Characteristics of non-native communication in English: The case of English-language lyrics by Dutch artists
Iris Hendrickx, Stan Vissers, Frank van Meurs
Centre for Language Studies, Radboud University
Organizations and individuals make language choices when communicating for particular purposes with particular target groups. For example, pop artists may approach their target market using the audience’s and their own first language, so they can fully express themselves and be fully understood. Alternatively, pop artists may use English as a second language (L2), for instance to reach a large audience. We studied to what extent the language and themes of English-language lyrics written by pop artists for whom English is an L2 adhere to native-speaker characteristics and to what extent they are influenced by the artists’ first-language background and cultural background. We investigated the linguistic characteristics, emotion expression and topics in the song lyrics through a corpuslinguistic analysis of English-language song lyrics by Dutch artists, English-language lyrics by native English artists and Dutch-language lyrics by Dutch artists. We collected a large dataset of Dutch- and English-language songs gained from Genius.com. A major bottleneck in our data collection was automatic identification of the nationalities of song writers to ensure we were indeed collecting lyrics written by native and non-native speakers. As a consequence, we only managed to gather a small curated data set of verified song lyrics. We decided to collect a second, larger collection of songs in which we filtered on the nationalities of the artists without checking all the backgrounds of the song writers of each song. We analysed both data collections on linguistic characteristics such as lexical richness and compared the L1 and L2 samples. To study emotion expression differences between L1 and L2 texts, we performed an automatic sentiment and emotion analysis on the English L1 and L2 samples with the Seance tool. We also performed a topic analysis to gain insights into differences in the themes of the song in the different sub samples. Our initial results indicate no significant differences in lexical richness but we did find differences in high frequent word phrases between L1 and L2 lyrics. We also observed differences in the emotions and topics of the different samples. We will discuss our findings and the limitations of this study.