Multicultural Language Hybrids

It's not just English that absorbs linguistic influences from other cultures and languages. What's happening with German seems to reflect patterns that have been noted in English over the last 20-30 years, where German teens are picking up vocabulary items from Turkish in areas where there is a significant Turkish population and mixing goes on between different ethnic groups. In this report about a study from Pottsdam University, the suggestion is that it's mostly lexical features - a few words - that are picked up by German youths.

So is this similar to Multicultural London English, with a new hybrid language emerging? Or is it more like London (and maybe Birmingham and Liverpool too) in the 1980s when it was more a case of "crossing"? I suspect it's the latter, as there doesn't seem to be quite the same range of lexical, phonological and grammatical features that we see in the research of Paul Kerswill, Sue Fox and Jenny Cheshire into MLE (as seen being explained by Paul Kerswill here in a TED lecture).

Keeping it street

There's a new wave of TV dramas and UK films on the way which feature gangs, council estates and street crime. It's not surprising that given the summer riots and subsequent moral panic about the state of our nation (and more importantly the state of our estates) these programmes are taking a look at life on the fringes for young people, but what's apparent is that for many writers and directors the key way for them to make their visions of urban Britain look and sound authentic is to get the slang right.

A clued-up young urban audience is not going to believe that the people they see on the screen are genuinely like them unless they speak like them, you get me? So, in order to keep it real they've used slang consultants - what a great job that must be.

This piece on the BBC News magazine site takes a look at some of the slang and its uses among young people, while this is a short article I did for the MacMillan Dictionary blog earlier in the week, looking at how slang gets picked up and appropriated by mainstream society.

I'm not sure how I feel about slang being seen as the one, crucial marker of authenticity, because like so many other aspects of language use, slang is about identity and more than just a series of buzzwords for outsiders to pick up and use for a while. Then again, part of the joy of slang is that it's constantly reinventing itself, with slang innovators generating new words, new meanings all the time to keep a sense of individuality and identity even as their words start to seep into the mainstream.

Maybe it's that cycle of creation - appropriation - recreation that keeps them on their toes, feeding the new slang into the system.

Starkey's "Norman Tebbit moment"

Amid the horrific mayhem and destruction of last week's riots, there were a few moments of grim irony - David Cameron deriding the violence of the British underclass shortly before "declaring war" on gang culture, a Labour MP criticising looters for their "naked greed" having made a claim on his parliamentary expenses the year before for an £8,865 flatscreen TV, Nick Clegg propping up a government who he'd previously warned the public about as being likely to cause riots on the streets - but surely the most bizarre moment of all was historian and TV pundit, David Starkey's appearance on Newsnight last Friday in which he blamed the riots on white people turning black, before clumsily reading out the text of a BBM he said represented the broken English of a looter.

Many media commentators struggled to find the right words to describe what was going on. Were the people smashing up shops and lobbing bricks at the police protesters or looters, scum or terrorists? The Guardian wasn't sure. Were these disturbances race riots, London riots, British riots or English riots? The BBC settled for England riots, which strikes me as odd, given that England weren't even playing. Were the young people using the term feds to describe the police showing the influence of US hip hop and mimicking the antics of the LA rioters back in the early 1990s? The BBC News magazine reflected on these issues and even got some linguists and lexicographers to comment, making it a more informative and nuanced discussion than many others.

But let's go back to David Starkey and his rant on Newsnight. Back in 1996, the linguist Jean Aitchison delivered a series of lectures for the BBC on language (which can be read here or listened to here) in which she talked about the worries that exist for many people about how language changes. In one example, she quoted the then Conservative Minister Norman Tebbit making a direct link between language use and crime:

"If you allow standards to slip to the stage where good English is no better than bad English, where people turn up filthy ... at school ... all those things tend to cause people to have no standards at all, and once you lose standards then there's no imperative to stay out of crime."

So, in David Starkey's diatribe against "Jafaican" I think we have this generation's Tebbit moment. Let's look more closely at what Starkey said and unpick why it's not only racist and wrongheaded but linguistically suspect too. The Independent quotes Starkey's words as follows:

"I think what this week has shown is that profound changes have happened. There has been a profound cultural change. I have just been re-reading Enoch Powell. His prophecy was absolutely right in one sense: the Tiber didn't foam with blood, but flames lambent wrapped around Tottenham, wrapped around Clapham.

"But it wasn't intercommunal violence; this was where he was completely wrong. What has happened is that the substantial section of the chavs that you [Mr Jones] wrote about have become black. The whites have become black. 

"A particular sort of violent, destructive, nihilistic gangster culture has become the fashion. Black and white, boy and girl operate in this language together, this language, which is wholly false, which is this Jamaican patois that has intruded in England. This is why so many of us have this sense of literally a foreign country. 

"Listen to David Lammy, an archetypal successful black man. If you turn the screen off, so you were listening to him on radio, you would think he was white." 

What strikes me as so twisted is Starkey's leap from the assertion that "the whites have become black" to the apparent linking of  "blackness" to "violent, destructive, nihilistic gangster culture". At that point in his argument, he makes no attempt to draw a distinction between skin colour and culture. Later, he offers some (feeble) attempts at mitigation, perhaps when he tries to argue that not all black people - David Lammy, for example - "sound black", but it's still a reductive and idiotic argument. Why? Because in Starkey's mind black = "violent, destructive, nihilistic gangster culture". And your degree of blackness can be identified by the way you talk...

From a linguistic standpoint, his assertion that the "Jamaican patois" that has "intruded in England" and is used by young people involved in the riots is "wholly false" smacks of desperation. As one Twitter user @vivmondo wittily put it, "Asking David Starkey for his views on youth culture is a little like asking Lady Sovereign for her views on Elizabethan shipping law" but even so he goes ahead and gives us the benefits of his massive knowledge. And that's before he launches into his freestyle, which has been remixed for your pleasure and delight in the You Tube clip here.

As Geoff Pullum explains on Language Log, Starkey's views about the insidious influence of Jamaican patois on the native language are ill-informed and wide of the mark. What Starkey quotes in his poorly performed rap is nothing like Jamaican patois and much closer to Multicultural London English (MLE, MEYD or what some dubiously call "Jafaican"). 

Even Katherine Birbalsingh (who normally gets my goat about as much as Toby Young and Richard Littlejohn) gets it right when she says that the language Starkey is talking about is "a kind of fusion of many cultures, including Cockney East End speech. One can also hear some Jamaican influence, general working-class London influence and so on. Does Starkey really believe that Jamaicans go around saying “innit”? “Innit” has a Cockney glottal stop in it! Interestingly, this accent not only is not Jamaican, but neither is it in American gangster culture. What MTV rapper sounds like our kids?".

In yesterday's Evening Standard, Sam Leith made a slightly different point about the language of  Starkey's rant. Annoyingly, he insists on calling the variety of English in question as "Jafaican" with all its connotations of affectation and mimicry, when any good language student knows that what is emerging in London and has been developing for well over two decades is an organic form of language that has its roots in a range of different varieties brought together by contact in urban areas. He can be forgiven though as he's not a linguist and doesn't claim to be an expert on language. Plus he makes some good points elsewhere. 

Discussing Starkey's claim that "so many of us have this sense of literally a foreign country" he agreed that "(Starkey) touches an anxiety more people feel than admit to" before going on to say "it's actually a class and generational anxiety. It finds its most poisonous outlet in fears about race" and concluding by saying "Prof Starkey defended his position by saying that in times like this, "plain speaking" is needed. No. Careful, precise speaking is needed". 

Wise words indeed, and all the wiser because Leith - and Birbalsingh - notice that the people who use the language Starkey so derided are actually all around us: they are our students, our own children, us, our communities, not some alien race. To mark them out as a separate group because of their "wholly false" language use is to misunderstand and misrepresent both young people and the ways in which language works.

*Edited 16.08.11 to change title after inadvertently copying Stan Carey's MacMillan blog title from yesterday. Woops!

RIP Smiley Culture

It was really sad to hear of the death of Smiley Culture, the genius behind Cockney Translation and Police Officer, in really strange and disturbing circumstances this week.

The lyrics of Cockney Translation were some of the first to really address the ways in which Caribbean slang and dialect and home-grown varieties like Cockney were starting to come together to create what most of would recognise as Multicultural London English/ Multi-ethnic youth dialect  these days. While the song is all about differences in slang, it's the shared subject matter and the celebration of different words that make this such a great song, especially considering the time when it first came out and the social unrest and race riots that had been part of the landscape around the early 1980s.

Musically and lyrically Smiley Culture led the way for people like The Streets, Lethal Bizzle, Dizzee Rascal and many other performers who've been happy to mix and match words from different strands of their ethnic and cultural backgrounds to create a new form of speech.

RIP David Emmanuel AKA Smiley Culture

"Crappy patois"

Yesterday's Evening Standard carried an op-ed by Henry Hitchings on the nature of changing London English. It's partly a response to Charles Moore's attack on changing English in the Telegraph and partly an advertisement for Hitchings' new book, which we mentioned on here yesterday.

Interestingly, Hitchings makes much of what linguists have called Multicultural London English, Multi-ethnic Youth Dialect, or what some journalists have called "Jafaican", which, as Hitchings points out, tends to cast it as an affectation or a fake dialect, rather than " an authentic, organic variety of English and it looks likely to become more prevalent". We've featured MEYD and MLE here on many occasions and if you click on the tabs at the bottom of this post you'll get some links to the research done by Sue Fox, Paul Kerswill, Jenny Cheshire (and others) into this fascinating area of sociolinguistics.

Sadly, anything about language change tends to aggravate those who see all change as a foul corruption of our beautiful tongue, or even (in the case of the Evening Standard article), deranged anti-Jamaican troglodytes who argue (or sneer, perhaps more accurately) that it's a "crappy patois" "derived from some of the most pointless countries in the world", and speaking it is likely to limit young people's life chances. Well, yes, but only if they speak it as their only variety, which is generally not the case, as Hitchings is at pains to point out. But why let a bit of reasoned argument get in the way of a good dose of prejudice?

'Londonstani'

Hey guys,

Apologies if you are already aware of this novel and it's potential for the Language student, I've only just 'discovered' it, and have literally just come back from a seminar where the author himself (Gautam Malkani) has been talking about the book. Even if you are aware of this novel, perhaps my ramblings will be useful anyway, if not to shed some light on what Gautam must have been thinking to write this work.

To give some background, 'Londonstani' is a novel about a group of Asian middle class boys who are part of the nineties 'desi' culture [I think!] They are a sort of a gang who are trying to please their parents at home whist maintaining their tough-boy attitude to their peers.

[In this way the novel is comparable to the novels of black writers Alex Wheattle and Courttia Newland-'East of Acre Lane'-see Biscuit struggling to tide things over at home- and 'The Scholar' -see Cory trying to protect Sonia from knowing what's going on with Sean-]

Amongst all this, the teenagers find their own take on religious racism and ethnic issues that prove interesting, but for Gautam Malkani the book has an essentially class focus. The plot is an especially recommended one on account of the controversial twist it has at the end [one I wish I could tell you but would completely spoil the book if you read it!] The rest is, at it's simplest, an Asian's take on growing up in Hounslow and what it means to be a man in light of your culture, religion and race.

Before I continue, it has to be said that this is no Asian ghetto story, and the author admits and prides the novel on that, he focuses on the superficial persona of thug/gangster and how it aids and hinders middle class youth at the time he is writing about (90s.) In this way, it is somewhat different to those texts by black writers I mentioned before- NOT that I'm trying to make out that Brickie or West London are ghettos! I hope you understand what I mean and choose to move on..

Background roughly completed, to us linguists (or linguistic enthusiast in my case,) it is important A- how this text came about and B- that the characters talk in a mixture of slang.

The language used by the characters contains a high percentage of swearing, some urban London/street lexis, some Pakistani and other Asian words from different regions that I now can't remember and haven't seemed to have documented in my notes.. never mind. I thought this interesting in comparison to the MEYD studies and the latest work by Ben Rampton on the 'new' language of Asian teens today:

• Rampton, Ben, Language in Late Modernity: Interaction in an Urban School, (Cambridge, 2006) )[this book is EXCELLENT but don't read it all in one go.]

And also his 'Crossing' book where it goes into more detail:

• Rampton, Ben, Crossing: Language and Ethnicity Among Adolescents, (London and New York, 1995 [you can find this in SFX library]

I obviously haven't studied into this area but for those of you interested in this type of speech I think 'Londonstani' has great potential here that could enhance and complicate Language A Level work.
More generally (in relation to linguistics), the fact that this book resulted from socially scientific research I think is interesting, as we can compare the way he attained his data to the way in which samples are taken for linguistic studies and the various methodologies used. [The differences noted by comparing his methodology to yours for example, may help you in tailoring to the concerns of your argument/research.] The author explained that the criteria he had to follow in order to make his data usable is distinctly different to that of linguistics, but I couldn't help but draw parallel.
To again take a step contextually outward, Gautam Malkani's novel came from an interest he pursued whilst at university in Cambridge [boo..] where he studied SPS (Social and Political Sciences) [again, boo..] and wrote a dissertation in his final year about the use of the term 'coconut' and the gender issues surrounding teenagers (especially 16-17 yr old Asian males.) He was selective in his sample groups, making sure that he has a mix of ethnicities [but at the same time the contacts he named on interrogation suggest to me that he had more Asian participants than others], and, like a linguist, went into 6th form common rooms with tape-recorders to talk to people. He also separated males and females somehow, but admits that his most useful data was gained on receiving information from the mixed groups.
Some of the research he came across on his way seems of particularly useful for those of you interested in the re appropriation of the N-word, as he compares this to the attempted re appropriation of the P-word. Debate ensued about this between Commonwealth lecturer Priya' Gopal (Cambridge) and the author on this, with the latter stating enthusiastically that the P-word could never have the same effect as the N-word with the black community because: 'there are too many divisions in the Asian community' for this to occur, and the author arguing that the low-nil political consciousness of youth culture resulted in this failure to ameliorate the word, as well as his belief that fears of emasculation and not-being-man-enough on-the-streets was and is the more pressing issue underlying the issue. I thought this was worth noting. There is a quote I'd love to use to exemplify this issue in the book but since I feel bad about copyright issues I'll let you try and find it amongst the extract given in the following link: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5590750
The extract really speaks for itself and so I'll refrain from my rambling on and end here. I hope the points raised by my seminar that I found useful will also prove useful for you, or at least were as interesting to you as they were for me.
P.S, for those of you who don't mind admitting that at the heart of things superficial things do matter, the author, is, quite hot.

Slang: bare swag or just repping your endz?

In a thorough, well-researched and rather splendid article in The Independent, youth slang in London gets some extended coverage. Those of you who like these kinds of things - slang, "Jafaican", multi-ethnic youth dialect (MEYD) and the changing nature of London's language - might remember that Sue Fox did a talk in college earlier this year on Tower Hamlets accents changing as a result of the influence of Bangladeshi young people, and this article picks up on her and Paul Kerwill's latest research as part of Linguistics Innovators: The Language of Adolescents in London.

The article covers what MLE(Multicultural London English)/MEYD is, how it is developing and how it's being viewed by teachers, politicians and (most importantly) the users of it. In one section, Fox looks at the ways in which this variety of English is represented in the media and how she views it:

"The term Jafaican gives the impression that there's something fake about the dialect, which we would refute," she says. "As one young girl who lives in outer London said of her eight-year-old cousin who lives in inner London, 'People say he speaks like a black boy, but he just speaks like a London boy.' The message is that people are beginning to sound the same regardless of their colour or ethnic background. So we prefer to use the term Multicultural London English (MLE). It's perhaps not as catchy," she says, "but it comes closer to what we're trying to describe."

Elsewhere, Kerswill explores the social factors that influence whether or not young people continue to use the language as they grow older:

"We don't quite know whether kids will un-acquire MLE as fast as they've picked it up," concedes Kerswill. "The indications are that it depends very much on people's social networks and aspirations. Those who go into university or highly-paid jobs will change their speech. Those who remain where they are will most likely retain a lot of it. Most people are doubtless somewhere in the middle, and will change to some extent. But that will open the way for MLE to lead to changes in the English language in its spoken form, at least. One conclusion that we have definitely drawn from this study," he concludes, "is that English is one of the most dynamically protean of all languages."

All in all, it's a top read so have a look...

Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Change & Varieties

Can you speak Jafaikan?

A piece in yesterday's Guardian looks at the influence of Jamaican English on London dialects. Referring to Sue Fox's research on changing London accents and dialects, the article brands such a dialect "Jafaikan" (fake Jamaican, geddit?). The author, Emily Ashton (a ghetto name if ever I heard one) then gives us a quick slang glossary before heading back to her ends for a cup of rosy lee.

Like a lot of articles about changing language, this one takes a fairly superficial view of what's a very complex pattern of subtle shifts and influences, but it's not a bad read and you can have a laugh at the definitions. In fact, Sue Fox's research will be given a more thorough explanation by the woman herself at next week's SFX Language Conference (plug).

Edited on 06.02.13 to add:
If you're coming here from The Guardian Society link then you can find some better discussions about Jafaican/Jafaikan, Multicultural London English (MLE) and Multi-ethnic Youth Dialect (MEYD) here and here.


Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Varieties and Change

Kidulthood

A new film, Kidulthood is about to hit the cinemas and its subject matter and language are likely to create a fair old stir. It hasn't even been released yet and campaigners have called for its withdrawal on the grounds that it promotes violence, happy-slapping and glamorises anti-social bahaviour.

Set in west London and focusing on the lives of a group of urban teens, the film has also attracted interest because of its attempts to use the genuine language of the street, or as an article in The Sunday Times magazine puts it, a multi-ethnic dialect. The relevant section of the article is scanned below, while the whole article appears (scanned) on the SFX resources site here.


It looks like it could be an interesting film and I'd be interested to hear from any of you who see it...

Thanks to Peter at SFX & Juliet at Highams Park for the info on the article, and to Kevin at Lancaster for these further links to MEYD:

Sunday Times article
New Scientist extract
Official webpage of the MEYD project

Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Varieties & Change

Multi-ethnic youth dialect

I don't know how many of you read this blog from beyond south London, where our college is based, but it would be handy to have as many of you contribute to this debate as possible, wherever you're from.

Various pieces of research and comment from linguists such as Roger Hewitt in the late 80s/early 90s, Roxy Harris in the 90s and Paul Kerswill, Sue Fox and David Britain this year, seem to be suggesting that there is a new youth dialect emerging in the UK. This dialect is not regionally based, as many have been in the past, but linked to a whole range of other factors: ethnicity, age, identification with a particular way of life or subculture (or "communities of practice" as linguists seem to be calling it now).

According to an article in today's Sunday Times (which, it has to be said, is a pretty badly cobbled together piece) this dialect is spreading far and wide. Read the article and let us know what you think. And more usefully, in weeks to come we'll be running our own research to see how well known certain slang terms are and what they mean to you around the country.

Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Change and Varieties

Cockney Translation

The Cockney accent is fading and being replaced with a hybrid of London and Bangladeshi accents in parts of East London, it's claimed in research by Sue Fox of Queen Mary University.

In her research, Fox has studied changing accents and dialect in a youth club in Tower Hamlets over a 9 month period and found that a new generation of Bangladeshi-influenced dialect has grown and spread into the speech patterns of many young East Londoners, Asian, white and black alike.

Three articles give you the tabloid, broadsheet and BBC website take on this research:

East End Cockney Accent Fading

Bangney New Voice of East End

It's All Kent and Dover for Cockney

As Julie points out in her Language Legend blog, it's interesting to see how this change of dialect is represented in the media. Many see the fading of cockney as a terrible loss to British culture, while others treat the dialect as a bizarre and unfathomable anachronism (much as they do the white working class who use it, I suppose).

In an article in The Daily Telegraph the spread of Bangla-dialect is even couched in terms of an invasion, getting a bit "Infectious Disease" model on us (Jean Aitchison fans, take note!).

While Sue Fox's research is fascinating in its depth and detail (and we hope to get her to speak at our next Language Conference in 2006!) this sort of language change is nothing new, just part of a wider pattern of immigration, demographic shifts and linguistic accommodation.

On the day these articles were printed, we were on holiday in Italy staying with friends who are big reggae fans. As luck would have it, one of the records I heard that day was Smiley Culture's Cockney Translation, a hit from the early 1980s which blends cockney rhyming slang and Jamaican slang into a witty commentary on shared culture in London. I've tried to track down the lyrics on google with no luck as yet, so if someone can find them I'd be grateful, but there are some great lines in the song which show just how normal the blending of cultures and languages is in youth culture.

11, 10 ,9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1
Its I Smiley Culture with the Mic in me hand
Me come to teach you the right and not the wrong
In a de cockney translation

Cockney's not a language it is only a slang
And was originated ya so inna England
The first place it was used was over East London
It was respect for different style pronounciation
But it wasn't really used by any and any man
Me say strictly con-man also the villain
But through me full up of lyrics and education
Right here now you go get a little translation.

Cockney have names like Terry, Arthur and Del Boy
We have names like Winston, Lloyd and Leroy
We bawl out YOW while cockneys say OI!
What cockneys call a jacks we call a blue bwoy.
Say cockney have mates while we have Spa
Cockney live in a drum, while we live in a yard
Say we get nyam while cockney get capture
Cockney say Guv'nor We say Big bout ya

In de cockney translation x2

Well watch a man.......
The translation of cockney to understand is easy
So long as you aint deaf and you listen me keenly
You should pick it up like a youth who find some money
Go tell it to your friends and also your family
No matter if a English or a Yardy
Ca' you never know when them might buck up a cockney
Remember warn dem dem deh man dem don't easy
Dem no fire sling shot a me say strictly double B
Dem run protection racket and control 'nuff CID

Say cockney fire shooter, we bus' gun
Cockney say tea leaf. We just say sticks man.
You know dem have wedge while we have corn
Say cockney say Be first my son! we just say Gwan!
Cockney say grass we say informer man
When dem talk about Iron dem really mean batty man
Rope chain and choparita me say cockney call tom
Cockney say Old Bill we say dutty Babylon

In a de Cockney Translation x2

Well watch a man
Slam bam
Jah man
Hear dem
Fasion
Smiley
Culture
Organisation

But let me first tell you more about the Cockney
Who live comfortably and have a yacht by the sea
And when it come to money most of them have plenty
But where dem spent it? In de bookie
Lose it all on the dogs ot on the gee gees
Or paying off fe dem bribes to the Sweeney
So dem nah get no time fe Armed Robbery
Or catching anything that fell off the back of a lorry

Slam bam
Jah man
Hear dem
Fasion
Me strong
Me long
Me at the mike stand
More time
In a dance
Me chat
'pon a sound

But sometimes me shake out and leave me home town
And thats when me travel a East London
Where I have to speak as a different man
So that the Cockney can unserstand
So black man and white man hear dem fashion

Cockney say Scarper we say Scatter
Cockney say rabbit, we chatter
We say bleach, cockney knackered
Cocknay say triffic, we say waaaacked!

Cockney say blokes we say guys
Cockney say alright, we say Ites
We say pants, cockney say strides
sweet as a nut.... just level vibes seen?

(thanks to King Biscuit Time & Tank Girl on Urban 75 for getting these lyrics!)

Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Change and Varieties
ENA6 - Language Debates