Aditi Deshpande, Snober Sataravala
Drawing on globally circulating hip hop practices, this paper examines how Marathi rap adopts lexical, syntactic, and stylistic features of Black English. It scrutinises the role of Black English as a possible conduit to build global solidarity with rappers to express shared experiences of marginality and belonging. A purposive sample of ten tracks, released between 2020 and 2025 and selected for prominence of Black English, was analysed through close reading and discourse analysis to study the integration of Black English in Marathi rap and its implications. The analysis suggests that Black English functions as a semiotic resource to express translocal experiences within a global rap community. Beyond simply imitating Black linguistic repertoires, Marathi rap recontextualises them, creating points of solidarity through linguistic choices that connect local experiences with broader hip hop narratives.