Using social media to infer the diffusion of an urban contact dialect: A case study of Multicultural London English

Christian Ilbury; Jack Grieve; David Hall

doi:10.1111/josl.12653

Using social media to infer the diffusion of an urban contact dialect: A case study of Multicultural London English

Christian Ilbury^*, Jack Grieve, David Hall

^*Corresponding author for this work

English Language and Linguistics

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

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Abstract

Sociolinguistic research has demonstrated that ‘urban contact dialects’ tend to diffuse beyond the speech communities in which they first emerge. However, no research has attempted to explore the distribution of these varieties across an entire nation nor isolate the social mechanisms that propel their spread. In this paper, we use a corpus of 1.8 billion geo‐tagged tweets to explore the spread of Multicultural London English (MLE) lexis across the United Kingdom. We find evidence for the diffusion of MLE lexis from East and North London into other ethnically and culturally diverse urban centres across England, particularly those in the South (e.g. Luton), but find lower frequencies of MLE lexis in the North of England (e.g. Manchester), and in Scotland and Wales. Concluding, we emphasise the role of demographic similarity in the diffusion of linguistic innovations by demonstrating that this variety originated in London and diffused into other urban areas in England through the social networks of Black and Asian users.

Original language	English
Journal	Journal of Sociolinguistics
Early online date	20 Mar 2024
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.12653
Publication status	E-pub ahead of print - 20 Mar 2024

Bibliographical note

Acknowledgments:
The authors are extremely grateful to the editors, Sari Pietikäinen and Marie Maegaard, and two anonymous reviewers, for their extremely constructive feedback which has improved this article immeasurably. We would also like to thank Diansheng Guo for collecting the data and Devyani Sharma for putting us in touch with each other. The research reported in this article was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK), the Economic and Social Research Council (UK), Jisc (UK) (Jisc grant reference number 3154), and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (US), as part of the Digging into Data Challenge (Round 3). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript.

Keywords

Twitter
Multicultural London English
multiethnolects
urban contact dialects
social media
Multicultural British English
diffusion

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IlburyC2024UsingFinal published version, 2.28 MBLicence: Creative Commons: Attribution (CC BY)

Cite this

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abstract = "Sociolinguistic research has demonstrated that {\textquoteleft}urban contact dialects{\textquoteright} tend to diffuse beyond the speech communities in which they first emerge. However, no research has attempted to explore the distribution of these varieties across an entire nation nor isolate the social mechanisms that propel their spread. In this paper, we use a corpus of 1.8 billion geo‐tagged tweets to explore the spread of Multicultural London English (MLE) lexis across the United Kingdom. We find evidence for the diffusion of MLE lexis from East and North London into other ethnically and culturally diverse urban centres across England, particularly those in the South (e.g. Luton), but find lower frequencies of MLE lexis in the North of England (e.g. Manchester), and in Scotland and Wales. Concluding, we emphasise the role of demographic similarity in the diffusion of linguistic innovations by demonstrating that this variety originated in London and diffused into other urban areas in England through the social networks of Black and Asian users.",

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Using social media to infer the diffusion of an urban contact dialect: A case study of Multicultural London English

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Keywords

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