Resources

Paul Kerswill’s lectures
Recorded examples
Films and TV series
Other online resources
MLE projects
Publications

Paul Kerswill’s lectures

Paul Kerswill’s lectures on MLE on YouTube

Lectures:

Slides for most of Paul's talks are available at: https://york.academia.edu/PaulKerswill/Talks

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

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.