21.1 Introduction

In recent years, many cities across Europe have seen the emergence of a new type of contact variety, generally described using the term multiethnolect (Clyne Reference Clyne2000). These multiethnolects have arisen in the mixed multicultural neighbourhoods of urban centres with large immigrant populations, including, for example, Amsterdam (Appel Reference Appel1999; Nortier and Dorleijn Reference Nortier and Dorleijn2008), Stockholm (Kotsinas Reference Kotsinas1988; Bodén Reference Bodén, Källström and Lindberg2011), Oslo (Svendsen and Røyneland Reference Svendsen and Røyneland2008; Aarsæther Reference Aarsæther, Quist and Svendsen2010), Copenhagen (Quist Reference Quist2008, Reference Quist, Quist and Svendsen2010), Helsinki (Lehtonen Reference Lehtonen, Kern and Selting2011) and Berlin (Wiese Reference Wiese2009; Freywald et al. Reference Freywald, Mayr, Özçelik, Wiese, Kern and Selting2011). Similar varieties have also been reported in cities across England, such as London (Cheshire et al. Reference Cheshire, Kerswill, Fox and Torgersen2011; Fox Reference Fox2015), Manchester (Drummond Reference Drummond2017) and Birmingham (Fox, Khan and Torgersen Reference Fox, Khan, Torgersen, Kern and Selting2011), leading to the notion that there may exist a Multicultural British English (Drummond, this volume). Due to rapid social-demographic changes in such communities, the availability of local, native models of the language of the host society is often weak and there is, therefore, no consistent target variety for newcomers. Consequently, language change can take place as immigrant children ‘acquire combinations of language features from a rich “feature pool” of linguistic forms influenced by a wide variety of languages, dialects and learner varieties’ (Cheshire and Fox Reference Cheshire, Fox, Corrigan and Mearns2016:288; see Mufwene Reference Mufwene2001 for the notion of the feature pool). Although the circumstances that give rise to the emergence of these new urban contact varieties are complex, and differ from place to place, they are nevertheless ‘sufficiently common … for the formation of multiethnolects to be seen as a distinct and important type of community language change’ (Cheshire et al. Reference Cheshire, Kerswill, Fox and Torgersen2011:191). The term multiethnolect was coined to capture the fact that, despite their origins, the resulting non-standard varieties are not restricted to any particular ethnic group but are available to anyone, including speakers from non-immigrant backgrounds (Cheshire et al. Reference Cheshire, Kerswill, Fox and Torgersen2011). I continue to use the term here, while acknowledging that it is not unproblematic and that some researchers prefer to use other labels, such as ‘contemporary urban vernacular’ (e.g. Rampton Reference Rampton2011). While some speakers may, in certain situations, choose to use multiethnolects for the purpose of portraying or expressing a certain kind of identity (see, for example, Ilbury Reference Ilbury2023), there are increasing indications that ‘these varieties have become the unmarked Labovian “vernacular” for many speakers’ (Cheshire et al. Reference Cheshire, Kerswill, Fox and Torgersen2011:153; see also Fox et al. Reference Fox, Khan, Torgersen, Kern and Selting2011). This chapter focuses on Multicultural London English (MLE), since it is the variety spoken in London, the UK’s largest metropolis, and is positioned to influence the future of vernacular speech across the UK.

21.2 Historical Origins of MLE

In the last seventy years or so, the London vernacular of Cockney (for an overview of Cockney, see Fox Reference Fox, Bergs and Brinton2012a; Torgersen Reference Torgersen and Bolton2024) has been subject to significant dialect/language contact due to shifts in both in- and out-migration. The working-class areas have experienced a shift away from the largely Anglo working-class families to the ‘super-diversity’ (Vertovec Reference Vertovec2007) that is London’s population in the twenty-first century. Today, London is home to 35 per cent of the UK’s foreign-born population, with some Inner London boroughs having some of the highest proportions,Footnote ¹ while white British residents comprise less than half of the city’s population (42.5%).Footnote ²

Of course, migration has always been pervasive in London. The city was built by the Romans and since then has continually attracted in-migration, from both within and outside Britain. Large waves of migration have included the French Huguenots in the latter part of the seventeenth century, a large Irish community who were attracted to London during the dock-building period throughout the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century, and large numbers of Jewish people (see Kircher, this volume) who, following their persecution in Russia and Poland, arrived towards the end of the nineteenth century (Fox and Sharma Reference Fox, Sharma, Heinrich and Smakman2017; see Fox Reference Fox2015 for a fuller discussion of these waves of immigration).

However, in the post-war era, London underwent an intense period of both in- and out-migration. During World War II, planners had worked on the reconstruction of London, much of which included moving large numbers of people out of the city to new housing estates on the outskirts and to new purpose-built satellite towns. This, together with the closure of the London Docks between 1967 and 1981, led to a decline in the London population (again see Fox Reference Fox2015 for a fuller discussion). In contrast to this out-migration, from the 1950s onwards, the government of the day actively encouraged large-scale immigration in order to fill labour shortages, especially in the transport network and in the newly created National Health Service. It was during this time that the first ‘non-white’ groups of people became established in London. These groups included large inflows of people from former British colonies such as Jamaica, Guyana, Trinidad, India and Pakistan (including the area that is now Bangladesh). Global migration has continued, and since the 1990s, London has become home to smaller immigrant groups from more diverse places outside of Europe, such as Somalia, Nigeria and Turkey, as well as to people from the newer European Union states, such as Poland and Lithuania. London now has one of the highest proportions of foreign-born residents across cities globally. Those currently living in London come from 179 countries (Vertovec Reference Vertovec2007) and more than half of Inner London schoolchildren are known or believed to have a first language other than English.Footnote ³ Unsurprisingly, such social and demographic changes have had linguistic consequences. In highly mono-ethnic areas such as Southall in West London, where the majority of the residents are of South Asian heritage, almost all exogenous linguistic features can be traced to Punjabi; here, British Asian English is spoken (Fox and Sharma Reference Fox, Sharma, Heinrich and Smakman2017; Sharma and Wormald, this volume). But for most young people living in multiethnic housing estates across London, the variety spoken is MLE.

The beginnings of MLE can be traced back to the 1980s when Hewitt (Reference Hewitt, Chisholm, Büchner, Krüger and Brown1990:191–2) reported the use of a ‘multiracial vernacular’, which he described as a ‘de-ethnicised, racially mixed language’ for the variety that was being used among young black and white speakers in London. He considered that language contact, and the two-way movement between Cockney and Creole, was having an impact on this emerging variety. Although there is no specific linguistic information reported, we can note that Hewitt (Reference Hewitt, Chisholm, Büchner, Krüger and Brown1990:191–2) refers to ‘a site within which ethnicity is deconstructed, dismantled and reassembled into a new ethnically mixed “community English”’. Fox’s (Reference Fox2015) later study in East London points further to the continued effects of language contact and the impact of non-UK varieties on the language of London. Analysing thirty-five hours of recorded speech data collected in 2001, Fox revealed that male adolescents of Bangladeshi heritage (but, importantly, born in London) had not acquired the traditional Cockney variety of London English and were leading in innovative variants of face and price vowels not previously documented for London (Fox and Torgersen Reference Fox, Torgersen, Braber and Jansen2018). Furthermore, the Bangladeshi adolescents were also leading in changes to the allomorphy system of definite and indefinite articles (see Fox Reference Fox2015: Chap. 5 for an in-depth discussion; see also Section 21.3.3, this volume). Although the Bangladeshi adolescents were the most frequent users of the innovative variants, the white British males in the study had also adopted the innovations. Fox argued that this was due to the fact that those groups were members of the same friendship networks and engaged in some of the same social practices, suggesting that there is a close link between innovation, diffusion and friendship networks (Fox et al. Reference Fox, Khan, Torgersen, Kern and Selting2011).

In 2006, the first use of the label Multicultural London English came into being to describe some of the innovations discussed above, among others (Kerswill and Torgersen Reference Kerswill, Torgersen, Beaman, Buchstaller, Fox and Walker2021:257). The term was coined by the research team working on two large-scale sociolinguistic studies of multiethnic Inner London districts in East and North London between 2004 and 2010,Footnote ⁴ and came about largely as a response to the use of the more negatively connotated term Jafaican used by the media earlier that year, which not only suggested an inauthenticity attached to the variety but also added to the popular belief that MLE originates from the speech of Jamaican immigrants (Kircher and Fox Reference Kircher and Fox2019). In their detailed account of tracing the origins of MLE, Kerswill and Torgersen (Reference Kerswill, Torgersen, Beaman, Buchstaller, Fox and Walker2021) show that while there does appear to be some continuity from the variety’s early beginnings, particularly with regard to the availability of Jamaican and African American slang (Kerswill and Torgersen Reference Kerswill, Torgersen, Beaman, Buchstaller, Fox and Walker2021:257; Kerswill Reference Kerswill, Auer, Hilpert, Stukenbrock and Szmrecsanyi2013; Green Reference Green and Coleman2014), many of the features of MLE cannot be traced to a single source. For morphosyntactic innovations, such as loss of indefinite and definite article allomorphy and quotative this is + speaker (see Sections 21.3.3 and 21.3.4), there are no identifiable traces of Creole. Beyond vocabulary, there appears to be no direct influence of African Caribbean on MLE. It would seem, then, that MLE has emerged as a result of language contact, arising from the social and historical changes outlined above. Let us turn now to the characteristics of MLE.

21.3 Phonology

21.3.1 Vowels

The most striking changes have taken place in the vowel system. The characteristic shifted qualities for diphthongs in Cockney (Figure 21.1) are no longer apparent in MLE.

Figure 21.1 Cockney diphthong shift.

(Wells Reference Wells1982:308)

Specifically, unlike Cockney, the face vowel in MLE has a high-front onset and the goat vowel has a high-back onset, while the mouth and price vowels both have lowered onsets. All of these vowels have shorter trajectories in MLE, giving them a near-monophthongal quality (Cheshire et al. Reference Cheshire, Kerswill, Fox and Torgersen2011). Furthermore, the goose and fleece vowels no longer have a diphthongal quality in MLE (Kerswill et al. Reference Kerswill, Cheshire, Fox and Torgersen2008). The shorter durations of these vowels, together with a longer duration of the schwa vowel, contribute to a more syllable-timed speech rhythm (Torgersen and Szakay Reference Torgersen and Szakay2012), adding to the overall effect that MLE sounds quite different from Cockney. In south-east England generally, the onset of goose is fronting, but the fronting is even more advanced, [y:] in MLE (Cheshire et al. Reference Cheshire, Kerswill, Fox and Torgersen2011). On the other hand, the foot vowel, while generally fronting in some speakers in south-east England (Torgersen and Kerswill Reference Torgersen and Kerswill2004), is more likely in MLE to be [ʊ], as in Received Pronunciation.

21.4 Perceptions of MLE

Although the labels Multicultural London English and MLE have emerged within an academic environment, rather than having arisen among its users, recent research has shown that speakers and non-speakers alike are able to identify the variety, even if they do not specifically use those terms. Kircher and Fox’s survey of 800 speakers in London showed that MLE is spoken by individuals in almost all London boroughs and that it is spoken across a wide range of ages, genders, ethnicities and linguistic backgrounds (Kircher and Fox Reference Kircher and Fox2019:6–7). For some speakers, it is their everyday vernacular (in the sense of Labov Reference Labov1972), while others claim that they draw on the variety as a stylistic resource within their speech repertoire, depending on their interlocutors and the context in which it is used (as with all speakers). MLE has also become enregistered (Agha Reference Agha2003) in public consciousness as a variety associated with multiethnic inner-city communities in London, as evidenced by its use in mainstream TV programmes and films that are set in multicultural/multilingual neighbourhoods in London (Cheshire et al. Reference Cheshire, Fox, Kerswill, Torgersen and Bolton2024). It has also attracted public attention in other areas of popular culture such as literature, for example In Our Mad and Furious City by Guy Gunaratne, and grime music, for example the lyrics of Stormzy’s Shut Up contain several lexical, grammatical and discourse-pragmatic features which are considered characteristic of MLE (Ilbury and Kerswill, Reference Ilbury, Kerswill, Svendsen and Jonsson2023), and advertising, as well as in education, where it now features in English A-Level syllabi.

Grime music, epitomised by artists such as Dizzee Rascal, Wiley, and Stormzy, emerged among MLE speakers in multiethnic areas of East London during the early 2000s (Adams Reference Adams2018); the language of grime is MLE. The rise in popularity of grime across the UK and beyond may promote the establishment and diffusion of MLE beyond London (Drummond Reference Drummond2018, this volume). Language attitudes will also contribute to the entrenchment of this new urban London English vernacular. As Kerswill (Reference Kerswill and Androutsopoulos2014) points out, the media portrayal of MLE is negative, the unfounded recurring narrative being that this non-standard variety could be educationally and socially harmful to its speakers. These arguments are often played out during heated debates in the public domain (for example see the video debate between Michael Rosen and Lindsay Johns in The Guardian (9 December Reference Rosen and Johns2013). Moreover, Kerswill (Reference Kerswill and Androutsopoulos2014) also shows how the media has perpetuated the perception that MLE ‘sounds black’ (Cheshire, Hall and Adger Reference Cheshire, Hall and Adger2017:4). There may be something in that argument. Ilbury (Reference Ilbury2023) goes one step further and argues that MLE has undergone ‘recontextualization’ (Bauman and Briggs Reference Bauman and Briggs1990) from an everyday vernacular spoken by working-class youth living in inner-city neighbourhoods in London to a UK-wide ‘supralocal style that is associated both with a specific subcultural orientation (road culture) and social identity (the roadman)’ (Ilbury Reference Ilbury2023:22), both markers ideologically linked to black British working-class youth. Along these lines, MLE may not be as ethnically neutral as was once thought (e.g. Cheshire et al. Reference Cheshire, Kerswill, Fox and Torgersen2011) or, at least, it may not remain so.

Negative representations of MLE could result in discrimination against its speakers (Kircher and Fox Reference Kircher and Fox2019). In a recent experimental investigation of accent bias in mock job interviews for a trainee solicitor, two MLE-speaking interviewees were rated lower overall on hireability compared to speakers with other UK accents. The MLE speaker who used a higher proportion of MLE features (K-backing, DH-stopping, and MLE variants of the foot and goat vowels) was one of the lowest-rated mock candidates on traits pertaining to employability (perceived professionalism, expertise and likeability). He was also evaluated as less educated than the other MLE speaker as well as more often perceived as being ethnically black (Cardoso et al. Reference Cardoso, Levon, Sharma, Watt and Ye2019). Interestingly, the speaker who used fewer MLE features was among the highest rated of all mock candidates – ‘suggesting a measure of social acceptance of a “mild” form of MLE’ (Cheshire et al. Reference Cheshire, Fox, Kerswill, Torgersen and Bolton2024).

MLE speakers themselves are aware of the stereotypical perceptions associated with their speech, but their own perceptions of the variety are much more positive, considering it to be ‘a natural evolution’ as well as ‘innovative’ and ‘cool’ (Kircher and Fox Reference Kircher and Fox2021:9). As one speaker put it, ‘it’s a symbol of one’s identity, MLE has become a norm for young people’ and another who stated that ‘[MLE] … is innovative and to many is a symbol of their identity as a Londoner surrounded, and proud to be surrounded by people from around the world’ (Kircher and Fox Reference Kircher and Fox2021:15).

21.5 Concluding Remarks and Looking to the Future

As the above discussion has shown, MLE has emerged as a result of language contact, arising from the social and historical changes outlined in Section 21.2. Children growing up in the multiethnic and multilingual inner-city areas of London will usually acquire English at an early age, but the English that they are exposed to may include different postcolonial and Creole-influenced varieties (if indeed English is spoken in the home) as well as a range of different learner varieties that will be influenced to various degrees by the first languages of the caregivers (Fox and Torgersen Reference Fox, Torgersen, Braber and Jansen2018:210; Oxbury Reference Oxbury2021:101–10). In households where the caregivers do not speak English at all, the children will acquire their English from their (multiethnic) peer groups at school or from their older siblings. In other words, they do not have access to a stable target model of local English but, rather, they are exposed to a rich ‘feature pool’ (Mufwene Reference Mufwene2001) of linguistic forms that are influenced by many languages, in addition to involving features taken from different English varieties from around the world, the many learner varieties in the community, as well as the local existing forms. The forms that they then acquire, through a process of unguided second language acquisition, can be modified into new structures and innovations (Cheshire et al. Reference Cheshire, Kerswill, Fox and Torgersen2011).

MLE is still a dynamic variety and is continuing to evolve. Ongoing immigration to different areas of London means that new linguistic features are constantly added to the feature pool for the children of new immigrants (Cheshire et al. Reference Cheshire, Fox, Kerswill, Torgersen and Bolton2024). Recent studies already indicate that there may be differences between areas and communities within London (Gates Reference Gates2019; Ilbury Reference Ilbury2019; Oxbury Reference Oxbury2021), but perhaps this was always the case, even among the monolingual white working classes who once made up the majority population in different areas of London. It may be that some MLE features will disappear as rapidly as they appeared; for example, the quotative form this is + speaker discussed previously was not attested in recent studies in West London, nor in East London (Ilbury Reference Ilbury2019), and we have yet to see whether MLE divides along ethnic lines, as suggested by Ilbury (Reference Ilbury2023). Only future research will be able to establish if, how and when the variety will become stabilised in the future. As a closing comment, it is exciting to note that research is already underway to track language change in real time. The studyFootnote ⁵ aims to answer how and why certain linguistic forms have spread, changed, or receded, and to clarify whether working-class and ethnic minority speech features are becoming part of casual London speech, or whether ethnic and class divides are deepening. The study will also inform and update work on accent bias and obstacles to social mobility. There should be a whole new body of work on this variety by the time the next edition of this volume is published.

22.1 Introduction

This chapter focuses on varieties of British English that have developed in South Asian communities around the United Kingdom. The term British Asian English is sometimes used in the literature but serves as an umbrella term for many regional sub-varieties in the United Kingdom.

At approximately 9.6 per cent of the total population,Footnote ¹ South Asians represent the largest ethnic minority in the United Kingdom. Some of the largest concentrations of South Asians in urban centres are spread across England, including in London, Birmingham, Leicester and Bradford. Thirty-five per cent of the South Asian community lives in London (over 15% of the city’s total population), with a major concentration in the West London boroughs of Ealing and Hounslow. South Asian languages are concentrated in different neighbourhoods of London: Gujarati in North London (Wembley), Bengali in East London (Tower Hamlets), and Panjabi in West London (Southall and Hounslow), for example.

We focus on South Asian varieties of English as these are more extensively attested and analysed than English use in East Asian British communities (see Li and Milroy Reference Wei and Milroy1995 for a discussion of English use in Chinese communities). Aside from differences in demographics, one reason that more distinctive varieties have emerged among South Asians may be the presence of English as a local language in South Asian countries, potentially reinforcing regular divergences from British English norms.

22.2 Language in South Asia

Contact between speakers of South Asian languages and British English began long before a large presence of South Asians became established in the UK. Significant contact began with the establishment of British control in India by the East India Company, from 1600 onwards. A number of links between Indic languages and English formed during this period, a period when British philologists based in colonial India discovered the Indo-European genetic affinities between Indo-Aryan languages (such as Sanskrit, Hindi, Panjabi and Gujarati) and English. During this period, British English was influenced by contact with Hindi, Farsi and Urdu, in the form of loanwords, borrowed both via officials from higher social classes (e.g. avatar, karma, pundit, shampoo) and via Cockney, the dialect used by many working-class military men (e.g. dekko, cushy, doolally, mufti, Blighty). Most importantly for the present discussion, a number of varieties of Indian English developed over centuries of colonial rule and in the postcolonial period. To understand the emergence and longevity of British Asian English varieties over generations, it is important to recognise the role of South Asian varieties of Englishes, both as part of the language repertoires that the first generations of migrants brought with them, and as a continuing reference point for maintaining South Asian speech features.

22.3 The History of British Asian Communities

Over the past century, South Asians have shifted from being a minority to a majority demographic group in many neighbourhoods in British cities. In the post-war period, the UK faced severe labour shortages and encouraged labour migration from former colonies. The British Nationality Act of 1948 converted former ‘British subjects’ to ‘Commonwealth citizens’ and permitted such citizens to enter the UK without restriction. The Asian population grew substantially between 1948 and 1971, before a series of immigration acts began to limit numbers. By this time, the economic climate had shifted (Oates Reference Oates2002), and along with it British public opinion, embodied in Enoch Powell’s infamous 1968 speech on Commonwealth immigration: ‘As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood”’ (Powell Reference Powell1969:289). Here, we offer a brief history of one of the oldest and best known South Asian communities in the UK – the Punjabi community in Southall – as an illustrative example.

By the late 1970s, 30 per cent of the population of Southall was Asian – still a minority but a large and highly visible one – and the town had become a lightning rod for racial tension (Campaign against Racism and Fascism (CARF) 1981:43; Oates Reference Oates2002:107). Far-right, anti-immigration parties held rallies in the town, leading to violent riots and racially motivated deaths (CARF 1981). British Asian anti-racist political activism developed in response, bringing together first-generation and early-second-generation members of the community. School policies also reflected anxiety about shifting demographics. Across the UK, bussing policies were introduced, to reduce the numbers of Asian children in local schools and force integration (Cashmore Reference Cashmore1996:62) and with remedial classes for Asian heritage children (CARF 1981:37). A British Asian Southall resident describes the conflicted sense of self that resulted:

Another British Asian resident reports, for the same period:

These experiences formed an important collective history for older British Asians and were alluded to repeatedly in their interviews in the first author’s fieldwork (Sharma Reference Sharma2011), as in (1).

1. (1)

   a.	Anwar (older man, 41):
   	We had extreme tensions. We had big problems with them. Whenever we would go to the park … they would hurl abuse at you and … even you know like even spit at you. But um because we- you know we had our pride. There was absolutely no way we were going to be abused like this.
   b.	Naseem (older man, 48):
   	They’d come up and they’d attack us or they’d verbally abuse us and all that. So we had to be very very careful. I still remember those days it was quite frightening … It’s changed now due to race relations laws and everything. It’s changed now a hell of a lot.

Although racial tension continued through the 1990s, this later phase was characterised by a striking reduction of overt hostilities. It is no coincidence that this change in race relations corresponds to a shift in Southall demographics, whereby the Commonwealth heritage population, mostly South Asians, became the majority and the white community the minority (Oates Reference Oates2002:107; Meads Reference Meads1983). Southall schools became dramatically more multi-racial, with the proportion of minority ethnic origin students in Ealing schools now ranging from 40 to 99 per cent (Ealing JSNA 2010:18).

Today, many public signs in Southall are in English and Panjabi, even at the local pub, and the town’s lively atmosphere – bhangra music, Indian restaurants, clothing and jewellery shops – has become something of an institution in London. Children born and raised during the 1980s and 1990s were now growing up in a climate in which wider British society accepted an increasingly visible, legitimated, even celebrated, middle-class British Asian culture, with mainstream comedians, musicians, TV presenters and politicians (Herbert Reference Herbert2009; Sharma Reference Sharma2011).

In stark contrast to the older group, the younger British-born participants in Sharma’s research rarely offered narratives of racial tension, instead describing experiences of being surrounded by an ethnically mixed, often Asian-dominant, peer group, as in (2).

1. (2)

   a.	Sameer (younger man, 22):
   	It wasn’t about racism nothing like that cos everyone knew each other in school … It was um mixture really but you know what there was- It was mainly Indians like Asian community and um Somalians mostly. And couple of like um like Jamaican. But British whites, there was only like one or two most probably.
   b.	Deepti (younger woman, 32):
   	When I first started school you maybe had maybe a third of the class were Indian and the rest were white. But by the time I’d left school I’d say out of- let me have a think. Out of two hundred children in the year, I remember there was one Black kid one Chinese kid and you’d be lucky to find maybe in a class of two hundred I don’t know say about a quarter, less than a quarter, of that was white. They were all, the majority were Punjabis.

Race relations have thus gone from overt and violent hostility to cooperative co-existence in many areas. Sharma (Reference Sharma2011) describes this changing context and lived experience as fundamental to patterns of acquisition and dialect use across men and women of different ages. For example, older men acquired full competence in traditional London vernacular to survive in violently hostile schools and neighbourhoods, while also gaining full competence in Indian English for their substantial transnational business and personal ties. Their bidialectalism reflects acutely segregated biculturalism. Later generations show a more fused British Asian style, reflecting major social change.

22.4 Sub-Varieties of British Asian English

British Asian English is in no way a unified dialect – it is better described as a set of linguistic signals of South Asian heritage that are overlaid upon a base of local British regional and social class dialect. Further differences in cultural and religious affiliation can introduce even more fine-grained differences.

Southern varieties of British Asian English combine the typical features of Southern British English in the wider population – either standard or working-class vernacular – with markers of Asian heritage such as distinctive consonant and vowel variants, speech rhythm influenced by South Asian languages (and Indian English), and some features of grammar and lexicon. In the Midlands, where there are large and well-established, multi-generational South Asian communities, for example in Leicester and Birmingham, it is common to hear strong working-class Midlands accents and grammar, overlaid with these South Asian linguistic features. Similarly in Scotland, one can hear very established Scottish speech with Asian elements. These regional varieties are described in detail in the sections that follow.

Although these varieties differ in terms of their British regional and social class traits, they all tend to be highly multilingual communities. According to the UK Census 2021, four of the top ten most spoken foreign languages in the UK are South Asian languages: Panjabi (291,000), Urdu (270,000), Bengali (199,000) and Gujarati (189,000). In addition to these, further languages include Tamil, Sylheti (under-reported, as frequently reported as Bengali), Hindi, Malayalam, and dozens of smaller South Asian languages. It is common for later generations to remain actively bilingual, although this can be affected by the size of the community and the status of the heritage language. Further, this multilingualism is not reflected in the census data, which asks residents only what their main language is. Stable bilingualism in a community can be an important source of continuing influence on the English spoken by later generations.

In addition to regional sub-varieties, diaspora communities should always be examined in terms of generational sub-varieties – in other words, temporal diversity, in addition to spatial diversity. Many early studies examined India-born (Gen 1; non-native) and/or young British-born (Gen 2; native) individuals. But some British Asian communities have been established for well over sixty years, and so these two categories overlooked an entire generation of older British-born (Gen 2) individuals, leading to an incomplete picture of stages of dialect shift. Sharma and Sankaran (Reference Sharma and Sankaran2011) and Sharma and Rampton (Reference Sharma and Rampton2015) filled in this picture, uncovering very distinctive intermediate stages of dialect shift, involving robust dialectal competence and high levels of alternation in casual conversation. By the younger Gen 2, this was found to have fused into a less bidialectal and less alternating set of systems, much like a shift from the status of ‘markers’ to less conscious ‘indicators’ (Labov Reference Labov1972). However, Sharma (Reference Sharma2011) also found that these differences were very gendered, for reasons of changing cultural gender roles and resulting differences in men’s and women’s social networks in each generation. In this way, ethnolectal Asian features always interact with other factors such as generation, age and gender.

Finally, an important additional form of British Asian speech that is not covered in detail in this chapter is the use of Multicultural London English (MLE) by ethnically Asian people in the UK. This represents a substantial and growing group. As a working-class variety used by people from many different ethnic backgrounds, MLE can take on different forms, one of which is a markedly Asian-influenced style of MLE, used extensively by young British Asians in East London (see Fox Reference Fox2015; Gates Reference Gates2018) and increasingly West London and beyond. This speech style is primarily MLE but with a tendency to incorporate specifically Asian phonetic features. We do not review this style in detail here; Asian-style MLE is effectively a blend of linguistic features discussed in the present chapter and in Fox (this volume).

In the sections that follow, we describe the linguistic features of British Asian English along with their social contexts. The discussion focuses on accent features, which are by far the most diverse and well studied, but also briefly reviews lexicon, grammar, and discourse.

22.5 Identity, Interaction and Ideology

It is impossible to fully understand the many elements of British Asian English described above without close analysis of how they play out in conversation, and how and when the speaker chooses to use these forms.

Rampton (Reference Rampton1995, Reference Rampton2006, Reference Rampton2011) has extensively documented the use of Asian English speech forms in social interaction in the UK. Examining social interactions among schoolchildren, he uncovers deep ideologies of social class, ethnicity and migration, and observes how peer groups are managed and reshaped through shared linguistic practices, particularly ‘crossing’ or use of styles typically associated with another social group. In the extract below, Rampton summarises some of the main findings of his early work on Asian English in the UK in the 1980s:

What Rampton describes as the ‘sociosymbolic polarisation of Creole and Asian English’ (Reference Rampton2011:278) echoes the historical and transnational stories of different heritage cultures. Unlike Creole, Asian English ‘represented distance from the main currents of adolescent life, and it stood for a stage of historical transition that many youngsters felt they were leaving behind’.

However, the artful play around these varieties also achieved a shared working-class alignment; in one example, Rampton (Reference Rampton1995:498) even describes a white youngster talking about how he and his friends call kids from other schools goras (whites) because they’re ‘a bit upper class’. These examples show that British Asian English should not simply be seen as an in-group marker of ethnicity – in the example here, it is neither used by an Asian, nor does it refer to Asians – it is used by a white boy to refer to upper-class white kids. Yet this usage is entirely consistent with the wider social context within which he and his British Asian friends operate.

Examining the speech of a middle-aged, second-generation British Asian man, Rampton (Reference Rampton2011) shows that these stylisations and playful school encounters were not fleeting, but rather remained an important part of the individual’s repertoire over thirty years.

Finally, the high degree of bilingualism was noted earlier, and this is a further source of identity marking in language in these communities. Many bilingual British Asians code-switch between English and one of their home languages (e.g. Panjabi, Urdu, Hindi, Gujarati, Tamil), and particularly in casual contexts with friends and family. In the example in (6), a young second-generation British Asian woman is speaking to the interviewer using SSBE. When her friend teases her in the background, she switches to loud Hinglish – a Hindi–English mixed register common among upper-middle-class, young urban residents in South Asia – for mock insults in lines 7 and 12, and then settles into a heightened British Asian style (dental and retracted stops) to share mock outrage with the interviewer when she returns to the main exchange in line 14.

1. (6)

   Int:	what about in nursery?	1
   Rita:	in nursery. did I used to thalk in nursery? I used to chew on my brush	2
   	in nursery	3
   Basma:	boys used to talk to you	4
   Rita:	oy shut your feɪce=	5
   Basma:	=(inaudible)	6
   Rita:	=TU SHUT UP HO JA, RIGH’? TU SHUT UP HO JA!	7
   	[you shut up become]
   	(smiling voice) hhhehhehh	8
   Basma:	(inaudible)	9
   Rita:	is ðat why you’re my best friend, inni’?	10
   Basma:	yeah	11
   Rita:	sali [bitch]	12
   Int:	(laughing) so she was there in nursery with you?	13
   Rita:	noʊ. t̪hank d̪e lord! I’d have been psychologically ɖisʈurbeɖ!	14

The maintenance of such practices can further support Asian-influenced phonology, lexicon and grammar, due to the cognitive tendency to converge between codes. Language mixing also sustains a range of ideologies of migration, anti-purism and belonging (Sankaran Reference Sankaran2020).

22.6 An Intersectional Perspective

Varieties of British Asian English can be heard around the United Kingdom, arising out of hundreds of years of migration between Britain and the continent of South Asia. The varieties follow familiar principles of language contact, combining rapid intergenerational integration into the majority or host variety with subtle elements of either unconscious structural convergence between the languages of bilinguals or, in many cases, more conscious acts of identity driven by bicultural life experience and competing relational priorities in a person’s social network.

British Asian English varieties almost always bear a distinctive regional stamp at the same time as their recognisable ethnic association. One of the most interesting insights these varieties have given us is how multiple social factors intersect to produce different sub-varieties. This allows us to reverse the analytic lens sometimes and use linguistic outcomes to better understand underlying social structures. In closing, we briefly comment on this intersection of ethnicity with other social factors.

Ethnolectal styles such as British Asian English always intersect with other social factors such as gender and social class. In their work on ethnolectal style, Kirkham (Reference Kirkham2011) and Gates (Reference Gates2018) both confirmed Eckert’s (Reference Eckert2000) finding for an intersection with gender, such that friendship groups or communities of practice had a more substantial effect on linguistic differences in style for girls than for boys. Sharma (Reference Sharma2011) also found that gender accounted for the different types of speech repertoire observed for first- and second-generation British Asians.

The same is true for social class – the emergence of ethnolectal varieties such as British Asian English can only be properly understood within their social class context. We illustrate this with one final example. As noted at the start of this chapter, London has a high number of Asian heritage residents living in very different neighbourhoods across the city. Larger British Asian communities tend to be more mono-ethnic than the public housing environments in which MLE developed. These differences are deeply based in the material consequences of social class. Fox and Sharma (Reference Fox, Sharma, Smakman and Heinrich2017) show that two otherwise similar Asian-majority neighbourhoods, one in West London and one in East London, have had very divergent dialect outcomes. In East London, Fox found that working-class children of different heritage backgrounds lived in close quarters in public housing estates, and MLE was born in this crucible. In West London, Sharma found a predominance of British Asian English, not MLE. The lower-middle-class community she studied were able to rent or buy homes that led to ethnic homophily in housing distributions. As social class increased, so too did the mono-ethnicity of neighbourhoods, of social networks, and ultimately of the speech varieties that resulted. These observations remind us that, while varieties of British Asian English are some of the most ethnically distinctive varieties in the United Kingdom, they are not solely defined by ethnic identity and always intersect with the myriad vectors of social identity in any community.

23.1 What Is Multicultural British English?

The concept of Multicultural British English was originally referred to as Multicultural Urban British English (MUBE) in Drummond (Reference Drummond2016) to describe a variety of English that has similarities to Multicultural London English (MLE) (see Fox, this volume) yet which is unmistakably ‘not London’. The term emerged in the process of research carried out in Manchester (Drummond Reference Drummond2018a) exploring the language of young people and its role in the enactment, negotiation and performance of identities. The motivation for the research came from the observation that some young people in Manchester are using what could broadly be described as MLE, yet they are still retaining specific supralocal (northern England) and local (Manchester) speech features. Due to the fact that Manchester is also culturally and linguistically diverse, there exists the strong possibility that the social context from which MLE emerged might also be seen in Manchester. As a result, it is likely that there might be a Multicultural Manchester English evolving in a similar way to the process of MLE. In fact, if we then consider other UK cities, which, like London and Manchester, also have a history of cultural, ethnic and linguistic diversity, it is worth considering the possibility of a Multicultural Birmingham English, a Multicultural Leeds English, and so on.

With this in mind, Drummond (Reference Drummond2018a) expanded on the idea that it might make sense to think of MUBE as a kind of overarching (or underlying) variety of English, with each city then having its own sub-variety. This recognises the fact that there are shared features among the local sub-varieties, and yet allows for the fact that speakers from each location retain particular local and supralocal features in their speech. However, picturing it in this way perhaps falsely diminishes the status and influence of MLE. Rather than simply existing alongside other possible city varieties, it could be argued that MLE plays a more dominant role as a variety that is being spread outwards from London. Its spread is successful among particular social groups, yet only ever partial; certain local and supralocal features tend to be resistant to change for whatever reason.

If all this sounds somewhat vague, that’s because it is. There simply has not been enough research to date into the different linguistic contexts and regions to enable us to adequately describe what is happening. We have partial pictures from some areas, but not nearly enough information to allow us to properly theorise as to what might be the driving force behind the observed linguistic practices of some groups of people in relation to a possible M(U)BE. However, what we do know is that certain people and groups of people across the UK are speaking in a way that somehow combines features identified as being part of MLE with local and supralocal features. Precisely how this has come about is yet to be determined, and whether we call it Multicultural Urban British English, Multicultural British English, Urban British English, or something else entirely is up for debate. But this chapter will describe the phenomenon, and, in the process, lay the groundwork for future research that might help answer some of the questions it poses.

Labelling language varieties is notoriously difficult. For the purposes of this chapter, I am going to refer to this variety (or style, see discussion in Section 23.4) as Multicultural British English, and therefore consciously drop the ‘urban’ element. In doing so, I am distancing the label from particular negative, racialised connotations around the use of the term ‘urban’. In addition, there is anecdotal evidence to suggest that the variety/style in question is not restricted to geographically urban contexts anyway, so there is more than one reason to move away from it as a descriptive term. Admittedly, the remaining label ‘multicultural’ is not without its own problems, arguably implying ‘non-white’ despite its efforts to be inclusive. The associated label ‘multiethnolect’ – the current generally accepted term for ethnically neutral repertoires combining existing and innovative features from various source languages – has been criticised for ‘implying a focus on one dimension of social variation, ethnicity, at the expense of other relevant dimensions’ Cheshire, Nortier and Adger (Reference Cheshire, Nortier and Adger2015:4) (see also Ilbury and Kerswill (Reference Ilbury, Kerswill, Svendsen and Jonsson2023) for a recent discussion of the value and accuracy of the term in relation to MLE). It could be argued that UK urban contexts are by their very nature multilingual, multiethnic and multicultural, so why the need for additional labels? However, for the sake of consistency, and to demonstrate its relationship to MLE, I will use the term Multicultural British English (MBE).

23.2 What Does MBE Sound Like?

As stated above, MBE is characterised by the fact that it contains features of MLE and features of the local variety, so by definition it is impossible to provide a single complete inventory covering everything. Also, a central characteristic of MLE and multiethnolects more generally is that they are conceptualised as ‘a repertoire of features’ in which speakers select linguistic items from a ‘feature pool’ (Cheshire et al. Reference Cheshire, Kerswill, Fox and Torgersen2011:176) consisting of elements from the various input languages and varieties. This means that the speech of individuals and groups of individuals will necessarily vary, even in the same context. However, we can describe those features of MLE that do appear to remain consistent across the regional varieties, and we can also describe features from different regions which appear to happily sit alongside MLE.

Before I begin describing MBE, I should explain from where I am getting my information. As I mentioned earlier, there simply hasn’t been enough research carried out into MBE outside London to be able to give anything like a complete picture. However, there has been some, and I will refer to it, where appropriate, in the sections that follow. The most detailed research to date has been my own work in Manchester, exploring the language of a group of fourteen–sixteen-year-olds, and this will be the main source of data and description. The research was an ethnographic study into the language and identities of two groups of young people who were being educated outside of the mainstream system, in Pupil Referral Unit (PRU) Learning Centres. Two researchers spent one academic year visiting two learning centres, observing day-to-day activity, and eventually making recordings of spontaneous conversations in and out of class, and of one-to-one or small-group interviews. The data is extremely ‘messy’ from the point of view of a traditional sociolinguistic study – recordings made during classes and other activities predictably contain a large amount of background noise, with overlapping speech competing with the sounds of pool-playing, chairs scraping, music, shouting, and numerous other sounds. This, along with unpredictable attendance at the centres, and engagement with the project, resulted in it being impossible to provide consistent and balanced details of speech features across all twenty-two participants. For these reasons, acoustic analysis was only successfully carried out on the speech of a subset of eleven speakers from the main study; however, descriptions here will be supported by auditory analysis. Additional data (acoustic and auditory) will be drawn from a pilot study carried out in the same locations a year earlier (Drummond Reference Drummond2016, Reference Drummond, Braber and Jansen2018b).

Another piece of research that will be referred to is that described in Fox, Khan and Torgersen (Reference Fox, Khan, Torgersen, Kern and Selting2011), particularly the elements which relate to a study carried out in Birmingham (Khan Reference Khan2006) among adolescents from three ethnic groups: White English, Black Caribbean, and Pakistani. Data was collected from 100 thirteen–sixteen-year-olds through sociolinguistic interviews, and analysed auditorily.

A further notable study which refers to a possible Multicultural British English is Paver (Reference Paver2019). This research examines the speech of British Pakistani men in London and Manchester through previously recorded phone calls, and explores the relationship between these particular British Asian varieties and multiethnolects.

In addition to the findings of existing research, I will also draw upon a more recent source: the speech and performance of a small selection of grime artists. Grime music is a form of UK rap that is extremely popular among particular groups of predominantly young people across the UK. Crucially for us, the language of grime is unmistakably MLE (Green Reference Green and Coleman2014:68) or, as we shall see, MBE.

Grime is a style of music that grew out of East London in the early 2000s. It has similarities with, and is often compared to Hip-Hop, but it has its roots in UK Garage, Bashment and Jamaican Dancehall. Grime is generally faster than Hip-Hop, and involves MCs uttering rhythmic and often very complex phrases and verses over a heavy beat. Grime is very British, and very territorial. The content of the raps frequently refers to locality (particularly postcodes) and thrives on adversarial rivalry between groups of young men especially. Despite emerging from black cultures, and despite it being predominantly associated with young black men, Grime is, arguably, not racially exclusive (Adams Reference Adams2018:12). Rather, it divides along lines of social class, telling the stories of the daily battles of what many see as the UK’s underclass (MacDonald Reference MacDonald2008), regardless of ethnicity.

The combination of the facts that (a) MLE is the language of grime and (b) grime is fiercely regional and territorial, makes it an ideal site for the observation of a possible MBE. However, the performance aspect of grime means it is relevant to consider the extent to which such language should be viewed as a performed style or as a natural vernacular. This is a debate that will be addressed later, in Section 23.4. The following description of MBE is organised into two sections: phonology, and lexis and syntax, and will draw on examples from the academic studies mentioned above.

Before I start, it is worth reminding ourselves of the main features of MLE (Cheshire et al. Reference Cheshire, Kerswill, Fox and Torgersen2011; Torgersen et al. Reference Torgersen, Gabrielatos, Hoffmann and Fox2011; Fox, this volume). Vowel positions are described relative to traditional London speech.

• • monophthongisation of price, mouth, face and goat

• • raised position of face (mid-high front) and goat (mid-high back)

• • lowered position of price and mouth

• • very fronted goose

• • lack of h-dropping

• • th-stopping

• • dh-stopping

• • th-fronting

• • simplification of article allomorphy

• • ‘man’ as pronoun

• • quotative ‘This is + speaker’

• • use of pragmatic marker ‘you get me’.

Of course, some features of MLE above actually correspond with features of traditional UK regional forms (e.g. monophthongised face and goat in various varieties of English in the north of England). In identifying a possible MBE, therefore, it is important to focus on examples where (a) MLE features can be observed which don’t coincide with local features and (b) identifiable local features exist alongside MLE features.

23.2.1 Phonology

Figure 23.1 shows the mean measurements for twenty vowels from eleven speakers from Drummond (Reference Drummond2018a). It demonstrates fairly typical vowel positions for Manchester adolescents (although it does mask a considerable degree of inter-speaker variation, which will be addressed shortly). Notice how foot and strut occupy the same vowel space, demonstrating an entirely predictable feature of northern England varieties in which words such as ‘put’ and ‘putt’ are likely homophonous. Similarly, there is a lack of a split between trap and bath. goose is clearly fronted, although given the age of the speakers, this is consistent with reports of goose fronting elsewhere, including Manchester (see Baranowski Reference Baranowski2017 for an overview). Notice too how happy is fairly central, and letter is fairly back – both examples of well-attested local Manchester features, although perhaps not as extreme as we might expect. I shall return to this shortly.

Figure 23.1 Mean vowel measurements from eleven speakers aged fourteen to sixteen in Manchester.

(Drummond Reference Drummond2018a)

Now compare the vowel chart for one of the speakers in the pilot study, Ryan (Drummond Reference Drummond, Braber and Jansen2018b) in Figure 23.2. Ryan was probably the most consistent speaker of MBE across both studies. There were no bath or foot tokens for Ryan, but auditorily it was clear that he exhibited the predictable local lack of foot/strut and bath/trap splits. What is perhaps most striking are the short trajectories of most diphthongs, including face, mouth and goat, and the openness of price/like (treated separately due to frequent auditory observations that discourse marker and quotative ‘like’ were being realised differently for some speakers (cf. Drager Reference Drager2009). The extreme fronting of goose is also interesting, and illustrates a realisation backed up by auditory analysis in which a few individual speakers had something much closer to [y] than to [ʉ]. It is the existence of these MLE-like features, alongside retained supralocal northern features, that begins to demonstrate a possible MBE.

Figure 23.2 Mean vowel measurements from one speaker aged fifteen in Manchester.

(Drummond Reference Drummond, Braber and Jansen2018b)

I mentioned that the chart in Figure 23.1 masks considerable inter-speaker variation. The reason for this is that the eleven speakers represented by the chart orient differently towards particular social practices, and these social practices have a strong connection to ways of speaking. In Drummond (Reference Drummond2018a) I describe this as an orientational scale in terms of music preferences and engagement, clothing, behaviour, language use (some form of MBE), and, to an extent, ethnicity. The scale is born out of ethnographic observation of these particular people in this particular context; however, it can, arguably, be generalised more widely. In order to illustrate the scale, it might be useful to describe an imaginary person who might typically lie at its extremes. At one end would be a boy (or a girl) who is heavily into grime and dancehall, and who is himself an accomplished low-level grime artist. In the context of the research site, he would typically wear tracksuits, trainers and hoodies, often expensive, and always with style. He would likely be of mixed heritage (e.g. White British and Black African or Black Caribbean), with friends from various ethnic groups. He would use MBE features in his speech. Let’s call this end of the scale ‘Point A’. At the other end, ‘Point B’, would be a girl (or a boy) who is into house music and RnB. She would most often wear skinny jeans, trainers and t-shirts. She would typically be from a white working-class background with Irish ancestry, as would most of her friends. She would have an identifiable, specifically ‘Manchester’ accent.

You will notice that these descriptions include mention of language, which therefore makes any resulting analysis somewhat circular. However, the scale is not intended to ‘explain’ the use of language in any way, it is simply there to illustrate the social practices which, in this context at least, patterned alongside the use of MBE features.

Perhaps the most significant inter-speaker variation exists in relation to letter and happy. Both of these vowels represent particularly local, Manchester features. Local Manchester happy is typically realised as a relatively open and lax [ɛ] or [ɛ̈], especially in phrase-final position, whereas elsewhere in northern England it is more likely to be [ɪ]. Local Manchester letter is open and backed, often described as [ʌ] or even [ɒ] (Hughes, Trudgill and Watt Reference Hughes, Trudgill and Watt2013), unlike the [ə] that is found elsewhere. Together, the two vowels are often the source of stereotypical imitations of a Manchester accent (Howley Reference Howley2015:139; Drummond et al. Reference Drummond, Dann, Ryan and Tasker2022). What is interesting is when we compare the realisations of the two vowels between speakers who orient towards Point A on the scale and speakers who orient towards Point B. Figure 23.3 replicates Figure 23.1 but shows measurements of happy and letter taken from the speech of three or four individuals at either end of the scale. Notice the extent to which some speakers produce a more open happy and a more open and backed letter, matching the traditional, local pronunciations, while others produce much more generic versions. The local pronunciations are not unexpected; these are all young people who have grown up in working-class societies within Manchester, and this is a typical feature. What is notable is the lack of the hyperlocal pronunciations in peers who have grown up in similar contexts but who engage in different social practices. The point here is that even though these particular vowels, happy and letter, have no connection to MLE or MBE in themselves, they are perhaps still playing a role through the absence of consistent hyperlocal realisations.

Figure 23.3 Mean vowel measurements from eleven speakers aged fourteen to sixteen in Manchester, with the inclusion of two additional variants of letter and happy.

(Drummond Reference Drummond2018a)

As I stated at the beginning of the chapter, making the case for MBE is ongoing, so we must be tentative in the claims we make with what little research we have. However, on the basis of the Manchester data, a case could be made that MBE is characterised by (a) the existence of MLE phonetic features alongside regional (supralocal) features and (b) the rejection of markedly local features.

One obvious omission from the description presented so far is any meaningful discussion of ethnicity, especially given that it plays such an important role in descriptions of MLE. The reason for this is simply that in the process of carrying out the research, we made the methodological choice to deliberately distance ourselves from seeing ethnicity as a meaningful way in which to pre-group individuals. Clearly, ethnicity and language have an important and complex relationship, but during the research, we came to treat ethnicity as something that may or may not be enacted in any given context, and not as something that should be used to categorise speakers a priori in any meaningful way. In the one part of the research in which I did take a more traditionally variationist approach and include self-reported speaker ethnicity in a statistical model to explore th-stopping (Drummond Reference Drummond2018c), it did not emerge as statistically significant in itself. Incidentally, ethnicity was not absent from some of the discussions with young people themselves around the way they speak, and the chapter will return to some of these insights later.

All of this should not be interpreted as a dismissal of the role of ethnicity in language variation, or of studies which categorise speakers along ethnicity lines (otherwise, how will the research explore the relationship?); it is simply mentioned here to explain why the findings cannot be compared fully with those from other MLE/MBE studies in this regard (e.g. Cheshire et al. Reference Cheshire, Kerswill, Fox and Torgersen2011; Gates Reference Gates2018; see also Ilbury and Kerswill Reference Ilbury, Kerswill, Svendsen and Jonsson2023 for a detailed reflection on how multiethnic a multiethnolect such as MLE actually is). Another, related, limitation is the lack of any measure of friendship networks in the Manchester data. This was due to the fact that as an ethnographic study, we were primarily interested in what we could observe as happening in that context at that time and were less focused on the lives of the young people outside this arena. Friendship networks within the learning centres were noted, but due to the small size (up to twelve young people in one centre) and the forced nature of attendance (young people were sent here having been excluded from school, and therefore likely away from traditional friendship groups), such networks were not deemed to be especially relevant in the most part.

A relevant study which does account for ethnicity and friendship networks is Khan (Reference Khan2006), described in Fox et al. (Reference Fox, Khan, Torgersen, Kern and Selting2011), the latter itself being a call for the recognition of a ‘Multicultural English’ that extends beyond London. One part of the research involved exploring the language use of 100 thirteen- to sixteen-year-olds in Birmingham from three ethnic groups – White English, Black Caribbean, and Pakistani. Khan also included six older (70+) White English speakers as a comparison with traditional Birmingham features. The focus was on two vowels, goat and price, but here I will discuss goat. The study describes four main variants of goat: [ʌə], [əʊ], [ɔʊ] and [oː], and notes that [ʌə] is the traditional pronunciation and [oː] is the typical minority ethnic pronunciation. As you can see from Figure 23.4, the most dominant variant by far for the White English adolescents is [əʊ], followed by [ʌə]. For the Pakistani adolescent group as a whole, [oː] and [ɔʊ] combined dominate (although there is a significant gender difference), and for the Black Caribbean adolescents, there is a fairly even split between [əʊ], and the two ‘minority ethnic forms’ of [oː] and [ɔʊ].

Figure 23.4 The frequency of goat variants for adolescents in Birmingham.

(Fox et al. Reference Fox, Khan, Torgersen, Kern and Selting2011)

However, despite the clear patterns of inter-ethnic linguistic differences, there is also evidence of inter-ethnic linguistic diffusion. Some white English speakers use the minority ethnic forms (up to 40% in some individuals), and some speakers from the minority groups use the traditional form (see the description of grime artist Lady Leshurr at the end of the chapter). Social network was found to be a significant predictor in these patterns, with those white English speakers who had mainly white English friends more likely to retain traditional pronunciations, and those with mixed networks more likely to use the minority ethnic variants.

Fox et al. (Reference Fox, Khan, Torgersen, Kern and Selting2011) argue that such inter-ethnic linguistic diffusion via multiethnic social networks demonstrates a change in progress; the fact that the variants exist in vernacular speech in sustained discourse distinguishes these findings from accounts of stylised use, or ‘crossing’ (Rampton Reference Rampton1995), whereby speakers from one ethnic group use language features associated with a different social group. The distinction between vernacular and style will be explored in more detail later in the chapter. For now, we have another small but important piece of evidence to suggest the existence of MBE.

Paver (Reference Paver2019) looks at the speech of twenty men of Pakistani descent living in London and Manchester with a view to exploring the relationship between British Asian speech and emerging multiethnolects such as MLE and a possible MME (Multicultural Manchester English). The study examined face, goat and /r/ in a series of recorded phone conversations, but the focus here will be on goat in Manchester. Paver found the typical Manchester goat among these speakers to be a relatively backed and monophthongal [o], in line with both existing accounts of British Asian varieties and with accounts of multiethnolects (albeit slightly more peripheral and monophthongal). In discussing whether this should be seen as evidence of a multiethnolect such as MME or simply part of a localised British Asian dialect, Paver suggests this is somewhat beside the point, given that the feature may have been made available to the MME ‘feature pool’ by its original existence within the local British Asian variety (Paver Reference Paver2019:33). Paver concludes, aligning with the main argument being made in this chapter, that further investigation is needed into the interaction between, in this case, particular British Asian varieties and possible multiethnolects.

23.2.2 Lexis and Syntax

Lexis is always a potentially problematic area when it comes to language varieties, especially those with a connection to young people, due to the fact that things can change so quickly. Described here are some of the words and phrases that were in regular use among some of the young people from Drummond (Reference Drummond2018a), which means they were current in 2014–15. Some of them are still being used by young people now (in 2020), others maybe less so. But the point is, some of these words arguably have connections with MLE, and were being used predominantly by individuals who were aligning themselves with a possible MBE in their pronunciation (above) and associated social practices. Therefore, they can be viewed as contributing to the evidence for the existence of MBE.

Allow it (Verb) Leave it, let it go, don’t worry about it. Nah, just allow it man. This was frequently heard in the learning centres during the Manchester research, particularly, although not exclusively, by a group of four boys who were also heavy users of MBE pronunciation features, and who aligned strongly with the associated social practices described earlier.

Bare (Adjective) Very, a lot. There’s bare people here. This was very common and used by almost all the young people at some point. This is a word that has its origins in Black British English but is now used far more widely.

Dutty (Adjective) This had two meanings, depending on the speaker. When asked, all the users seemed to know it comes from a (Jamaican) pronunciation of ‘dirty’, but some used it as a derogatory reference to a person, usually a girl: That girl’s dutty, while others used it to mean ‘good’: That’s well good – that’s dutty that. Incidentally, one of the girls in the study claimed that dutty was a ‘boys’’ word.

Ra! (Interjection) Ra is used as an exclamation to express surprise, excitement, shock, and so on. This was originally a Jamaican word, but was used widely among most of the young people in the study.

Man (Plural Mans/Mandem) (Pronoun) Still very much used as a pragmatic marker: leave me alone, man, but also used as a pronoun in the same way as Cheshire (Reference Cheshire2013) describes its use in MLE, meaning both ‘I’ and ‘he’: Man’s tired; Man threw a bat. Mandem was used, but very infrequently, to describe a group of people or friends.

Quotatives feature quite strongly in descriptions of MLE (Cheshire et al. Reference Cheshire, Kerswill, Fox and Torgersen2011) due to the emergence of a previously unreported quotative structure: this is + speaker:

this is them ‘what area are you from. what part?’

this is me ‘I’m from Hackney’

(Cheshire et al. Reference Cheshire, Kerswill, Fox and Torgersen2011:172)

The structure did not appear frequently in the MLE data, so could not be seen as common, but it did clearly exist. For whatever reasons, this is + speaker does not appear anywhere in the Manchester data, neither has it appeared anecdotally in any further research I have carried out. This is not to say it doesn’t exist in the area, but it is keeping a low profile if it does. Perhaps, as Cheshire et al. (Reference Cheshire, Kerswill, Fox and Torgersen2011:73) acknowledge, it is simply a ‘transient phenomenon’ after all. Again, further research is needed.

The Manchester study actually provided its own interesting finding with regard to quotatives. Figure 23.5 compares the Manchester data with the closest age group from the MLE study (Cheshire et al. Reference Cheshire, Kerswill, Fox and Torgersen2011) and a broadly comparable group from the Newcastle Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (NECTE2) (Buchstaller Reference Buchstaller2014) in terms of the most frequent quotative structures. What is immediately striking is the extremely high use of ‘say’ among the boys, and the relatively high use of ‘go’ among the girls in Manchester, compared to the other two datasets, both of which have ‘be like’ as the clear favourite.

Figure 23.5 Quotative use in the PRU (Manchester), separated by speaker sex and compared with MLE and a sample from the NECTE2 corpus.

Interestingly, when the numbers are separated into individual speakers, the ones who are leading in the use of ‘say’ (70–80% of their quotative use) are the same boys who were the highest users of the MBE pronunciation features described earlier. There is no obvious reason why this should be the case; there is nothing to link ‘say’ with this particular group, or these particular social practices. Neither is there any obvious reason for them to move away from ‘be like’, especially when this structure is so frequent in the MLE data and I am trying to make the case for these to be MBE speakers. However, there is a pattern, and it is one that is perhaps worth exploring in future research.

23.3 Language Awareness

The aim of the Manchester project was not simply to describe the language that was being used, but also to explore how the young people themselves felt about the way they speak, and to reflect on how their speech might be perceived by others. Possibly the clearest comment came from one of the boys in the pilot study, Ryan, one of the heaviest MBE users (and whose vowels were described earlier), when he was asked to describe his accent.

This was a common view among the MBE-using boys, that they were simply using everyday language, the same as their peers. It is a nice twist on the familiar idea of ‘not having an accent’ when you are surrounded by people who speak the same as you.

Some interesting insights came from Jordan, a mild user of MBE features, but someone who seemed quite aware of the language around him. We were talking about whether Manchester accents had changed:

Not all the young people viewed MBE in a positive way. Many of the girls, especially, were quite negative towards the language of the MBE-using boys, especially those (white) boys who they perceived as inauthentic users due to their background. In a conversation with a couple of the girls, we were talking about words that they might use but which I might not know.

When I asked where they thought it all came from, this way of speaking, they identified media:

One last example comes from a boy who was asked about the way other people speak. Luke, a non-MBE-user, is talking about another boy, Callum, and picks up on the latter’s use of ‘blud’ (meaning ‘friend’, traditionally in varieties of Black British English). The pronunciation is interesting, as he uses /blæd/, a hypercorrection in aiming for /blʌd/ from his own accent of /blʊd/, thus demonstrating the word’s association, in his mind, with a London (MLE) pronunciation.

What is clear through conversations such as these, and countless others with other young people and adults who work with young people, is that there is a recognisable way of speaking that has emerged in Manchester that differs from the traditional variety. I would argue that the situation is similar in other UK cities.

23.4 Is It a Vernacular or a Style?

The question as to whether MBE (or MLE for that matter) is viewed primarily as a vernacular or as a style is to some extent dependent on one’s own individual approach to, and view of, language variation itself. The two approaches are asking different questions and seeing slightly different evidence. An MBE-as-vernacular approach suggests that there is an underlying and natural way of speaking that can be accessed through unguarded, casual conversation. There is a sense of stability in the observed language, which can be used to evidence change, or the emergence of new varieties. An MBE-as-style approach, on the other hand, focuses on the stylistic language choices (unconscious, conscious, and strategic) that people make in order to perform or enact particular identities in particular contexts (for a recent analysis along these lines, see Ilbury’s (Reference Ilbury, Kerswill, Svendsen and Jonsson2023) work exploring the use of MLE features in the online stylisation of the ‘roadman’ persona). Quist (Reference Quist2008) provides a fascinating description of taking both approaches to the same overall context, in this case Copenhagen. She argues that both are necessary if we are to gain a more complete picture of what is happening around the emergence and use of multiethnolects. Because the fact is, both things are likely happening in any given context – a fundamental change in the underlying vernacular, and the use of particular features as part of a system of stylistic resources. If we want to further our understanding of a possible MBE across the UK, we need research of both types: that which focuses on underlying change across a wider population, and that which focuses on specific and contextual use by small groups of individuals.

23.5 Future Research

Clearly, there is a lot more to be done if we are to gain a clearer understanding of MBE. Firstly, studies such as those described here need to be adapted and replicated in more areas of Britain and Ireland. Detailed data from two or three cities is not enough to allow us to adequately describe what is happening in the wider context. However, future studies need to be open to both an MBE-as-vernacular and an MBE-as-style approach, as both have something to offer. It is important that we get a sense of underlying vernacular change in areas outside London in order to ascertain whether similar processes are indeed at work; similarly, it is important to properly explore the ways in which MBE is being used as a stylistic resource in the enactment of identities within specific contexts. Such work is taking place, with existing data and findings being re-examined to inform studies into the ‘recontextualisation’ of MLE/MBE, or how such named varieties are taking on new meanings and representing different practices (Ilbury and Kerswill Reference Ilbury, Kerswill, Svendsen and Jonsson2023). With the combined insights of these types of studies, in addition to what we already know, we will be in a better position to be able to say that there is such a thing as MBE, and fully recognise it as a fascinating development of English in Britain and Ireland.