I came across an interesting article in PloS ONE this week that I thought you may enjoy, dear reader. The article is written by a linguist, Paula Chesley, from the University of Alberta in Canada and asks the question, ‘Has Mainstream American English (MAE) been influenced by the vocals in hip-hop’. The research has implications for our understanding of how musical traditions influence mainstream language development within a culture. It is not a surprising fact that speakers acquire vocabulary by watching films or TV, but there is not a great deal of evidence that listening to music has a similar influence. On top of this, the present paper argues that…