Thesis Title: The role of ethnicity in the development of Multicultural London English in early childhood
Abstract: The current project expands on my previous undergraduate research on Multicultural London English (MLE), which was one of the first studies to closely analyse and explore the role of ethnicity within MLE. I conducted an acoustic phonetic analysis in Praat (Boersma & Paul, 2023) of vowel sounds in MLE and explored how ethnicity impacted vowel production. I compared black speakers from African heritage to Asian speakers from south Asian heritage. My findings show distinct differences in ethnic groups did impact MLE features, which implies ethnicity does affect the development of MLE. Since my BA in Linguistics, I have been working in an East London primary school where I noticed children in the first year of school spoke with different accents. Some spoke with either a Cockney, Southern British English, South Asian English, West African English or MLE accent. The range of accents in the class is understandable when assuming children normally acquire the language of their primary caregiver (Kerswill, 1996), however it was interesting because it made me think when do children begin to exhibit the social vernacular of a community and how does this occur. This project focuses on how young children acquire a new dialect of English in a socially diverse environment. It will expand our understanding of how this latest dialect of London is changing, but also child language acquisition in general.
Primary Supervisor: Kathleen McCarthy