- HiST/ALT
N-7004 Trondheim
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This study investigates voice quality in London English, using acoustic features such as harmonic structure (H1-H2) and fundamental frequency (f0). We compare the speech of 28 Inner London Hackney speakers of Anglo and non-Anglo... more
This study investigates voice quality in London English, using acoustic features such as harmonic structure (H1-H2) and fundamental frequency (f0). We compare the speech of 28 Inner London Hackney
speakers of Anglo and non-Anglo background with the speech of 14 Outer London Anglo speakers from Havering. The results reveal that voice quality and pitch significantly differ between the two locations, where Inner London speech is lower in pitch,
yet more breathy in voice quality. This suggests that the H1-H2 measure is not necessarily dependent on global f0 values.
speakers of Anglo and non-Anglo background with the speech of 14 Outer London Anglo speakers from Havering. The results reveal that voice quality and pitch significantly differ between the two locations, where Inner London speech is lower in pitch,
yet more breathy in voice quality. This suggests that the H1-H2 measure is not necessarily dependent on global f0 values.
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Recent work on London English has found innovation in inner city areas, most likely as the outcome of dialect contact. These innovations are shared by speakers of different ethnic backgrounds, and have been identified as features of... more
Recent work on London English has found innovation in inner city areas, most likely as the outcome of dialect contact. These innovations are shared by speakers of different ethnic backgrounds, and have been identified as features of Multicultural London English (MLE). This study examines whether syllable-timing is a feature of MLE, as work on rhythm shows that dialect and language contact may lead to varieties of English becoming more syllable-timed. Narratives as told by teenagers of different ethnic backgrounds and elderly speakers were segmented by forced phonemic alignment and measurements of vocalic normalized Pairwise Variability Index (nPVI), as an indicator of rhythmic patterns, were calculated. The results revealed that young speakers of non-Anglo background were significantly more syllable-timed than young Anglo speakers and the inner-London speakers were more syllable timed than the outer London speakers. Additionally, there was a correlation between articulation rate and nPVI for the non-Anglo speakers: speakers with a high vocalic articulation rate were more syllable-timed. Changes in the duration of particular diphthongs and schwa may have influenced the overall speech rhythm. The relatively low nPVI for all speaker groups may also indicate London's status as a center of linguistic innovation due to long-standing migration.
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This paper presents perceptual data from London and Birmingham. We used perceptual tests to investigate the uniformity of Multicultural London English (MLE) in relation to ethnicity and geographical location of speakers, as measured by... more
This paper presents perceptual data from London and Birmingham. We used perceptual tests to investigate the uniformity of Multicultural London English (MLE) in relation to ethnicity and geographical location of speakers, as measured by London and Birmingham listeners’ ability to classify ethnicity and location based on short speech samples. The MLE features shared by most speakers in inner-city London were corroborated by small or no differences in the ethnic classification of inner-city speakers by London listeners. We have also tested listeners from Birmingham to examine to what degree MLE is also regionally neutral, i.e. if the multicultural varieties are non-regional.
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Communicative adequacy is a key construct in second language research, as the primary goal of most language learners is to communicate successfully in real-world situations. Nevertheless, little is known about what linguistic features... more
Communicative adequacy is a key construct in second language research, as the primary goal of most language learners is to communicate successfully in real-world situations. Nevertheless, little is known about what linguistic features contribute to communicatively adequate speech. This study fills this gap by investigating the extent to which complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) predict adequacy; and whether proficiency and task type moderate these relationships. Twenty native speakers and 80 second language users from four proficiency levels performed five tasks. Speech samples were rated for adequacy and coded for a range of complexity, accuracy, and fluency indices. Filled pause frequency, a feature of breakdown fluency, emerged as the strongest predictor of adequacy. Predictors with significant but smaller effects included indices of all three CAF dimensions: linguistic complexity (lexical diversity, overall syntactic complexity, syntactic complexity by subordination, frequency of conjoined clauses), accuracy (general accuracy, accuracy of connectors), and fluency (silent pause frequency, speed fluency). For advanced speakers, incidence of false starts also emerged as predicting communicatively adequate speech. Task type did not influence the link between linguistic features and adequacy.
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London, like many other large cities in Europe, is now home to immigrants from many different countries. In some areas of the city immigrant families now outnumber the White British families that have been living in the area for many... more
London, like many other large cities in Europe, is now home to immigrants from many different countries. In some areas of the city immigrant families now outnumber the White British families that have been living in the area for many generations. As a result the English spoken in these areas has changed rapidly, with many innovations that we argue are due to the indirect effect of multiple language contact. We discuss some of innovations in terms of why and how they have emerged, and consider the available evidence that can indicate whether the innovations are likely to survive.
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This article analyses the use of particular pragmatic markers in two corpora of spoken London English: the Linguistic Innovators Corpus (LIC) and the Corpus of London Teenage Language (COLT). We found variation according to sex, ethnicity... more
This article analyses the use of particular pragmatic markers in two corpora of spoken London English: the Linguistic Innovators Corpus (LIC) and the Corpus of London Teenage Language (COLT). We found variation according to sex, ethnicity and geographical location, with a different distribution for each pragmatic marker. The innovative pragmatic marker you get me was most frequent among male non-Anglo Hackney residents, indicating innovation in inner London. We argue that a number of pragmatic markers, most notably you get me, should be regarded as elements of Multicultural London English, along with other features that have already been documented.
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This article reports on work carried out as part of the project Analysis of Spoken London English Using Corpus Tools, namely, an analysis of the use of indefinite article forms in spoken London English in a corpus of transcribed... more
This article reports on work carried out as part of the project Analysis of Spoken London English Using Corpus Tools, namely, an analysis of the use of indefinite article forms in spoken London English in a corpus of transcribed interviews, combining methodologies from sociolinguistics and corpus linguistics.The authors find a relatively high frequency of a before words beginning with a vowel, where Standard English will have an. Social factors, in particular speakers’ age, ethnicity, and place of residence, are more important than linguistic factors affecting the use of a before vowels. The authors argue that the indefinite article a before vowels forms part of Multicultural London English, along with other phonological and grammatical features that have previously been documented. The indefinite article a before vowels seems to have undergone a process of reallocation in which its status has been realigned, possibly because of an increase in social acceptance of nonstandard forms.
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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... more
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 highest usage. Community-internal factors explain the age-related variation in the remaining features.
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Recent work on London English has found innovation in inner city areas, most likely as the outcome of dialect contact. These innovations are shared by speakers of different ethnic backgrounds, and have been identified as features of... more
Recent work on London English has found innovation in inner city areas, most likely as the outcome of dialect contact. These innovations are shared by speakers of different ethnic backgrounds, and have been identified as features of Multicultural London English (MLE). This study examines whether syllable timing is a feature of MLE, as work on rhythm shows that dialect and language contact may lead to varieties of English becoming more syllable-timed. We hypothesized that MLE speakers would also show suprasegmental innovations, having more syllable-timed rhythm than what has been reported for British English. Narratives as told by teenagers of different ethnic backgrounds, elderly speakers born between 1920 and 1935 and speakers born between 1874 and 1895 were extracted from interviews. The speech was segmented into consonantal and vocalic elements by forced phonemic alignment. Measurements of vocalic nPVI, as an indicator of rhythmic patterns, were calculated. Overall, the inner-London speakers were more syllable-timed than what has been found for British English. The results revealed that young speakers of non-Anglo background were significantly more syllable-timed than young Anglo speakers. The relatively low nPVI for all inner-London speaker groups may indicate the capital’s status as a centre of linguistic innovation and long-standing migration. The results of the present study combined with work on other varieties reinforces the idea that the tendency for English to become more syllable-timed is a global phenomenon fuelled by language and dialect contact.
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This study contributes to innovation and diffusion models by examining phonetic changes in London English. It evaluates Sapir's notion of “drift,” which involves “natural,” unconscious change, in relation to these changes. Investigating... more
This study contributes to innovation and diffusion models by examining phonetic changes in London English. It evaluates Sapir's notion of “drift,” which involves “natural,” unconscious change, in relation to these changes. Investigating parallel developments in two related varieties of English enables drift to be tested in terms of the effect of extralinguistic factors. The diphthongs of price, mouth, face, and goat in both London and New Zealand English are characterized by “Diphthong Shift,” a process that continued unabated in New Zealand. A new, large data set of London speech shows Diphthong Shift reversal, providing counterevidence for drift. We discuss Diphthong Shift and its “reversal” in relation to innovation, diffusion, leveling, and supralocalization, arguing that sociolinguistic factors and dialect contact override natural Diphthong Shift. Studying dialect change in a metropolis, with its large and linguistically innovative minority ethnic population, is of the utmost importance in understanding the dynamics of change.
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This article is a contribution to the debate about the primacy of internal versus external factors in language change (Farrar and Jones 2002; Thomason and Kaufman 1988). Taking Labov's Principles of Vowel Shifting (Labov 1994) as... more
This article is a contribution to the debate about the primacy of internal versus external factors in language change (Farrar and Jones 2002; Thomason and Kaufman 1988). Taking Labov's Principles of Vowel Shifting (Labov 1994) as representing internal factors, we examine a vowel shift in Ashford, south-east of London. F1 and F2 measurements of the short vowels suggest a classic chain shift, largely following Labov's Principles II and III (though Labov's assumption that London short front vowels are rising is shown to be wrong). However, corresponding data from Reading, west of London, evidence no signs of a chain shift. The two datasets show identical targets for the changes in each town. Thus, there has been convergence between the two short vowel systems – from different starting points. We argue that a dialect contact model is more explanatory than internal factors in this case of regional dialect levelling in the south-east of England.
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Previous acoustic analyses of the short monophthongs of younger and older speakers in south-east England demonstrate a convergence in the vowel systems (Torgersen and Kerswill, 2004). Following Wells’s (1982) claim that London is the... more
Previous acoustic analyses of the short monophthongs of younger and older speakers in south-east England demonstrate a convergence in the vowel systems (Torgersen and Kerswill, 2004). Following Wells’s (1982) claim that London is the centre of accent innovation in the south-east, we suggested that the change was driven by diffusion from London. Analyses of vowels of young and elderly informants in inner and outer London boroughs suggest that, in fact, many young Londoners are engaged in a process of innovation and divergence, not levelling. We find variation between ethnic groups, and this points to inter-ethnic relations as a source of innovation in London English.
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We draw on the observation that many features of new urban language varieties in multilingual contexts do not seem to be associated with any one particular ethnic group. Rather, many young speakers draw on and share at least a portion of... more
We draw on the observation that many features of new urban language varieties in multilingual contexts do not seem to be associated with any one particular ethnic group. Rather, many young speakers draw on and share at least a portion of the wide linguistic resources reflecting the ethnically mixed nature and multilingual backgrounds of their communities. We discuss new varieties of this kind in Britain’s two largest cities, London and Birmingham. Our results support the existence of a Multicultural English, with social and regional variation. An important factor appears to be the amount of social interaction that takes place between individual speakers and we demonstrate that multi-ethnic friendship networks play a key role in its emergence and diffusion.
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In this paper we consider whether different ethnic ways of speaking can be distinguished in the spoken English of young people aged 16-19 in London. We base our analysis on a corpus of 1.4 million words of informal speech from 100 young... more
In this paper we consider whether different ethnic ways of speaking can be distinguished in the spoken English of young people aged 16-19 in London. We base our analysis on a corpus of 1.4 million words of informal speech from 100 young people aged 16-19, from one inner London and one outer London area. The socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds of the young speakers reflect the social composition of the two areas: both groups of speakers are predominantly working class, but the inner London speakers are from a wide range of ethnicities while the outer London speakers are predominantly of white British (Anglo) heritage. Many (mainly white) Londoners moved from the inner city (the East End) to the outer London area and further afield, particularly Essex, in the 1950s; by contrast, the inner London area has a high proportion of recent migrants from overseas. Our conclusions so far suggest that the nature of a speaker's friendship group is a key factor in the diffusion of linguistic innovations, and that this interacts with ethnicity. Although speakers who are part of multi-ethnic friendship groups make greater use of certain linguistic features, and the non-Anglo speakers have the largest proportion of the innovative features, all speakers draw on a range of linguistic forms that cannot necessarily, or at least can no longer, be attributed to specific ethnic groups. Together, these features constitute a variety which we have dubbed Multicultural London English (MLE). We illustrate our conclusions with qualitative and quantitative analyses of phonological variables as well as one grammatical feature. We also try to identify who the (potential) linguistic innovators are, i.e. the (types of) individuals who are in the lead in language change. We show that the young person's ethnicity is a factor in itself, but that this interacts with their friendship patterns: membership of a dense multi-ethnic friendship network determines their choice and degree of use of certain linguistic features. Secondly, we identify a cluster of life-style indicators which seem to be shared by most of the individuals we identify as potential linguistic innovators.
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Research Interests:
This article reports on work carried out as part of the project Analysis of Spoken London English Using Corpus Tools, namely, an analysis of the use of indefinite article forms in spoken London English in a corpus of transcribed... more
This article reports on work carried out as part of the project Analysis of Spoken London English Using Corpus Tools, namely, an analysis of the use of indefinite article forms in spoken London English in a corpus of transcribed interviews, combining methodologies from sociolinguistics and corpus linguistics.The authors find a relatively high frequency of a before words beginning with a vowel, where Standard English will have an. Social factors, in particular speakers’ age, ethnicity, and place of residence, are more important than linguistic factors affecting the use of a before vowels. The authors argue that the indefinite article a before vowels forms part of Multicultural London English, along with other phonological and grammatical features that have previously been documented. The indefinite article a before vowels seems to have undergone a process of reallocation in which its status has been realigned, possibly because of an increase in social acceptance of nonstandard forms.
Research Interests:
This paper reports on the analysis of the use of a number of invariant tags in spoken London English, which formed part of the completed project Analysis of spoken London English using corpus tools (funded by the British Academy). The... more
This paper reports on the analysis of the use of a number of invariant tags in spoken London English, which formed part of the completed project Analysis of spoken London English using corpus tools (funded by the British Academy). The tags examined were: innit, okay, right, yeah, you get me and you know, as well as three semi-fixed expressions containing you know, which functioned as tags: do you know what I mean, if you know what I mean and do you know what I'm saying.
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This paper discusses the practical and methodological issues that arose in adapting a set of data that was originally compiled with a largely manual analysis in mind to be used within a quantitative, sociolinguistic research paradigm. The... more
This paper discusses the practical and methodological issues that arose in adapting a set of data that was originally compiled with a largely manual analysis in mind to be used within a quantitative, sociolinguistic research paradigm. The data in question stem from the project Linguistic innovators:The English of adolescents in London (2004-2007), which was the first large-scale sociolinguistic project set in London. Interview data were collected from more than 120 speakers, who were sampled according to age, gender, ethnicity and geographical location. The transcribed dataset, which contains 1.3m words, has been successfully analysed for morpho-syntactic and discourse features within a sociolinguistic research paradigm (see Cheshire et al. 2008, Cheshire & Fox 2009). At the time of compilation, it had, however, not been envisaged that corpus linguistic analyses would be carried out on the basis of this data. Yet, this was the aim of the project Analysing London English using corpus tools (2008). As a result, despite the overall high accuracy of the transcriptions and the fact that the interviews had been transcribed using a standardised protocol, some modifications to the original format became necessary. In our paper, we will in a first step briefly outline these modifications. In a second step, we will then demonstrate how the new format can now be searched with standard corpus tools such as Wordsmith and AntConc as well as with Perl scripts. In particular, we will discuss how the rich levels of sociolinguistic meta-data available within LIC for all speakers can be fruitfully employed in such an endeavour, as reported in Gabrielatos et al. (2010) and Torgersen et al. (2011). This is important, as detailed information about the corpus speakers has in the past sometimes been missing in spoken language corpora, and indeed, not always been considered as that important when the goal was to have a large corpus (Sinclair 1995). Finally, we will raise some outstanding issues of corpus design that have not yet been applied in the current format of the corpus.
Certainly, neither the conversion process nor the search methodology presented in our paper are new, nor are they particularly advanced in their level of difficulty. Nevertheless, we feel that our extended experience in making use of the LIC-data for different research purposes can contribute to a general discussion of data standards beyond core corpus-linguistic data sources. In a time when corpus linguistics has “come of age”, such a discussion is no doubt beneficial for both corpus linguists and sociolinguists alike.
References
Cheshire, J., S. Fox, P. Kerswill & E. Torgersen. 2008. Ethnicity, friendship network and social practices as the motor of dialect change: Linguistic innovation in London. Sociolinguistica 22: 1-23.
Cheshire, J. & S. Fox. 2009. Was/were variation: A perspective from London. Language
Variation and Change 21: 1-38.
Gabrielatos, C., E. Torgersen, S. Hoffmann & S. Fox. 2010. A corpus-based sociolinguistic
study of indefinite article forms in London English. Journal of English Linguistics 38: 297-
334.
Torgersen, E., C. Gabrielatos, S. Hoffmann & S. Fox 2011. A corpus-based study of pragmatic markers in London English. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 7: 93-118.
Certainly, neither the conversion process nor the search methodology presented in our paper are new, nor are they particularly advanced in their level of difficulty. Nevertheless, we feel that our extended experience in making use of the LIC-data for different research purposes can contribute to a general discussion of data standards beyond core corpus-linguistic data sources. In a time when corpus linguistics has “come of age”, such a discussion is no doubt beneficial for both corpus linguists and sociolinguists alike.
References
Cheshire, J., S. Fox, P. Kerswill & E. Torgersen. 2008. Ethnicity, friendship network and social practices as the motor of dialect change: Linguistic innovation in London. Sociolinguistica 22: 1-23.
Cheshire, J. & S. Fox. 2009. Was/were variation: A perspective from London. Language
Variation and Change 21: 1-38.
Gabrielatos, C., E. Torgersen, S. Hoffmann & S. Fox. 2010. A corpus-based sociolinguistic
study of indefinite article forms in London English. Journal of English Linguistics 38: 297-
334.
Torgersen, E., C. Gabrielatos, S. Hoffmann & S. Fox 2011. A corpus-based study of pragmatic markers in London English. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 7: 93-118.
Research Interests:
Language Variation – European Perspectives V is based on papers presented at the Seventh International Conference on Language Variation in Europe (ICLaVE 7), which was held in Trondheim, Norway from 26 to 28 June 2013. The 17 papers... more
Language Variation – European Perspectives V is based on papers presented at the Seventh International Conference on Language Variation in Europe (ICLaVE 7), which was held in Trondheim, Norway from 26 to 28 June 2013. The 17 papers included in the book explore phonetic and phonological variation (Bitenc and Kenda-Jež; Hildenbrandt and Moosmüller; Jansen; Schaufuß; Schleef, Flynn and Ramsammy; Stuart-Smith, Rathcke, Sonderegger and Macdonald), morphology (Padilla-Moyano), syntax (Christensen and Juel Jensen; Jónsson, Brynjólfsdóttir and Sverrisdóttir), morphosyntax (Auger and Wycoff; Cerruti and Regis), language ideology, linguistic practices and language attitudes (Strand; Hall-Lew, Fairs and Lew; Dunmore and Smith-Christmas), code-switching (Amadou; Bucher) and language documentation (Kühl). The book is essential reading for scholars working on variation and change in European languages. The articles in the present volume investigate Romani, Turkish, Greek, Slovene, Picard, Swiss-German, Basque, Danish, Italian, English, Gaelic, Icelandic Sign Language, Faroe Danish and Norwegian.