Penelope Eckert
美国社会语言变异研究中的社会意义：历史与未来
Social meaning in the history and future of sociolinguistic variation in the US
Technological advances have allowed the study of sociolinguistic variation to embrace larger and more diverse populations in greater detail and over time, while ethnographic studies have brought attention to the local social meaning of variation. These ethnographic insights in turn are being explored in large data sets. At the same time, semanticists have become increasingly engaged with social meaning, presenting the challenge of bringing together semantics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology into a unified theory of meaning. The result is a greater integration of sociolinguistics with linguistic theory on the one hand, and anthropology on the other. This talk will briefly recount these developments since the founding work in variation, and explore the challenge that lies before us.
Paul Edward Kerswill
大都市的新接触方言研究:以伦敦为例
Researching new contact dialects in metropolitan cities: the example of London
In North-west European cities, new varieties of established languages have emerged in the past 40 years, following rapid migration. Arrivals from other countries acquire local languages with varying levels of fluency, while their children acquire something like ‘native’ proficiency. It is these (young) people’s speech that is in focus. To varying degrees, these speakers’ varieties differ structurally from the established varieties, and the obvious question arises as to the mechanisms behind these changes.
My case study deals with Multicultural London English (MLE; Cheshire, Kerswill, Fox & Torgersen 2011). I take a broadly contact linguistics approach, coupled with an evaluation of the relevance of demography, population history and culture (Kerswill & Torgersen 2021). A striking fact about MLE is the importance of vocabulary originating from Jamaican Patois. This reflects the role of the post-World War II African Caribbean immigrants as the founders of a new London youth culture, reflected in the rise of Caribbean-influenced language and music. On the language side, this development is very much in line with Mufwene’s Founder Effect (Mufwene 1996), which argues that a founding population has a disproportionate influence on the developing dialect compared to later arrivals.
MLE has been described as a ‘multiethnolect’, a variety used in a community with many different language backgrounds. In the last 30 years, social and political developments have allowed the emergence of stronger, more visible Black identities in Britain. A concomitant of this has been the hotly debated claim that there is a distinctive Black British English (BBE), which contains the features of MLE but in a more consistent form. I wind the lecture up by showing how both these positions – MLE as BBE and MLE as a multiethnolect – can be reconciled.
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