Event overview
Using Social Media to Infer the Diffusion of an Urban Contact Dialect: A Case Study of Multicultural London English.
Abstract: Dr Christian Ilbury, University of Edinburgh
Over the past two decades, research has increasingly documented a new variety of British English – what has been termed ‘Multicultural London English’ (MLE) (Cheshire et al., 2008; 2011). The emergence of MLE is an example of a more general phenomenon: the appearance of new ‘urban contact dialects’ (Kerswill & Weise, 2022). Similar varieties have been documented elsewhere including in Sweden (Kotsinas, 1988; Gross & Boyd, 2022), Denmark (Aasheim, 1997; Quist, 2008; 2022), and Norway (Svendsen & Røyneland 2008; Svendsen, 2022).
Some of this research has also found that ‘urban contact dialects’ tend to diffuse beyond the speech communities in which they first emerge. However, little research has attempted to explore the distribution of these varieties across an entire nation nor described the social mechanisms that propel their spread.
In this talk, I present findings from a recent project with Jack Grieve (Birmingham) and David Hall (QMUL) in which we use a corpus of 1.8 billion geo-tagged tweets to explore the distribution of MLE lexis across the UK. By mapping different MLE lexical variants (e.g., leng, roadman, paigon), we find evidence for the diffusion of MLE from East and North London into other ethnically and culturally diverse urban centres across England, particularly those in the South (e.g., Luton), but find lower frequencies of MLE lexis in the North of England (e.g., Manchester), and in Scotland and Wales. We go on to question the claim of a more general multicultural British English by demonstrating that this variety originated in London and diffused into other areas in England through the social networks of Black British users.
In concluding, I consider the role of demographic similarity in the diffusion of linguistic innovations before reflecting on the analytical potentials of using social media in the study of language variation and change.
This is an online event via Teams (meeting link below).
Meeting ID: 359 791 172 134
Passcode: PRnxQg
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 11 Oct 2023 | 4:00pm - 5:00pm |
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