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Manchester Youth Language

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Researching Urban Youth Language and Identity

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Abstract

This chapter provides a description of the language encountered in the learning centres, along with some insights relating to issues of identity. It focuses on three specific linguistic areas: vowel sounds, quotatives, and lexis, as these are all aspects of spoken language in which variation and possible change are both apparent and often socially relevant. It makes comparisons with existing descriptions of language—notably Multicultural London English—and explores the extent to which a Multicultural Urban British English might be emerging. Identity is discussed in relation to a third-wave variationist approach, and the speech of individuals is described in relation to a scale of urban ‘street style’.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Part of this introduction is based on work which first appeared in Drummond (2018b).

  2. 2.

    Good (and relevant) examples of studies which look at the multiple-meaning potential of the same linguistic feature include Moore and Podesva’s (2009) account of tag questions and Pharao et al.’s (2014) research into the realisation of /s/ in urban Danish speech.

  3. 3.

    I realise that by invoking the concept of ‘street’ I am touching upon a complex area with which I do not have the space (or possibly understanding) to fully engage. At a superficial level I am drawing on the idea of ‘the symbolic power of street culture, which is often understood as authentic, defiant and vital, in other words “cool”’ (Ilan 2015: 3).

  4. 4.

    Grime is a style of rap music that developed out of early 2000s East London which has similarities to US hip hop, but is specifically British in style, with its musical roots in UK garage, bashment, jungle, and dancehall.

  5. 5.

    Dancehall originated in Jamaica and developed out of reggae, although the (rapped) lyrical content is very different, with a tendency towards profanity, violence, and misogyny.

  6. 6.

    Acoustic analysis is the process by which we measure particular frequencies within the soundwaves of speech. Using specialist software, we are able to use these measurements to get a sense of the ‘position’ (or quality/nature) of vowel sounds. See Thomas (2013) for an introduction. The description and analysis assumes that introductory understanding.

  7. 7.

    It should be noted that all the tokens from both Jake and Callum in Fig. 6.3 come from a one-to-one context; however, this lax variant is consistent with additional auditory analysis of more spontaneous contexts. In other words, I don’t believe this lax realisation was part of any situational style-shifting.

  8. 8.

    Baranowski and Turton (2015) do not investigate ethnicity, focusing only on white British speakers. However, I am unconvinced as to the role of ethnicity in traditional variationist terms anyway, a topic I will address shortly in relation to TH-stopping.

  9. 9.

    Cheshire et al. (2011) report on findings from two studies, one which gathered data from young and old speakers in both inner (Hackney) and outer (Havering) London, and one which gathered data from a variety of inner-city North London areas, with a focus on young people.

  10. 10.

    In actual fact, two other researchers working on MLE in 2016–17 have also reported that they have not come across this variant either (Shivonne Gates p.c.; Christian Ilbury, p.c.).

  11. 11.

    This could be seen as an example of precisely the sort of top-down researcher-imposed categorisation I discussed in Chap. 4. The danger is that if we simply divide the sample into male and female by default, we might notice differences that we then explain as being due to sex or gender, even though it is us who created the categories in the first place. We should only identify categories if there is a valid reason for doing so, that is, if we have other evidence (ideally from observation) that the groups are behaving or interacting differently.

  12. 12.

    Some of these speakers are clearly not ‘young’ in comparison to the speakers being discussed here, but they are ‘younger’ relative to the corpora.

  13. 13.

    Newcastle Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English 2.

  14. 14.

    See Chap. 4 for more details.

  15. 15.

    This excerpt is discussed in more detail in Drummond (2017).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Languages, Information and Communication, Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK

    Rob Drummond

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Drummond, R. (2018). Manchester Youth Language. In: Researching Urban Youth Language and Identity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73462-0_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73462-0_6

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