For my research project, I will be looking at the relationship between languages and music. In recent years, there has been an apparent increase of musicians singing and writing songs in English as opposed to their native languages. Why is this? While there are clearly several reasons behind this cultural (and economical) phenomena, it might become clearer if I choose a specific a specific type of music or region to focus on, which I have yet to do.
For the time being, I will be doing some general research on the topic and come up with some questions that I hope to answer by the time I complete this project. Some questions that I have so far include: When did this trend start gaining popularity and what will be the future of music? Do some musicians write a mix of songs in different languages, one language, or songs with multiple languages in one? Are the musicians choosing to write songs in English or do they feel forced to based on what the market demands? Which language do people in the country who are not musicians prefer to listen to? There are many more questions I could ask but those are the main ones I have right now.
Link to article by Huffington Post about the development of English as a global language: https://nyti.ms/2k47eRS
So far I have done some research on the rise of English in general; about one-fourth of the world can communicate in English to some degree, and English is spoken in every country in the world. It is unclear how long English will remain a powerful language used for communication and business, but it likely to be around for several more decades. If this is the case, who knows how long songs will be written primarily in English and what will happen to other languages in the music industry.
This is a wonderful topic and I can recommend a couple of articles for you on postcolonial uses of English–by Ngugi wa Thiono and Chinua Achebe.