This study explores how personae are performed in contemporary Swedish rap lyrics, focusing on the interplay between attitudinal stance and linguistic heterogeneity. Employing discourse analytical tools from the Appraisal framework and sociolinguistic theories of linguistic styling, fourteen rap texts are analyzed to examine how attitudes and linguistic features interact with thematic content and genre conventions in enacting personae.

The Appraisal analysis identifies various personae that (1) express emotional ties to socioeconomically disadvantaged urban places as well as non-urban places, (2) achieve financial and musical success, (3) adopt confrontational stances in contexts of violence and criminality, or (4) voice resistance to social injustice. These performances rely on genre-typical shifts between attitudes that construct the self as powerful and attitudes that position others as adversaries. References to persons, places, and phenomena play a pivotal role in invoking such attitudes by triggering cultural associations that listeners draw on to interpret the texts. This makes the performances dependent on the listener’s prior knowledge.

The analysis of linguistic styling shows how features from different languages produce varied effects. Swedish Contemporary Urban Vernacular (CUV) tends to anchor a persona locally, while English indexes a globally recognizable rap persona. Features from languages such as Somali, Arabic, and Mandinka exert more text-specific effects. Building on these observations, the analysis highlights indexical links between linguistic features and attitudes, which are most evident in texts about violence and criminality where personae appear as deliberately exaggerated enactments of a characterological figure – the young man using Swedish CUV and who is associated with threat and danger.

While some findings align with previous studies on rap, language variation, and identity performance (based on non-Swedish data), this study offers new insights into how such performances take shape in a contemporary Swedish context. By integrating the Appraisal framework with sociolinguistic theories, the study demonstrates how the rap lyrics both reflect diverse cultural affiliations and conform to genre conventions. They appear both innovative and rooted in tradition, with these dual aspects being central to persona performance.