Contact, the feature pool and the speech community: The emergence of Multicultural London English Jenny Cheshire School of Languages Linguistics and Film Queen Mary, University of London Mile End Road London E1 4NS
[email protected] fax +44 (0)20 8980 5400 tel. +44 (0)20 7882 8293 Paul Kerswill Department of Linguistics and English Language Lancaster University Lancaster LA1 4YL United Kingdom
[email protected] fax +44 1524 843085 tel. +44 1524 594577 Susan Fox School of Languages Linguistics and Film Queen Mary, University of London Mile End Road London E1 4NS
[email protected] fax +44 (0)20 8980 5400 tel.+44 (0)20 7882 7579 Eivind Nessa Torgersen Sør-Trøndelag University College 7004 Trondheim Norway
[email protected] fax +47 73559851 tel. +47 73559790 Page 1 of 64 Contact, the feature pool and the speech community: The emergence of Multicultural London English Abstract In Northern Europe’s major cities, new varieties of the host languages are emerging in the multilingual inner cities. While some analyse these ‘multiethnolects’ as youth styles, we take a variationist approach to an emerging ‘Multicultural London English’ (MLE), asking: (1) what features characterise MLE? (2) at what age(s) are they acquired? (3) is MLE vernacularised ? (4) when did MLE emerge, and what factors enabled its emergence? We argue that innovations in the diphthongs and the quotative system are generated from the specific sociolinguistics of inner-city London, where at least half the population is undergoing group second-language acquisition and where high linguistic diversity leads to a feature pool to select from.