ethnicity

• heritage language


  not the dominant language in the society in which someone lives, but one that is spoken at home
• code-switching


  when a person shifts from one language to another in a conversation
• style-shifting


  occurs with monolingual speakers, and is when they are adjusting the way they speak based on a combination of factors
• Multicultural London English (MLE)


  • sociolect of english that emerged late 20th century
  • spoken authentically by working class, mainly young, people in London
  • replacing cockney and other dialects
  • combines elements of cockney, jamaican, carribean and south asian englishes
  • young people who are exposed to different varieties of englishes
• features of MLE


  • shift in some vowels to the back of the mouth- pronunciation of /h/ which isn't pronounced in cockney
  • vocabulary - 'bare' , 'beef', 'innit'
  • grammatical features- 'dem' as a plural, 'man' as pronoun
• patois


  the dialect of a particular region, especially one with low status, in relation to the standard language of the country
• creole


  a person mixed of european and black descent

  a mother tongue formed from the contact of a european language (english, french, spanish) with local languages (african languages spoken by slaves in west indies)
• idiolect


  the speech habits peculiar to a particular person.
• sociolect


  a form of language or a set of lexical items used by a socioeconomic class, profession, age group, or other social group
• familect


  language used to a particular family
• migration


  large scale arrival of carribean people in late 1940s onwards (wind rush), new forms of englishes formed in urban areas

  • creole
  • They brought their rich culture, language, and work ethic.
• context jamaican english


  1960s and 1970s - contact between Jamaican-English young people and their white working class neighbours at work and at school, and the increasing number of mixed race relationships -exposed to each other’s varieties of English.

  A degree of ‘crossing’ e.g. a young white person might use more traditional language with some peer groups but ‘shift’ into lexis more influenced by Jamaican English when with black friends
• non standard use of verbs- jamaican english


  'to be' - she be wrong, she dreaming

  he tell me dat yesterday, she think he a super star
• how creole was used

  ​

  Ben Rampton ‘Creole was widely seen as cool, tough, and good to use. It was associated with assertiveness and verbal resourcefulness, competence in heterosexual relationships and opposition to authority’ (2010)
• in some ways, usage of language that is influenced by Jamaican Creole can be seen as creation of resistance identity through language. Shunned and mocked by the establishment, the usage of creole could be seen almost as a political stance – an intentional divergence.​

  • John Pitts (2012) – stated that young black people who felt ignored by society might see their use of creole as a statement of resistance.
• gary ives bradford study

  In 2014 two case studies in London and Bradford because he wanted to investigate new dialects. School A, was the Bradford Study:​

  • Micro study – spoke to 8 teenage boys about the way they spoke and the language they used. In the school - 95% of the students were from Pakistani backgrounds – the majority from Mirpuri which is very rural. ​
  • Ives found that, quite clearly, the boys used a mix of Punjabi and English when communicating with each.
• what boys said about their language - gary ives

  • “It’s all about our area”​
  • “Other people don’t understand what you are saying … we use a different language so they don’t know … that isn’t between a white person and a Pakistani person but from Pakistani to Pakistani … there’s different types from different areas”​
  • Self-identified as ‘British Asian’ – they referred to those who had recently come over from Pakistan as ‘freshies’. The boys admitted that although they did not look down on ‘freshies’ they did not feel as connected to them because of their accent.
• gary ives - social class consideration

  • Distinction based on post code - referred to some of their language choices as ‘street’ or ‘BD8’ and how ‘BD22’ language would be ‘different’ and ‘posh’.​
  • One boy talked about how his language had a lot to do with ‘the music industry, like rap and hip hop’ – he said that peer slang unified social groups.
• kerswill et al


  Multicultural London English- a multiethnolect- 88 different varieties in Hackney- post Wind Rush and slum clearance. Media has mockingly labelled it as ‘Jafrican’ but it is more complex than ‘white kids trying to sound black’ (Starkey’s famous words)
• Research carried out at Lancaster University and Queen Mary University of London suggests that, "In much of the East End of London the Cockney dialect... will have disappeared within another generation.... it will be gone [from the East End] within 30 years.... It has been 'transplanted' to... [Essex and Hertfordshire New] towns.
• sharma and sankaran

  South Asians in Southall Study – They found that second generation children abandoned the pronunciation of their parents (retroflex /r/ as in Punjabi).This was assumed that because there was more acceptance in the community, as South Asians were no longer a minority in Southall.
• mark sebba

  studied London Jamaican in the 90s and concluded that the new generation speakers born into London’s Caribbean communities speak a variety influenced by Jamaican Creole, Cockney & RP.
• comtext - african american english/ black english


  slave trade initiated by european powers in 16th century

  These historic facts supports the linguistic assumption that the native Africans first developed a pidgin in West Africa and then when moved to the Caribbean the following generations developed this make-shift language into a fully-fledged one, a creole based on fragments of English and dramatically re-structures with constructions not found in the input varieties of English.
• pidgin 


  a grammatically simplified means of communication that develops between two or more groups of people that do not have a language in common