This paper delves into the concept of ‘enregisterment,’ which defines processes and practices linking linguistic repertoires with social meanings, by examining meta-linguistic commentary in ...newspapers. Focussing on ‘Multicultural London English (MLE),’ the study analyses 200 articles from major British newspapers (2006–2022) qualitatively and quantitatively. The research uncovers recurring linguistic shibboleths, indexically linked social meanings, and prevalent language ideologies concerning MLE and other London dialects. Results reveal a consistent emphasis on specific linguistic shibboleths repeated in articles. Indexical links for ‘MLE’ are constructed through evaluative comments, alarmist metaphors employing xenophobic immigration tropes, and loaded keywords. ‘Cockney’ and ‘Estuary English’ are portrayed more favourably and, together with ‘Received Pronunciation (RP)’, serve to stigmatise MLE. This study underscores the role of media discourse in shaping the enregisterment of dialects, contributing to social stratification and the ‘othering’ of certain linguistic varieties.
•Multicultural London English (MLE) is ‘enregistered’ in English newspapers.•Enregisterment describes the process of linking social meanings to linguistic shibboleths, thus creating sociolinguistic indexes.•Enregisterment happens against a backdrop of language ideologies, which become apparent in newspaper discourse.•MLE is often evaluated negatively in newspapers due to conservative ideologies, also in left-leaning newspapers.•Other London dialects are used to ‘other’ MLE and receive a more benign treatment in print media.
This paper aims to contribute to the study of Multicultural London English (MLE) by focusing on the perceptions of MLE speakers of their own linguistic production and, also, by exploring the ...reactions and responses to this variety in the British press and on social media. The results indicate that most of the MLE speakers feel that they use a kind of slang. The majority of accounts found in the media depict MLE as foreign, associated with grime music and bad behaviour. Opinions garnered from social networks show more diverse views; while some reiterate the perceived negative aspects, others highlight its multicultural nature and uniqueness. The paper also suggests measures that could be adopted to change negative attitudes towards MLE.
Sociolinguistic research has demonstrated that ‘urban contact dialects’ tend to diffuse beyond the speech communities in which they first emerge. However, no research has attempted to explore the ...distribution of these varieties across an entire nation nor isolate the social mechanisms that propel their spread. In this paper, we use a corpus of 1.8 billion geo‐tagged tweets to explore the spread of Multicultural London English (MLE) lexis across the United Kingdom. We find evidence for the diffusion of MLE lexis from East and North London into other ethnically and culturally diverse urban centres across England, particularly those in the South (e.g. Luton), but find lower frequencies of MLE lexis in the North of England (e.g. Manchester), and in Scotland and Wales. Concluding, we emphasise the role of demographic similarity in the diffusion of linguistic innovations by demonstrating that this variety originated in London and diffused into other urban areas in England through the social networks of Black and Asian users.
The impersonal gets personal Hall, David
Natural language and linguistic theory,
02/2020, Volume:
38, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Multicultural London English (MLE) has developed a new pronoun,
man
, with a number of interesting properties. It can be interpreted as any person and number combination (1
sg
, 1
pl
, 2
sg
, 2
pl
, ...3
sg
, 3
pl
), and at first blush appears the allow a generic impersonal reading. One central strand of analyses of the ‘generic’ or ‘quasi-universal’ interpretation of impersonal pronouns involves treating them as featurally impoverished pronouns which act as variables bound by a generic operator either high in the clause (Moltmann
2006
; Sigurðsson and Egerland
2009
, a.o.) or at the top of the DP (Ackema and Neeleman
2018
). What is interesting about MLE
man
is that it seems to allow a generic reading while being generally resistant to binding: the pronoun never behaves as a bound variable, and so it could not reasonably be assumed that a generic operator can bind it. I show, however, that a closer look at the facts reveals that the quasi-generic interpretation, and all other possible interpretations of the pronoun, can be explained instead by assuming that it has a featureless person head, which introduces the full lattice of possible referents including speaker and addressee (following Harbour
2016
), and then allowing contextually determined subsets of that full lattice to be picked out by a choice function, modelled on the epsilon operator of von Heusinger (
2004
). This novel data from MLE suggests that generic-like interpretations can arise even where generic binding is not possible, but that the traditional strategy of generating these interpretations are still needed to capture the full typology of impersonal pronouns.
This variationist analysis investigates the development and spread of innit as an invariant tag in London English. The sociolinguistic distribution of innit in a socially stratified corpus of ...vernacular speech suggests that the form's emergence and spread were initiated and propelled system-internally through changes associated with grammaticalization. Frequency triggered phonetic reduction of isn't it to innit; loss of syntactic-semantic usage constraints and growing functional versatility enabled innit to seize the range of contexts and functions of grammatically-dependent tags (e.g. didn't you, weren't we), virtually ousting these from the system of negative-polarity interrogative tags. Examination of cross-linguistic data and comparisons with relevant pre- and non-contact varieties indicate multiple language contact and grammatical replication may have played an ancillary role. I flag some challenges of establishing contact effects in discourse-pragmatic change, and propose that the promotion of innit for invariant use was governed by its low salience and social indexicality of localness. (Innit, question tags, (Multicultural) London English, grammaticalization, language contact, grammatical replication)*
Peter Trudgill has suggested that a number of the processes involved in new-dialect formation may be of a widespread or universal type. Multicultural London English (MLE) is a new dialect that ...emerged in a different and more complex sociolinguistic situation than those considered previously, so it provides an opportunity to further consider the extent to which the processes are widespread or universal. I argue that the characteristic features of MLE emerged as a result of dialect mixture, including traditional London English, colonial and creole-influenced varieties of English, and many different interlanguage varieties of English. Some MLE features confirm the relevance of the levelling of minority forms, and perhaps also of simplification. There is also evidence of drift. Above all, their emergence confirms the importance of linguistic accommodation in face-to-face interactions. In this, as for so many sociolinguistic issues, Peter Trudgill was right!
The research presented here constitutes the first investigation of the standard language ideology (SLI) in Great Britain that takes account of a multiethnolect - namely Multicultural London English ...(MLE). A corpus-informed discourse study was conducted to explore representations of MLE and its speakers in two corpora: one containing data from non-MLE-speaking Londoners and one consisting of data from MLE speakers themselves. The data included in these corpora had been collected by means of an online questionnaire. The discourses in both corpora clearly reflected the SLI that prevails in the British context - but much stronger evidence of this was found in the non-MLE speakers' discourses. The non-MLE speakers were also found to hold much stronger, and very negative, social stereotypes of multiethnolect speakers. There was evidence of their use of iconisation and erasure in order to create linguistic (and social) differences between themselves and MLE speakers. Given the current political climate in Great Britain, it is hypothesised that the non-MLE speakers' negative views of the multiethnolect and its speakers helped them reaffirm their own prestige, which they perceived to be threatened. Notably, the MLE speakers themselves were not complicit in the negative stereotypisation of their own group.
Linguistic research refers to many related accents in Southeast England: Standard Southern British English (SSBE), Received Pronunciation (RP), Estuary English (EE), Cockney and Multicultural London ...English (MLE). However, there is inconsistency and imprecision in the demarcation of these accents based on linguistic and social factors. This paper delineates accents in Southeast England based on patterns of linguistic co-variation which we then relate to social predictors. We applied functional Principal Component Analysis to F1 and F2 measurements for diphthongs extracted from wordlist and passage productions for 193 young, south-eastern speakers. Principal Components were entered into a clustering analysis that identified patterns of linguistic co-occurrence. Three clusters emerge, broadly aligning with SSBE, MLE and EE for both linguistic and social factors. We illustrate the linguistic centre of gravity of the three diphthong systems for use as reference points in future research, and we discuss the need to make explicit how accents are defined.
The study presented here is the first empirical investigation of attitudes towards Multicultural London English (MLE), the multiethnolect spoken in England's main metropolis. An online questionnaire ...was used to gather data from 800 participants, including MLE speakers as well as non-MLE speakers from a wide variety of different backgrounds. The results indicate that the traditional dichotomy of status and solidarity as distinct evaluative dimensions does not manifest in attitudes towards MLE. We discuss the implications this would have for attitude theory, provided that this finding holds true for other multiethnolects.
The results also indicate that overall, attitudes towards MLE are affected by (1) individuals' own variety of English, (2) their mother tongue(s), (3) their level of education, and (4) the frequency of their contact with MLE speakers. We interpret the effect of these variables to be due to (1) ingroup loyalty, (2) familiarity with social stereotypes, (3) enhanced reasoning skills, and (4) the reduction of stereotypes through intergroup contact. We discuss the implications these findings - should they generalise to the London population at large - would have for the development of effective language planning measures to promote social equality for multiethnolect speakers.
Recent accounts of discourse-pragmatic (DP) variation have demonstrated that these features can acquire social indexical meaning. However, in comparison to other linguistic variables, DP features ...remain underexplored and third-wave perspectives on the topic are limited. In this article, I analyse the distribution, function and social meaning of the ‘attention signals’ – those features which fulfil the explicit function of eliciting the attention of an individual – in just over 35 hours of self-recordings of 25 adolescents collected during a year-long sociolinguistic ethnography of an East London youth group. This leads me to identify an innovative attention signal – ey. Distributional analyses of this feature show that ey is associated with a particular Community of Practice, the self-defined and exclusively male ‘gully’. By examining the discourse junctures at which ey occurs, I argue that this attention signal is most frequently used by speakers to deploy a ‘dominant’ stance. For gully members, this feature is particularly useful as an interpersonal device, where it is used to manage ingroup/outgroup boundaries. Concluding, I link the use of ey and the gully identity to language, ethnicity and masculinity in East London.
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