Slang within the hip-hop community is a constantly growing and changing medium. Everyday new words are created by reinventing, reapplying and recycling preexisting lingo to new meanings. This makes for a localized language that may not be fully decipherable outside that particular community. Because of this constant growth, hip-hop language is a very effective form of communication which serves as a medium of resistance to the dominant cultural communication. And yet, because rap also serves as an economic and commercial enterprise that spreads to those who are not a part of this original environment, a continual translation is necessary. With this lingual interpretation comes many tensions that strike at the contradictions inherit in hip-hop's commercialization.

These debates often take form on hip-hop internet newsgroups in reaction to a "rap dictionary" that is sent out on the groups every month. This dictionary lists much of the slang that is heard in rap and gives academic translations for them. It also spells out artists' acronyms, explains references to places and times, and answers any other questions that internet hip-hop headz bring up. The existence of this dictionary is highly contended in these groups. There are many foreign internet headz who read it to understand the many references to American popular culture and there are others who argue that it is a helpful tool for full comprehension of rappers' lyrics. There are others, however, who say that the dictionary absolutely defeats the purpose of using hip-hop slang. They say that the role of rap is not to teach outsiders, but to communicate within their community, and that once it crosses this boundary, it alienates this original group. Furthermore, if the outsiders do not already know the meaning of rappers' references, then, like any lingual translation, they will never truly understand its full meaning. Related to this is the argument that once these translations reach the internet, then they are probably no longer used in the street community. Their existence on the internet assumes that a fair amount of time has passed since their invention, enough time for the originators to have created 3 other words that mean the same thing.

The primary source of this conflict revolves around the fact that these cybersocial communities rely on the written word to communicate. This phenomenon is in almost direct contrast to the use of language in the street and brings up some interesting issues as far as expectations for spelling and the use of black english/hip-hop slang in what is presumed to be an academic environment. Spelling errors are often criticized and overuse of slang is questioned. Since most people on the internet gain access through college connections, it is assumed they are used to more formal writing and thus writing that varies too far from this mode of discourse is often interpretted as being a result of someone trying to hard to show they are from the street hip-hop community. Hip-hop slang is essentially an unwritten medium, and though some terminology is integrated into the academic format, any attempts to make the net mimic street conversations seems to be seen as trying to force a parallel relationship that cannot realistically exist. Thus, instead of making the writer seem more integrated within the community, it comes across as being a "front".

Related to this debate on the use of hip-hop language is the integration of typing lyrics and starting battles on the internet. Since it is essentially impossible for internetters to compare rapping on the internet, some headz have attempted to mimic some aspects of rapping by comparing and contesting lyrical skills. A fair amount of people participate or read these battles, but it is argued by others that it is a shallow subsitute for street rapping. Rapping is about more than just lyrics because although the cleverness of lyrical metaphors, puns and the use of uncommon popular culture references is judged, so is their delivery. The voice, timing, beat, speed and variety of the above are all important qualities of a rappers skill which the written form leaves out. It is argued to be a spoken skill in which the body can not be removed from the words, making the internet ill-suited for its performance.

All of these conflicts around the written medium draw off of this foundation on the body to question the legitimacy of alt.rap and rec.music.hip-hop. Their members recognize that language is an important medium for communication, but that its form and application vary drastically in the different spaces it assumes. And in the case of cyberspace, their attempts to communicate creates mistranslations and shallow interpretations of the audio and verbal foundation of hip-hop language; a fact that they urge all to respect.

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