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

Oleh:

Cheshire, Jenny ; Kerswill, Paul ; Fox, Sue ; Torgersenc, Eivind

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Journal of Sociolinguistics (Full Text) vol. 15 no. 2 (2011), page 151-196.
Topik: Multiethnolects; youth language; language contact; new dialect formation; London English
Fulltext: Cheshire_Jenny.pdf (654.49KB)

Isi artikel

In themultilingual centres ofNorthern 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 anemerging ‘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.

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