What Bongo Flava Taught Me About Language and Gender

Long before I focused on wedding ceremonies, my research looked at a different stage entirely: Bongo Flava, Tanzania's dominant popular music genre. My study, 'Language and Gender Stereotyping: A Case of Language Use in Bongo Flava Music in Tanzania' (University of Dar es Salaam, 2012), examined how song lyrics construct and reinforce gender roles through language: who gets to be desired versus who gets to desire, whose voice narrates the song, and whose is merely described. Music is one of the most widely consumed forms of language in any culture, which makes it a powerful and under-examined site for studying how stereotypes get normalized. What started as a linguistics research question has stayed relevant to everything I do now, because whether the stage is a wedding, a concert, or a corporate keynote, the same principle holds: the language we normalize in public becomes the language we live by in private.