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22 - British Asian English

from Part IV - Multilingualism: The Development of Urban Contact Varieties

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 October 2024

By
Devyani Sharma  and
Jessica Wormald
Edited by
Susan Fox
Susan Fox
Affiliation:
Universität Bern, Switzerland
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Summary

This chapter reviews varieties of British English that have developed in South Asian communities around the United Kingdom. There is no single British Asian English; rather, the term can be used to describe a diverse range of regional sub-varieties. South Asians are the largest ethnic minority in the United Kingdom, with large concentrations in urban areas across England, including London, Birmingham, Leicester and Bradford. In addition to large demographic numbers, a reason for the emergence of distinctive varieties in South Asian communities is the historical presence of English in South Asian countries, reinforcing systematic divergences from British English speech norms. The chapter reviews the history of British South Asian communities in recent decades, and then describes an array of features of these regional varieties: phonetics and phonology, lexicon, and grammar, as well as at the level of discourse and conversational interaction, where systematic signals of identity and ideology can be observed in speech style variation and code-switching.

Keywords

British South Asian diasporaSouth Asian languagescode-switchingregional variationintersectionality
Type
Chapter
Information
Language in Britain and Ireland , pp. 471 - 490
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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