Cholas of All Countries, Unite!

Cholas of all countries, unite!

Popular culture, represented by various genres as pop music, comics, sitcoms and computer games, is claimed to affect language learning and the identity-building among primarily adolescences. Who, if not teachers, who correct endless "wanna" and "gonna" at each essay writing, are aware of the fact that young people often imitate linguistic constructions from songs or soap operas simply because they believe these phrases and words are the proper ones. Today's teaching in the classroom is often reversed, it is sooner about how it should not be instead of how it should be. This reflects the idea that the English found in Popular Culture is important and note-worthy since it constitutes the source for imitation by language learners (Trotta, p.5)

Capitulation in front of Popular Culture

Since I have always been an old-fashioned scholar, raised in Soviet Union´s pre-modern free era with it´s limited and dogmatic doctrine of the only acceptable Royal British English and BBC newsreaders´ pronunciation, I have neither advocated nor practiced any influences of popular culture on language use. Unconscious fear of popular culture, which Joe Trotta describes clearly in his essay Grammar Controversies and Popular Culture, is very typical for my generation and my conservative contemporaries strongly believe that using of non-standard English is commonly viewed as a reflection of bad character and poor education ( Trotta, p.21) Within the course of Popular Culture I was literally forced to explore some Hip-Hop, Reggae and mainstream pop music songs in general and, shockingly enough, I found Lady Gaga´s lyrics genius. My total rejection of pop culture as a contemorary art altered to the great interest to it´s traits and I surrender in fron of pop culture´s magical attraction. In this paper, I will examine Lady Gaga´s song lyrics in Born This Way, which, in the way it is constructed, is of no minor importance as The Communist Manifesto.

Hypothesis

Deliberately using non-standard grammar and vocabulary, Lady Gaga follows the rules of mainstream popular culture by breaking the laws of Standard English (SE) and modifying linguistic behaviour aimed towards target audience, since she wishes to identify with them and/or demonstrate good will towards them ( Trudgill, 1997, p.253) Lady Gaga adopts some traits of lower English on purpose to show loyality and solidarity with different odd groups.

Textual analysis, conntations and denotations (or what we hear and what we should have heard)

The singer tells the audience about a girl with a great self-esteem, which she has got from her mother, who was an extremeley kind woman and told her dotter to love herself for that she was and to believe in herself. The girl is a grown up person at the time