Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-tf8b9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T11:24:35.751Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Cognitive and social forces in dialect shift: Gradual change in London Asian speech

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2011

Devyani Sharma
Affiliation:
Queen Mary, University of London
Lavanya Sankaran
Affiliation:
Queen Mary, University of London

Abstract

This study examines the retention of a non-native dialect feature by British Asians in London. We examine the use of one Punjabi feature (t-retroflexion) and one British feature (t-glottaling) across three groups: first-generation non-native immigrants and two age groups of second-generation British Asians. Cognitively oriented models predict that non-native features will either be innately blocked (Chambers, 2002) or reallocated by native generations. A socially oriented model allows for more gradual change. Contrary to the cognitive view, the older second generation neither blocks nor clearly reallocates use of t-retroflexion; they closely mirror the first generation's non-native use. However, they simultaneously control nativelike t-glottaling, reflecting a robust bidialectal ability. It is the younger second generation who exhibit focused reallocation in the form and function of t-retroflexion. This 20-year lag corresponds to major changes in demographics and race relations in the community over 5 decades. The study shows that acquisition of the local dialect and retention of exogenous features should be seen as independently constrained rather than as mutually exclusive.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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

REFERENCES

Alam, Farhana. (2007). Language and identity in “Glaswasian” adolescents. M.Litt. dissertation. University of Glasgow.Google Scholar
Alam, Farhana, and Stuart-Smith, Jane. (forthcoming). Identity and ethnicity in /t/ in Glasgow-Pakistani high-school girls. In Proceedings of the 17th International Congress of Phonetics Sciences (ICPhS), Hong Kong, China.Google Scholar
Alford, R.R. (1962). A suggested index of the association of social class and voting. Public Opinion Quarterly 26:417425.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Al-Wer, Enam. (2007). The formation of the dialect of Amman: From chaos to order. In Miller, C., Al-Wer, E., Caubet, D., & Watson, J. (eds.), Arabic in the city: Issues in dialect contact and language variation. London: Routledge. 5576.Google Scholar
Bhatia, T.K. (1993). Punjabi: A cognitive-descriptive grammar. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Bickerton, Derek. (1984). The language bioprogram hypothesis. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 7:173221.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blom, Jan-Petter & Gumperz, John J. (1972). Social meaning in linguistic structures: Code switching in Northern Norway. In Gumperz, J.J. & Hymes, D. (eds.), Directions in sociolinguistics. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 274310.Google Scholar
Britain, David. (2002). Diffusion, levelling, simplification and reallocation in past tense BE in the English Fens. Journal of Sociolinguistics 6(1):1643.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bybee, Joan. (2001). Phonology and language use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
CARF, Campaign against Racism and Fascism. (1981). Southall: The birth of a black community. London: Institute of Race Relations.Google Scholar
Cashmore, Ernest. (1996). A dictionary of race and ethnic relations. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Census, UK. (2001). U.K. Office for National Statistics. Available at: www.statistics.gov.uk. Accessed November 3, 2010.Google Scholar
Chambers, Jack. (2002). Dynamics of dialect convergence. Journal of Sociolinguistics 6:117130.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chambers, Jack. (2003). Sociolinguistic theory. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Cheshire, Jenny, Fox, Sue, Kerswill, Paul, & Torgersen, Eivind. (2011). Contact, the feature pool and the speech community: The emergence of Multicultural London English. Journal of Sociolinguistics 15(2):151196.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chun, Elaine. (2007). The meaning of mocking: Stylizations of Asians and preps at a U.S. high school. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Texas: Austin.Google Scholar
Chun, Elaine. (2009). Speaking like Asian immigrants: Intersections of accommodation and mocking at a U.S. high school. Pragmatics 19(1):1738.Google Scholar
DMAG Briefing. (2006). Data Management and Analysis Group, Greater London Authority. Available at: www.london.gov.uk. Accessed November 3, 2010.Google Scholar
Drummond, Rob. (2010). Poles in Manchester: social factors affecting the acquisition of local speech features. Presentation at Workshop on Dialect and Social Change in Urban Diasporic Communities, July, Queen Mary, University of London.Google Scholar
Ealing JSNA. (2010). Joint Strategic Needs Assessment report. Available at: http://www.ealingpct.nhs.uk/Publications/needs-assessment.asp. Accessed November 3, 2010.Google Scholar
Eckert, Penelope. (1989). The whole woman: Sex and gender differences in variation. Language Variation and Change 1:245268.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Evans, Bronwen, Mistry, Ajay, & Moreiras, Caroline. (2007). An acoustic study of first- and second-generation Gujarati immigrants in Wembley: Evidence for accent convergence? In Trouvain, J. & Barry, W. (eds.), Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Phonetics Sciences (ICPhS), 17411744. Available at: http://www.icphs2007.de/Google Scholar
Foulkes, Paul, Docherty, Gerry, & Watt, Dominic. (1999). Tracking the emergence of structured variation: Realisations of (t) by Newcastle children. Leeds Working Papers in Linguistics and Phonetics 7:125.Google Scholar
Foulkes, Paul, Docherty, Gerry, & Watt, Dominic. (2005). Phonological variation in child-directed speech. Language 81:77206.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goldthorpe, John H. (2000). On sociology: Numbers, narratives and the integration of research and theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Guzzo, Siria. (2009). Bedford Italians at work: A sociolinguistic analysis of the Italians in Britain. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Essex.Google Scholar
Hall-Lew, Lauren. (2009). Ethnicity and phonetic variation in a San Francisco neighborhood. Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University.Google Scholar
Hall-Lew, Lauren, & Starr, Rebecca L. (2010). Beyond the 2nd generation: English use among Chinese Americans in the San Francisco Bay area. English Today 26(3):1219.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harris, John, & Kaye, Jonathan. (1990). A tale of two cities: London glottaling and New York City tapping. The Linguistic Review 7:251274.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harris, Roxy. (2006). New Ethnicities and Language Use. London: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Herbert, Joanna. (2009). Oral histories of the Ugandan Asians in Britain: Gendered identities in the diaspora. Contemporary South Asia 17:1, 2132.Google Scholar
Heselwood, Barry, & McChrystal, Louise. (2000). Gender, accent featured and voicing in Panjabi-English bilingual children. Leeds Working Papers in Linguistics and Phonetics 8:4570.Google Scholar
Hirson, A., & Sohail, N. (2007). Variability of rhotics in Punjabi-English bilinguals. In Trouvain, J. & Barry, W. (eds.), Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Phonetics Sciences (ICPhS), 15011504. Available at: http://www.icphs2007.de/Google Scholar
Hoffman, Michol, & Walker, James. (2010). Ethnolects and the city: Ethnic orientation and linguistic variation in Toronto English. Language Variation and Change 22:3767.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hollingshead, A. B. (1975). Four factor index of social status. Unpublished manuscript, Department of Sociology, Yale University.Google Scholar
Kerswill, Paul. (1996). Children, adolescents, and language change. Language Variation and Change 8:177202.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kerswill, Paul, & Williams, Ann. (2000). Creating a new town koine: Children and language change in Milton Keynes. Language in Society 29:65115.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Khan, Arfaan. (2003). Reading revisited: Dialect levelling within a multi-ethnic British community. M.A. dissertation, University of Reading.Google Scholar
Khattab, Ghada. (2009). Phonetic accommodation in children's code-switching. In Bullock, B. E. & Toribio, A. J. (eds.), The Cambridge handbook of linguistic code-switching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 142160.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kirkham, Sam. (forthcoming). The acoustics of coronal stops in British Asian English. In Proceedings of the 17th International Congress of Phonetics Sciences (ICPhS). Hong Kong, China.Google Scholar
Labov, William. (1963). The social motivation of a sound change. Word 19:273309.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Labov, William. (1972). Sociolinguistic patterns. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Labov, William. (2007). Transmission and diffusion. Language 83(2):344387.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Labov, William. (2008). Mysteries of the substrate. In Meyerhoff, M. & Nagy, N. (eds.), Social lives in language: Sociolinguistics and multilingual speech communities. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 315326.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Laferriere, Martha. (1979). Ethnicity in phonological variation and change. Language 55:603617.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lambert, Kirsten, Alam, Farhana, & Stuart-Smith, Jane. (2007). Investigating British Asian accents: Studies from Glasgow. In Proceedings of the XVIth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. 15091511.Google Scholar
Li, Wei, Milroy, Lesley, & Pong, Sin Ching (1992). A two-step sociolinguistic analysis of code-switching and language choice. International Journal of Applied Linguistics 2(1):6386.Google Scholar
Masica, Colin. (1993). The Indo-Aryan languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Meads, R. J. (1983). Southall 830–1982. London: Merlin.Google Scholar
Milroy, James, Milroy, Lesley, Hartley, Sue, & Walshaw, David. (1994). Glottal stops and Tyneside glottalisation: Competing patterns of variation and change in British English. Language Variation and Change 6:327357.Google Scholar
Newman, Michael. (2010). Focusing, implicational scaling, and the dialect status of New York Latino English. Journal of Sociolinguistics 14(2):207239.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Oates, Jonathan. (2002). Southall and Hanwell. London: The History Press Ltd.Google Scholar
Penfield, Joyce, & Ornstein-Galicia, Jacob. (1985). Chicano English: An ethnic contact dialect. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pingali, Sailaja. (2009). Indian English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Platt, Lucinda. (2005). The intergenerational social mobility of minority ethnic groups. Sociology 39(3):445461.Google Scholar
Podesva, Robert. (2007). Phonation type as a stylistic variable: The use of falsetto in constructing a persona. Journal of Sociolinguistics 11(4):478504.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Powell, Enoch. (1969). Freedom and reality. Kingswood: Elliot Right Way Books.Google Scholar
Prince Ellen, F. (1988). On pragmatic change: The borrowing of discourse functions. Journal of Pragmatics 12:505518.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rampton, Ben. (1995). Crossing: Language and ethnicity among adolescents. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Roberts, Julie. (2002). Child language variation. In Chambers, J., Schilling–Estes, N., & Trudgill, P. (eds.), Handbook of language variation and change. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Roberts, Julie, & Labov, William. (1995). Learning to talk Philadelphian: Acquisition of short a by preschool children. Language Variation and Change 7:101112.Google Scholar
Roberts, Sarah. (2000). Nativization and the genesis of Hawaiian Creole. In McWhorter, J. (ed.), Language change and language contact in pidgins and creoles. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Sankoff, David, Tagliamonte, Sali, & Smith, Eric. (2005). Goldvarb X: A variable rule application for Macintosh and Windows. Department of Linguistics, University of Toronto.Google Scholar
Sankoff, Gillian. (2002). Linguistic outcomes of language contact. In Chambers, J. K., Trudgill, P., & Schilling-Estes, N. (eds.), The handbook of language variation and change. Oxford: Blackwell. 638668.Google Scholar
Sharma, Devyani. (2011). Return of the native: Hindi in British English. In Kothari, R. & Snell, R. (eds.), Hinglish. New Delhi: Penguin.Google Scholar
Sharma, Devyani (forthcoming). Style repertoire and social change in British Asian English. Journal of Sociolinguistics.Google Scholar
Singler, John. (2006). Yes, but not in the Caribbean. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 21:337358.Google Scholar
Smith, Jennifer, Durham, Mercedes, & Fortune, Liane. (2007). ‘Mam, my trousers is fa'in doon!’: Community, caregiver, and child in the acquisition of variation in a Scottish dialect. Language Variation and Change 19(1):6399.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, Jennifer, Durham, Mercedes, & Fortune, Liane. (2009). Universal and dialect-specific pathways of acquisition: Caregivers, children, and t/d deletion. Language Variation and Change 21(1):3667.Google Scholar
Stanford, James. (2008). Child dialect acquisition: New perspectives on parent/peer influence. Journal of Sociolinguistics 12(5):567596.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stuart-Smith, Jane, Timmins, Claire, & Alam, Farhana. (2011). Hybridity and ethnic accents: A sociophonetic analysis of ‘Glaswasian, In Gregersen, F., Parrott, J., and Quist, P. (eds), Selected papers from the Fifth International Conference on Language Variation in Europe (ICLaVE 5), Amsterdam: Benjamins, 4357.Google Scholar
Thomason, Sarah. (2001). Language contact: An introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Trudgill, Peter. (1986). Dialects in contact. New York: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Trudgill, Peter (2004). New-dialect formation: The inevitability of Colonial Englishes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Ullman, M. T. (2001). The neural basis of lexicon and grammar in first and second language: The declarative/procedural model. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 4(1):105122.Google Scholar
Urcioli, Bonnie. (1991). The political topography of Spanish and English: The view from a New York Puerto Rican Neighborhood. American Ethnologist 18(2):295310.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Winford, Donald. (2003). An introduction to contact linguistics. Oxford: BlackwellGoogle Scholar
Zentella, Ana Celia. (1997). Growing up bilingual: Puerto Rican Children in New York. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.Google Scholar