Creoles and Crossing

With the large-scale arrival of Caribbean people in the UK from the late 1940s onwards (as part of a post-war drive to recruit workers for Britain's growing public services), new forms of English started to be heard in many predominantly urban areas. While the new arrivals were not all from Jamaica, the variety of English developed by second- and third-generation speakers later became known as London Jamaican.

English had been a large part of the Caribbean's linguistic heritage for over 500 years before that - its history inextricably bound up with that of slavery and liberation struggles - and the Creole spoken by many Jamaicans had its roots in English and the various West African languages spoken by slaves taken from Africa during the period of the slave trade. While the first generation of Caribbean immigrants tended to speak the variety they had brought with them, younger speakers who were born and/or brought up in the UK often developed a more mixed form of language.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the contact between Jamaican-English young people a-their white working-class neighbours at work and at school, and the increasing number of mixed-race relationships, meant that people of different ethnic backgrounds were exposed to each other's varieties of English. A degree of crossing was evident in some situations, when speakers who had access to both London English and Jamaican English might shift from one style to another, depending on who they were with. So a young white speaker might use more traditional London English with a white peer group and shift into a lexis more influenced by Jamaican English with black friends.

This cross-cultural mixing gave rise to significant changes in youth culture, as well as language. Interestingly, some white or Asian young people without a black peer group started to use non-standard Creole-influenced speech at around this time, too. Ben Rampton notes that 'Creole was widely seen as cool, tough and good to use. It was associated with assertiveness, verbal resourcefulness, competence in heterosexual relationships, and opposition to authority' (2010).

Work by Roger Hewitt (1986) and Mark Sebba (1993) identified a new development in the 1980s, that of 'Black Cockney' - a style, rather than a discrete variety - used by young black speakers in London, while John Pitts (2012) noticed a different shift among some young black English speakers who felt that mainstream society was ignoring and constraining them, towards a resistance identity through language. As he put it, there was a move from 'sounding like lan Wright to sounding like Bob Marley. As you will see from other sections in this chapter and other chapters in this book, the role of language to express identity is crucial in this and goes beyond where you are born and the colour of your skin to the sense of who you are and how you want to be seen.

As well as research into different non-standard forms of English used by ethnic minorities, there is a strand of research that looks at what are called super-standard forms used by some white speakers. Bucholtz (2001) for example, looks at the language of white nerds' who deliberately distance themselves from white peers who are more willing to adopt 'cooler' black speech styles.