Hip Hop Pantsula making Setswana fashionable: impact on Setswana orthography

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Abstract

The aim of this article is to investigate how South African hip-hop lyrics break language rules and promote South African indigenous languages. The article focuses on youth participation in linguistic change in South Africa and illustrates how youth linguistic cultures are practised in everyday interactions. In South Africa, most rap musicians consider hip-hop to be the voice of youth culture. The challenge is that hip-hop has a bad reputation, mostly because hip-hop rappers were associated with bad language and violence. However, motswako (a South African genre of hip-hop) lyricists want to be associated with creativity and freestyling that make sense to the youth in a contemporary era. The study of hip-hop and identity from a factual narrative perspective is not well represented. In this article, discourse analysis is used to examine how the linguistics and identities are presented by motswako lyricists to associate creativity with freestyling from an African perspective. A few examples of motswako lyrics were selected to analyse the creativity of the lyricists and their contributions to linguistic and cultural change. The results show that youth in these spaces are active creators and contributors to linguistic and cultural change, which has led to the popularity of this genre.