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Abstract

The focus of this investigation is to analyze the concept of “foreign soundingness” used by David Bellos in his essay “Fictions of the Foreign the Paradox of “Foreign-Soundingness” in the Latino/a music context. Specifically, it is interesting to see how code-switching between English and Spanish in certain songs can be used to connect with the US Latino/a community, but also be a “foreign soundingness” for the audience outside of the mainland. Additionally, I argue that due to the increase in the bilingual populace around the world, it is not necessary for contemporary artists to translate their music to a specific language to increase their followers or gain international status. Most likely, the combination of two languages in Latino/a music gives them the opportunity to connect with a more diverse audience, and in the U.S., it helps to fight the bad stereotypes that have been established about using more than one language in the communication process. Therefore, to analyze this phenomenon, I use three songs that gain a lot of popularity in the US music industry during the last 7 years as examples: Odio (2014) by Romeo Santos ft. Drake, Despacito (2017) by Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee ft Justin Bieber, and Tusa (2019) by Karol G ft Niki Minaj. These collaborations which end in mixed languages within one song are helping in their own way to promote linguistic and cultural diversity and the development of plurilingual products that can reach a more diverse audience.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

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