Steven Gilbers raps and does special linguistic research. About Tupac Shakur, the duration of vowels in milliseconds, hip-hop feuds, and what they all have to do with each other.
It is a Saturday afternoon in the very last parallel session of a linguistic conference. The young Steven Gilbers (23) leads the audience in English with a smooth American accent through a perfectly timed and coherent PowerPoint about his master's thesis. In these most original twenty minutes of the day my tired brain is refreshed. Among other things, I learn that African American English is not one homogeneous language variety, who Tupac Shakur (alias 2Pac ) actually was and how he met his end, and how you can combine all of this in research of exceptional scientific quality.
Hip-hop and linguistics
A few weeks later I meet with him again. The on YouTube and other websites especially as rapper and spoken become artist common 'Steven Ghilbers' turns out to be a boy from Groningen clay. “Some visitors to my lecture thought I was American because of my pronunciation and name, others expected to see my father present,” laughs Steven. His father Dicky Gilbers is also a linguist at the University of Groningen. And pop musician.
“I grew up in a house full of music. I experienced my first Pinkpop in my mother's tummy. A CD by rapper Eminem that my father played when I was eight hit like a bomb. Hip-hop never let go of me.” Gilbers has been performing in the Dutch hip-hop scene for many years, sometimes accompanied by his father as a band member. And he is now also following in his footsteps as a linguist. The father-son symbiosis is otherwise not that bad:“During my entire education I only attended one lecture with him,” says Steven, who has just started as a PhD student at the University of Groningen. Steven's doctoral research – just like his thesis research – is about the language used by American hip-hopper Tupac Shakur. He got the idea when he heard the following line from the song Thug Style:
I guess I ain't East Coast enough for my niggas back in New York, and I ain't West Coast for these niggas on the West, huh?
This quote captures the core of Tupac's changing language use, according to Gilbers. “In his short life, Tupac has become the personification of the emerging West Coast hip-hop and the conflict with the East Coast. While he himself grew up in New York (East Coast), and only moved to California (West Coast) when he was seventeen. When I heard that line I thought:'Apparently he saw his identity somewhere in between those two'. I wondered what that meant for his use of language.” His master's thesis became a case study to the development of Tupac's original East Coast African American English to West Coast African American English .
From short to long vowels
Gilbers chose to focus on a difference in pronunciation between East and West Coast, namely the duration of the vowel a. “In a word like man you hear a longer vowel on the west coast than on the east coast. Although regional differences in African American English little researched, laymen and experts notice this different vowel duration, and it is also easily measurable.”
Jay Z audio clip
Ice Cube audio clip
First excerpt from Jay Z (East Coast ); second fragment of Ice Cube (West Coast ).
Gilbers analyzed interviews with Tupac on TV and radio between 1988 and 1996 and accurately measured the duration of his A's in milliseconds. The wide availability of audio material made special theoretical depth possible. “I had many measuring points so that I could closely examine how the development was progressing from the east coast to the west coast. If you only have two points of measurement (for example, one interview in 1988 and one in 1996) you can only determine that it has become longer, but the path in between provides important insights for linguistics.”
Gilbers first showed that development is not linear but erratic. For a long time you will find long and short variants of the a mixed up in Tupac's language, and gradually the proportion of long variants increases. This confirms modern visions of how people acquire a new language, or, as in this case, dialect. Second, Steven discovered a sudden boost in the duration of Tupacs a from 1995. “That is a strong indication of sociolinguistic agency :more or less consciously directing your language use as an expression of your identity. The boost takes place in the period when he is going to distance himself extra strongly from his East Coast identity.”
Rivalry
That distancing is set in motion in late 1994, when Tupac is shot while visiting New York. He survives, but the incident sets off a chain reaction in hip-hop culture. Tupac distances himself from his New York rival The Notorious B.I.G., who is vaguely suspected of complicity. The East Coast scene he finally turns his back. Shortly afterwards, he signs a contract with Death Row Records, the west coast hip-hop label that will become the largest in the country.
“An unprecedented turnaround, not only for Tupac, but also for hip-hop culture. The East Coast hegemony in hip-hop suddenly ended and there has been a strong rivalry between East and West ever since,” said Steven. “In 1996 the vowels are suddenly twenty percent longer than during the previous measurement point, while before that the average increase per year was around 2.5 percent. So not only did his behavior and his lyrics take on a rival tone, his language went with it. Logical too, it's hard to rap what a losers who are New Yorkers, if you sound like a New Yorker yourself.”
In the latter period there is even talk of exaggeration, also called hypercorrection named. Sometimes his a sounded longer than West Coast colleagues Ice Cube and Dr. dre. “He really wants to join the West Coast belong, and very hard not to the East Coast .”
Rap flows
Gilbers recently started his PhD project, in which he is building on his thesis research. “Tupac was shot dead in 1996. Unfortunately, I cannot research his further development linguistically. I would have liked to see how long it would take for his vowel duration to stabilize.” But he has plenty of other ideas:“I'm curious about the impact of Tupac's linguistic development in his music, among other things. I think there must be a connection between the sound structure of the dialects and the rhythm of the rap flows. New York rap sounds more staccato, west coast rap more wavy. It would be interesting to investigate whether Tupac's raps also change in rhythm. Quite exciting !”