Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in
Book cover

Sociolinguistics in England pp 67–96Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

The Changing Language of Urban Youth: A Pilot Study

  • Chapter
  • First Online:

Abstract

This chapter describes the speech of a small group of adolescents (14–16 years old) in inner-city Manchester following an ethnographically informed sociolinguistic pilot study carried out in 2013. The young people had all been excluded from mainstream schools and so were being educated in two learning centres within Manchester’s Pupil Referral Unit. The chapter has two aims: firstly, to provide a description of the linguistic features that make up the current spoken language of a small group of young people in a particular context in Manchester. The description will involve comparison to existing accounts of Manchester English, in addition to work carried out in London. Secondly, to explore some of the social factors behind the observed variation, highlighting problems with looking at social categories such as gender and ethnicity, before going on to suggest a practice-based approach. In achieving this second aim, some reference is made to the subsequent follow-up study which is still in progress at the time of writing. The chapter is intended to offer an introduction to this area of ongoing research while outlining future directions.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.

Notes

  1. 1.

    The subsequent larger study continued in the same sites and ran from 2014 to 2016. It was funded by The Leverhulme Trust—Expressing inner-city youth identity through Multicultural Urban British English. RPG 2015–059—and brought in Susan Dray, an ethnographer and discourse analyst. Although the main linguistic data presented here comes from the pilot study, reference will be made to the follow-up study where relevant in order to explore areas of explanatory or methodological interest.

  2. 2.

    The decision to focus the research on the PRU context was made for three main reasons. Firstly, from a practical perspective, it provided access to a relatively stable group of young people who, given their inner-city context, would serve as examples of current urban Manchester speech . Secondly, the Pupil Referral Unit (PRU) environment is one that lends itself to the ethnographically informed approach being aimed for, in that the learning centres exist as relatively closed groups of a small number of Young People (YP) in which there is flexibility in day-to-day activities and lessons (unlike the rigid nature of most mainstream school timetables). And thirdly and most importantly, the YP in the learning centres represented a group of potentially marginalised individuals who were in real danger of slipping through the cracks with regard to further education and employment prospects, and some of the marginalisation, arguably, could be seen as stemming from the general prejudice surrounding ‘youth language’ (e.g. West 2011; Johns 2012; Harding 2013).

  3. 3.

    There were no ‘clean’ tokens of foot in the recording of Ryan.

  4. 4.

    Perhaps the closet comparable Northern British English data comes from Buchstaller (2014) in which she shows that in the speech of her ten 19- to 21-year-olds (albeit middle class university students in Newcastle), be like is the most common form, followed by un framed quotatives, followed by say and then go.

  5. 5.

    A 2011 British comedy film about a young man in London http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1658797/

  6. 6.

    A 2006 British film about a group of 15-year-olds in London http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0435680/

References

  • Baranowski, M., & Turton, D. (2015). Manchester English. In R. Hickey (Ed.), Researching Northern English (pp. 293–316). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Beal, J. C. (2008). English dialects in the North of England: Phonology. In B. Kortmann & C. Upton (Eds.), Varieties of English. Vol. 1: The British Isles (pp. 122–144). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

    Google Scholar 

  • Boersma, P., & Weenink, D. (2015). Praat: Doing phonetics by computer [Computer program]. Version 5.4.18. Available online: http://www.praat.org/

  • Bucholtz, M., & Hall, K. (2005). Identity and interaction: A sociocultural linguistic approach. Discourse Studies, 7(4–5), 585–614.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Buchstaller, I. (2014). Quotatives: New trends and sociolinguistic implications. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

    Google Scholar 

  • Buchstaller, I., & D’Arcy, A. (2009). Localized globalization: A multi-local, multivariate investigation of quotative be like. Journal of SocioLinguistics, 13(3), 291–331.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cameron, D. (2009). Demythologising sociolinguistics. In N. Coupland & A. Jaworski (Eds.), The new sociolinguistics reader (pp. 106–118). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Cheshire, J., Kerswill, P., Fox, S., & Torgersen, E. (2011). Contact, the feature pool and the speech community: The emergence of multicultural London English. Journal of SocioLinguistics, 15(2), 151–196.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Drager, K. (2009). A sociophonetic ethnography of Selwyn Girls’ High. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Canterbury.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dray, S., & Drummond, R. (Forthcoming). Language variation-in-practice: Variationist and ethnographic research methods in collaboration. In K. Tustin (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of linguistic ethnography. London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Drummond, R. (2011). Glottal variation in /t/ in non-native English speech: Patterns of acquisition. English World-Wide, 32(3), 280–308.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Drummond, R. (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.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Drummond, R. (2013). The Manchester polish strut: Dialect acquisition in a second language. Journal of English Linguistics, 41(1), 65–93.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Drummond, R. (2016). (Mis)interpreting urban youth language: white kids sounding black? Journal of Youth Studies, 1–21. Available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13676261.2016.1260692

  • Drummond, R., & Dray, S. (2015, October). ‘Gimme dat ting’: Word initial th-stopping among urban British youth. Paper presented at NWAV 44, University of Toronto, 22–25.

    Google Scholar 

  • Drummond, R., & Schleef, E. (2016). Identity in variationist sociolinguistics. In S. Preece (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of language and identity (pp. 50–65). London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fabricius, A., Watt, D., & Johnson, D. E. (2009). A comparison of three speaker-intrinsic vowel formant frequency normalization algorithms for sociophonetics. Language Variation and Change, 21(3), 413–435.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Harding, N. (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. Available online: 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, G. (2016). The acquisition of Manchester dialect variants by adolescent Roma migrants. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Salford.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hughes, A., Trudgill, P., & Watt, D. (2012). English accents and dialects: An introduction to social and regional varieties of English in the British Isles. London: Hodder Arnold.

    Google Scholar 

  • Johns, L. (2012). Do we really need to listen more to young people? I’m, not so sure. Mail Online. 13th December. Available online: http://johnsblog.dailymail.co.uk/2012/12/do-we-really-need-to-listen-more-to-young-people-im-not-so-sure.html

  • Kerswill, P. (2014). The objectification of ‘Jafaican’: The discoursal embedding of multicultural London English in the British media. In J. Androutsopoulos (Ed.), Mediatization and sociolinguistic change (pp. 428–455). Berlin: De Gruyter.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kerswill, P., Torgersen, E., & Fox, S. (2008). Reversing ‘drift’: Innovation and diffusion in the London diphthong system. Language Variation and Change, 20, 451–491.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mufwene, S. S. (2001). The ecology of language evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Quist, P. (2008). Sociolinguistic approaches to multiethnolect: Language variety and stylistic practice. International Journal of Bilingualism, 12, 43–61.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Schleef, E., & Turton, D. (2016). Sociophonetic variation of like in British dialects: effects of function, context and predictability. English Language and Linguistics, 1–41. Available online: https://doi.org/10.1017/S136067431600023X

  • Schleef, E., Flynn, N., & Ramsammy, M. (2015). Production and perception of (ing) in Manchester English. In E. Torgersen, S. Hårstad, B. Mæhlum, & U. Røyneland (Eds.), Language variation – European perspectives V (pp. 197–209). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

    Google Scholar 

  • Svendsen, B. A., & Røyneland, U. (2008). Multiethnolectal facts and functions in Oslo, Norway. International Journal of Bilingualism, 12, 63–83.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Szakay, A., & Torgersen, E. (2015). An acoustic analysis of voice quality in London English: The effect of gender, ethnicity and f0. In The Scottish Consortium for ICPhS 2015 (Ed.), Proceedings of the 18th international congress of phonetic sciences. Glasgow: The University of Glasgow.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tollfree, L. (1999). South East London English: Discrete versus continuous modelling of consonantal reduction. In P. Foulkes & G. Docherty (Eds.), Urban voices: Accent studies in the British Isles (pp. 163–184). London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Torgersen, E., & Szakay, A. (2012). An investigation of speech rhythm in London English. Lingua, 122(7), 822–840.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Torgersen, E., Gabrielatos, C., Hoffmann, S., & Fox, S. (2011). A corpus-based study of pragmatic markers in London English. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, 7(1), 93–118.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Turton, D., & Ramsammy, M. (2012, May). /ɪ,ə/−lowering in Manchest[ʌ]: Contextual patterns of gradient variabilit[ε]. Paper given at the 20th Manchester phonology meeting, University of Manchester, 24–26.

    Google Scholar 

  • Watson, C., & Harrington, J. (1999). Acoustic evidence for dynamic formant trajectories in Australian English vowels. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 106, 458–468.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wells, J. (1982). Accents of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • West, Ed. (2011). ‘Jafaican’ may be cool, but it sounds ridiculous. The Telegraph. 7th June. Available online: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/brendanoneill2/100101050/starkey-racism-row-it-is-the-political-elites-ceaseless-denigration-of-white-working-class-culture-that-has-turned-kids-black/, http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/edwest/100091088/jafaican-may-be-cool-but-it-sounds-ridiculous/

  • Wiese, H. (2009). Grammatical innovation in multiethnic urban Europe: New linguistic practices among adolescents. Lingua, 119, 782–806.

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK

    Rob Drummond

Authors
  1. Rob Drummond
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Arts & Humanities, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, United Kingdom

    Natalie Braber

  2. Department of English and American Studies, University of Paderborn, Paderborn, Germany

    Sandra Jansen

Copyright information

© 2018 The Author(s)

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Drummond, R. (2018). The Changing Language of Urban Youth: A Pilot Study. In: Braber, N., Jansen, S. (eds) Sociolinguistics in England. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56288-3_4

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56288-3_4

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-137-56287-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-137-56288-3

  • eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation