Multicultural London English in Ealing: sociophonetic and discourse-pragmatic variation in the speech of children and adolescents.
Abstract
This thesis is about Multicultural London English (MLE), a multiethnolect that is spoken
by young people in London (Cheshire et al., 2011) and potentially beyond (Drummond,
2016). The thesis investigates MLE in the speech of young people in a relatively understudied
part of London: Ealing, a borough of West London. The speech of adolescents
and children is compared to see if in Ealing, MLE features are used as part of an adolescent
speech style, or are also acquired by children. Because a different range of heritage
languages are spoken in Ealing compared to East London, the thesis also asks whether
there are linguistic innovations in Ealing that have not been found in previous studies of
MLE.
Using a variationist sociolinguistic framework, the project analyses MLE in the speech
of 24 young people aged 16–24 and 14 children aged 5–7. The diphthongs FACE, PRICE
and GOAT are analysed acoustically for both age groups. There is also a qualitative analysis
of epistemic phrases (phrases related to I swear) in the adolescent data, motivated by
the adolescents’ use of wallah – an Arabic borrowing that has also been found in other
European youth languages (Opsahl, 2009).
It is found that the children’s and adolescents’ diphthongs are similar in the quality of
the onset, and similar to the emerging MLE system described by Kerswill et al. (2008).
Among the adolescents, differences in the diphthongs pattern with language-internal effects
as well as social factors including speaker sex and community of practice membership.
The comparison between adolescents and children reveals that the children have
acquired the same diphthong onset qualities as the adolescents – replicating Cheshire et
al.’s finding in Hackney. However, the children have not acquired monophthongisation
of the diphthongs. These findings have implications both for the study of multiethnolects
and MLE, and for research on children’s acquisition of sociolinguistic variation.
Authors
Oxbury., Rosamund.Collections
- Theses [4121]