Football chants have been researched in several disciplines – from musicology to ethnology to linguistics – for quite a while now. They have been most intensively investigated in the German speaking countries, thus focusing on German chants; Kopiez/Brink 1998 is still the reference work in this respect. Other languages and cultures, however, have been studied much less; this paper therefore proposes an investigation of the (lyrics of) football chants of Romance language cultures using a corpus of French, Spanish and Italian songs. The analysis follows a new categorizing scheme, namely “participant constellations”, i.e. constellations of senders and addressees (fans towards their own team, fans towards referees, fans towards opponents’ fans etc.). The results reveal that constellations can be both real and fictitious; in the latter case, the fans sing a text which takes the position of a first person and is sung from the perspective of one exemplary fan. This is the case in chants which stylize the fan’s connection with his/her team as a romantic relationship. The corpus also contains other, sometimes very original fictitious speakers that are linked to the feeling of togetherness among the fan base and show creativity and humour.
Adventures in Music Translation: Italian Songs and Arias (aka “The Yellow Book”) and Me