Multicultural Language Hybrids

It's not just English that absorbs linguistic influences from other cultures and languages. What's happening with German seems to reflect patterns that have been noted in English over the last 20-30 years, where German teens are picking up vocabulary items from Turkish in areas where there is a significant Turkish population and mixing goes on between different ethnic groups. In this report about a study from Pottsdam University, the suggestion is that it's mostly lexical features - a few words - that are picked up by German youths.

So is this similar to Multicultural London English, with a new hybrid language emerging? Or is it more like London (and maybe Birmingham and Liverpool too) in the 1980s when it was more a case of "crossing"? I suspect it's the latter, as there doesn't seem to be quite the same range of lexical, phonological and grammatical features that we see in the research of Paul Kerswill, Sue Fox and Jenny Cheshire into MLE (as seen being explained by Paul Kerswill here in a TED lecture).

Placing the accent on bigotry

Articles about different accents are often full of judgemental adjectives like "lazy", "pleasant" and "harsh" (and you can see what genuine linguists  think of such vocabulary by having a look at Paul Kerswill and John Wells' comments about the recent Economist article on changing accents) but a piece by Telegraph journalist Ed West reaches some new lows.

For him, "Jafaican" (or Multicultural London English) is "rather unpleasant, sinister, idiotic and absurd". His entire premise seems to be built upon the wrongheaded notion that MLE is something people "put on" - that it's a fake accent and one that reflects a desire to be street. As he puts it, "In London the adoption of Jafaican, even among the privately-educated, reflects both a lack of confidence in British cultural values and an aspiration towards some form of ghetto authenticity".

Frankly, this is a pile of steaming cobblers. Underpinning it seems to be a profound dislike for the speakers of MLE and a simmering resentment that otherwise decent posh people (white people, dammit) are picking up this dirty ghetto accent. It's almost like they want to be black. Shame!

The article annoys me too much to string many more sentences together, so I'm glad that a more restrained and analytical response to it is presented here by Ben Trawick-Smith on Dialect blog. He ends by characterises the article as not "a writer bravely fighting against an increasingly “PC” world... just an ignorant rant".

Changing accents

Several newspapers have picked up on an article* the research and ideas of Lancaster University linguist Paul Kerswill featured in an article for The Economist in which he talks about how accents are changing over time and speculates about what the country will sound like in years to come (2030, to be precise).

The original Economist article is here under the title Geordie's Still Alreet.  The Daily Mail jumped on the Geordie angle and the chance to print a picture of the delightful Cheryl Cole (whose recent tribulations with Simon Cowell and the US X Factor have been covered at length recently and at least partly blamed on her accent being tricky for Americans to understand) and featured the story under the title More than "Alreet".

Kerswill is one of the key linguists in the field and has been involved in a lot of recent work on Multicultural London English, among other things, so he knows what he's talking about. However, not all the articles based on his work are problem-free and it's interesting to see what Kerswill himself, and other linguists, have to say about the ways in which accents are described in the media. You can read more here on John Wells' phonetic blog.

Language Variation is one of the big areas for ENGA3 (sadly, it's not currently covered on the AQA B spec) and there's a decent chance of something about accent and dialect cropping up as a Language Discourses topic too this year. It's therefore worth looking at some of the complaints about the language used to represent different accents. Adjectives like sloppy, lazy, guttural and bland abound in many of these mainstream articles, and that's before you even get onto the readers' comments which are often laced with quite offensive stereotypes about the inhabitants of different regions and the way they speak.

We've covered the main thrust of Kerswill's argument here before, but it's certainly worth having a look at all of this again in preparation for the A2 exam later this month.

* edited on Thursday 9th June to reflect Paul Kerswill's comments below (sorry, Paul!)

"Crappy patois"

Yesterday's Evening Standard carried an op-ed by Henry Hitchings on the nature of changing London English. It's partly a response to Charles Moore's attack on changing English in the Telegraph and partly an advertisement for Hitchings' new book, which we mentioned on here yesterday.

Interestingly, Hitchings makes much of what linguists have called Multicultural London English, Multi-ethnic Youth Dialect, or what some journalists have called "Jafaican", which, as Hitchings points out, tends to cast it as an affectation or a fake dialect, rather than " an authentic, organic variety of English and it looks likely to become more prevalent". We've featured MEYD and MLE here on many occasions and if you click on the tabs at the bottom of this post you'll get some links to the research done by Sue Fox, Paul Kerswill, Jenny Cheshire (and others) into this fascinating area of sociolinguistics.

Sadly, anything about language change tends to aggravate those who see all change as a foul corruption of our beautiful tongue, or even (in the case of the Evening Standard article), deranged anti-Jamaican troglodytes who argue (or sneer, perhaps more accurately) that it's a "crappy patois" "derived from some of the most pointless countries in the world", and speaking it is likely to limit young people's life chances. Well, yes, but only if they speak it as their only variety, which is generally not the case, as Hitchings is at pains to point out. But why let a bit of reasoned argument get in the way of a good dose of prejudice?

'Londonstani'

Hey guys,

Apologies if you are already aware of this novel and it's potential for the Language student, I've only just 'discovered' it, and have literally just come back from a seminar where the author himself (Gautam Malkani) has been talking about the book. Even if you are aware of this novel, perhaps my ramblings will be useful anyway, if not to shed some light on what Gautam must have been thinking to write this work.

To give some background, 'Londonstani' is a novel about a group of Asian middle class boys who are part of the nineties 'desi' culture [I think!] They are a sort of a gang who are trying to please their parents at home whist maintaining their tough-boy attitude to their peers.

[In this way the novel is comparable to the novels of black writers Alex Wheattle and Courttia Newland-'East of Acre Lane'-see Biscuit struggling to tide things over at home- and 'The Scholar' -see Cory trying to protect Sonia from knowing what's going on with Sean-]

Amongst all this, the teenagers find their own take on religious racism and ethnic issues that prove interesting, but for Gautam Malkani the book has an essentially class focus. The plot is an especially recommended one on account of the controversial twist it has at the end [one I wish I could tell you but would completely spoil the book if you read it!] The rest is, at it's simplest, an Asian's take on growing up in Hounslow and what it means to be a man in light of your culture, religion and race.

Before I continue, it has to be said that this is no Asian ghetto story, and the author admits and prides the novel on that, he focuses on the superficial persona of thug/gangster and how it aids and hinders middle class youth at the time he is writing about (90s.) In this way, it is somewhat different to those texts by black writers I mentioned before- NOT that I'm trying to make out that Brickie or West London are ghettos! I hope you understand what I mean and choose to move on..

Background roughly completed, to us linguists (or linguistic enthusiast in my case,) it is important A- how this text came about and B- that the characters talk in a mixture of slang.

The language used by the characters contains a high percentage of swearing, some urban London/street lexis, some Pakistani and other Asian words from different regions that I now can't remember and haven't seemed to have documented in my notes.. never mind. I thought this interesting in comparison to the MEYD studies and the latest work by Ben Rampton on the 'new' language of Asian teens today:

• Rampton, Ben, Language in Late Modernity: Interaction in an Urban School, (Cambridge, 2006) )[this book is EXCELLENT but don't read it all in one go.]

And also his 'Crossing' book where it goes into more detail:

• Rampton, Ben, Crossing: Language and Ethnicity Among Adolescents, (London and New York, 1995 [you can find this in SFX library]

I obviously haven't studied into this area but for those of you interested in this type of speech I think 'Londonstani' has great potential here that could enhance and complicate Language A Level work.
More generally (in relation to linguistics), the fact that this book resulted from socially scientific research I think is interesting, as we can compare the way he attained his data to the way in which samples are taken for linguistic studies and the various methodologies used. [The differences noted by comparing his methodology to yours for example, may help you in tailoring to the concerns of your argument/research.] The author explained that the criteria he had to follow in order to make his data usable is distinctly different to that of linguistics, but I couldn't help but draw parallel.
To again take a step contextually outward, Gautam Malkani's novel came from an interest he pursued whilst at university in Cambridge [boo..] where he studied SPS (Social and Political Sciences) [again, boo..] and wrote a dissertation in his final year about the use of the term 'coconut' and the gender issues surrounding teenagers (especially 16-17 yr old Asian males.) He was selective in his sample groups, making sure that he has a mix of ethnicities [but at the same time the contacts he named on interrogation suggest to me that he had more Asian participants than others], and, like a linguist, went into 6th form common rooms with tape-recorders to talk to people. He also separated males and females somehow, but admits that his most useful data was gained on receiving information from the mixed groups.
Some of the research he came across on his way seems of particularly useful for those of you interested in the re appropriation of the N-word, as he compares this to the attempted re appropriation of the P-word: 'Paki'. Debate ensued about this between Commonwealth lecturer Priya' Gopal (Cambridge) and the author on this, with the latter stating enthusiastically that the P-word could never have the same effect as the N-word with the black community because: 'there are too many divisions in the Asian community' for this to occur, and the author arguing that the low-nil political consciousness of youth culture resulted in this failure to ameliorate the word, as well as his belief that fears of emasculation and not-being-man-enough on-the-streets was and is the more pressing issue underlying the issue. I thought this was worth noting. There is a quote I'd love to use to exemplify this issue in the book but since I feel bad about copyright issues I'll let you try and find it amongst the extract given in the following link: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5590750
The extract really speaks for itself and so I'll refrain from my rambling on and end here. I hope the points raised by my seminar that I found useful will also prove useful for you, or at least were as interesting to you as they were for me.
P.S, for those of you who don't mind admitting that at the heart of things superficial things do matter, the author, is, quite hot.