Recorded examples

Recorded examples of MLE and other London accents from the Multicultural London English projects

http://www.teachrealenglish.org/teaching-units/spoken-london-english/

This is an excellent place to start in your exploration of MLE. There are commentaries on each of the voices - not all of them MLE.

Films and TV series

Films and TV series using MLE

• Kidulthood
• Adulthood
• Black Sheep
• Anuvahood
• Attack the Block
• Top Boy
• Phone Shop

Other online resources

Other online resources on MLE

• Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicultural_London_English
• Tony Thorne’s ‘Slang, ‘Patois’ and - once again - the case of ‘MLE’: https://language-and-innovation.com/2017/08/26/slang-patois-and-once-again-the-case-of-mle/
• Alistair McGowan interviews David Hornsby about MLE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KdVoSS_2PM&feature=youtu.be 
  (Beware: they didn’t manage to find any real MLE speakers!)

MLE voices heard in the media (thanks to Mary McDonald-Lewis for suggesting these; comments are Paul Kerswill’s):

• Artists & Others Speaking in Their MLE Accent
  • Stefflon Don (musician)
  • Dizzee Rascal (musician)
  • Vicky Grout (photographer) 
    
    
• Spoken Word Artists
  • George the Poet 
  • http://www.sounds-familiar.info/2018/09/o2-breathe-it-all-in/
  • Akala (Great interview. His accent is more Cockney or Estuary than MLE)
    
    
• Internet Personas
  • The Pengest Munch, Episode. 1 (Elijah Quashie’s accent is not really MLE - he sounds fairly standard - although he uses MLE slang.)
  • Jake Wardle performs many accents here, with the 2nd one being MLE (Great imitation! Uses the pronoun man)
    
    
• Music (grime)
  • Stormzy
  • Big Shaq 
    
    
• Event associated with MLE in the news
  • 2011 London Riots - Tottenham (Marcus Knox-Hooke is a speaker of MLE.)

MLE projects

The MLE projects

• Kerswill, Paul, Jenny Cheshire, Susan Fox and Eivind Torgersen. 2004-2007. Linguistic Innovators: The English of Adolescents in London (UK Economic and Social Research Council project RES 000 23 0680)
• Kerswill, Paul, Jenny Cheshire, Susan Fox and Eivind Torgersen. 2007-2010. Multicultural London English (UK Economic and Social Research Council project RES 062 23 0814)

Publications

Academic publications dealing with MLE and British youth language

• Cardoso, Amanda, Erez Levon, Devyani Sharma, Dominic Watt, & Yang Ye. 2019. Inter-speaker variation and the evaluation of British English accents in employment contexts. Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. 
• Cheshire, Jenny. 2013. Grammaticalisation in social context: The emergence of a new English pronoun. Journal of Sociolinguistics 17(5): 608–633.   
• Cheshire, Jenny, Paul Kerswill, Sue Fox, & Eivind Torgersen. 2011. Contact, the Feature Pool and the Community: The Emergence of Multicultural London English. Journal of Sociolinguistics 15(2): 151–196.
• Cheshire, Jenny, Paul Kerswill, Susan Fox and Eivind Torgersen, 2011, Language contact and language change in the multicultural metropolis, Revue Française de Linguistique Appliquée 18: 63-76; available at http://jennycheshire.com/publications
• Drummond, Rob. 2016. (Mis)Interpreting Urban Youth Language: White Kids Sounding Black? Journal of Youth Studies 20(5): 640–660.
• Drummond, Rob. 2018. Researching urban youth language and identity. Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan.
• Drummond, Rob. 2018. ‘Urban youth language’. In Clayton, Dan (Ed). Language handbook (2nd Edition). Key thinkers on key topics. EMC
• Drummond, Rob. 2018. ‘Maybe it’s a grime [t]ing. TH-stopping in urban British youth’. Language in Society 47(2), 171-196.
• Drummond, Rob. 2018. ‘The changing language of urban youth’. In Braber, Natalie & Sandra Jansen (Eds) Sociolinguistics in England. Palgrave Macmillan. 
• Fox, Sue. 2015. The New Cockney: New Ethnicities and Adolescent Speech in the Traditional East End of London. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Green, Jonathon. 2014. Multicultural London English - the new ‘youthspeak’. In Coleman, Julie (ed.), Global English Slang: Methodologies and Perspectives. London: Routledge, pp. 62-71.
• Kerswill, Paul. 2012. Language variation I – Social factors: class and ethnicity. In Clayton, Dan (ed.) Language: a Student Handbook on Key Topics and Theories. London: English and Media Centre, pp. 23–43.
• Kerswill, Paul. 2013. Identity, ethnicity and place: the construction of youth language in London. In Auer, Peter, Martin Hilpert, Anja Stukenbrock & Benedikt Szmrecsanyi (eds) Space in language and linguistics: geographical, interactional, and cognitive perspectives (Series: linguae & litterae). Berlin: de Gruyter, pp. 128–164. 
• Kerswill, Paul. 2014. The objectification of ‘Jafaican’: the discoursal embedding of Multicultural London English in the British media. In Androutsopoulos, Jannis (ed.) The Media and Sociolinguistic Change. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 428–455.
• Kerswill, Paul (in preparation). Great Britain: Multicultural London English. In Paul Kerswill & Heike Wiese (eds.) Urban contact dialects and language change: Insights from the global North and South. London: Routledge. 
• Kerswill, Paul, Cheshire, Jenny, Fox, Susan and Torgersen, Eivind. 2013. English as a contact language: the role of children and adolescents. In Hundt, Marianne & Schreier, Daniel (eds.) English as a contact language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 258–282.
• Kerswill, Paul & Eivind Torgersen (in preparation). Tracing the origins of an urban youth vernacular: The Founder Principle and Multicultural London English. (To be published in 2020)
• Kircher, Ruth & Sue Fox. 2019. Attitudes towards Multicultural London English: implications for attitude theory and language planning. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development.
• Sebba, Mark. 1993. London Jamaican: language systems in interaction. London, Longman.