accent and dialect- MLE Flashcards
WHAT IS MLE and who is it used by
Multicultural London English is an ethnolect.
MLE has shown to be spoken by mainly young working class people living in neighbourhoods with a high level of immigration, especially fropm the carrabien
However, in recent times it has spread all across the UK and many people use it, but since MLE is the product of the speech of people whose parents and grandparents were immigrants from places like the Caribbean, India and Africa, where (Standard) it is not surprising that ethnolect we now know as MLE is spoken by many people with Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) backgrounds
what it MLE and what does it sounds like
MLE is a multiethnolect – a speech repertoire -as opposed to a ‘variety’ which is more fixed– which has emerged in a multilingual and multicultural urban centre
Prof. Kerswill says MLE is based on the traditional East End Cockney dialect, but it has a number of different sounds and grammatical constructions due to the infiltration of carrabiean influence. For instance, unlike Cockney, where speakers drop their “aitches”, MLE speakers always pronounce them, as in house, instead of Cockney ‘ous. As well as that MLE is characterized by long vowels made in the centre of the mouth
where is MLE spoken?
Although it has London in its name, you’ll actually hear it all over England in mixed urban areas. People who speak it in cities including Birmingham, Leicester and Manchester will also throw in flavours of the local accents in those places
why do people speak MLE in areas other than london?
Due to it spreading, possibly through the media as well as migration
what did drummond and dray 2018 find?
Drummond & Dray, 2018: found that in
Manchester youths used features of MLE while still retaining certain features to indicate they’re from the North-West
MLE: th-stopping such as ‘dem’ (them); ‘ting’ (thing)
Manchester: northern vowel sounds of bath (/bæθ/) and /tɹæp/) and in strut and foot (/stɹʊt/ and /fʊt/) – ‘put’, ‘putt’; cf. Southern /pʌt/ and /pʊt
They also found that youths would code switch from MLE to a more standard variety of english when needed to, which indicates an idea of youth language being performative, to establish identity
young people are using speech as a way of creating or performing particular identities, depending on who they are speaking to and in what social situation.’
Drummond, 2018
what is MLE associated with media wise?
Music, specifically hip-hop and grime which indicates ‘street’ culture, toughness and gang mentality
rof.
Kerswill mentions how grime artists use the word “man” in a new way to mean ‘I’.
what are the attitudes towards MLE
–>Some people see it as ‘Jafacian’
the term Jafaican, used to refer to youth language in multiethnic parts of London and beyond, most likely has media origins and is strongly associated with hip-hop.’ (Cheshire, Kerswill & Fox, 2011)
Jafacian is often linked to connotations of bad behaviour and agression, placing a negative view of those who use it
–> viewed by many people in middle and upperclass as sounding uneducated and impolite
whats MUBE
Multu cultural urban british english.
An extension of MLE as it has spread into places further than london
examples of MLE vocab
bare-a lot/very
beef-argument
ting-girlfiend/thing
ends-local area, where you’re from
examples of MLE grammar/discourse features
use of ‘dem’ as plural marker e.g. mandem =men
galdem=girls
innit as a tag question
you get me as a confirmation
where did MLE originate from
t originated in the east end of london among the young working class and it is slowly replacing cockney
where did MLE originate from
whats code switching?
code switching is when a speaker swtiches between two or more different langauges or langauge variations
what did kircher and fox find
conducted an online survey among 800 Londoners to find out what sorts of attitudes they had towards MLE. They asked several questions, but the overall result is interesting: on a five-point scale, on which 1 is very low and 5 very high, the people who answered the survey gave MLE an overall score of 2.2 - more towards the low end.
Interestingly, people who claimed to speak MLE gave it a better rating than those who didn’t (2.37), as did people who had frequent contact with MLE speakers, people who had a mother tongue other than English, and people with higher levels of education. E
whas the study on code switching bradford
gary ives took out a study on 8 Teenage boys from a school in Bradford got interviewed about the way they speak and the language they use
They speak an adaptation of MLE
When asked why they spoke a certain way they said ‘It’s natural’ and ‘it’s the way we’re born’
However when pushed it was not natural but in fact a conscious choice and ‘we mix Punjabi and English’
The boys wanted to distinguish themselves from what they labeld as ‘freshies’ who were people that were born in Pakistan and recently moved to the UK they said they don’t look down on the ‘freshies’ but don’t feel connected
Another key aspect of their language use was to do with postcode and people from a different postcode were posh
This links to La Bov study and can be directly compared to Martha Vineyard as is a clear example of using language to exclude others and feel included
