Multicultural London English in Ealing: sociophonetic and discourse-pragmatic variation in the speech of children and adolescents Rosamund Oxbury Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy March 2021 School of Languages, Linguistics and Film Queen Mary University of London Statement of originality I, Rosamund Frances Oxbury, confirm that the research included within this thesis is my own work or that where it has been carried out in collaboration with, or supported by others, that this is duly acknowledged below and my contribution indicated. Previously published material is also acknowledged below. I attest that I have exercised reasonable care to ensure that the work is original, and does not to the best of my knowledge break any UK law, infringe any third party’s copy- right or other Intellectual Property Right, or contain any confidential material. I accept that the College has the right to use plagiarism detection software to check the electronic version of the thesis. I confirm that this thesis has not been previously submitted for the award of a degree by this or any other university. The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or informa- tion derived from it may be published without the prior written consent of the author. Signature: Date: 13th November 2020 1 Abstract This thesis is about Multicultural London English (MLE), a multiethnolect that is spoken by young people in London (Cheshire et al., 2011) and potentially beyond (Drummond, 2016). The thesis investigates MLE in the speech of young people in a relatively under- studied part of London: Ealing, a borough of West London. The speech of adolescents and children is compared to see if in Ealing, MLE features are used as part of an adoles- cent speech style, or are also acquired by children. Because a different range of heritage languages are spoken in Ealing compared to East London, the thesis also asks whether there are linguistic innovations in Ealing that have not been found in previous studies of MLE. Using a variationist sociolinguistic framework, the project analyses MLE in the speech of 24 young people aged 16–24 and 14 children aged 5–7. The diphthongs FACE, PRICE and GOAT are analysed acoustically for both age groups. There is also a qualitative anal- ysis of epistemic phrases (phrases related to I swear) in the adolescent data, motivated by the adolescents’ use of wallah – an Arabic borrowing that has also been found in other European youth languages (Opsahl, 2009). It is found that the children’s and adolescents’ diphthongs are similar in the quality of the onset, and similar to the emerging MLE system described by Kerswill et al. (2008). Among the adolescents, differences in the diphthongs pattern with language-internal ef- fects as well as social factors including speaker sex and community of practice member- ship. The comparison between adolescents and children reveals that the children have acquired the same diphthong onset qualities as the adolescents – replicating Cheshire et al.’s finding in Hackney. However, the children have not acquired monophthongisation of the diphthongs. These findings have implications both for the study of multiethnolects and MLE, and for research on children’s acquisition of sociolinguistic variation. 2 Dedication This thesis is dedicated to the children and young people who generously gave their time and voices. 3 Acknowledgements Thanks must go first of all to: the young people who were generous enough to help with the project, not just by taking part in recordings but allowing a weird university person to sit in awkwardly on their conversations and pester them with questions; their youth workers; the school teachers for accommodating me, allowing me to sit in on their lessons, and finding places and times when I could do recordings; the children for wanting to be involved and their parents for giving me the time of day and letting their children take part. The fieldwork for this project began in January 2017. During the time that I was doing sociolinguistic interviews, the UK saw four terrorist attacks, a general election, and the Grenfell tower disaster. Negotiations for Britain’s self-removal from the EU began. This was a time when it was hard to feel any kind of optimism for the future of the country. I would like to thank those who took part in this study for giving me hope. Sociolinguistic interviews have no agenda other than to get the participant to talk as much as possible. But that is only from the interviewer’s point of view! Many of these teenagers used the microphone self-consciously to explain those aspects of their lives that they thought my university needed to know, and to put their best foot forward by telling me their plans and ambitions for the future. This thesis is dedicated to them, and to their primary school counterparts. Thank you to my supervisors, Jenny and Kathleen. I feel extremely privileged to have been one of the last PhD students of Jenny Cheshire, and the first PhD student of Kathleen McCarthy! Thank you both for your patience, your encouragement and your attention to detail. It was a blessing to have two supervisors who are fantastic academics in their respective fields, but also just such nice people. Thank you to the DDS at QMUL and Equality Focus for matching me with my mentor, Amina Ispahani. Amina has been a constant source of kindness, advice and encourage- ment over the last three years. It is no exaggeration to say that I would not have been able to produce this thesis without her. She has helped me break the PhD into month-by-month and week-by-week to-do lists, pushed me to plan my time, nudged me to tackle the tasks I really didn’t want to do, talked me through break-ups and numerous house moves, and even got me to sign up for my first half marathon. Amina, thank you! 4 Thank you Erez, for first inviting me to QM to meet Jenny and discuss a 3+1 applica- tion all the way back in 2014 and then for your dedicated attention to the various drafts of the PhD proposal. Thank you for suggesting I do an OIV in Copenhagen and for helping to make that happen. I am grateful to have been part of the QMUL Linguistics community. In particular, thanks are owed to: Devyani, for teaching me Sociolinguistic Theory and encouraging me to write up my first journal article; Esther, for teaching me Phonetics and pushing me to write up my MA thesis; Colleen, for advice with fieldwork; Adam and Adib, for various bits of advice with the phonetic analysis. Thank you to the various iterations of the Linglab community who have brightened my day at different points: Zoe, Daniella, Shivonne, Annette, Melissa, Mohammed, Panpan, Chen; Nate, Christian, Maame; Ynda, Elisa, Scott, Tom Rausch; Elvis, Stamatina, Pietro, Chiara, Margaret, Lujain, Tom Mead- ows, Pedro, Adrian, Songyan, Antoaneta, Louis, Matthew, Liam, Celia, Jessica, Rosy Hall. The Copenhagen department, especially Pia Quist and Nicolai Pharao for being so kind and welcoming, and the masters students for taking me under your wings. By pure luck, my time in Copenhagen coincided with a visit by Heini Lehtonen. If I hadn’t met her, Chapter 8 would not exist in its current form. Thank you Tanya, for telling me to keep going. Thank you to those who got me through the (first) lockdown: friends and family who called me from the UK; Ikram, Andrea, Yao, Sylvette, Gita and Eva for looking out for me in Germany. Thank you to my friends, especially Sophie for being the Monica to my Rachel, and Sijana and Anna for all of the long, long phonecalls. Matt: I don’t know if this makes me a bad feminist, but I’m glad I did a PhD if for no other reason than that’s how I met you! Thank you for putting up with me. Thank you to my brother George and my own non-local caregivers. I have been hugely privileged to have a family as interested in language as I am! Thank you especially to my mother, who told me I would like Linguistics when I was trying to pick an undergrad degree ten years ago – I should have listened to you! My mother is actually one of the unsung heroes of Linguistics, having spent her career project-managing and copy-editing textbooks and handbooks for Wiley-Blackwell and CUP. I decided to spare her by not asking her to check my references... Lastly, I’m grateful to the ESRC for the 3+1 funding that made this project possible. 5 Contents List of Tables 14 List of Figures 18 1 Introduction and background 24 1.1 Multiethnolects and ethnolects . 25 1.1.1 Ethnolects (US-based research) . 26 1.1.1.1 Repertoire vs. lect . 27 1.1.2 European research & multiethnolects . 28 1.1.2.1 Variety or style? . 30 1.1.2.2 Terminology . 31 1.1.3 Summary . 32 1.2 Multicultural London English (MLE) . 32 1.2.1 Summary . 35 1.3 The spread of MLE: the diffusion of an adolescent youth style, or similar language contact outcomes? . 35 1.3.1 Possibility 1: Adolescent youth style . 36 1.3.2 Possibility 2: similar language contact outcomes in different speech communities . 38 1.3.3 Summary . 40 1.4 The role of children in the development of MLE . 40 1.4.1 Children in (monolingual) sociolinguistics . 41 1.4.2 Comparison with Milton Keynes . 42 1.4.3 Other studies of children with non-local caregivers .