Abstract
This chapter provides the background to an ethnographic, sociolinguistic research project exploring the language and identities of urban adolescents in Manchester. It describes the frequently negative portrayal of young people in mainstream media and sets out to challenge the damaging and misguided commentary around the way some young people speak. It discusses the concept of a Multicultural Urban British English—an overarching variety or repertoire of shared features, with each urban centre then having its own local version or sub-variety (such as Multicultural London English). It then tells the story of the project in hand—describing the eventful journey from the initial idea to the moment before the researchers entered the research sites.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Multicultural London English (MLE) is a variety or repertoire of English that has emerged as a result of the ethnic, linguistic, and cultural mix of London. It is in many ways ‘ethnically neutral’—available to be used by anybody, but it is heavily influenced by features from various other languages and varieties of English. It is primarily associated with young people. MLE will be discussed in more detail later in the chapter.
- 2.
An area of Manchester. Moss Side has had a bad reputation in the past, especially in the 1990s, when it was known for its relatively high rate of gun crime. Since then, it has been redeveloped and substantially cleaned up.
- 3.
Pupil Referral Units exist to cater for children who have been temporarily or permanently excluded from mainstream school. I will explain the system in more detail in Chap. 2.
- 4.
Police.
- 5.
Manchester boasts two top-flight football (soccer) teams—Manchester United and Manchester City. Manchester United is regularly cited as one of the most well-known clubs globally and is currently the richest (Ozanian 2017).
- 6.
Manchester has a rich musical heritage in well-known bands such as New Order, The Smiths, The Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, and Oasis. It is also famous for its 1990s nightclub scene, with venues such as the Hacienda.
- 7.
Manchester (technically Salford, a neighbouring borough within Greater Manchester) is home to MediaCityUK—a media hub which houses a variety of media companies, including the BBC. The 2011 move to MediaCityUK represented a major decentralisation process for the BBC from London.
- 8.
See Chap. 4 for a full description of these approaches. For the unfamiliar reader, it is enough for now to know that they represent two different ways of approaching the socially oriented analysis of language.
- 9.
With hindsight, this was a very naïve idea. At this stage, I simply wasn’t aware how much I didn’t know about ethnography and interactional sociolinguistics.
References
Baranowski, Maciej and Danielle Turton. 2015. Manchester English. In Raymond Hickey (ed.), Researching Northern Englishes, 293–316. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Cheshire, Jenny, Paul Kerswill, Sue Fox, and Eivind Torgersen. 2011. “Contact, the feature pool and the speech community: The emergence of Multicultural London English”. Journal of Sociolinguistics 15, 2: 151–196.
Delingpole, James. 2011. “If David Starkey is racist then so is everybody”. The Telegraph. 14th August. http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100100911/if-david-starkey-is-racist-then-so-is-everybody/
Dray, Susan and Mark Sebba. 2011. Practices, ethnicity and authenticity: ‘Creole’ and youth language in a British inner city community. In L. Hinrichs & J. Farquharson (eds.), Variation in the Caribbean: From creole continua to individual agency. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Dray, Susan and Rob Drummond. 2018. Language variation-in practice: Variationist and ethnographic research methods in collaboration. In Karin Tustin (ed.), The Routledge handbook of linguistic ethnography. London: Routledge.
Drummond, Rob. 2011. “Glottal variation in /t/ in non-native English speech: Patterns of acquisition.” English Worldwide 32, 3: 280–308.
Drummond, Rob. 2012. “Aspects of identity in a second language: ING variation in the speech of Polish migrants living in Manchester, UK.” Language Variation and Change 24:107–133.
Drummond, Rob. 2013. “The Manchester Polish STRUT: Dialect acquisition in a second language”. Journal of English Linguistics 41, 1: 65–93.
Drummond, Rob. 2015. Non-native Northern English. In R. Hickey (ed.), Researching Northern Englishes. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Drummond, Rob. 2018. The changing language of urban youth. In Braber, Natalie & Sandra Jansen (eds.), Sociolinguistics in England. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Harding, Nick. 2013. “Why are so many middle-class children speaking in Jamaican patois? A father of an 11-year-old girl laments a baffling trend”. Daily Mail. 11th October. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2453613/Why-middle-class-children-speaking-Jamaican-patois-A-father-11-year-old-girl-laments-baffling-trend.html
Howley, Gerry. 2015. The acquisition of Manchester dialect variants by adolescent Roma migrants. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Salford.
Hughes, Arthur, Peter Trudgill, and Dominic Watt. 2013. English accents and dialects: An introduction to social and regional varieties of English in the British Isles. London: Routledge.
Johns, Lindsay. 2011. “Ghetto grammar robs the young of a proper voice”. London Evening Standard. 16th August. http://www.standard.co.uk/news/ghetto-grammar-robs-the-young-of-a-proper-voice-6433284.html
Johns, Lindsay. 2013. “Language is power”. Four Thought. BBC Radio 4, 2nd October. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03brt2x
Johns, Lindsay. 2014. “D’ya get me? Does proper English matter?” Battle of Ideas 10. 18th October. http://www.battleofideas.org.uk/2014/session_detail/9001
Jones, Owen. 2011. Chavs: The demonization of the working class. London: Verso.
Kerswill, Paul. 2014. The objectification of ‘Jafaican’: The discoursal embedding of Multicultural London English in the British media. In Androutsopoulos, Jannis (ed.), Mediatization and sociolinguistic change, 428–455. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Office for National Statistics. 2015. A01 Manchester factsheet. Available at http://www.manchester.gov.uk/downloads/download/4220/public_intelligence_population_publications [Accessed Oct 2017].
Ozanian, Mike. 2017. “The World’s most valuable soccer teams 2017”. Forbes. Available at https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikeozanian/2017/06/06/the-worlds-most-valuable-soccer-teams-2017/#56c922b577ea [Accessed Sep 2017].
Quist, Pia. 2008. “Sociolinguistic approaches to multiethnolect: Language variety and stylistic practice”. International Journal of Bilingualism 12: 43–61.
Sebba, Mark and Susan Dray. 2013. “Making it real: ‘Jamaican’, ‘Jafaican’ and authenticity in the language of British youth”. Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 60, 3: 255–273.
Svendsen, Bente Ailin and Unn Røyneland. 2008. “Multiethnolectal facts and functions in Oslo, Norway”. International Journal of Bilingualism 12: 63–83.
Wiese, Heike. 2009. “Grammatical innovation in multiethnic urban Europe: New linguistic practices among adolescents”. Lingua 119: 782–806.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Drummond, R. (2018). Introduction. In: Researching Urban Youth Language and Identity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73462-0_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73462-0_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-73461-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-73462-0
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)