Chinese pentaglot rap

A Shanghainese friend of a friend just sent him a link to a curious video, and he forwarded it to me.  It looks like a Nike-sponsored rap song with five different fāngyán 方言 ("topolects") and lots of English.

My friend asked, "I wonder to what degree the Hànzì 汉字 ("Chinese characters") in the subtitles match the actual lyrics."

The video comes via Bilibili, which sometimes seems to load very slowly.  It is also available on iQIYI and DigitaLing.  Subtitles are more clearly visible in the Bilibili and DigitaLing (last one) versions.

The main questions, at least for me, are which topolects are presented, how faithful the presentations are, and how well the subtitles represent what is being said.

The title of the video is "Dirty Class / Bridge WOW" (the group and the name of their performance).

I watched the three versions of the video repeatedly, for a total of about a dozen times, so I have a good idea of who the singers are and where they're from, though I certainly cannot claim to understand everything they're saying.

First comes the emcee, who begins the song with these words:  "It's your boy P.Q.  We got Beijing, Chongqing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Changsha.    All Star.    Dirty Class on the track.    Rock."

Next is Sūn Xù 孙旭 from Beijing.  Native Pekingese report that they can understand most of what he is saying, and that the subtitles reflect pretty well the words he utters.  Most of his sentences end with "wow", which he pronounces more as if it rhymes with "hoe" than with "how".

After Sūn Xù is Ayuko 葉子, which is a distinctly Japanese-style name in its pronunciation, though I don't think it's a real Japanese name, whereas it means "leaf" in Mandarin.  The sole female rapper, she speaks in Cantonese with a very nimble tongue, and plenty of English mixed in ("Who's the champion", "I'm the champion", "Let me show you how we do it", "Shinning [sic] ring ring [sic] let me show it", "Just do it", etc.).  The gap between what she speaks and the subtitles seems to be larger than for the other singers.

Then comes BRIDGE GO$H from Chonqqing.  He's really good with twirling a basketball and I can hear that he's speaking some kind of Sichuanese, though I can't fully comprehend his words, not even when he speaks English:  "Hold up Hold up Hold up", which sounds like "Hola Hola Hola".

P.Q returns now, representing Shanghai.  His pronunciation sounds very Shanghainese, and he uses some Shanghainese words such as 作, which in Mandarin (zuò) means "make; do", with the meaning "kill" (zú [not sure of the tone and romanization]).  作 also has another special pronunciation and meaning in Shanghainese:  zo ("to make a mountain out of a molehill; to make a big deal out of nothing" — an expression favored by girls).

Last is DamnShine C-Block / Sup Music from Changha, who does sing in a very Hunanese way and the subtitles match what he is singing quite closely (verified by one of my students who is from that province).  The last words of the song are "Let me know. Wow" (to rhyme with "know") — sung by the group as a whole.

A couple of general notes:

1. Their English usage and pronunciation are remarkably au courant.

Cf., among many other relevant posts

"When intonation overrides tone" (6/4/13)

"When intonation overrides tone, part 2" (5/11/17)

"Stress, emphasis, pause, and meaning in Mandarin" (11/8/17) — with references to additional posts

A final observation:  this kind of expression, which mixes English liberally with Chinese, is becoming increasingly popular and natural.  I believe that it bears out a prediction I made about twenty years ago in a still unpublished novel, China Babel, viz. that Chinese is absorbing so much English that it is slowly merging with the latter.  In terms of the massive borrowings of tens of thousands of vocabulary items, the same thing has been happening in Japanese and South Korean.  But the borrowing in Chinese is more far-reaching, since it includes not only vocabulary, but morphemes, grammatical constructions, and whole snatches and sentences of English incorporated in Chinese speech.  It's an exciting time to be witness to these changes.

See "A New Morpheme in Mandarin" (4/26/11) and dozens of other posts about English creeping into Chinese, despite the protestations and prohibitions of the government.