Rock & rolla: le parole della trap

This paper presents an overview of the language of trap music, presented during the conference “It’s (not) just rock ‘n’ roll. ON AIR” organized by the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures and Modern Cultures of the University of Turin. Since music is expression of languages, culture and youth identity, the paper investigates the vocabulary of Italian trap music produced by artists belonging to ‘Gen Z’ (the generation born between 1997 and 2012). Feeding on youth language, trap lyrics inevitably hold in words from traditional jargon, innovative jargon, digital language and foreign languages. Due to the trappers’ background, most of the words coming from traditional jargon and other languages (English, French, Spanish, Arabic) belong to the semantic spheres of street life, money and drugs.