Contact, the feature pool and the speech community: The emergence of Multicultural London English

TLDR

New varieties of host languages are emerging in the multilingual centres of Northern European major cities. The study investigates the features of Multicultural London English, their age of acquisition, vernacularisation, emergence, and enabling factors. The authors attribute innovations in diphthongs and the quotative system to inner‑city London’s sociolinguistic environment, where many residents are second‑language learners and high linguistic diversity supplies a heterogeneous feature pool. Only two global changes—BE LIKE and goose‑fronting—show incremental acquisition with adolescents using them most, while other features vary with community‑internal factors.

Abstract

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.