Les does most of the authenticating work in this extract, by highlighting his own brother’s membership in the notorious South London gang, the Peckham Boys (‘my brother’s a Peckham yout innit’, stave 23) as well as by using a range of narrative, lexical, and phonological strategies. Already in stave 1 Les says of Mike and his gang, a bad yout bruv dey all bad you-’. Both and yout bruv ‘he’s are used throughout the extract, as are pronunciations of and as and As we ‘them’ ‘they’ dem dey. explained above, many of these features cannot be said to index membership in hip hop culture in isolation. This is partly due to the fact that HHSS or HHNL draws on and is intertwined with black vernacular and culture (Alim 2006: 100-116). The distinction between HHSS and Multicultural London English (Cheshire et al 2011) is also far from clear and HHSS does of course also contain local elements of language use, as many observers of code-mixing in multilingual rap have observed before (e.g. Pennycook 2007; Alim et al 2009; Terkourafi 2010b). There are multiple layers of authentication present in this extract. In their narrative Les and Joe use symbols such as the mink coat, the bling designer watch, the Rolls Royce Phantom or the automatic weapon to construct authentic gangsta identities for Adam and his gang members. At the same time the group challenges the authenticity of these tough gangstas to some extent. This challenge, just as much as Les’s brother’s gang membership, as well as the use of HHSS and MLE, and, above all, the insider knowledge of cultural concepts indexing thug life, all constitute important means of authentication for the group. CONCLUSION Our study was originally motivated by an interest in spontaneous talk of young South London men. The data recorded by these young men from multi-ethnic, working class backgrounds soon led us to
Les does most of the authenticating work in this extract, by highlighting his own brother’s membership in the notorious South London gang, the Peckham Boys (‘my brother’s a Peckham yout innit’, stave 23) as well as by using a range of narrative, lexical, and phonological strategies. Already in stave 1 Les says of Mike and his gang, ‘he’s a bad yout bruv dey all bad you-’. Both yout and bruv are used throughout the extract, as are pronunciations of ‘them’ and ‘they’ as dem and dey. As we explained above, many of these features cannot be said to index membership in hip hop culture in isolation. This is partly due to the fact that HHSS or HHNL draws on and is intertwined with black vernacular and culture (Alim 2006: 100-116). The distinction between HHSS and Multicultural London English (Cheshire et al 2011) is also far from clear and HHSS does of course also contain local elements of language use, as many observers of code-mixing in multilingual rap have observed before (e.g. Pennycook 2007; Alim et al 2009; Terkourafi 2010b). There are multiple layers of authentication present in this extract. In their narrative Les and Joe use symbols such as the mink coat, the bling designer watch, the Rolls Royce Phantom or the automatic weapon to construct authentic gangsta identities for Adam and his gang members. At the same time the group challenges the authenticity of these tough gangstas to some extent. This challenge, just as much as Les’s brother’s gang membership, as well as the use of HHSS and MLE, and, above all, the insider knowledge of cultural concepts indexing thug life, all constitute important means of authentication for the group. CONCLUSION Our study was originally motivated by an interest in spontaneous talk of young South London men. The data recorded by these young men from multi-ethnic, working class backgrounds soon led us to
ECL_Pichler_2016.docx