ethnicity and identity
- speakers may choose aspects of their language to signal how:
correct or incorrect they are
how ‘white’ or ‘non white’ they are (non white varieties have covert prestige)
how ‘nerdy’ or ‘street’ they are
British ethnic minorities
- some significant groups have migrated to Britain and retained a linguistic identity
eg. Irish Gaelic speakers may avoid saying yes/no as it is typically considered rude, and may instead choose to say ‘that it is’ / ‘to be sure’
Pidgins and Creoles
- pidgins and creoles are languages that draw their lexis primarily from one larger language, but their grammar, syntax and phonology from several others
- pidgins aren’t anyone’s first language but sometimes a pidgin will turn into a creole
eg. Tok Pisin which literally means Talk Pidgin
Bamboo English
- developed between Vietnamese and English soldiers during the Vietnam war so they could train with each other
- died out in 1985 but reappeared when ex-servicemen surfaced for holidays
eg. Me Love You Longtime uses English words but not English grammar, and uses me as an object pronoun instead of a subject
Jamaican Creole
- in places such as Jamaica, colonial powers such as GB set up plantations using enslaved workers from Africa
- it was a policy of the colonial government to divide speech communities to reduce the risk of plots and uprisings
- the slaves developed pidgins to communicate with each other, the lexis derived from English as it was the most common language and the grammar and phonology was drawn from the original African languages of the workers
- as the indigenous population died out, Jamaica was largely populated by slaves from Africa, and the pidgin turned into a creole in the 1750s
lexical characteristics of pidgins and creoles
- a lot of creole languages have a much smaller vocabulary than other languages as vocab develops after limiting circumstances
1) it tends to be drawn from one language
2) the phenomes (sounds) have to be present in all of the speaker’s original languages
reduplication is common in pidgins and creoles, so one sound can mean two things eg. sip - ship sipsip - sheep
grammatical characteristics of pidgins and creoles
plurals - pidgins and creoles do not mark plural nouns
gender - creolised and pidginised Englishes tend not to distinguish between genders in either nouns or pronouns
Black British English
- these decreolised, Caribbean-influenced English are called BBE
eg. universal tag question ‘innit’
the +s inflection is omitted from third person singular verbs in the present tense, ‘she eat apples’
/θ/ is pronounced /t/ think = tink
crossing
- in the 1960s, the influence of Jamaican creole on people who don’t have Jamaican heritage
- firstly it was white people converging with black friends
- then it became white people using creole features
Multicultural Urban English
- not the same thing as BBE
- MUE has different varieties around the country, for eg. the Manchester variety doesn’t include as much Cockney
MUE lexis
bare - many
Gyal - girl
MUE phonology
Fes /ʒ/ instead of Face/ɑɪ/
a:ks instead of a:sk (metathesis)
code switching and code mixing
code mixing - occasionally inserting words or phrases from one la nguyage to another
code switching - moving from one language into another for a prolonged period of time
Gumpert’s function sets
- this choice (to switch languages) can be practical as English has lexical gaps
- code switching can also be a way of establishing the relationship with the interlocutor
- Gumpertz argued that often, of the two languages used, one is a ‘we code’ and one is a ‘they code’
- eg British Pakistani Muslims adding ‘inshallah’ onto the end of their sentences
Domain Theory
- suggests speakers switch languages depending on the social context you associate that language with
eg British Punjabi Muslims
domain language
home punjabi
school english
mosque arabic
