A Computational Analysis and Exploration of Linguistic Borrowings in French Rap Lyrics

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. Further research will include examining external factors (like song popularity) on the usage of words as well as machine learning methods to predict future lexical borrowing popularity trends.