Language and Ethnicity Flashcards
What is multiethnolect?
A variety combining features from a range of languages within a multi ethnic/cultural context
What is a heritage language?
A language spoken at home which isn’t dominant in that society
What is intersectionality?
Social categories all overlapping; ethnicity is interconnected with all other categories
What is essentialism?
The idea that a characteristic is inherited and fixed, not adopted or variable
What is constructivism?
The notion of being able to adopt certain characteristics to construct identity
What is performativity?
The power of language to effect change in the world; language function as a form of social action which can involve the creation of identities
What is resistance identity and who suggested it?
- John Pitts
- Noticed a shift among young black speakers who reported feeling that society was ignoring them towards a linguistic identity that went against the mainstream
- “A move from sounding like Ian Wright to Bob Marley”
What is multicultural London English?
- Multi ethnolect used mostly by young people in London
- Perceived as ‘ethically neutral’
What are linguistic innovators and who suggested this?
- Kerswill and Cheshire
- The English of adolescents in London was changing due to multi ethnic social networks facilitating horizontal transmission of language features
What is brokering and who suggested it?
- Wenger and Eckert
- The use of multimembership in to transfer some element of language from 1 social group to another
- In order to be a successful ‘broker’, individuals must be able to exert enough influence in each group to be able to carry ideas from 1 group and introduce them to another
What is Multicultural Urban British English and who proposed it?
- Rob Drummond
- Various urban multi ethnolect varieties in existence; each includes a local accent and dialect features
What is code mixing?
The occasional insertion of vocabulary items from 1 language to another
What is code switching?
When the speaker moves from 1 language to another for more extensive periods of time
What are some of the discourses around multicultural London English?
- Not English- fake
- Lack of morality
- Spoken by black communities
- Aggressive/ crime related
- Foreign/strange
- Trend
- Insignificant/no value
What did Sharma and Sanskaren conduct research into?
Punjabi Indian English heritage
What did Sharma and Rampton conduct research into?
British Asian men
What did Sharma and Rampton find in their research into British Asian men?
- Young men socialised in mainly Asian groups but their employment and entertainment were local
- There was much less need to switch between speech styles to the same extent
What did Sharma and Sanskaren find in their research on Punjabi Indian English heritage?
West London Indians seemed to have moved from a wide ranging repertoire to one narrower and less flexible in the space of a generation
How is Cockney ‘under threat’?
- H dropping is disappearing
- TH fronting and glottal stops from London accent has moved to places such as Kent (possibly due to social attitudes)
How could ‘Bredren’ be described?
Voiced dental fricative ‘th’ (brethren) is substituted with voiced alveolar plosive ‘d’ (bredrin)
How could ‘yutes’ be described?
- Voiceless dental fricative TH (youths) substituted with voiceless alveolar plosive T (yutes)
- TH dropping
What 2 view points conflict?
Essentialist and Constructivist
How can Milroy’s work on social networks be applied to language and ethnicity?
- Those within the same social networks may share language, e.g. MLE
- Therefore, ethnicity may not play a large role within some people’s language
How could Giles’ Accommodation theory be applied to language and ethnicity?
Speakers will manifest their position and their positive attitude towards a particular group by sounding like members of that group (convergence)
What are multicultural Urban British English features?
- Vowel variation
- Word initial DH and TH dropping
- Use of pragmatics markers (you get me?)
- Use of slang words with a Jamaican heritage
