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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 729

Part of Session 177: Field methods in multicultural megacities (Other abstracts in this session)

Investigating Multicultural London English: Corpus approaches to the discursive construction of identity in a large-scale variationist study

Authors: Kerswill, Paul Edward
Submitted by: Kerswill, Paul Edward (University of York, United Kingdom)

London’s Cockney dialect is one of very few working-class urban varieties in Britain to have its own well-established label. This high degree of enregisterment has some historicity: the dialect was portrayed by Dickens through some of his London characters, and it was the object of disapproval in Shaw’s Pygmalion. Centuries of immigration to London have had relatively few direct effects on developments in Cockney. However, this is no longer the case. Since around 1980, radical changes to the vowel system, particularly the diphthongs, and new discourse features including a this is + speaker quotative, attest to linguistic innovation induced by high levels of language contact in the East End mediated by second-language learning. This has resulted in a repertoire of speech forms used by young working-class people which we have labelled Multicultural London English (Cheshire et al. 2011). The extreme diversity of the population posed challenges for the research design. In this paper, I focus on one aspect of the design: the interview schedule, which encouraged particularly rich discussions among the participants of language and identity. Using a corpus analysis of these interviews, conducted with some 140 young Londoners in friendship pairs, I focus on the way the young people discursively construct their own way of speaking (Kerswill fc 2012). It is clear that they are ambivalent about ‘Cockney’, usually defining it as ‘the other’, belonging to people who are possibly older, white, sometimes racist, using rhyming slang, and living in another borough. They position their speech as separate from both Cockney and Received Pronunciation (or ‘posh’), and many simply call it ‘slang’. Many see it as non-racial, but others, particularly those living in an outer-city borough, see it as essentially ‘black’. Expressions of linguistic identity are thus polarised, while within the polarisation categories these expressions are nuanced. Corpus-driven discourse analysis thus emerges as a useful tool in language variation and change.

References:

Cheshire, Jenny, Kerswill, Paul, Fox, Susan & Torgersen, Eivind (2011). Contact, the feature pool and the speech community: The emergence of Multicultural London English. Journal of Sociolinguistics 15/2: 151–196.

Kerswill, Paul (fc 2012). Identity, ethnicity and place: the construction of youth language in London. In P. Auer (ed.) Space in Language and Linguistics. Berlin: De Gruyter.