Speaking Smibanese: hip-hop, local youth language variety, and representations of the Amsterdam Bijlmer

Abstract

‘That shit is just HIP-HOP!’ is how writer Soortkill characterises the popular local youth language ‘Smibanese’. Soortkill is one of the members of SMIB, a trendy Amsterdam hip-hop art collective that uses this self-named and self-claimed local youth language in their hip-hop-inspired art performances. SMIB, founded in 2014 by artists Ray Fuego and GRGY, currently consists of multiple artists who produce a wide range of hip-hop art, ranging from music to fashion, podcasts, and even books, reaching a national audience with their locally oriented stories. The collective has played a crucial part in the spread of ‘Smibanese’ all over the Netherlands, both through their extensive usage of it in their hip-hop oeuvre (including lyrics, music videos and social media posts) and through their documentation of the local youth language in their two publications of the Smibanese Woordenboek (Smibanese Dictionary, 2017 and 2019). (...) While the link between hip-hop, language, and representation has been studied extensively, there is a growing interest in the ways hip-hop performers actively use local linguistic sources (such as Smibanese) to style their local identities and stories. Coming from a history of research into specifically contemporary Dutch hip-hop and identity practices, I would like to narrow these broad research focuses down to hip-hop artists’ linguistic praxes in the Dutch context. Drawing on SMIB’s rap/hip-hop music as a case study, I aim to answer how the hip-hop artists use the local youth language variety Smibanese to represent themselves, their local environment, and their local (imagined) community.