Multicultural London English - part 3

I was, you was, they was, we was .…….. wasn’t we?

Researchers Jenny Cheshire, Paul Kerswill, Sue Fox and Eivind Torgersen report on the use of past BE forms (i.e. was/were) in London. Although the standard English forms are was with first and third singular subjects (I was, he/she was, negative wasn’t) and were with all other subjects (you were, we were, they were, negative weren’t), it is well known that the pattern varies considerably around the English-speaking world. There are predominantly two patterns which involve non-standard forms. These patterns are both variable i.e. the non-standard forms occur alongside the standard forms:

1. Variable use of was with all subjects in positive contexts (e.g. I was but also we was, you was) and wasn’t with all subjects in negative contexts (e.g. I wasn’t but also they wasn’t, you wasn’t)

2. Variable use of was with all subjects in positive contexts (e.g. I was but also we was, you was) but weren’t with all subjects in negative contexts (e.g. we weren’t but also I weren’t, she/he weren’t)

Although the first pattern is the most common throughout the English-speaking world, it is the second pattern (i.e. was/weren’t) which is the most common in Britain (note, though, another pattern in north-west England) so that many people in Britain today will say things like we was busy; she weren’t at home; he was angry, weren’t he? (You might remember the FT article on Lord Alan Sugar’s use of you was)

In their first study of London English Linguistic Innovators: the English of Adolescents in London the researchers found that adolescents in outer London (the borough of Havering) conformed to the expected non-standard British was/weren’t pattern but in inner London (the borough of Hackney) they found that the use of was in positive contexts was increasing but that there was competition between the two non-standard negative forms of wasn’t and weren’t. The researchers give the language contact situation in London as a likely explanation for this competition. Many speakers in London come from linguistic backgrounds where the dominant pattern is was/wasn’t e.g. English Creole-influenced varieties, second-language varieties such as African and Indian English as well as interlanguage (or learner) varieties and this competes with the local vernacular variety which tended to favour a was/weren’t pattern. In the second study Multicultural London English: the emergence, acquisition and diffusion of a new variety the researchers looked to see whether one of these patterns was winning out among younger children but it seems that, for the time being at least, the two patterns exist alongside each other.

The researchers focus on a newcomer to London to try to predict future trends in the use of this feature. They examine the speech of a 12 year-old Albanian girl who lived in London between the ages of 4 and 7, then returned to Albania until she was 11, after which she returned to live permanently in London.  She uses non-standard was in positive contexts almost all of the time and her few instances of negative past tense forms are all non-standard wasn’t. Perhaps this suggests that the trend is moving towards a was/wasn’t pattern in the multiethnic areas of inner London but we will have to wait and see.

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Cheshire, J., Kerswill, P., Fox, S. and Torgersen, E. 2011. Contact, the feature pool and the speech community: the Emergence of Multicultural London English. Journal of Sociolinguistics 15/2: 151-196.

DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9841.2011.00478.x

This summary was written by Sue Fox

‘I’m after giving her some flowers’

The following article comes from a special issue of English Today which focuses on Irish English in Today’s World.

Map of counties in Northern Ireland and Eire



The expression in today’s title might not make sense to a lot of readers but if you’re from Ireland then the likelihood is that it sounds very familiar and you’ll know that it means that the speaker has probably given somebody some flowers quite recently to the time of speaking.

Researcher Karen Corrigan is an expert on Irish English and she explains some of the variety’s grammatical features and how they have arisen. She emphasises the fact that Irish English emerged as a result of historical contact between Irish speakers and settlers of regional Scots and English vernaculars. This contact situation makes it difficult to determine whether the resulting grammatical structure a) has been influenced by the indigenous Irish language, b) derives from features that were in the English varieties spoken by the Scots and English settlers or c) whether innovations emerge as a result of the contact situation itself. Corrigan discusses three features of grammatical variation in Irish English and illustrates that all three processes are likely to have been involved.

The first feature is referred to as the ‘After Perfect’, like the example in the heading. It is sometimes also called the ‘Hot News Perfect’ and this is because it can be used to describe a recent event but one that has nevertheless been completed. The structure is formed by combining a form of the verb be with the preposition after followed by the continuous form of a verb e.g. he’s after breaking the window which has the same meaning as he’s just broken the window in standard English. The origin of this feature has been subject to considerable debate but the evidence points to it being a ‘calque’ or ‘loan translation’ because it is a literal translation from the same structure that exists in Irish.

The second feature is the use of double modal verbs e.g. I might could do that (to mean ‘I might be able to do that’). This structure does not occur in Irish and does not therefore derive from this source. It did, however, occur in Northern and Scottish varieties of English at the time when large numbers of these settlers arrived in Ireland and it is considered that this is how it came to be part of Irish English. Furthermore, it is only in those regions of Ireland where large numbers of Scottish and Northern English migrants settled that this feature exists today, namely the Ulster Scots areas of Counties Down and Antrim.

Finally, Corrigan talks about two special types of relative clause found in Irish English. The first is seen in ‘I’ve a cousin a nurse, she lives in Ederney’ where the word ‘she’ refers back to ‘cousin’ and seems to be used instead of a relative pronoun such as ‘who’. The second type is demonstrated by the example ‘you’ll see a wee clock in the window and it goin’ yet’ which has the meaning of ‘you’ll see a wee clock in the window which is still going’. She argues that these two strategies are generally used in more complex relative clauses and that there are parallel uses in both Irish and earlier forms of English. She also finds examples of such constructions in other contact varieties of English and in other languages such as French and Brazilian Portuguese. On this basis, she argues that the structures cannot simply be traced to either Irish or earlier English sources but have emerged in line with linguistic universal principles.

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Corrigan, K. 2011. Grammatical variation in Irish English. English Today 106. Vol.27/2: 39-46.

doi:10.1017/S0266078411000198

This summary was written by Sue Fox

What’s going on with you guys?

 Which one of you guys stole my biscuit?

How do we cope with the ambiguity of you in English? When we say to a group of friends what have you been doing recently? are we asking just one of them, or two or more of them? Research by Theresa Heyd suggests that young people are resolving the potential ambiguity by coining a new pronoun, you guys, used only when they want to refer to more than one person. She traces the development of you guys over a ten year period in the Friends TV series (noting that young people in Britain are also beginning to use you guys as a new plural pronoun).

The six central characters in Friends used both you guys and you when they were referring to more than one individual, but overall you guys was the more frequent form. It accounted for 48 per cent of second person plural forms, whereas you accounted for 42 per cent. Other forms, such as all of you or you all, accounted for about 10 per cent. More important than the overall frequency of you guys, though, is the fine detail of how the characters use the form over the period, as this reveals some of the general pathways through which this kind of language change can occur.

You guys seems to have evolved from contexts that are more emotive and discourse-oriented. Its most frequent use is as a vocative, directly involving the people being addressed, as in Phoebe’s hey you guys, I don’t mean to make things worse but umm I don’t want to live with Rachel anymore.  Gradually, though, you guys comes to be used in more neutral contexts, and becomes part of the grammatical structure of the language. Over the ten year period it is increasingly used as a subject pronoun (as in you guys were a lot more supportive when I wanted to make denim furniture – again from Phoebe) and then as an object or indirect object pronoun (as in I’ll give you guys a break).  At the beginning of the period you guys was heard more often than expected in questions, which also directly involve the people being addressed (since there is an expectation that they will reply to the question), but it is then used more and more frequently in non-questions, a further indication that it is losing its emotive connotations and behaving more like an ordinary pronoun form.

The development of the pronoun goes hand in hand with a change in the

meaning of the noun guy. Although guy once referred only to male humans,

its main use now is for ‘mixed reference’, to a group of both males and

females.  As a pronoun, you guys in Friends also has mixed reference most of

the time: 67% of the forms referred to one (or more) male and one (or more)

female together. Heyd notes that in other situations (outside the Friends

series) you guys is even heard referring to non-humans, a further indication

that its meaning is now bleached: she gives the example of “what happened

to you guys?” uttered by a scientist to the dinosaurs he is studying.

In the earliest Friends programmes, female characters lead in using you guys as a plural pronoun. Eventually, though, the male characters overtake them – a gender pattern that is often attested when language changes.

One question raised by this study is whether the language heard in Friends accurately reflects the language used in everyday life. Heyd finds that the frequency of you guys in Friends is far higher than in the spoken sections of the Corpus of Contemporary American English for the same ten year period.  It is also higher than in a 2008 corpus of email hoaxes. She points out that although the Friends dialogue sounds convincingly representative of the spontaneous English of young urban professionals, it is of course more meticulously scripted, rehearsed and refined than real–life spontaneous conversation. Scriptwriters may strategically employ innovative features such as a new pronoun form to help “stage” contemporary speech. What remains to be seen is whether the heightened influence of innovative forms such as you guys in a popular TV series like Friends might influence the language use of its viewers.

For English Language teaching resources and a suggested English A level language investigation related to this topic click here.

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Theresa Heyd (2010) How you guys doin’? Staged orality and emerging plural address in the television series Friends. American Speech 85 (1): 33-66.

doi 10.1215/00031283-2010-002

This summary was written by Jenny Cheshire

I sang the song or I sung the song? What do YOU say?

 

What do the verbs hang, spin, sling, sting, dig and slink all have in common? Answer: they all form their past tense and past participle by changing their vowel to <u>, so that I spin the wheel becomes I spun the wheel in the past tense and I’ve spun the wheel in the present perfect tense (using the past participle). So, what happens with verbs like begin, sing, drink, ring, shrink, spring, sling, stink and swim? On the face of it, these verbs look very similar to the first group of verbs but they behave differently.  In standard English these verbs have a past tense form with <a> and a different past participle form with <u>, resulting in three-part paradigms like begin - began- begun and sing - sang - sung.

However, it soon becomes clear – as researcher Lieselotte Anderwald has discovered – that there is frequently variation between two past tense forms in the second group of verbs. This variation is quite often reflected in the entries of some dictionaries, which permit an either/or past tense form for these verbs. For example, the Longman Advanced Dictionary of Contemporary English Use gives the past tense of shrink as shrank or shrunk and the past tense of sink as sank or sunk, with, in this dictionary, the second of the two past tense forms being attributed to American English usage (though this is not always the case in other dictionaries).

Anderwald investigated the use of <a> vs <u> forms among traditional dialect speakers in the Freiburg English Dialect Corpus (FRED), a corpus of traditional dialect data by speakers born (mainly) pre-1920 from across the UK. All instances of past tense forms of the most frequently occurring verbs that have the three-part paradigm - sink, drink, ring, sing, begin – were extracted from all dialect areas and each use was classified as being standard (e.g. sang) or non-standard (e.g. sung). From a total of 218 past tense uses she found that the non-standard forms were used in 91 (42%) cases. She then compared the traditional dialect speakers with young working class urban speakers from the Corpus of London Teenage Speech (COLT) and found that they used the non-standard forms almost 67% of the time (although we should add a cautionary note that there were only 12 instances of use in the corpus for this social group). Despite pressure from prescriptive norms, the results show that the use of non-standard forms for these verbs is as robust today as it has been in the past.

Anderwald explains this persistence in two ways. Firstly, the non-standard forms can be traced back historically to Old English so they are a long-standing feature of vernacular English. More importantly, though, she points out that the majority of verbs in English have the same form for past tense and past participle (not only those listed in the beginning of this article but also all regular verbs, which simply add -ed to both past forms) and therefore using the non-standard form in verbs like sing and drink is more ‘natural’ than their standard English counterparts because it conforms to the dominant pattern in English and thus eases the cognitive load of the language user. So if you say I sung the song – don’t worry, you’re in good company!

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Anderwald, L. 2011. Norm vs variation in British English irregular verbs: the case of past tense sang vs sung. English Language and Linguistics 15.1: 85-112.

doi:10.1017/S1360674310000298

This summary was written by Sue Fox

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