Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gxg78 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-05T16:24:48.761Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Style-shifting in Multicultural London English in an all-girls homework club

A group of 11-year-old girls in Hackney change their pronunciations of the innovative Multicultural London English diphthongs according to the speech context.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2020

Rosie Oxbury  and
Esther de Leeuw
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

This study investigated whether and how pre-adolescent girls style-shift in Multicultural London English (MLE), a variety of English that is relatively new and potentially still changing. We looked at the extent to which five 11-year-old girls in a homework club in East London, where MLE is spoken, changed their pronunciations in different speech contexts. The results showed that the girls did indeed change their pronunciations in the different contexts (i.e. they style-shifted), and that the patterns of style-shifting varied between both the individual participants and the three vowels which were examined.

Type
Research Article
Information
English Today , Volume 36 , Special Issue 3: Special Issue: Language in the South of England , September 2020 , pp. 59 - 69
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bell, A. 2001. ‘Back in style.’ In Eckert, P. & Rickford, J. R. (eds.), Style and Sociolinguistic Variation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 139–169.Google Scholar
Boersma, P. & Weenink, D. 2016. Praat: Doing Phonetics by Computer (Version 6.0.19). Retrieved from http://www.praat.org/.Google Scholar
Census Information Scheme. 2013. 2011 Census Snapshot: Main Language. (No. CIS2013-01).Google Scholar
Cheshire, J., Kerswill, P., Fox, S. & Torgersen, E. 2011. ‘Contact, the feature pool and the speech community: The emergence of Multicultural London English.’ Journal of Sociolinguistics, (2), 151–196.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Di Paolo, M., Yaeger–Dror, M. & Wassink, A. B. 2011. ‘Analyzing vowels.’ In Di Paolo, M. & Yaeger–Dror, M. (eds.), Sociophonetics: A Student's Guide. London; New York, N.Y; Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, pp. 87–106.Google Scholar
Eckert, P. 1996. ‘Vowels and nail polish: The emergence of linguistic style in the preadolescent heterosexual marketplace.’ In Warner, N., Ahlers, J., Bilmes, L., Oliver, M., Wertheim, S. & Chen, M. (eds.), Gender and Belief Systems. Berkeley: Berkeley Women and Language Group, University of California, pp. 183–190.Google Scholar
Fox, S. 2015. The New Cockney: New Ethnicities and Adolescent Speech in the Traditional East End of London. NY: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Gafter, R. J. 2016. ‘What's a stigmatized variant doing in the word list? Authenticity in reading styles and Hebrew pharyngeals.’ Journal of Sociolinguistics, 20(1), 31–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hazen, K. 2005. ‘The IN/ING variable.’ In Brown, K. (ed.), Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (2nd edn.) Vol. 5. St. Louis: Elsevier, pp. 581–584.Google Scholar
Haddican, B., Foulkes, P., Hughes, V. & Richards, H. 2013. ‘Interaction of social and linguistic constraints on two vowel changes in Northern England.’ Language Variation and Change, 25(3), 371–403.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Huber, J. E., Stathopoulos, E. T., Curione, G. M., Ash, T. A. & Johnson, K. 1999. ‘Formants of Children, Women, and Men: The Effects of Vocal Intensity Variation.’ The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 106(3 Pt 1), 1532–1542.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kerswill, P., Torgersen, E. N. & Fox, S. 2008. ‘Reversing ‘drift’: Innovation and diffusion in the London diphthong system.’ Language Variation and Change, 20(3), 451–491.10.1017/S0954394508000148CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kerswill, P. & Williams, A. 2000. ‘Creating a New Town koine: Children and language change in Milton Keynes.’ Language in Society, 29(1), 65–115.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Labov, W. 1972a. Sociolinguistic Patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Labov, W. 1972b. ‘Some principles of linguistic methodology.’ Language in Society, 1(1), 97–120.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Labov, W. 1994. Principles of Linguistic Change. Volume 1: Internal Factors. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Lanza, E. 1992. ‘Can bilingual two-year-olds code-switch?’ Journal of Child Language, 19, 633–658.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mott, B. L. 2012. ‘Traditional Cockney and popular London speech.’ Dialectologia: Revista Electrònica, (9), 69–94.Google Scholar
Podesva, R. 2007. ‘Phonation type as a stylistic variable: The use of falsetto in constructing a persona.’ Journal of Sociolinguistics, 11(4), 478–504.10.1111/j.1467-9841.2007.00334.xCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Reid, E. 1978. ‘Social and stylistic variation in the speech of children: Some evidence from Edinburgh.’ In Trudgill, P. (ed.), Sociolinguistic Patterns in British English. London: Edward Arnold, pp. 158–171.Google Scholar
Rickford, J. R. 2014. ‘Situation: Stylistic variation in sociolinguistic corpora and theory.’ Language and Linguistics Compass, 8(11), 590–603.10.1111/lnc3.12110CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rickford, J. R. & McNair–Knox, F. 1994. ‘Addressee- and topic-influenced style shift: A quantitative sociolinguistic study.’ In Biber, D. & Finegan, E. (eds.), Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Register. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 235–276.Google Scholar
Roach, P. 2004. ‘British English: Received Pronunciation.’ Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 34(2), 239–245.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sharma, D. 2011. ‘Style repertoire and social change in British Asian English.’ Journal of Sociolinguistics, 15(4), 464–492.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sharma, D. 2018. ‘Style dominance: attention, audience and the “real me”.’ Language in Society, 47(1), 1–31.10.1017/S0047404517000835CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sharma, D. & Rampton, B. 2015. ‘Lectal Focusing in Interaction: a new methodology for the study of style variation.’ Journal of English Linguistics, 43(1), 3–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, J., Durham, M. & Richards, H. 2013. ‘The social and linguistic in the acquisition of sociolinguistic variation.’ Linguistics, 51(2), 258–324.CrossRefGoogle Scholar