Diversity in adoption of linguistic features of London English by Chinese and Bangladeshi adolescents

Abstract

This comparative study, conducted in multicultural London, investigates the occurrence in interviews with a researcher and in constructed same-sex peer conversations of five linguistic features characteristic of London English in the speech of two groups of British-born adolescents: ethnic Bangladeshis and ethnic Chinese of Cantonese heritage. The features are glottal stop in place of medial /t/, high rising tone in declaratives, invariant tag innit, quotative be like, and negative concord. Based on relative frequency of occurrence, the two groups have comparable performance on two of these features, showing no instances of medial glottal stop and similarly moderate incidence of innit. On the other three features, the performance of the two groups contrasts. For the Bangladeshi group, the highest frequency item is negative concord, and the other two (high rising tone and quotative be like) have low occurrence. For the Chinese group, the highest frequency item is high rising tone, the frequency of be like is similar to that of innit, and negative concord has minimal occurrence. These patterns of usage may be indicative of differential adoption of linguistic forms by these adolescent ethnic groups conveying a partially similar and partially different identification vis-à-vis the wider speech community, both in London and the wider world.