1. Multicultural London English: blueprint for the future?
School of English, Sheffield
4 March 2015
Multicultural London English: blueprint for the future?
Paul Kerswill
University of York

2. London’s multiethnolect: Multicultural London English
The term multiethnolect was first used by Clyne (2000)
In northwest Europe, ‘multiethnolect’ is widely applied to the speech of young people living in multicultural and multilingual districts of large cities
It’s a variety of the host language, formed in a community with a high proportion of 2nd language speakers

3. Who speaks it and when? Multiethnolects occupy a continuum:
Vernacular speakers of Multicultural London English (MLE) are usually working class
Elements of MLE, especially slang, available to other speakers, including middle class, as style
Vernacular variety
Youth style

4. Labels
Pejorative terms (invented, or at least propagated by the media):
Kanak Sprak
Kebabnorsk
Smurfentaal
Jafaican (origin obscure!)
Academics’ terms, often based on local usage:
Kiezdeutsch (Wiese 2012)
rinkebysvenska (Kotsinas 1989)
straattaal (Cornips et al.)
Multicultural London English (Kerswill/Cheshire)

5. What is MLE like?
Indefinite pronoun man: I don’t really mind how my girl looks…..it’s her personality man’s looking at
This is + Speaker quotative: This is me I’m from east London
Pronunciation:
Strikingly different diphthongs in e.g. coat, face, price, mouth
Use of ‘h’ in e.g. go home, my house … 5

6. Zack: well they say I physically attacked my headteacher but I didn’t like
I had a fight with him it was a fight
it weren’t just me beating him up it was a fight cos like
cos like but that’s why
I didn’t get arrested or nothing
Sue: what happened then?
Zack: no it was like it was the end of school yeah so that school’s finished yeah
and everyone was going home
and I was getting my bike from the bike rack
and I was going out
and I was riding my bike
and he stopped my bike
I was like “yeah”
and he goes “get off the bike”
I was like “why am I getting off the bike I’m going home now like I’ve gotta go home” yeah
he was like “no get off the bike walk the bike outside of school”
I was like “what’s the point?” yeah
cos like it’s quite far like to get out the school from the entrance like in the school yeah
and he goes “ah no get off the bike” yeah
so like he kind of shoved me off the bike
so I dropped it but I didn’t fall over like but I kind of stumbled yeah
and he put his he tried to take my bike up to his office like he was gonna keep my bike there
I was like “nah” like
and this time everyone was gathering round cos we were shouting at each other yeah
he was like “no I’m taking your bike upstairs”
I was like “what’s the point in that when I’m just gonna take it back downstairs”
so I must have pulled the bike off him yeah
and I put it I put it I leant it up against the wall yeah
and I walked over to him
and this is me “what what’s your what’s your problem?”
and he goes “I don't like you”
I was like “I don't like you” yeah
so I just swung for him and then we like
but we had a fight though [Sue: did you] and I got kicked out of school
like I weren’t allowed into any school that’s why I came here last year
Zack, 17 Hackney 2005

7. Web resource with MLE extracts
English Language Teaching Resources Archive

8. When did it start?
1950s on: Anglos (white British) and African-Caribbeans (mainly from Jamaica) formed the most numerous groups
Their linguistic repertoires differed:
Both Anglos and African-Caribbeans: Cockney
African-Caribbeans: ‘London Jamaican’ or ‘Patois’

9. The view from academe, c. 1984
Mark Sebba and Roger Hewitt recognised the existence of this repertoire
But noted an intermediate ‘Black Cockney’ or ‘multiethnic/multiracial vernacular’
Apparently for use in adolescent peer groups only
So not actually a native dialect, but more a style

10. A criminologist speaks
John Pitts notes the start of a new youth language among young black people in the East End in the early 1980s, when their deteriorating social position was preventing them from living up to their parents’ expectations
Pitts argues that the new dialect reflects a ‘resistance identity’. 
(29 minutes in)

11. The London projects 2004–10

12. Linguistic Innovators: the English of Adolescents in London (2004–7)
Investigators: Paul Kerswill (Lancaster University) Jenny Cheshire (Queen Mary, University of London) Research Associates: Sue Fox (Queen Mary, University of London) Eivind Torgersen (Lancaster University)
E· S· R· C
ECONOMIC
& S O C I A L RESEARCH
C O U N C I L
Funded by the Economic and Social Research Council

13. Project design: ‘Innovators’ project
16 elderly Londoners
98 17 year old Londoners
from inner London (Hackney) and outer London (Havering)
female, male
“Anglo” and “non-Anglo”
Free interviews in pairs
1.4m words transcribed orthographically, stored in a database time-aligned at turn level

14. Multicultural London English: the emergence, acquisition and diffusion of a new variety (2007–10)
Investigators: Paul Kerswill (Lancaster University) Jenny Cheshire (Queen Mary, University of London) Research Associates: Sue Fox, Arfaan Khan, (Queen Mary, University of London) Eivind Torgersen (Lancaster University)
E· S· R· C
ECONOMIC
& S O C I A L RESEARCH
C O U N C I L
Funded by the Economic and Social Research Council

15. Project design: MLE project
Six age groups: 4-5, 8, 12, 17, c.25, c.40
North London
female, male
“Anglo” and “non-Anglo”
Free interviews in pairs
c. 1.5m words transcribed
Phonological and grammatical analysis
Perception tests

16. The research sites 16

17. Sociohistorical context of Multicultural London English
High in-migration of population originating from countries other than the UK from 1950s onwards
Poverty – Hackney has the highest rating on indicators of deprivation out of all 355 boroughs in England
Poverty leaves all groups in these boroughs with few opportunities for interaction with the wider, mainstream, mobile community
At the same time, there is the formation of dense, family and neighbourhood networks
Because of extreme ethnic heterogeneity and lack of residential segregation, there are contacts across ethnic groups among young people

18. Immigration to London
Resident population by country of birth, London & UK, 2006
Inner London
Outer London
Greater London
Rest of UK UK
London as % of UK
All persons
2,856,000
4,496,000
7,352,000
51,489,000
58,841,000 12
Born in UK
1,756,000
3,276,000
5,031,000
47,961,000
52,992,000 9
Born outside UK
1,100,000
1,220,000
2,320,000
3,528,000
5,849,000 40
% born outside UK 39 27 32 7 10
Source: Annual Population Survey 2006

19. Hackney

21. What kinds of English formed the input to MLE?
Creole-influenced varieties (Jamaica, etc.)
Ex-colonial Englishes (Pakistan, Nigeria …)
Learner varieties of varieties
The local London vernacular (‘Cockney')
Kinds of English encountered in the school (Standard English, teachers’ varieties)
Media (television)
Monolingual English speakers have also been exposed to all these varieties

22. Diphthong vowels of elderly male speaker from Hackney born 1918

23. Diphthong vowels of young male from Hackney, Afro-Caribbean origin, born 1989

24. Discourse markers, a new pronoun and quotatives as contact-based innovations in inner London

25. Discourse markers: I got the right moves innit but I ain't telling you though still . I ain't telling you
Indefinite pronoun man: I don’t really mind how my girl looks…..it’s her personality man’s looking at
Why…..for question frame: I said “why you searching my jacket for?”
This is + Speaker quotative expression: This is me “I’m from east London” 25

26. New quotative in London: This is + speaker
i) this is them “what area are you from . what part?”
this is me “I’m from East London”
ii) this is him “don’t lie . if I search you and if I find one I’ll kick your arse”
iii) this is my mum “what are you doing? I was in the queue before you”
iv) this is my mum’s boyfriend “put that in your pocket now”

27. Quotatives in MLE project
4–5 years
8–9 years
12–13 years
16–19 years
Caregivers
say
93.9 (46)
39.5 (202)
25.4 (163)
17.0 (218)
50.3 (174)
think -
0.6 (3)
1.9 (12)
7.2 (92)
10.7 (37) go
4.1 (2)
31.1 (159)
23.8 (153)
7.3 (94)
5.2 (18)
zero
2.0 (1)
2.0 (10)
14.5 (93)
12.5 (160)
18.2 (63)
BE LIKE
17.0 (87)
25.9 (166)
45.7 (584)
10.1 (35)
this is + speaker
5.3 (27)
2.0 (13)
3.0 (38)
tell
1.6 (8)
0.3 (2)
2.2 (28)
1.2 (4)
others
2.5 (13)
1.6 (10)
2.7 (34)
3.2 (11)
Total no. quotatives 49
512
642
1279
346

28. Summary of MLE features
Narrow diphthongs and monophthongs replace broad diphthongs in FACE and GOAT: [æɪ]  [eɪ]  [e:] and [ʌʊ]  [oʊ]  [o:]
Backing of /k/ before low back vowels to [q]
Full reinstatement of /h/ - no h-dropping!
More syllable-timed (staccato) rhythm
Use of a new quotative: this is + SPEAKER, as in ‘This is me: let’s go now’
Widespread use of slang, including blood (friend), cuss (defame), ends (place of residence), mandem (Creole plural), rude, safe, tief (steal), man (as address term), man (as indefinite pronoun). Many of these are of Jamaican origin.

29. Conclusions on the question ‘What is MLE’?
MLE is a new, mixed variety
It varies to a small extent across ethnicities, but most is shared
It is distinct from traditional London English in specific ways
But some features may be tied to youth style
they will be lost in adulthood
they aren’t consistently used
slang is a case in point, and needs investigation
But many will be kept – it is the speakers’ vernacular
MLE has a social construction by young people as ‘our language’, ‘cool’, non-racial, in opposition to both Cockney and RP

30. Tracing Multicultural London English in British newspapers
Kerswill, Paul The objectification of ‘Jafaican’: the discoursal embedding of Multicultural London English in the British media. In Androutsopoulos, Jannis (ed.) The Media and Sociolinguistic Change. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 428–455.

31. The multiethnolect in the papers
Nexis UK database
I searched for Jafaican (Jafaikan) and Multicultural London English in July 2012
62 articles contained at least one occurrence of Jafaican
29 contained Multicultural London English, of which 20 also contained Jafaican.

32. Jafaican pushes out Cockney
THE Cockney accent is being pushed out of its heartland by a new kind of speech. Playgrounds and housing estates of London are alive with the sound of an accent that sounds Jamaican with flavours from West Africa and India. The Standard can reveal that this new English variety is replacing Cockney in inner London, as more white children adopt the speech patterns and vocabulary of their black neighbours and classmates. Teachers have dubbed the phenomenon Jafaican and TV's Ali G would understand it perfectly. Evening Standard 10th April 2006

33. Jafaican as contemporary, classless, modern, stylish
It's significant that the message-board of the new Englishness is MySpace, the social networking website that somehow flattens out the traditional nuances of class differentiation. It's there, too, in the magpie lexicon from which the lyrics are drawn, with many of them delivered in the fertile hybrid of Cockney, the Queen's English and pretend Jamaican - what's it called? Jafaican? - that is the lingua franca of young southern England. Daily Telegraph 23rd December 2006

34. Jafaican and people ‘in the know’
End-of-year quiz in the Evening Standard, 24th December 2010:
‘How did Nang, Greezy and Butters triumph in 2010?
a) They are the producers who work on the X Factor winner's recordings.
b) They are the stars of a new CBeebies show.
c) They are "street" or "Jafaican" expressions which have overtaken Cockney slang terms.
d) They are ingredients popularised by Delia Smith in her last Waitrose promotion.’

35. Time Out, 2nd August 2012 Welcome to The London Citizenship Test.
......
You have already demonstrated adequate speaking and listening skills in London's three key dialects (Estuarine, Mockney and Jafaican) and, having attained level two Posh, are able to buy shoes confidently in Knightsbridge ...

36. Jafaican and the far right
Cockneys Have Become First British Group to be Ethnically Cleansed
The Cockney culture and language has been ethnically cleansed from London’s East End as mass Third World immigration has pushed white people into minority status and destroyed the world-famous accent.

37. Starkey, Jamaican and the riots: just how wrong could he be
Starkey, Jamaican and the riots: just how wrong could he be? TEDx talk, September 2011: Who’s an East Ender now? Migration and the transformation of the Cockney dialect

38. David Starkey comments on the London riots, Newsnight, 13 August 2011

39. David Starkey:
‘The whites have become black. A particular sort of violent, destructive, nihilistic, gangster culture has become the fashion, and black and white, boy and girl, operate in this language together, this language which is wholly false, which is this Jamaican patois that has been intruded in England, and that is why so many of us have this sense of, literally, a foreign country.’

40. Linguist Geoff Pullum on Starkey (THE, 18 August 2011)
‘Did Starkey really mean what he said? Well, he gave an additional clear indication of believing that the dangerous blacks are marked out by their patois, while safe ones such as the MP for Tottenham speak white English. “Listen to David Lammy, an archetypical successful black man,” he said in his defence: “if you turned the screen off, so that you were listening to him on radio, you'd think he was white.” ...’

41. Starkey’s double mistake
He is hearing ‘Jamaican’, when actually he’s hearing MLE
Wrong attribution of foreignness
He ascribes a violent disposition directly to the language

42. 19 August 2014
James Foley’s killer is heard speaking with a British accent
Now known to be Mohammed Emwazi
Linguists (myself included!) widely interviewed, and confirmed the jihadist in the video as a speaker of Multicultural London English
‘Multicultural London English’ appears dozens of times on the Internet closely associated with the jihadist

43. Consequences Media exposure makes accents more recognisable
Media discourses strongly guide the way an accent is perceived socially
MLE has become negatively stereotyped, after a brief ‘honeymoon’ back in 2006 when the term was first used by the press
The riots and (especially) the explicit mention of MLE in the context of the London Jihadist will accelerate the negative stereotyping

44. Blueprint for the future?
More multicultural accents/dialects can be expected in the future
But they may remain restricted to inner cities
Constant renewal of immigrant populations
East End has had large-scale immigration over centuries
The linguistic and social mix will change
MLE and its successors are now part of our dialect landscape

45. Kerswill, Paul, Torgersen, Eivind & Fox, Susan (2008)
Kerswill, Paul, Torgersen, Eivind & Fox, Susan (2008). Reversing ‘drift’: Innovation and diffusion in the London diphthong system. Language Variation and Change 20: 451–491.
Torgersen, Eivind and Anita Szakay (2012) An investigation of speech rhythm in London English. Lingua.
Cheshire, Jenny, David Adger and Sue Fox (2013). Relative who and the actuation problem. Lingua 126 (2013) 51–77.

46. Kerswill, Paul (fc 2014). The objectification of ‘Jafaican’: the discoursal embedding of Multicultural London English in the British media. In J. Androutsopoulos (ed.) Media and sociolinguistic change. Mouton.
Kerswill, Paul (fc 2013). Identity, ethnicity and place: the construction of youth language in London. In P. Auer et al. (eds.) Space in Language and Linguistics. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Torgersen, Eivind (2012). A perceptual study of ethnicity and geographical location in London and Birmingham. In P. Stoeckle, S. Hansen, T. Streck and C. Schwartz (eds.) Raumkonzepte. Freiburg: FRIAS.
Cheshire, Jenny, Kerswill, Paul, Fox, Susan & Torgersen, Eivind (2011). Contact, the feature pool and the speech community: The emergence of Multicultural London English. Journal of Sociolinguistics 15/2: 151–196.
Kerswill, Paul, Cheshire, Jenny, Fox, Susan and Torgersen, Eivind (2012). English as a contact language: the role of children and adolescents. In Hundt, Marianne & Schreier, Daniel (eds.) English as a contact language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

47. References
Cheshire, Jenny, Kerswill, Paul, Fox, Susan & Torgersen, Eivind Contact, the feature pool and the speech community: The emergence of Multicultural London English. Journal of Sociolinguistics 15/2: 151–196.
Kerswill, Paul Identity, ethnicity and place: the construction of youth language in London. In P. Auer, M. Hilpert, A. Stukenbrock & B. Szmrecsanyi (eds). Space in language and linguistics: geographical, interactional, and cognitive perspectives. Berlin: de Gruyter, pp  
Kerswill, Paul The objectification of ‘Jafaican’: the discoursal embedding of Multicultural London English in the British media. In Androutsopoulos, Jannis (ed.) The Media and Sociolinguistic Change. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 428–455.