HomeMulticultural London English: the emergence, acquisition and diffusion of a new variety
Principal Investigator
Co-Investigator
Research Assistants
Sue Fox, Arfaan Khan and Eivind Torgersen
Time Period
October 2007–September 2010
Funding
£721,495 from the Economic and Social Research Council
Description
This project builds on the results of our previous one, examining the role of ethnic minority English in driving forward linguistic innovation in London in phonetic, grammatical and discourse features. The key is to understand the nature of what we call ‘Multicultural London English’: the (potentially) ethnically neutral way of speaking that nevertheless contains many features attributable to different ethnic groups. We attempt to demarcate this variety and to discover how and when children acquire it, as well as whether people continue to use it into adulthood. We will try to discover how features pass from being ethnically marked to being communally accepted. The project will explore ‘ethnicity’ as an aspect of identity and will investigate experimentally how adolescents evaluate socially some specific phonetic features. The project builds on Fox's and Khan's PhD research and integrates ethnicity explicitly into the study of language change in progress, with implications for our understanding of mechanisms of linguistic innovation and change in a highly multiethnic and multilingual metropolis.
