Language and Ethnicity and World English

Paper 2

Ethnolect

Language used by a particular ethnic group

A pidgin

Initial contact language that is formed when people don’t have a language in common

A creole

More developed contact language that has native speakers

Where did many English pidgins form?

Caribbean and West Africa

How does ‘language’ imply different status to varieties?

Language is formal, standard, long-standing and has an accepted status

How does ‘dialect’ imply different status to varieties?

Dialect is less formal, a sub-category of language, less respected and prone to change

How does ‘non-standard’ imply different status to varieties?

Non-standard is less respected than standard, carries stigma and not what people aspire to use to be taken seriously in formal situations

Windrush scandal

The victims, mainly people from the Caribbean, arrived in the UK in 1948

A British political scandal that began in 2018 concerning people who were wrongly detained, denied legal rights, threatened with deportation and in at least 83 cases wrongly deported from the UK to the Home office.

Year of Windrush’s arrival to the UK

1948

BBE

Black British English

Been described as based on a Jamaican creole spoken by Caribbean communities, mainly in London but also in large cities such as Manchester etc

Example of /t/ used for RP /θ/

ting

Example of /d/ used for RP /ð/

dis

Standard English object pronoun

me

AAE

Afro-American English

Person arguing Black English is sophisticated

John McWhorter

User of habitual ‘be’

Jay-Z

Verb used in Black English as marker of the counter-expectational

done

BBC programme that uses Jamaican Creole

Rastamouse

Black English grammar features

Copula verb is often omitted

‘Be’ is used as auxiliary (‘she be good’) often in habitual sense of always doing something

Verbs in the present 3rd person singular are not inflected with -s e.g. she eat

Auxiliary verb ‘do’ is used with the past participle to imply finished activity

Plural nouns are uninflected e.g. two apple

Multiple negatives

Different pronoun use e.g. dem instead of them

Negative formations e.g. she no want it

Copula verb

when the verb ‘to be’ is used as the main verb, introducing a complement clause

e.g. ‘he good’

Black English phonological features

Consonant clusters are simplified at ends of words - so ‘axe’ for ‘asked’

‘tink’ for ‘think’

‘de’ for ‘the’

Why is Black English not mistakes in language use?

Its a common misconception - its actually often more complicated or sophisticated than Standard English

e.g. unconjugated ‘be’, serves as a marker, used by Jay-Z in his song lyrics

Dr Christian Ilbury’s research

He mentions copular deletion - this is a rule-governed feature which happens in the middle of sentences, but not at the ends.

Users on Twitter use these spoken features also which are features of African-American Vernacular English reflecting users’ spoken language.

‘I be stunned’, ‘period’, ‘slay’ are mentioned as features recontextualised to now be part of the digital vernacular/Gen Z language. This can be problematic as users are borrowing features that aren’t really part of their identity and may mis-use AAVE features as they don’t fully understand the actual patterns.

Code-switching

A common universal language-contact phenomenon where speakers ‘switch’ from one language variety to another

It can be inter-sentential or intra-sentential

Inter-sentential

Between sentences

Intra-sentential

Within sentences

Gary Ives’s work in Bradford, Yorkshire 2014

Interviews conducted about individual’s language use in Bradford

8 British born teen boys of Pakistan heritage

Feel their language use distinguishes them from ‘freshies’ (those born in Pakistan but moved to UK)

Distinguish language use by postcode

Lexis from music influences define slang of group

Punjabi influences swear words to create group identity

Language use different from parents and elders

Language creates well-defined social identity

Sharma and Sankaran 2011 approach to the research

Investigated the English of three age groups of Punjabi-speaking Indians in West London

Oldest group - first generation, immigrants who arrived as adults from 1950s onwards

Second and third groups - children of immigrants

Participants made recordings of themselves speaking to a range of different people

Researches divided accent features into Indian features and British features

Sharma and Sankaran 2011 findings to the research

Older generation seemed to vary forms used considerably from 100% Indian when talking to maid to 100% British when talking to Cockney mechanic.

Far less variation among younger generation speakers

Sharma and Sankaran 2011 reasons for findings of the research

Older generation faced more hostile, anti-immigrant community and therefore under more pressure to integrate linguistically.

Younger generation in more mixed neighbourhoods but with British Asians in a majority. Less need to switch between speech styles to the same extent.

MLE language features

Vocabulary - ‘bare’, ‘beef’, ‘ting’, ‘endz’, ‘on road’

Phonology - the diphthong vowel sounds of words such as ‘face’ and ‘like’ are pronounced /fes/ and /la:k/

Grammar - use of ‘dem’ as a plural marker e.g. mandem for men as a new pronoun referring to oneself

Discourse features - ‘innit’ as a tag question, ‘you get me’ as a confirmation check, ‘this is me’ as a quotative.

Examples of typical Cockney accent speakers

David Beckham

Dot Cotton

What varieties of world English are suggested as influences for MLE?

Caribbean

Greece

Asia

Africa