Contact, the feature pool and the speech community: The emergence of Multicultural London English
Autor: | Eivind Nessa Torgersen, Jenny Cheshire, Paul Kerswill, Susan Patricia Fox |
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Rok vydání: | 2011 |
Předmět: |
Linguistics and Language
education.field_of_study Sociology and Political Science media_common.quotation_subject Population Diphthong Quotative Language and Linguistics Linguistics Speech community Feature (linguistics) Philosophy Variation (linguistics) History and Philosophy of Science Multiculturalism Sociology education Sociolinguistics media_common |
Zdroj: | Journal of Sociolinguistics. 15:151-196 |
ISSN: | 1360-6441 |
Popis: | 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; (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. |
Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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