Work

Contact, the feature pool and the speech community: The emergence of Multicultural London English

Year: 2011

Type: article

Abstract: In the multilingual centres of Northern Europe's major cities, new varieties of the host languages are emerging. While some analyse these ‘multiethnolects’ as youth styles, we take a variationist approach to an emerging ‘Multicultural London English’ (MLE), asking: (1) what features characterise MLE; (2) at what age(s) are they acquired; (3) is MLE vernacularised ; and (4) when did MLE emerge, and what factors enabled this? We argue that innovations in the diphthongs and the quotative system are generated from the specific sociolinguistics of inner‐city London, where at least half the population is undergoing group second‐language acquisition and where high linguistic diversity leads to a heterogeneous feature pool to select from. We look for incrementation ( Labov 2001 ) in the acquisition of the features, but find this only for two ‘global’ changes, BE LIKE and goose ‐fronting, for which adolescents show the highest usage. Community‐internal factors explain the age‐related variation in the remaining features.

Source: Journal of Sociolinguistics

DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9841.2011.00478.x

Authors: Jenny Cheshire, Paul Kerswill, Sue Fox, Eivind Torgersen

Institutions: Queen Mary University of London, Lancaster University, Høgskolen i Sør-Trøndelag

Language: English

Topic: Linguistic Variation and Morphology

Subfield: Linguistics and Language

Field: Social Sciences

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: bronze

Funder: Economic and Social Research Council

Awards: G2870888651, G4178682258