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

✍ Scribed by Jenny Cheshire; Paul Kerswill; Sue Fox; Eivind Torgersen

• Book ID: 111038047
• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2011
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 654 KB
• Volume: 15
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1360-6441
• DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9841.2011.00478.x

✦ Synopsis

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; ( ) 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 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.