People from different parts of the UK are sounding more and more like each other as their local accents and dialects die out with geographical and social mobility – a phenomenon that was nailed down more than a decade ago under the name “dialect levelling”. But now sociolinguist Paul Kerswill and his colleagues have found it’s not quite so simple. They are hot on the trail of two intriguing cultural clues which may have interesting implications for the world’s cities at a time of dizzying diversity. Teenagers in inner London, one of the world’s most ethnically diverse areas, are forging a separate multi-ethnic youthspeak based on common culture rather than ethnic or social background. By contrast, in the city that gave birth to the Beatles, Liverpudlians are busily defending their Scouse accent to the cultural death.
Eleanor Case asks Kerswill what all this means. Is it a worrying sign of people under pressure, forging tight groups to repel outsiders because they feel threatened? Or does it simply show that British cities are developing a vibrant culture in which newcomers and natives alike are finding ways of asserting their identity in the face of the pressures of the 21st century?
What do you think is going on?
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For me, it’s a welcome sign that we are not becoming as linguistically monochrome as the 1990s’ “Estuary English” debate seemed to suggest. Then we all thought the accent in the south-east would end up somewhere between Cockney and the Queen. In fact, a language can be subject to either greater homogeneity (accents tending to converge) or diversification (accents diverging). Over the past 150 years, but acutely since the second world war, the main force has been towards homogeneity. Diversification, on the other hand, is most obvious where new communities with separate identities appear. That may be what is happening to inner-London teenagers now.
What exactly is this dialect levelling that London teenagers and Liverpudlians are out of step with?
Dialect levelling happens when quite strong local dialects are watered down as people become more mobile, and have more contact with each other – and less with local people. Two hundred years ago, we would only have met people in our village, and dialect would have been maintained by the family. The other strand is upward mobility: we have different jobs from our parents, who may not have been skilled or educated and may have had a working-class local accent. The upwardly mobile strive to “improve” their speech as they gain social status, eliminating such things as double negatives: “I don’t want none” becomes “I don’t want any”. They also change their accent. Arguably, education has led to the loss of many regional words. Dialect levelling is strongest in new towns such as Milton Keynes.
How do you feel about levelling?
As a linguist I feel it would be a pity if local distinctions are lost – if people’s ability to use language to mark their identities is lost. Having said that, language is very much a mirror of society, so it is bound to happen.
Has class got anything to do with this?
We have to accept that in the UK we live in a class-stratified society. Local accents tend to be spoken by working-class people. Maybe working-class people are not as geographically mobile as the middle classes. You get a sort of solidarity in places where people live in close-knit communities. And such communities very strongly maintain accents and dialects. Sounding local has prestige value and is a symbol of group identity: if you start speaking differently, something has happened to you.
What happens if you speak differently?
Provided we have the ability to be linguistically as well as geographically mobile, then we’re fine. But it’s a problem for people speaking with an accent that is not appreciated by their new peers. There was a report about a woman from Bristol who went to work in London but was quickly frozen out. She suffered from a form of dialect bullying, and she moved back to Bristol. It seems culturally acceptable to discriminate against – and bully – people because of their dialect or accent.
What’s happening with the London teenagers?
My colleagues Jenny Cheshire, Susan Fox, Eivind Torgersen and I found what looks like the opposite of dialect levelling. Our study, the first large-scale study of the capital, recorded adolescents in the inner and outer city. We are studying 17-year-olds at a sixth-form college whose accents are not traditional “London”. Their speech contains a lot of features of Afro-Caribbean English with influences from the Indian subcontinent. Although most people speaking this way are from these and other ethnic minorities, white teenagers adopt it too.
What is happening here?
A clear new vernacular is emerging in inner London, linking ethnicities and forging shared identities – often around music like rap, hip-hop, grime or bangra. This is probably because there is a high concentration of recent immigrants whose first language is not English. When they were acquiring English, they had few English-speaking role models; it may be one reason why there’s this new sound in inner-city London where immigrants or first-generation descendants of immigrants are concentrated. What’s important is that they seem to be forming a model for the majority of Londoners – because the style of speaking is cool, connected with rap and the Caribbean and maybe America. The proof of the pudding lies with the next generation – how they sound when they’re 40-odd and living outside London. I think they’ll keep some features of this speech. It is firmly embedded, certainly in the ethnic minorities that we have interviewed. So you’re getting a new form of levelled English, regardless of ethnic background.
How did you measure all this?
We have measured a number of vowel sounds acoustically, and plotted them on vowel charts to show that vowels are changing in London. We compared the vowels of our teenagers with those of Londoners on archive recordings and our own interviews with elderly Londoners. Then we compared all of them with our data from teenagers in Ashford in Kent and Reading. The vowel charts show that sounds are changing, for example, the “o” in home pronounced by traditional Londoners and the dialect-levelled southerners would be miles apart from the London teenagers who have a vowel that sounds Scottish or northern. It’s Caribbean or subcontinental in fact.
Are you surprised by what you’ve found?
Yes. The sounds are so similar whether your family comes from South America, the Caribbean, west Africa or the Arabic-speaking countries. Our study is important because it makes concrete what people long suspected – the idea of a multi-ethnic youth English that shares features within itself – different from London English, spoken by the descendants of London speakers or Cockneys. And because this English forms a model, it has the potential to spread to the wider London population and beyond. You can hear a version among ethnic minority speakers in Birmingham.
“What’s important is the idea of a multi-ethnic youth English”
And what about Liverpool?
Kevin Watson, one of my colleagues, found that Liverpool is getting more Scouse, not less. I guess this is because of what some linguists would call “neighbour opposition” with arch-rival Manchester. It’s only 50 kilometres away with a continuous corridor of towns between the two, but there’s no evidence that the cities are converging linguistically. Liverpool traditionally has “t” and “d” in words like “thing” or “brother”. Or else they use the standard “th” sounds. Mancunians go for “f” and “v” like Londoners. Liverpudlians have special ways of pronouncing “t”, “k”, and “p”. With a word like “work”, they say “workh”, with “k” sounding like the “ch” in the German word “Bach”. With “hat”, they drop “h”, and pronounce “t” like an “s”. They’re doing this more not less. It’s partly a matter of keeping their local identity.
Are other cities worldwide showing these trends?
The Japanese sociolinguist Yoshiyuki Asahi has found dialect levelling in people who moved from inner-city Kobe to Seishin, a 1970s new town reminiscent of Milton Keynes. There is lots of evidence of new, ethnic forms of the majority languages in Sweden, Germany and elsewhere. And in a way, the vowel sounds being used by London teenagers are like those you find in Singapore or Ghana, where people are learning English not as a first language. These vowels are simpler to produce, and not any harder to understand. They belong to what some have called “international English”.
Profile
Paul Kerswill is professor of linguistics at Lancaster University, UK. He is lead investigator in the Linguistic Innovators Project, funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council. Last month, Kerswill and his colleagues presented phase one of the project at New York University
