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Article In: Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages: Online-First Articles

From ethnolect to multiethnolect

The role of diasporic Jamaican Creole in urban dialect contact

ORCiD logo with link | The University of Texas at Austin
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Abstract
This study examines the phonetic and social dynamics surrounding forms of Jamaican Creole in Toronto Jamaican English (TJE) and its influence on the emerging multiethnolect, Multicultural Toronto English (MTE, Denis, Derek, Vidhya Elango, Nur Sakinah Nor Kamal, Srishti Prashar & Maria Velasco. 2023. Exploring the vowel space of Multicultural Toronto English. Journal of English Linguistics 51(1). 30–65. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). Focusing on the FACE/GOAT and STRUT vowels, the research identifies significant variation patterns influenced by linguistic and social factors. TJE speakers, particularly men, show a strong orientation towards Jamaican Creole features, resisting mainstream Canadian English patterns. This resistance highlights vernacular orientations at the phonetic level in TJE to challenge mainstream social norms from the position of racialized identities. The study underscores TJE’s role in urban cultural and linguistic contact in Toronto and the dynamic interplay between language, identity, and social context.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Data and methods
    • 2.1Fieldwork and data sample
    • 2.2Method of analysis
  • 3.Findings: The creole feature pool in Toronto Jamaican speech
    • 3.1FACE onset raising
      • Results
      • GOAT as a parallel feature
    • 3.2STRUT backing
      • Feature description
      • Results
  • 4.Discussion: Comparing Toronto Jamaican speech with MTE
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
References (81)
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