your songs, I speak Spanish and English, and I'm a Mexicana." So really identifying personally, I think with Snow Tha Product with her persona as a rapper. Someone else says, "This lady here got these lyrics, got this lyrics. And this is one of the examples I see of like when you have the influence of multiple languages on online writing. This lady here got these lyrics heavy. I fucking swear, she got skills, she just keeps bringing it to the fucking table. So underrated but fucking dope." [foregin] Hahaha, LOL. Hell, yeah. Mad respect to all my fellow independent women, though." So that's the whole comment. It's again, very affirming. 

Megan: And these are from women. Were both of those from women?

Matt: Both of those seem to be.

Megan: Yeah because Mexicana.

Matt: Yeah, to my fellow independent women. "You get down home, girl. Your shit is fire. Snow killed it as usual." So there are a lot of bilingual comments on this track in particular. Those that sort of use Spanglish, switch back and forth, that sort of thing. "I'm in love with her. She is the best. [foreign]. The best thing about this girl is she kill it in English. [foreign] Dominican Republic love what you do. Hip-hop life." So there's these sort of like hashtag-like things that go on get tacked on the end. 

Megan: Yeah. So these are like really good examples of like just positive reactions from Latinx people that listen to this music. 

Matt: Absolutely. 

Megan: Yeah, like this is Latina-like, just, okay.

Matt: So the way that she portrays it is picked up as very, very authentic and well-liked by the people online. There are people looking at say, Bodega Bamz's video that people are like, "Why is he putting on this fake country accent?" And I can't really tell if they're talking about him having a country accent in English or in Spanish or what, or where they think he has a country accent. It might be because he's putting on- They might be referring to the fact that as a rapper and being from Spanish Harlem, I mean, his English variety is a little closer to African-American English, especially in his hip-hop songs or even hip-hop nation language which Samuel Liam talks about. So maybe that's what somebody meant by saying, "Oh, I don't know why he's putting on this country accent or something like that."

Carrie: But he's Afro-Latino, right? 

Matt: I think so. I don't know how he identifies or whether he identifies as Afro-Latino, but I think he is, yeah.

Carrie: I could understand the country maybe if they were interpreting him as white. Because to me, that's how I would interpret that sentence or that comment.

Megan: But I don't think he looks white at all. 

Carrie: No, he doesn't.

Matt: Yeah, and his whole thing is about Tan boys. So he's definitely making an entire sort of persona and identity out of being non-white and being non-white in a way that's not being black, that's not being white and it's being tan. 

Megan: Yeah. In the middle. Yeah. Do you notice that it's like a common narrative in the music?

Matt: Yeah, I think it is. It's it definitely is. My colleague, CC Cutler has studied some Latinx hip-hop as well. And looks at an artist, I think it's Jae-P from LA who has this whole song about not from here, not from there, about being Mexican-American in LA. Like, not good enough for- not white enough, not good enough for Americans, to Americans or the Mexican to Mexicans, I'm an American and all of this sort of stuff. And it's something that Gloria Anzaldua has been writing about since the late 70s, or was writing about back in the late 70s.

Megan: And Edward James Olmos said as Selena's dad in the movie Selena. 

Matt: Love that movie.

Edward James Olmos: Listen, being Mexican-American is tough. Anglo's jump all over you if you don't speak English perfectly. Mexicans jump all over you if you don't speak Spanish perfectly. We got to be twice as perfect as anybody else.

Megan: Since our podcast is about linguistic discrimination, I want to go back to talk about what is our point here when it comes to Spanglish or Spanish in music and hip-hop. How can we not be an asshole about Spanglish whether it's in music or whether it's on the street or in writing, wherever we see it?

Matt: Language is unable to be sort of divorced from its context. But one thing I think that people can do is to try to counteract and break down this hegemonic sort of standard language ideolog, this language purest ideology is whether you're an English speaker, whether you're a Spanish speaker. Getting away from the idea of linguistic purism and proper language and all of that is I think one of the best ways to be good to other people in a linguistic sense. And to recognize that Spanglish, the different varieties of Spanish and English, border Spanish, all these different things are valid ways of communicating invalid contexts and people living valid lives. 

So I find it interesting how they're used in different contexts both for and against these ideas of the standard English and the standard Spanish language. But I think the takeaway is it can be kind of cool to- you know, I enjoy hip hop and I enjoy to some extent when The Game is doing like a threatening sort of gangster-esque persona because hip-hop is ultimately in many ways fantasy. It's ideally rappers aren't out there doing all the things that they talked about in hip-hop songs. But it is really like all music in some way escapism and fantasy.

So there's that sort of issue and there's portraying characters using different sorts of language and all of that. But I think that if we can, I guess to get back to the main point, to recognize different linguistic modes of production is valid is just crucial I think to stop talking about, "Oh, hip-hop is just bad language and slang and all this sort of stuff." Doesn't mean we have to say, "Oh, well, this is the most proper thing ever" because then hip-hop's no fun anymore. It's supposed to be a little transgressive.

Carrie: Right. But then I guess if people stopped complaining about hip-hop being transgressive, it would lose its power.

Matt: That's kind of the point too. It's got to have-

Megan: Damn it.

Carrie: Well, there will always be stodgy people that will feel that way. So we don't have to worry about that.

Matt: That's true.

Megan: That's not true.

Carrie: Okay, fair.  

Megan: I always speak of flipping narratives because they tell me not to use my vocal fry if I want to get a job and I'm like, "No, the listeners should get used to vocal fry or whatever."

Carrie: Which they are, [crosstalk] we are in men.

Megan: As we all are. Judge me for it, but I feel like this whole idea of purist is like, oh my gosh, everyone speaks the way that they do and that's a pure way of sweet. Like that's their priority. It's like, I don't know.

Matt: Yeah, everyone's speaking their own truth. 

Megan: Yes that's cheesy but it's true.

Carrie: But yeah, we really need to get away from purity stuff because it's very dangerous. Like it leads to eugenics, you know, like bad.

Megan: Yeah, that word, it definitely has some gross shit associated with that for sure. But yeah, no, I really hope like again, I said, we've talked about Spanglish before on this podcast and I hope this is another way kind of hits or makes the point that Spanglish is valid and it is not bad Spanish or bad English. 

Carrie: Just two different things.

Megan: Yes. And that it's really connected to a lot of people's identity. Another reason to respect it. If it's not just pure linguistic reason for it because it's a valid way to speak. Well, it's also a way people talk about their identity and show their identity and reclaim their identity. And that's a really important reason not to be a shit about it.

Matt: Agreed. I can agree with that for sure.

Megan: Yeah, awesome. We really appreciate you talking to us about that.

Carrie: Yeah. Thank you so much. 

Matt: Of course. It was a lot of fun. 

Megan: This was awesome.

Matt: Thanks so much for having me on the show. 

Megan: Yeah, we'll have some great clips out into this.

Matt: Cool.

Carrie: I'm looking forward to adding the music for sure. 

Megan: Yeah, exactly. Well, we always leave our listeners with our tagline, our main message, don't be an asshole.

Carrie: Do not be an asshole.

Matt: Don't be an asshole.

Megan: Bye.

Carrie: Bye.

Matt: Okay, bye.

Woman: The Vocal Fries Podcast is produced by Chris Ayers for Halftone Audio. Theme music by Nick Granum. You can find us on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at Vocal Fries Pod. You can email us at vocalfriespod@gmail.com.

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