A Study of the Main Grammar Features of Multicultural London English (MLE)

Abstract

In the last few years a new variety of English has emerged in the city of London which is known as Multicultural London English (MLE) or ‘Jamaican’, that is, a pseudo or fake Jamaican, due to a large numbers of its speakers coming from the Caribbean or Africa. One can say that MLE has developed as the result of language contact and second language acquisition with a large proportion of young speakers. This sociodialect is particularly interesting because it shows a number of innovative grammar features that are worthy of attention. This paper will be then particularly concerned with the analysis of this variety by looking in detail at some of its main grammar features, such as the following: quotatives or verbs that serve to reproduce the words pronounced by other speakers with special attention to the new quotative “this is” + pronoun (e.g. this is him: ‘blah’), “man” as a new pronoun (e.g. before I got arrested “man” paid for my own ticket to go to Jamaica), negative concord or double negatives (e.g. but “never” heard “no” more about it), “never” as a temporal negator rather than as a universal one (e.g. I “never” done nothing), invariant tags such as “innit” and “you get me” (e.g. we got two separate rooms “innit”?), “proper” and “bare” as adjective intensifiers (e.g. “proper” strict, “bare” addictive), general extenders (e.g. “and stuff”) and placcholders or general reference nouns (e.g. “thingy”). For the description of all these features I will be mainly using the studies by Cheshire, Kerswill and their research team together with the London English Corpus, which includes the Linguistics Innovators Corpus (LIC) and the Multicultural London English (MLE). The paper will be roughly divided into the following parts: Introduction, definition and origin of MLE, attitudes of speakers to MLE, description of its main grammar features together with the discussion of examples extracted from the previous corpora and general conclusions