Verba Bestiae: How Latin Conquered Heavy Metal

Flavio Massimiliano Cecchini, Greta Franzini, Marco Carlo Passarotti

Risultato della ricerca: Contributo in libroChapter

Abstract

The presence of Latin in heavy metal music ranges from full texts, intros, song and album titles to band names, pseudonyms, and literary quotations. This chapter sheds light on heavy metal’s fascination with the history and ‘arcane’ sound of Latin, and investigates its patterns of use in lyrics with the help of Natural Language Processing tools and digitally-available linguistic resources. First, the authors collected a corpus of lyrics containing differing amounts of Latin and enhanced it with descriptive metadata. Next, the authors calculated the richness of the vocabulary and the distribution of content words. The authors processed the corpus with a morphological analyser and performed both a manual and a computational search for intertextuality, including allusions, paraphrase and verbatim quotations of literary sources. The authors show that, despite it being a dead language, Latin is very frequently used in metal. Its historical status appears to fascinate bands and lends itself well to those religious, epic and mysterious themes so characteristic of the heavy metal world. The widespread use of Latin in metal lyrics, however, sees many bands simply reusing Latin texts – mostly from the Bible – or even misspelling literary quotations.
Lingua originaleEnglish
Titolo della pubblicazione ospiteMultilingual Metal Music: Sociocultural, Linguistic and Literary Perspectives on Heavy Metal Lyrics
EditorRiitta-Liisa Valijärvi, Charlotte Doesburg, Amanda DiGioia
Pagine239-259
Numero di pagine21
Stato di pubblicazionePubblicato - 2021

Keywords

  • Heavy Metal
  • Latin

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