Williams, Q. (2016) . Youth multilingualism in South Africa's hip-hop culture: A metapragmatic analysis. Sociolinguistic Studies, 10(1-2): 109-133 http://dx. Abstract This paper describes the practice of youth multilingualism in South Africa's hip-hop culture, in an online social media space and an advertising space. Based on a multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork study of youth multilingual practices, comprising of the following data sets -multilingual interviews, observations, multilingual

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... actions and performances, documents and online social networking interactions -the paper reports on how young multilingual speakers active in the hip-hop culture of the country talk and write about the intermixing of racial and ethnic speech forms, as well as use registers in the practice of gendered identities. The argument I put forth in the paper is that the examples of youth multilingualism suggest a complex picture of youth multilingual contact in postcolonial South Africa, and one that require a sociocultural linguistic response that accounts for the cultural influence of youth multilingualisms in local hiphop culture. To such an end, I suggest that multilingual policy planning in the country should be readjusted to the complex sociocultural changes we see emerge with youth multilingual practices. The notion of metapragmatics underpins the theoretical framework and I use this notion to analyze (1) the intermixing of racial and ethnic speech forms (see sub-section 3.4.1) and (2) the use of registers in the practice of gendered identities (see subsection 3.4.2). In the first part of the analysis, I demonstrate how hip-hop artists and their fans, on the social media platform Facebook, engage in a discussion on the importance of language use in https://repository.uwc.ac.za/ As a female emcee, Kimmie Kool is presented as an anomaly in her workplace. She defies the boredom of her work's institutional culture by bringing in the coolness factor of local hip-hop culture. Her playful presentation of her manifold rap identities, in contradistinction to the office identity she needs to conform to, is a strong feature of Kimmie Kool, which she unpacks for her imagined interlocutor and viewing audience. As the camera cuts to her seated at her chair, she tells her imagined interlocutor that she is: Extract 3. Seated, describing identities Kimmie in the cut, Creamy cream puff. Tiny Kimmie Cause I'm not big I'm little. Klein Kimmie Kimmie cool. It's betta to be cool than ice cold. Around here they call me Kimberley.