Introduction
Queen Latifah has produced albums in rap/hip-hop and R and B genres for three decades. She is unapologetically black in her music. Her ethnic identitiy is obvious and clearly expressed.
The focus of this project is on Queen Latifah's use of code-switching, African American English lexicon and phonology, and indexing in her songs. I will show how her language use varies between African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and Standard English (SE), emcompassing features of both.
I'll be exploring the AAVE used in Just Another Day, Go Head, I Know Where I've Been (from the movie Hairspray), and U.N.I.T.Y.
She shows features of AAVE in her discourse, some more than others, depending on her audience and listeners.
As Troutman stated (212-213), African American women rarely have language of their own available to them; they either use AAVE, which is black men's language, or they're forced to use white women's language. Queen Latifah fully utilizes multiple aspects of AAVE in her songs. African American Women's Language (AAWL) is seldom studied. Any AAVE study is typically conducted on men. Denise Troutman has studied AAWL and concluded that Black women have two language options available to them - AAVE (male) and White women's language. Black speech is male and sexually/verbally aggressive (Troutman, 212).
She utilizes code-switching in Just Another Day. She sings in a more standard English vernacular and raps in obvious AAVE. The phonoloy and lexicon during the rap portions are symbolic of the violence African American neighborhoods face. The chorus is sung in what could be called a more "standard" form of English - one that lacks features of AAVE. The constrast between the rap and the singing shows cognitive disonance when easily and naturally accepting a life filled with violence.