“Cultural Contact and New Dialect Emergence in Large Cities: From Ethnolects to Multiethnolects”, Lars Hinrichs, University of Texas at Austin

Lars Hinrichs is Associate Professor in English Language and Linguistics at UT Austin (Texas, USA). The talk was chaired by Virginie Iché, Associate Professor in English Language and Linguistics at Université de Montpellier Paul-Valéry (Montpellier, FR).

In at least two different locations, London and Toronto, diasporic Jamaican Creole has developed through four successive sociolinguistic stages (described in Hinrichs 2024): from (1) the L1 of first-generation immigrants via (2) a second dialect of second-generation speakers and (3) a localized repertoire that indexes minoritized racial identities (as opposed to Jamaican ethnicity) to (4) a tributary to a highly diverse, local “feature pool” (Mufwene 2001) from which a multiethnolect (or “contemporary urban vernacular”, Rampton 2015) emerges. Given how widely multiethnolects are spoken and how broad their linguistic input is, advancement to stage (4) is the most remarkable for any diasporic repertoire in an urban contact setting. Drawing on findings from my research on Toronto Jamaican English (TJE, Hinrichs forthcoming), this paper asks which sociolinguistic prerequisites must be met for a diasporic creole to advance to Stage 4. The analysis attends to aspects of phonetics/phonology, lexis, and metadiscourse and draws comparisons between TJS (representing Stages 2 and 3) and Multicultural Toronto English (MTE, Denis et al. 2023), two relatively new urban contact varieties. The conclusion offers a discussion of similarities and differences between the feature pools of TJE and MTE and the various selection processes at play. 

References

Denis, D., Elango, V., Kamal, N. S. N., Prashar, S., & Velasco, M. (2023). Exploring the vowel space of Multicultural Toronto English. Journal of English Linguistics, 51(1), 30–65.

Hinrichs, L. (forthcoming). Language contact in the Toronto Jamaican community: Culture, mobility and the renegotiation of identity. Cambridge University Press.

Hinrichs, L. (2024). Caribbean Englishes on the move: The formation of diaspora communities. In S. Hackert (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of Caribbean Englishes. Oxford University Press.

Mufwene, S. S. (2001). The ecology of language evolution. Cambridge University Press.

Rampton, B. (2015). Contemporary urban vernaculars. In J. Nortier & B. Svendsen (Eds.), Language, youth and identity in the 21st century (pp. 24–44). Cambridge University Press.