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After analyzing the music of some of hip hop's biggest artists, from Eminem to Public Enemy, linguists at the University of Manchester in England noticed something pretty impressive. As it turns out, Grammy Award-winning rappers seem to have an intuitive sense for rhyme, using subtle rhyming patterns called half-rhymes (like "hop and "rock") much more often than traditional rhymes (like "cat" and "mat").

The Rap Genius website annotates rap lyrics: creators hope to provide a hip-hop Wikipedia. You can listen to songs, read lyrics, and click the lines that interest you for pop-up explanations. Like Wikipedia, you can also create and annotate entries.

This Wall Street Journal interactive employs lyrics from the musical Hamilton as well as the song lyrics of the Fugees, Nas, Kendrick Lamar, Rakim, etc. to illustrate sound devices in context. Audio included.

NPR's Jasmine Garsd, cohost of Alt.Latino, NPR's weekly music podcast, speaks re: indigenous lyrics and music sung in indigenous languages, fused to Western idioms like hip-hop and electronica. The show itself, featuring artists who showcase their musical talents in indigenous languages from Mapuche to Tzotzil, Guarani and Quechua, can be found at this link: http://www.npr.org/blogs/altlatino/2015/03/05/390934624/hear-6-latin-american-artists-who-rock-in-indigenous-languages

This blog has various articles re: the overlapping themes of race, ethnicity and culture, how they play out in our lives and communities, and how all of this is shifting. Recent posts include the role of Asians in hip-hop, popular media and code-switching.

Talks about how rhythmic characteristics of language and accents are reflected in the rhythms of songs.

In a 2011 published study (https://mp.ucpress.edu/content/29/1/51.full.pdf+html), Nicholas Temperley and David Temperley, 2 musicologists, did a musical corpus analysis showing that the Scotch snap, a sixteenth-note on the beat followed by a dotted eighth-note, is common in both Scottish and English songs, but virtually nonexistent in German and Italian songs, and explored possible linguistic correlates for this phenomenon. British English shows a much higher proportion of very short stressed syllables (less than 100 ms) than the other two languages. Four vowels account for a large proportion of very short stressed syllables in British English, and also constitute a large proportion of SS tokens in our English musical corpus. A Scotch snap, as Adam Neely notes in the above video, is the musical, rhythmical counterpart to a trochee in poetry. Say the phrase "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" to hear a series of Scotch snaps.