2nd February 2022

Jaspal Naveel Singh (Lecturer in Applied Linguistics and English Language, Open University)

When we tell each other stories, we often construct the voices of the characters that speak in our narratives. Prosodic voice qualities, such as intonation, rhythm and loudness, lend themselves well to such voicing strategies, because prosody is largely non-referential and thus meaningful independent of the lexical or grammatical meaning of an utterance. In this talk, I analyse two narratives that I have collected among hip hop practitioners in Delhi, India, to show how the narrators create contrasts in intonation and loudness to construct dialogues between figures of the self and the other. I argue that these voice contrasts build on widely enregistered linguistic ideologies about how certain types of people speak habitually, but the contrasts also seem to undergo an incremental enregisterment in the real-time unfolding of the narratives. Ultimately, the narrators’ contrastive voicings allow them to present themselves to me, the visiting ethnographer, as hip hop cosmopolitans and make transcultural statements about their own ‘global’ identities in rapidly changing urban India.