A Computational Analysis and Exploration of Linguistic Borrowings in F rench Rap Lyrics (2024)

Abstract: In France, linguistic borrowings in the relatively conservative French language are an important site of cultural debate, and rap in particular is a hotspot for borrowings. In this work, we use computational methods to understand the factors that affect the prominence and prevalence of a borrowing. To do so, we manually annotate a lexicon of over 700 borrowings occurring in this context (including key aspects for each borrowing such as origin and semantic class). We analyze the prevalence of these borrowings in a newly collected corpus of over 8000 French rap song lyrics and find that there are increases in the proportion of linguistic borrowings, interjections, and Niger-Congo borrowings while terms related to the arts are decreasing in prevalence. We release our code and data to facilitate further research in this area and discuss potential future directions.

## introduction ever since its origin, the musical genre of rap has changed the languages it has touched, starting with placing several african american vernacular english (aave) terms into the lexicons of many other english speakers @xcite . the popularity of rap music has allowed both the genre (and opportunities for linguistic borrowing through it) to go to countries far beyond the united states, like the western european country of france. there, linguistic borrowing is especially intriguing, as it is particularly prone to language change through anglicisms from the united states, linguistic minorities from countries affected by european colonialism @xcite , and european linguistic communities being in close proximity to each other - @xcite highlights that near half of france's and belgium's immigrant population comes from other european union countries. there, the usage of linguistic borrowings in the french language is a socially complex issue. some wesh, cette bitch veut mon corps, pourtant je sue comme un sumo "yo [arabic borrowing], this bitch [english borrowing] wants my body, yet i'm sweating like a sumo [japanese borrowing]" from "intro (introduced by caspi)" by jmk$ & beamer à 14 ans dans la tess, igo c'était gore "in the streets [verlan] at 14 years old, dude [spanish borrowing] that was gory" from "des nomes" by fresh ladouille c'est la crise au mic, fait la bise au mac "it's a crisis at the mic [english borrowing], give the pimp [argot] a kiss" from "oh mama oh" by le classico organisé people and organizations value linguistic preservation and resist this change, like a forty-member organization having close ties to the french government called the académie française (af) @xcite . they try to act as a "guide" for french speakers, often resisting foreign borrowings in the process @xcite . however, french rap poses challenges for these types of organizations, reflecting borrowings into the language that occur in different contexts of french society. linguist and public speaking teacher julien barret states that linguistic borrowings through french rap have become so widespread that students he works with sometimes don't know if they learned about a borrowed word in a rap song or from their neighborhood @xcite . french rap artists also help influence the popularity of various types of french argot, or slang, like verlan -inverting syllables of french words to create new unusual-sounding ones, often due to motivations of identity and power to go against the status quo @xcite . political motivations, especially among more marginalized communities, are not uncommon in french rap; most french rappers stem from "black african, caribbean and north african" immigrants who use their music to highlight inequality towards their ethnic groups @xcite . this gives linguistic borrowings the ability to reach masses of new people alongside other political messages or implications. as a result, what about a linguistic borrowing in french rap could make it more well-used, and thus able to reach more people, than others? in other words, it would be valuable to see which types of borrowings the french rap community can become commonplace while which types of borrowings organizations like the af can hold back for the sake of linguistic preservation. this work will explore both if and when certain borrowings are more popular than others, contributing the following to existing research: ## background and related work this paper aims to bridge the gap between the computational literature on temporal trends in word popularity, the causes and impact of linguistic borrowing in rap songs, and lexical borrowings in frecnch specifically. a substantial body of prior computational work has targeted the question of identifying when linguistic borrowings occur in context -lexical borrowing identification. approaches to this task generally involve wordlists for all the donor and target languages and pre-processing the text to computationally search for deviations in the target language's sound patterns. for example, @xcite converted swahili text to the international phonetic alphabet to find derived words from arabic, @xcite analyzed phonotactic patterns in the siberian language of sakha to uncover borrowings from russian, and @xcite needed a wordlist for every language when searching for spanish borrowings in indigenous central and south american languages. however, this means that examining linguistic borrowings from as many languages as possible using these techniques quickly becomes a difficult data collection and annotation task. another approach to detecting lexical borrowings in french rap could be slang detection because many lexical borrowings in french rap act as slang. approaches like @xcite using bidirectional long short-term memory (bi-lstm) to detect english slang have been relatively effective, though these models are more accurate at identifying the presence of slang in text than identifying the particular slang word. still, this method could detect french slang terms that are not linguistic borrowings, like verlan (a type of french argot where syllables are inverted -"bonjour" becomes "jourbon"). another strain of computational research more directly related to our work examines factors influencing the popularity of lexical borrowings. one approach has been to study the survival of words in a language (regardless of if it is a lexical borrowing) in a natural selection lens, like word-wars, which found that the word's morphology was the most important factor to its survival (with word length following) (mohammad, 2020). works studying changes in word meaning like @xcite are also related to our work despite not being its main objective. @xcite took the approach of studying exclusively slang words relative to non-slang counterparts, finding that simply the word's status as a slang word was the largest determining factor of its popularity. in the lens of specifically linguistic borrowings, most of the work outside of english is done on anglicisms, like with alvarez-mellado's (2020) and @xcite work on anglicisms in spanish. in the french context in particular, @xcite studied lexical borrowings in two corpora of french newspapers 10 years apart, examining the factors determining its entrenchment into french. they found dispersion (a measure of a word's spread in text and not simply its quantity) was a better indicator of its longevity in french than frequency, though both were important factors @xcite . this highlights the need to examine both, even though frequency is a more interpretable metric to analyze. @xcite also found that languages other than english were less likely to be borrowed, but it would be interesting to analyze this in more detail in this work through collecting borrowings with many different origins. qualitative research on rap lyrics demonstrates that france is not the only western european country that has rap artists eager to spread social awareness about certain linguistic groups. arabic has a foothold in german rap, though much of it has to do with expressing muslim identity @xcite . in spain, a galician rap group uses their language to address local issues while using spanish and english to rap about more global ones @xcite . lastly, identity and anti-imperialism are a large topic of discourse in portugal's kriolu rap (a portuguese-based creole from cape verde) @xcite . to our knowledge, our study is the first to apply a computational approach to ask large-scale questions about the popularity of borrowings into music in the rap domain specifically. ## discussion this paper finds that a linguistic borrowing's length is a likely determining factor in its popularity while the origin, semantic class, and part of speech of a borrowing can all influence its overall usage. furthermore, certain categories of borrowings have experienced both ups and downs in their popularity over the years relative to each other, hinting at trends involving demographics or musical style. most importantly, the number of borrowings has been increasing over time, showing the increasing influence that linguistic borrowings are having on the french language. all code and data are available for open-source use on this project's github repository 9 . we found these results by collecting over 8,000 songs with spotify and genius and analyzing the trends of the usage of 700 words over time with regression models and temporal analysis. these findings are compelling for several reasons. firstly, they illustrate the dynamic linguistic environment of french rap, showing the influences of both linguistic minorities and organizations like the académie française on the french language as it is. it also studies linguistic borrowing with a large breadth and depth on the donor languages that make their way into french rap lyrics. lastly, french rap provides a small window into how music can change the languages it encounters in a region undergoing demographic change.