Ryan, Sadie Durkacz (2018) Language, migration and identity at school: a sociolinguistic study with Polish adolescents in Glasgow. PhD thesis. https://theses.gla.ac.uk/30681/ Copyright and moral rights for this work are retained by the author A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge This work cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Enlighten: Theses https://theses.gla.ac.uk/ [email protected] LANGUAGE, MIGRATION AND IDENTITY AT SCHOOL: A SOCIOLINGUISTIC STUDY WITH POLISH ADOLESCENTS IN GLASGOW Sadie Durkacz Ryan, MA (Hons), MPhil Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy School of Critical Studies College of Arts University of Glasgow March 2018 © Sadie Durkacz Ryan, 01.03.18. Abstract When young migrants enter a new community, are they able to acquire the community’s sociolinguistic norms? In this thesis, I examine the speech of 14 adolescents who were born in Poland, and who now attend a high school in the East End of Glasgow. I spend two years in this high school, conducting ethnographic analysis and collecting speech recordings. The linguistic behaviour of these young migrants is compared to that of a matched group of seven of their classmates who were born in Glasgow. Focusing on several sociolinguistic variables from different levels of the grammar, I use quantitative analysis to ask whether the Polish speakers are matching the local patterns of use shown by their Glaswegian peers. I use quantitative and qualitative analysis to explore why some individuals are matching these patterns to a greater extent than others. The results show that as a group, the Polish speakers come close to matching the rates of use shown by the Glaswegian speakers. They have successfully replicated some of the native constraints on the variation, although not all. They have also innovated some constraints on use which are not significant for the Glaswegian speakers. I suggest that these innovations represent a type of hypercorrection in some cases, and a lexical diffusion effect in others. I find that the individual learners are not all acquiring sociolinguistic variation to the same extent or in the same way. The individual differences observed are not explained by the length of time an individual has spent in Glasgow. Neither are they explained by the age at which an individual arrived in Glasgow, or by an individual’s gender. Instead, I suggest that friendship networks may play a role in the acquisition of more highly-constrained, ‘under-the-counter’ variables, and individual speaker agency and identity may play a role in the acquisition of the variables which are higher in speaker awareness. Table of contents Abstract 2 List of tables 8 List of figures 10 Acknowledgements 15 List of abbreviations 16 List of frequently used local forms 17 1. Introduction 18 2. Acquiring sociolinguistic variation in an L2 23 2.1. The acquisition of native speaker constraints on use 25 2.2. Predictors of the acquisition of sociolinguistic variation 27 2.2.1. Social context 27 2.2.2. Length of residency 28 2.2.3. L2 attainment 29 2.2.4. Age at onset 29 2.2.5. Gender 32 2.2.6. Integrative motivation 33 2.2.7. Relevance to the current study 36 2.3. Comparing the acquisition of different variables 38 2.3.1. Constraint complexity 38 2.3.2. Speaker awareness 41 3. Conducting the fieldwork at St John’s high school 43 3.1. Choosing a research site: Glasgow’s East End 44 3.2. Initial planning 47 3.3. St John’s high school 50 3.4. Recruitment 56 3.4.1. Gaining informed consent 56 3.4.2. The Polish participants 57 3.4.3. The Glaswegian participants 60 3.5. Using ethnographic methods 63 3.6. Recording speech data 69 3.6.1. The peer-group context 69 3.6.2. The conversation context 79 3.6.3. The interview context 81 3.6.4. Summary of speech data recorded 83 3.7. Sociograms 84 3.8. Preparing the data for analysis 85 3.8.1. Transcription 85 3.8.2. Anonymisation 88 3.8.3. Selection of variables for quantitative analysis 89 3.8.4. Creating an NVivo database 90 3.8.5. Summary of data to be analysed 91 4. ‘We don’t count you as Polish…you’re just Scottish now’: Exploring integrative motivation using ethnographic methods 93 4.1. Integrative motivation at St John’s 94 4.2. The individual participants 96 4.2.1. The high IM group 96 4.2.1.1. Zofia 96 4.2.1.2. Maja 100 4.2.1.3. Kamila 101 4.2.1.4. Szymon 103 4.2.1.5. Piotr 105 4.2.2. The medium IM group 108 4.2.2.1. Anna 108 4.2.2.2. Jan 111 4.2.2.3. Dominik 112 4.2.2.4. Kinga 114 4.2.2.5. Izabela 116 4.2.2.6. Adam 120 4.2.3. The low IM group 121 4.2.3.1. Marek 121 4.2.3.2. Angelika 122 4.2.3.3. Nikola 125 4.3. Sociograms and language dominance 128 4.4. Grouping the participants 130 5. Aye 133 5.1. Research context 134 5.2. Methodology 137 5.3. The acquisition of native speaker constraints on aye 139 5.3.1. Results 140 5.3.2. Discussion 145 5.4. Predictors of the acquisition of aye 147 5.4.1. Results 147 5.4.2. Discussion 149 5.5. Chapter summary 155 6. Scots negation 156 6.1. Research context 157 6.2. Methodology 160 6.3. The acquisition of native speaker constraints on Scots negation 162 6.3.1. Results 162 6.3.2. Discussion 170 6.4. Predictors of the acquisition of Scots negation 173 6.4.1. Results 173 6.4.2. Discussion 174 6.5. Chapter summary 178 7. Glottal replacement 179 7.1. Research context 180 7.1.1. Social constraints 180 7.1.2. Linguistic constraints 182 7.1.2.1. Word-final glottal replacement 182 7.1.2.2. Word-medial glottal replacement 185 7.1.3. Predictors of the acquisition of word-final glottal replacement 186 7.2. Methodology 188 7.2.1. Circumscribing the variable context 188 7.2.2. Coding the data 189 7.3. Overall distribution 191 7.4. Word-final glottal replacement 193 7.4.1. The acquisition of native speaker constraints on word-final glottal replacement 193 7.4.1.1. Results 196 7.4.1.2. Discussion 202 7.4.2. Predictors of the acquisition of word-final glottal replacement 203 7.4.2.1. Results 203 7.4.2.2. Discussion 205 7.4.3. Summary for word-final glottal replacement 207 7.5. Word-medial glottal replacement 208 7.5.1. The acquisition of native speaker constraints on word-medial glottal replacement 208 7.5.1.1. Results 210 7.5.1.2. Discussion 224 7.5.2. Predictors of the acquisition of word-medial glottal replacement 224 7.5.2.1. Results 225 7.5.2.2. Discussion 227 7.5.3. Summary for word-medial glottal replacement 232 8. Morphosyntactic and discourse-pragmatic variation 233 8.1. Verb formation 235 8.2. Agreement patterns in plural existentials 241 8.3. Plural demonstratives 244 8.5. Intensifiers 248 8.6. Discussion 252 9. Discussion 254 9.1. The acquisition of native speaker constraints on use 255 9.2. Predictors of the acquisition of sociolinguistic variation 261 9.2.1. Length of residency (LoR) 261 9.2.2 Age at onset (AaO) 262 9.2.3. Gender 263 9.2.4. Integrative motivation (IM) 263 9.3. Comparing the acquisition of different variables 265 9.3.1. Speaker awareness 265 9.3.2. Constraint complexity 267 10. Conclusion 269 Appendices 275 Bibliography 293 List of tables Table 1: Summary of possible constraint acquisition patterns 26 Table 2: Summary of predictions on AaO and L2 attainment 31 Table 3: Details of the Polish participants (speakers ordered youngest to oldest) 59 Table 4: Details of the Glaswegian participants (speakers ordered youngest to oldest) 62 Table 5: Summary of speech data collected 83 Table 6: Summary of speech data transcribed 87 Table 7: Overall distribution of aye 138 Table 8: Output of the logistic regression analysis showing the significant constraints for aye (both speaker groups modelled together) 140 Table 9: Output of the logistic regression analysis showing significant constraints for aye with speaker group added as an interaction term 142 Table 10: Summary of constraint acquisition pattern for aye 145 Table 11: Comparison of auxiliary verb effect for enclitic negation contexts across speaker groups 160 Table 12: Overall distribution of Scots negation after removal of don't and dinnae 161 Table 13: Output of the logistic regression analysis showing the significant constraints for Scots negation (both speaker groups modelled together) 162 Table 14: Output of the logistic regression analysis showing the significant constraints for Scots negation with speaker group added as an interaction term 166 Table 15: Summary of constraint acquisition patterns for Scots negation 170 Table 16: Summary of constraints on word-final glottal replacement for native speakers and Polish migrants in Edinburgh: Findings from Meyerhoff & Schleef (2014: 113 and 117) 184 Table 17: Overall distribution of all variants of /t/ 191 Table 18: Overall distribution of [ʔ] and [t] for word-final /t/ 193 Table 19: Output of the logistic regression analysis showing the significant constraints for word-final glottal replacement (both speaker groups modelled together) 196 Table 20: Output of the logistic regression analysis showing significant constraints for word- final glottal replacement with speaker group added as an interaction term 199 Table 21: Summary of constraint acquisition patterns for word-final glottal replacement 202 Table 22: Overall distribution