Multicultural London English: Interview data

<p>Abstract copyright data collection owner.</p>This collection consists of transcripts of paired interviews of 127 speakers aged 4–40, 5 age groups; working-class Londoners from Hackney, Haringey and Islington of different ethnicities, c. 1.6 million words. Multi-ethnic and multilingual cities throughout northern Europe are spawning new varieties of their national languages. ‘Multicultural London English’ (MLE) is a case in point. Baptised ‘Jafaican’ by the media, this new variety of English combines pronunciations from the immigrants’ languages with features we can trace to Cockney, as well as to general developments in the South of England. Young people of all ethnicities tend to say ‘fehs’ and ‘coht’ for face and coat, instead of the traditional ‘fice’ and ‘cowt’. Like young speakers everywhere, Londoners say ‘I WAS LIKE “that’s stupid”. But they also use ‘THIS IS ME: “let’s go home”’, rarely found elsewhere. We wanted to establish how MLE arose. We recorded not only teenagers but also children as young as 4 and adults. Unexpectedly, MLE was quite well established among the youngest children, suggesting they acquired it from peers and older children, not their parents, who were mostly not first-language English speakers. Young adults used it, but less consistently than teenagers. Older adults did not, probably because they grew up before it had become established. We investigated whether MLE was similar across ethnicities and districts: perceptually, listeners could not distinguish ethnicity with any certainty, while more MLE-sounding voices were likely to be thought to be from London. We conclude that this multi-ethnic variety emerges because children select from a ‘pool’ of linguistic features they hear around them, giving rise to a new, possibly permanent, way of speaking. We argue this is a distinct form of language change. <p>Project description:</p>London has long been considered by linguists as a motor of change in the English language in Britain. The investigators’ ESRC-funded studies from the early 90s to 2007 show that, while there is widespread ‘levelling’ in the south-east, leading to greater uniformity in accent and grammar, there are new, largely minority ethnic-based changes emerging in inner-city London. The present project investigates whether and how young children acquire these new features, how they are maintained or accentuated in adolescence, and whether they are maintained in adulthood. If they are, this will have consequences for the development of spoken English in Britain. The research asks: Are there different ‘ethnic’ Englishes in London, or is the new variety, dubbed ‘Multicultural London English’ (MLE), relatively uniform across ethnicities, including ‘Anglos’? Do Londoners change their speech across the lifespan? What features enter into MLE, and which don’t? Do Londoners detect any ethnic affiliation for the features? Are there rhythmic differences in the speech of Londoners? The project will record, mainly in pairs, at least 112 people from the northern inner city, ages ranging from 4 to 40 and the ethnic balance reflecting the local population. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses will be performed