Over the past six years at CUNY, I have built a research program focused on orthographic stylization and language contact, particularly in subcultural and online domains. My research concerns itself not only with novel written and linguistic forms, but also engages questions of identity construction, authenticity, and in large part, the attitudes and ideologies of language which frame linguistic production. The research which I undertake employs a wide variety of methods, ranging from large-scale corpus work, which is uniquely suited to establish patterns of use and language variation, to detailed ethnographic interviews and qualitative analysis, drawing on the methods of linguistic anthropology to establish motivations for variation and patterns of use. On this page, I link to and highlight five of my key recent works, providing some context in each case.
1. Garley, Matt. 2014. Seen and not heard: Orthography, morphology, and phonology in loanword adaptation in the German hip hop community. Discourse, Context, and Media 3. 27-36.
In “Seen and not heard: The relationship of orthography, morphology, and phonology in loanword adaptation in the German hip hop community,” I examine a particular morpheme and its orthographic form (-ed) originating as the participial suffix in English, and its instantiation in borrowed and native words in German hip hop. This research analyzes a 12.5 million word corpus collected from a German internet forum focused on hip hop music and culture; in it, I examine the most frequent English borrowings (forms like released and performed) in an otherwise German-language context. In investigating the corpus further, and extending this search to German hip hop videos and lyrics, I found that while it was not respelled by German fans, this orthographic –ed was used in a number of borrowed forms were the German -t would be expected, including third-person singular present (der Thread sucked!, ‘this thread sucks!’) and second-person plural imperative (voted für den clip!, ‘[you all] vote for this clip!’). Analysis of these forms and the metalinguistic commentary about them in the corpus and through interviews established that borrowings like this, while stylistically creative, are not divorced from phonological reality but crucially rely on the productive combination of morphophonological rules and orthographic norms from both English and German.
2. Garley, Matt & Benjamin Slade. 2016. Virtual meatspace: Word formation and deformation in cyberpunk discussions. In Lauren Squires (ed.) English in Computer-Mediated Communication: Variation, Representation, and Change, 123-148. Mouton de Gruyter.
A focus on orthography continues into the second sample I include, “Virtual meatspace: Word formation and deformation in cyberpunk discussions,” written with collaborator Benjamin Slade, and published in an edited volume on English in computer-mediated communication. In this article, we diachronically examine corpora of cyberpunk discussion and literature, beginning with fiction texts from 1980 and USENET posts from 1987. We track the development of linguistic forms used by authors and fans of cyberpunk literature and subculture, examining the most productive strategies used for the creation of neologisms and cyberpunk jargon. These strategies were found to include compounding, clipping, and acronym formation, as well as fantasized borrowings. We provide a detailed qualitative analysis of the orthographic form cypx, (‘cyberpunk’/’cyberpunks’) with regard to previous examinations of the ‘orthographic variable’ x, and trace the preferred approach to creating cyberpunk jargon, a combination of clipping and compounding, to its likely roots in the jargon of real and imagined totalitarian/militaristic states.
3. Garley, Matt. 2018. Peaze up! Adaptation, innovation, and variation in German hip-hop discourse. In Cecelia Cutler & Unn Røyneland (eds.) Multilingual Youth Practices in Computer-Mediated Communication, 87-108. Cambridge University Press.
“Peaze up! Adaptation, innovation, and variation in German hip hop discourse,” a chapter in an edited volume published by Cambridge, explores another aspect of orthography in German hip hop discourse, namely the use of the grapheme z as an alternative orthographic choice in forms like peaze, ‘peace’ where the z cannot or does not have its normative German value of /ts/ or its English value of /z/. In addition to the large German hip hop corpus, I examine data from an American hip hop forum for comparison, to establish which forms are German hip hop scene innovations and which are borrowed from the American scene. At particular issue in this chapter is the contention by other researchers that the stylization of written forms is often entirely divorced from phonological considerations and the spoken language; I contend here that the use of z in this case is motivated by a combination of rules from the German and English orthographic and phonetic systems (paralleling the findings in the first study listed here.) I find that the borrowed form peace (which is far more commonly used in the German forum) has taken new life a particular site for stylization, creativity, and the expression/establishment of identity among German hip hop enthusiasts.
4. Garley, Matt. 2019. “Do they know the normal language?” Language attitudes and ideologies in the German hip hop scene. Critical Multilingualism Studies 7(3). 93-128.
The fourth article I include here, “Do they know the normal language? Language attitudes and ideologies in German hip hop culture” shifts gears to an ethnographic approach. While corpus studies can establish patterns of variation, the relative frequency of words and orthographic forms, I turn here to the motivations for and metalinguistic discourse surrounding the use of anglicisms in German hip hop, through an extensive examination of a series of ethnographic interviews I conducted with hip hop fans and artists in Hamburg. I propose here a theoretical model relating language attitudes, which are conceived of as individual, with shared and enduring language ideologies and larger ‘ideology complexes,’ uniting concepts which are commonly used individually in the field, but rarely correlated with one another. Through interviews focusing on individuals’ attitudes toward English, German, and anglicisms within and outside the German hip hop subculture, I identify common themes which reveal the action of a Standard Language Ideology Complex, an overarching system of beliefs about language which is supported by the ideology of the standard language, Herderian (‘one nation-one people-one language’) language ideology, and language purism.
5. Garley, Matt. 2019. Choutouts: Language contact and US-Latin hip hop on YouTube. Lengua y Migración 11(2). 77-106.
The final and most recent article I include here, “Choutouts: Language contact and US-Latin hip hop on YouTube,” reports on my most recent research direction, which shifts the focus onto Latin hip hop language and culture in the US, while reconsidering standard assumptions about the nature of language varieties in the wake of the sociolinguistic turn toward translanguaging and codemeshing approaches. In this study, I examined a set of YouTube videos featuring Latinx hip hop artists from different regional scenes (New York, California, and Texas), taking a holistic approach by examining the lyrics alongside viewers’ comments and, to some extent, the visual-semiotic cues from music videos. I found that a codemeshing approach best explained the linguistic production of Houston rapper/comedian Chingo Bling and his commenters, in tune with previous research on codemeshing and translanguaging in the heavily Chicanx border states, but that an analysis of lyrics and comments from New York Afrolatino rappers The Beatnuts’ videos revealed more strictly compartmentalized languaging practices.
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