MLE Flashcards
Which dialect is on course to be replaced by MLE?
Cockney
According to who?
Paul Kerswill
How long has this traditional accent been around?
500+ years
How long do they think it will take for MLE to replace it?
30 years
Which accents is MLE a mixture of?
Jamaican creole, cockney and BBE
More specifically, what kind of Englishes formed MLE?
Cockney, media, learner varieties of varieties, peer groups, cockney, ex-colonial (Pakistan,Nigeria), creole (Jamaican).
Who (mainly? originally?) speaks MLE?
Young Afro-Caribbean men
Why does Kerswill think young Afro- Caribbean men in particular use MLE?
As an “ exclusionary strategy “
Quotation
“Cockney in the East End is now transforming itself into MLE, a new melting point mixture of all this people living in London who learnt English as a second language.”
What is AAVE?
African American Vernacular Englisj
Where/how did AAVE originate?
Roots in the slave trade where people captured from west Africa were force to form there own language (pidgin/creole)
What is a pidgin?
Simplified language created to enable communication between groups with no common language.
What is a creole?
A mother tongue formed from contact- a nativised pidgin ( Jamaican creole)
What is BBE? What creole is it based on and why?
British Black English. High immigration if people into the Uk in the 1950s/60s (Windrush Generation) meant Jamaican creole was adopted by British speakers.
Until when was Jamaica a colony?
1962
Why is Jamaican creole recognised as an independent language?
It’s the native language of people from Jamaica or within Jamaican diaspora
According to Bill Bryson, what have these new widely used creoles done to English?
They are “used widely and enriching English”
Who said that creole was “widely seen as cool” and used “in opposition to authority”?
Ben Rompton
Who commissioned a survey to assess the current knowledge / popularity of Cockney?
The Museum of London 2012
According to this survey, how many Londoners are no longer familiar with Cockney rhyming slang?
80%
In terms of origin,what do Cockney and MLE have in common?
Both formed as a secret language (argot) to evade others such as the police or hostile society and show solidarity amongst its users.
Which linguists, in 1984 recognised that a “black cockney” or “multi-ethnic vernacular “ emerged out of the East End in the 1950s?
Mark Seba and Roger Hewitt
Who located the origin of MLE to young people in the East Ebd in the early 1980s?
John Pitts
What did he call “the act of a shift in a speech away from mainstream society that they felt was ignoring or constraint them”?
Resistance Identity
He also describes youth language all over the world and in historical times as..?
“endeavouring to be incomprehensible “
What is another word for this?
Argot
Give 3 examples of a lexical/grammatical feature of MLE
Elliptical tag questions-“Innit” “You get me”
Phonologically variant clippings-“Bruv”
Indefinite pronoun man “Man’s hungry”
Which feature is used by cockney speakers but not MLE speakers but not by MLE speakers?
The pronunciation of h
Who coined the term multiethnolect, and what does it mean?
Clyne-Young people living in multicultural abs multilingual districts of large cities.
What impact has poverty had in some areas,e.g Hackney, on the development of MLE?
Formation of dense family neighbourhood networks -enforces linguistic norms if a social group.
Extreme ethnic heterogeneity and lack of residential segregation- contact across ethnic groups especially among young people
The authentic vernacular variety of MLE is spoken by the working class-who else has adopted it,why, and how is we recognise it as a “style” of language, rather than an authentic form?
White people and the middle classes have adopted it either from peer groups, influence from the media or pop culture (rap/hip-hop) and the youths tendency to immerse themselves in culture to show solidarity.
Why do you think it is emerging/has emerged in other large UK cities? Why is it possible to have predicted the spread?
Influence of the media, pop culture abs rise in use of MLE among youth and peer groups. F&D’s model of spread states that language change starts in London and spreads up the UK- explains rise in MLE.
Who concluded from their research that white MLE speakers are not trying to sound like black youths, but have incorporated different influences because of their exposure to different varieties of English ?
Jenny Cheshire,Sue Fox and Paul Kerswill
What did the research suggest had the biggest influence on whether an adolescent spoke MLE?
The area they grew up in
What did Jenny Cheshire rename MLE as a result if it taking root far beyond London?
UBE- Urban British English
