Authors
Jenny Cheshire, Paul Kerswill, Sue Fox, Eivind Torgersen
Publication date
2011/4
Journal
Journal of sociolinguistics
Volume
15
Issue
2
Pages
151-196
Publisher
Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Description
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 …
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