Smitherman calls the African American Verbal Tradition, which further
encompasses speech acts specific to the community such as signification,
call-and-response, tonal semantics and sermonic tone (Smitherman
1995b).^5 Smitherman elaborates on this in other publications.
The African American verbal tradition clashes with the European
American tradition because there are different – and, yes,
contradictory – cultural assumptions about what constitutes
appropriate discourse, rhetorical strategies, and styles of speaking.
While the African American linguistic style has been described as
passionate, emotional, and “hot” and the European as objective,
detached, and “cold,” we are seriously oversimplifying if we assert
that one tradition is superior. What is not an oversimplification,
however, is that African and European Americans have different
attitudes about and responses to a speaker depending on whether she
uses one style or the other.
(Smitherman 2000: 254)Since the first edition of this book, serious study of Hip Hop culture has
produced a body of interdisciplinary work relevant to this discussion. In
terms of language, discourse and communication, much of this work has
occurred at the cross-section of linguistics and cultural anthropology
(Bucholtz 2003). While the term was first used to reference a musical
movement, Hip Hop Studies have expanded beyond the local to the global.
In the States, Hip Hop is a reference to an urban, youth-focused culture
which has evolved from its origins in African American and Latino
communities on both coasts in the 1970s, and which values creativity,
color and style.
This is a very large topic and one that cannot be seriously addressed in
this chapter, but the relevance of the complex relationship between the
languages of African American communities and evolving Hip Hop Nation
can hardly be overestimated. What is especially interesting is the way this
approach has made it possible to bring almost intangible issues into
clearer focus. In his 2004b study and elsewhere, Alim addresses the
importance of creativity of “Style. Steelo. Steez. The fact that there are at
least three different lexical items to describe the concept of style in Hip
Hop Nation Language ... underscores its importance to the community”