IOSR Journal Of Humanities And Social Science (IOSR-JHSS) Volume 23, Issue 1, Ver. 10 (January. 2018) PP 67-102 e-ISSN: 2279-0837, p-ISSN: 2279-0845. www.iosrjournals.org DOI: 10.9790/0837-23011067102 www.iosrjournals.org 67 | Page The Language of Fliptop among Filipino Youth: A Discourse Analysis Bong Borero Lumabao, Ph.D (Research Associate, Datu Ayunan National High School, Cotabato City, Philippines) Abstract: This qualitative research is a study on the lines of Fliptop talks performed by the Fliptop rappers employing Finnegan‘s (2008) discourse analysis. This is aimed to analyze the phonological, morphological and semantic features of the fliptop talk, to explore the structures in the lines of Fliptop among Filipino youth, and to uncover the various insights that can be gained from it. The corpora of the study included all the 20 Fliptop Videos downloaded from Youtube Channel of Fliptop. Results revealed that Fliptop contains phonological features such as assonance, consonance, deletion, lengthening, and rhyming. Morphological features include acronym, affixation, blending, borrowing, code mixing and switching, compounding, conversion or functional shifts, and dysphemism. Semantics presented the lexical category, meaning, and words used in the fliptop talks. Structure of Fliptop revolves on the personal attack (physical attributes), attack on the bars (rapping skills), extension: family members and friends, antithesis, profane words, figurative languages, sexual undertones, anime characters, homosexuality, and famous celebrities involvement. Keywords: discourse analysis, fliptop talks, filipino youth, fliptop videos, Philippines --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Date of Submission: 12-01-2018 Date of acceptance: 03-02-2018 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I. INTRODUCTION Internet is a global linking of computers that allows information transfer. It was established in the early 1960s by the U.S. Department of Defense primarily for military purposes. Since then, the continual improvement of the internet technology has provided an extraordinary level of public accessibility to a wide range of forms of communication, for example intra-organisational and inter-organisational email; data storage, management and transfer; social websites like Facebook; text messaging such as Twitter, and so forth (Wanajak, 2011). One prominent internet site is YouTube. The site is a public video sharing web site which consists of usergenerated content and ranks among the most successful Web 2.0 projects. Registered users can upload their videos to the server, share them with the world, watch all other videos uploaded to the site; and interact with the community. Unregistered users can watch all videos too but they are not permitted to upload; share their own content; and interact with the community (Varga, 2011). Since its creation in 2005, YouTube has grown and evolved into one of the biggest sites on the internet. It has been the host of countless viral videos and it continues to attract users to its bottomless variety of content. The strength of YouTube is in the freedom it grants its users to create and explore around the site. Its many features allow users to utilize the site in a variety of ways. This is the reason why young Filipino YouTube users create their own experiences of YouTube (Ferraris, 2014). However, it has been observed that some of the videos such as Fliptop rap battles have affected some of the aspects of youth advancement more specifically on the use of language. In the United State, one of the most intriguing linguistic aspects of contemporary hip hop culture is rap battling. Rap battling is a highly competitive and creative style of discourse whose aim is the verbal domination and embarrassment of one‘s opponent through a combination of creative rap lyrics and effective delivery (Fitzpatrick, 2005). ―Rap Battling,‖ a highly competitive subtype of hip-hop discourse in which participants engage in ―freestyling‖ – the creation of extemporaneous, rhymed discourse for the purpose of bolstering their own social standing or attacking that of their opponents. This provides many insights into the social and ideological underpinnings of hip hop culture. When the lines in the rap battle are examined, the lines demonstrate the prevalence of sexist, misogynistic, and homophobic language in hip hop songs. In hip hop culture, social capital is largely linked to the extent to which a speaker espouses heterosexual masculine values. While sexist and homophobic language retards hip hop‘s ability to be fully accepted into mainstream culture, it is indicative of a larger social trend – namely, that African Americans, who constitute the large majority of users of hip hop