English Sociolinguistic Covert Prestige through Digital Music in Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL): Insights from Dance Monkey

The purpose of this article is to establish how digital music can be integrated as English sociolinguistic covert prestige content within Content and Learning Integrated Learning (CLIL) in higher education. To achieve this, insights are drawn from the Dance Monkey popular music lyrics of the Australian singer, Toni Watson. The choice of this popular music is mainly motivated by the unique display of English sociolinguistic covert prestige in the song. Therefore, this article seeks to exemplify English sociolinguistic covert prestige as a semiotic signifier of the commodification, marketisation, and popularisation of the Dance Monkey song. A qualitative research approach of sorting sociolinguistic text from the lyrics and a digital-sound mapping procedure of the lyrics onto the digital song was used. A quantitative approach entailed incorporating indexicality into the methodology in sorting, identifying, and classifying English covert prestige. Analysis involved integrating qualitative components into the quantitative ones after indexing of fortition and lenition of fricatives and bursts as semiotic signifiers of linguistic covert prestige. Findings show palatalisation of sound segments through fortition of certain identified fricatives and bursts in the song, the purpose of which is speech enhancement for commodifying and marketing Dance Monkey as a song. These findings are central to how English sociolinguistics can be taught as CLIL through digital music. Through this CLIL approach, this article further uncovers an underlying potential of cross-disciplinary collaborations and innovation in English sociolinguistics and digital music teaching and learning.