Dialect development and style in a diasporic community
Funded by the ESRC, UK, 2008-2010
Principal Investigator: Devyani Sharma
Co-investigators: Ben Rampton, Roxy Harris
Researchers: Lavanya Sankaran, Pam Knight
Funding: £ 412,000
Description
This project is the first sociolinguistic study of English dialect variation and change within families
of Indian origin in London. The project aims to: examine how individuals develop multiple dialect proficiencies in contact
situations; document social change through the study of dialect change; and assess the balance between
speaker agency and deterministic factors, particularly in rapid change across generations.
The quantitative analysis has identified an intermediate bidialectal generation and a social lag in the development
of a local variety of English. This gradual change corresponds more closely to demographic shifts
than to pure cognitive factors such as being a native learner. The study has also
found a gender reversal in style repertoires between two British-born generations,
a pattern that corresponds to social transformation in the community.
Qualitative methods are used to account for variation and change in terms of speakers' rhetorical
purpose and interactional strategy.
The combination of methods explores the interplay between structural and agentive
processes in style acquisition and dialect shift. The unified analysis will build
a practice-centred perspective on dialect acquisition as well as help enrich
contemporary public understandings of the largest ethnic minority group in Britain.
The results of the project
have implications for claims about dialect formation, family (vs. peer) influences
in dialect change, repertiore analysis, adult dialect plasticity, transnationalism, and the native/non-native divide.
Methodology
One of the goals of this project is to investigate the role of discourse and agency in language change by exploring
the boundary between quantitatve variationist (VS) methods and interactional sociolinguistics (IS) methods.
The project uses recorded speech data, new social network measures, a bilingualism index, and attitude
measures from participants networked across three generations.
In order to ensure interactionally rich data for both components of the analysis, one innovation in
data collection was to move beyond sociolinguistic interviews and additionally collect self-recordings from 10
individuals in 3-6 distinct everyday interactional settings, generating multi-faceted individual
speech profiles. As part of the VS analysis, these repertoires are analyzed
using a new network heterogeneity metric. The integrated VS/IS analysis investigates the role of interaction in
the distribution of variants and in dialect shift.
Initial outputs (downloadable)
- 'Style repertoire and social change in British Asian English'
doi (Sharma, 2011, Journal of Sociolinguistics 15:4)
- 'Cognitive and social factors in dialect shift: Gradual change in London Asian speech'
pdf (Sharma & Sankaran, 2011 in press, Language Variation and Change)
- 'From 'multi-ethnic urban heteroglossia' to 'contemporary urban vernaculars''
doi (Rampton, 2011, Language and Communication 31)
- 'Lectal focusing in interaction: A new methodology for the study of superdiverse speech'
pdf (Sharma & Rampton, 2011, working paper (QMUL OPALs and KCL WPULL))
- 2-day workshop on dialect and social change in urban diasporic communities
pdf (programme)
- 'Return of the Native: Hindi in British English'
pdf (Sharma, 2011, preprint from Chutnefying English, Kothari & Snell eds., Penguin)
Presentations
- NWAV 40 conference, Washington DC, October 2011:
- 'Stylistic activation in ethnolinguistic repertoires' (Sharma)
- 'Incremental change in substrate effects in London Asian English' Panel on: Substrate effects: Linguistic resources for indicating ethnic orientation. (Sharma)
- Plenary talk on Ethnicity, Contact, and Change, Sociolinguistics Summer School, Glasgow (Sharma, July 2011)
- 'Gender, style, and social transformation: Generational change in British Asian style repertoires', International Gender and Language Conference (IGALA) 6, Tokyo, Japan (Sharma, Sept 2010)
- Sociolinguistics Symposium conference, Southampton, September 2010:
- 'Post-adolescent urban heteroglossia' (Rampton)
- 'Beyond the sociolinguistic interview: Style repertoire and social change in a minority community' (Sharma/Sankaran)
- 'Randomness and purity in style variation' (Sharma/Rampton/Sankaran)
- Workshop on Dialect and Social Change in Diasporic Communities, London, July 2010:
- 'Dialect repertoire and social change in London Asian English' (Sharma/Sankaran)
- 'Style purification in interaction' (Rampton/Sharma)
- 'Sounds of the Five Rivers: The Persistence of Punjabi Style in West London English', SLLF Annual Lecture, QMUL London (Sharma, Nov 2009)
- 'Inter-generational dialect change in a Punjabi London community', UCL English Department (Sharma, Nov 2009)
- 'Superdiversity and social class: The view from interaction', Tilburg University (Rampton, Oct 2009)
- 'Retroflexion in 1st and 2nd generation Punjabi London English.' UKLVC conference, Newcastle (Sharma/Sankaran, Sept 2009)
- 'Dialect and social change in a Punjabi London community': SOAS London; Lancaster University; Newcastle University; Middlesex University; Southampton University Applied Linguistics and Transnationalism joint seminar; University of Essex (Sharma, 2009-10)
- 'Sociolinguistic fieldwork at home.' Teaching field linguistics techniques workshop, SOAS London (Sharma, May 2009)
- 'Return of the Native: Hindi in British English.' Chutnefying English conference, Mumbai, India (Sharma, Jan 2009)