Project: “Generations of London English: Language and Social Change in Real Time”

Posted on 14 September 2022

Major new research collaboration on London English

The Department of Language and Linguistic Science is delighted to announce a new grant-funded collaboration with colleagues at QMUL. Prof Devyani Sharma (PI) and Prof Paul Kerswill, Dr Kathleen McCarthy, Prof Sam Hellmuth (Co-Is) have recently been awarded an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) grant for the project “Generations of London English: Language and Social Change in Real Time”

Project summary:

London has historically been the most important source of both standard and urban vernacular British English. In the last quarter century, some of the most significant British dialect innovations have taken place in London, spurred by migration and rapid social change. The first generation of people to speak these new contact-driven varieties (e.g. Multicultural London English) are now middle-aged and the second generation are adolescents or children. This time vector creates a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for longitudinal tracking of dialect in real time, as a window into the cognitive and social forces that will shape the future of the language. We integrate approaches from sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and social psychology to address three objectives:

To track changing London speech in real time: We ask how and why certain linguistic forms have spread, changed, or receded, 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 data will comprise a new London English Corpus, the first to span age, year of recording, social class, ethnicity, and gender.

To understand change within the lifespan: Tracking children and young adults longitudinally, we examine how speech repertoires and dialect control develop in young childhood, adolescence, and middle age.

To clarify implications for equality: We test perceptions of changing voices, including real-world consequences such as whether accent affects what we remember about a person. This work will inform and update our public engagement work on accent bias and obstacles to social mobility.

“This project builds on Prof (Emeritus) Paul Kerswill’s prior research with colleagues at QMUL which established the existence of Multicultural London English as an emerging new variety of English in the UK. This ambitious project takes advantage of a ‘once in a lifetime’ opportunity to capture the evolution of this new speech variety in real time, yielding a unique large scale corpus of speech data. We’ll also build on our earlier collaboration in Accent Bias Britain to tackle the potential impact of public perceptions of changing language features on the life chances of speakers of different accents.” - Prof Sam Hellmuth, Department of Language and Linguistic Science