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Style-shifting in Multicultural London English in an all-girls homework club

A group of 11-year-old girls in Hackney change their pronunciations of the innovative Multicultural London English diphthongs according to the speech context.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2020

Rosie Oxbury  and
Esther de Leeuw
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Extract

This study investigated whether and how pre-adolescent girls style-shift in Multicultural London English (MLE), a variety of English that is relatively new and potentially still changing. We looked at the extent to which five 11-year-old girls in a homework club in East London, where MLE is spoken, changed their pronunciations in different speech contexts. The results showed that the girls did indeed change their pronunciations in the different contexts (i.e. they style-shifted), and that the patterns of style-shifting varied between both the individual participants and the three vowels which were examined.

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Type
Research Article
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English Today , Volume 36 , Special Issue 3: Special Issue: Language in the South of England , September 2020 , pp. 59 - 69
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Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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