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.
Cheshire, Jenny, Susan Fox, Paul Kerswill & Eivind Torgersen
2013. Language contact and language change in the multicultural metropolis. Revue française de linguistique appliquée Vol. XVIII:2 ► pp. 63 ff.
Cychosz, Margaret
2019. Bilingual adolescent vowel production in the Parisian suburbs. International Journal of Bilingualism 23:6 ► pp. 1291 ff.
de Lacey, Alex
2022. Live and direct? Censorship and racialised public morality in grime and drill music. Popular Music 41:4 ► pp. 495 ff.
Ilbury, Christian, Jack Grieve & David Hall
2024. Using social media to infer the diffusion of an urban contact dialect: A case study of Multicultural London English. Journal of Sociolinguistics
Kircher, Ruth & Sue Fox
2019. Attitudes towards Multicultural London English: implications for attitude theory and language planning. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 40:10 ► pp. 847 ff.
Kircher, Ruth & Sue Fox
2021. Multicultural London English and its speakers: a corpus-informed discourse study of standard language ideology and social stereotypes. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 42:9 ► pp. 792 ff.
Lau-Preechathammarach, Raksit Tyler
2023. The interaction between language usage and acoustic correlates of the Kuy register distinction. Laboratory Phonology 14:1
Morand, Marie-Anne , Sandra Schwab & Stephan Schmid
2020. The perception of multiethnolectal Zurich German: A continuum rather than clear-cut categories. Loquens 7:2 ► pp. e072 ff.
OXBURY, ROSAMUND, MATTHEW HUNT & JENNY CHESHIRE
2023. Epistemic phrases and adolescent speech in West London. English Language and Linguistics 27:4 ► pp. 815 ff.
Sharma, Devyani & Robin Dodsworth
2020. Language Variation and Social Networks. Annual Review of Linguistics 6:1 ► pp. 341 ff.
Erik R. Thomas
2019. Mexican American English,
Wiese, Heike
2022. Urban Contact Dialects. In The Cambridge Handbook of Language Contact, ► pp. 115 ff.
Zipp, Lena
2019. World Englishes, Migration, and Diaspora. In The Cambridge Handbook of World Englishes, ► pp. 120 ff.
[no author supplied]
2013. Reference Guide for Varieties of English. In A Dictionary of Varieties of English, ► pp. 363 ff.
[no author supplied]
2022. Multilingualism. In The Cambridge Handbook of Language Contact, ► pp. 27 ff.
[no author supplied]
2023. References. In Sounds of English Worldwide, ► pp. 354 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 11 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.