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:
- 294–302
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-srw.27
- DOI:
- 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 294–302, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- A Computational Analysis and Exploration of Linguistic Borrowings in French Rap Lyrics (Zurbuchen & Voigt, ACL 2024)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2024.acl-srw.27.pdf