Sweden

Gross, Johan; Boyd, Sally

doi:10.4324/9780429487958-18

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

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“…The emergence of MLE and ME/MBE can be seen as an example of a more general phenomenon: the appearance of new 'urban contact dialects' (Kerswill & Wiese, 2022). There is now a wealth of research which describes the development of these varieties in countries such as Sweden (Gross & Boyd, 2022;Kotsinas, 1988), Denmark (Aasheim, 1997;Quist, 2008Quist, , 2022, Norway (Svendsen, 2022;Svendsen & Røyneland, 2008), the Netherlands (Nortier, 2008;Kossmann, 2017), Germany (Şimşek & Wiese, 2022;Wiese, 2009), and France (Cheshire & Gardner-Chloros, 2018;Gadet, 2022). Some of this work has also described the tendency for urban contact dialects to spread (or diffuse) beyond the speech communities in which they first emerge (e.g.…”

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confidence: 99%

Using social media to infer the diffusion of an urban contact dialect: A case study of Multicultural London English

Ilbury,

Grieve,

Hall

2024

Journal of Sociolinguistics

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Sociolinguistic research has demonstrated that ‘urban contact dialects’ tend to diffuse beyond the speech communities in which they first emerge. However, no research has attempted to explore the distribution of these varieties across an entire nation nor isolate the social mechanisms that propel their spread. In this paper, we use a corpus of 1.8 billion geo‐tagged tweets to explore the spread of Multicultural London English (MLE) lexis across the United Kingdom. We find evidence for the diffusion of MLE lexis from East and North London into other ethnically and culturally diverse urban centres across England, particularly those in the South (e.g. Luton), but find lower frequencies of MLE lexis in the North of England (e.g. Manchester), and in Scotland and Wales. Concluding, we emphasise the role of demographic similarity in the diffusion of linguistic innovations by demonstrating that this variety originated in London and diffused into other urban areas in England through the social networks of Black and Asian users.

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