A Computational Analysis and Exploration of Linguistic Borrowings in French Rap Lyrics

Lucas Zurbuchen, Rob Voigt


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.
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-srw.27
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Xiyan Fu, Eve Fleisig
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
200–208
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-srw.27
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.acl-srw.27
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Lucas Zurbuchen and Rob Voigt. 2024. A Computational Analysis and Exploration of Linguistic Borrowings in French Rap Lyrics. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop), pages 200–208, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Computational Analysis and Exploration of Linguistic Borrowings in French Rap Lyrics (Zurbuchen & Voigt, ACL 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-srw.27.pdf