“All that is solid melts into the air”: on the problem of popular in language

Abstract

This article has as its main objective to present a discussion about what criteria must be considered when we talk about aspects of a speech defined as popular. In order to do this, we present a brief reflexion about how two different fields - social history and sociolinguistics – have been dealing with the relations between language and social class. We also analyze two portions of a rapper discourse (a public one and a private one) in different contexts so we can postulate that complex relations between certain linguistic marks and the discursive rapper position in the social field are responsible for the popular nature of his speech.