«Roma-Bacău». Lingua, ideologia e identità fra Italia e Romania nel rap di Sosa Priority

This contribution fits into the line of studies on the rap of the «new Italians» and focuses on both the linguistic dimension and the ideological-identity dimension. In the texts of Sosa Priority, the pseudonym of Roberto Danculea, a Roman rapper of Romanian origin born in 1999 in Bacău and raised in Rome since he was just over a year old, these three elements—language, ideology, identity—play a fundamental role, to the point of giving rise to a semantics of belonging and detachment with strong iconic force. The musical genre of rap, born in the United States at the end of the Seventies of the last century, spread in Europe already in the Eighties: the globalization phase, which affected the entire hip-hop counterculture, was followed by a complex process of re-territorialization, in which for rap music «almost categorically [...] the mother tongue of the respective countries of adoption of the genre» was adopted. However, while American rap adopts as its only reference variety African American Vernacular English, considered a resistance vernacular in accordance with its countercultural charge and in opposition to standard American English, «the use in European rap depends on the constellation of local repertoires and the linguistic attitudes that exist in the individual communities of speakers».