An Example of Linguistic Stylization in Spanish Musical Genres: Flamenco and Latin Music in Rosalía’s Discography

Abstract

Studies on stylistic change in music argue that when singers use stylistic devices in their songs, they have one purpose: to represent their image and their artistic and social identity. In this paper we focus on the singer Rosalía, a Catalan artist who sings flamenco and Latin music. These two musical genres are associated with innovative varieties of Spanish, but this singer is not a speaker of this variety (she uses the Spanish spoken in Catalonia, a conservative variety). So, we want to know whether, when she sings, she linguistically adapts to the associated phenomena of flamenco and Latin music. In order to carry out this work, we have collected two oral corpora: the first is Rosalía’s discography and the second is 40 min of interviews in Spain and America. In our analyses we have verified that, indeed, when Rosalía sings, she uses indexicalized phenomena of the genres. However, in the interviews she keeps her vernacular variety, Catalan, although we have observed signs of accommodation to American Spanish, which also reveal a significant change in the singer’s idiolect.