Language and Ethnicity

Introduction

Ethnicity is a concept that relates to aspects of a person's cultural identity. It is different from nationality, which refers to the more technical issue of which nation or nations you formally belong to i.e. what is on your passport. Nationality is more of a legal concept, while ethnicity is more to do with who you see as your community. This could involve several factors, including religious beliefs and language, as well as your family relationships or other close connections. In a label such as 'British Asian', the first term relates to nationality while the second relates to ethnicity.

The terms 'black' and 'white' are very broad labels that don't make distinctons between ethnic groups, but try to suggest similarities - sometimes in a very crude and over-simplifying way - by focusing on skin colour. All of the terms that surround ethnicity need serious thought, because there are some complex issues to unravel.

The term 'ethnicity' has quite a complicated history. It was intended to replace the word 'race', which had acquired negative associations with ideas about racial superority and inferiority, and with racism. But 'ethnic' has come to mean 'non-white' in many people's minds; 'ethnic food' could suggest curry or couscous, but is unlikely to be used for fish and chips. In fact, the term 'ethnic' should refer to everyone: just as everyone has an accent because of the way they pronounce words, everyone has ethnicity because of their family ties. Everyone is part of an ethnic group of some sort, regardless of skin colour or nationality. Now, you will see the term 'race' in academic texts: for example, a 'raced text' would be a text that uses ideas of race in a manipulative way.

Where ethnicity is perhaps most useful is in its refernece to the family heritage that many people share - linking them historically and culturally to places where their relatives may once have lived.

As identity is so intimately connected to langauge, it is hardly surprising that the intersection of ethnicity and language is such a fertile area of social linguistics. Different ethnic groups often use language in ways that reflect solidarity and affiliation to aspects of their heritage, but there is also a wider linguistic repertoire to draw upon, signalling different elements of identity, but with ethnic background as another variable, more choices exist.

In a world and a country where there is more contact and mixing between different ethnic groups than ever before, the language linked to ethnic background rapidly changes. As with other forms of variation in language use, there are many different ways in which language users are judged by others. This can involve judgements about whether a particular use of language is 'correct' or 'incorrect', how 'white' or 'black' someone sounds, and how 'nerdy' or 'street' a speaker might be. 

Early Immigration and Language

Immigration to Britain is not a recent phenomenon - for many centuries people have moved to Britain, bringing with them their own mother tongues. The Anglo-Saxons (the tribes from nothern Europe who settled in Bbritain and gave us what we now know as English) arrived in the 5th century. French became a significant language in Britain after the Norman invasion in the 11th century. In the early 1500s, African musicians are recorded as living in Britain, and during the 16th and 17th centuries; the slave trade meant the arrival of more African people.

Historically, one of the largest ethnic groups to settle in England has been the Irish, and there is some linguistic evidence of Irish affecting the Liverpool accent and dialect, but little elewhere. Other groups to arrive have included the French Protestant refugees, the Huguenots, who arrived in London in the 17th century, and Jewish refugees from Russia, who settled in large numbers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In the 20th and 21st centuries, many people from the Caribbean, India, Pakistan and Bbangleadesh have settled in the UK, while there are also communities from many other parts of the world, including Turkey, Cyprus, Somalia, Prortugal, Colombia, and Eastern Europe.

Many of these immigrants have chosen to settle in the inner city, specifically, East London. Where there were concentrations of a particular ethnic group, the English language often absorbed some influences from these new arrivals. However, it is debatable whether these groups had any significant impact on the English spoken more widely. What seems to have happened in most cases is a rapid 'Anglicization' of the incomers' language use, so within a generation or two at most, they would have been speaking English.  There is evidence of some lexical influence from Jewish settlers on the slang of London English and beyond, with spread of terms such as kosher (which has a specific cultural meanining in Yiddish relating to the suitability of food for eating by Jews, but broadens out to mean something similar to 'OK' or 'legitimate'), and nosh (meaning 'food').

Creoles and Crossing

With the large-scale arrival of Caribbean people in the UK from the late 1940s onwards (as a part of a post-war drive to recruit workers for Britain's growing public services), new forms of English started to be heard in many predominantly urban areas. While the new arrivals were not all from Jamaica, the variety of English developed by second and third-generation speakers later became known as London Jamaican.

English had been a large part of the Caribbean's linguistic heritage for over 500 years before that - its history inextricably bound up with that of slavery and liberation struggles - and the Creole spoken by many Jamaicans had its roots in English and the various West African languages spoken by slaves taken from Africa during the period of the slave trade. While the first generation of Caribbean immigrants tended to speak the variety they had brought with them, younger speakers who were born and/or brought up in the UK often developed a more mixed form of language

In the 1960s and 1970s, the contact between Jamaican-English young people and their white working-class neighbours at work and at school, and the increasing number of mixed-race relationships, meant that people of different ethnic backgrouns were eposed to each other's varieties of English. A degree of 'crossing' was evident in some situations, when speakers who had access to both London English and Jamaican English might shift from one style to another, depending on who they were with. So a young white speaker might use more traditional London English with a white peer group and shift into a lexis more influenced by Jamaican English with black friends.

This cross-cultural mixing gave rise to significant changes in youth-culture, as well as language. Some white or Asian young peopl without a black people also started to use non-standard Creole-influenced speech around this time. Ben Rampton notes that 'Creole was widely seen as cool, tough and good to use. It was associated with assertiveness, verbal resourcefulness, competence in hetero sexual relationships, and opposition to authority' (2010).

Work by Roger Hewitt (1986) and Mark Sebba (1993) identified a new development in the 1980s, that of 'Black Cockney' - a style, rather than a discrete variety - used by young black speakers in London, while John Ppitts felt that mainstream society was ignoring and constraining them, towards a resistance identity through language.  As he put it, there was a move from 'sounding like Ian Wright to sounding like Bob Marley'. The role of language to express identity is crucial, and this ges beyond where you are born and the colour of your skin to the sense of who you are and how you want to be seen.

Hybrid Forms and Multicultural London English

While language contact between different ethnic groups in the 1960s through to the late 1990s was often a case of mix and match, one distinct variety that has emerged is British Black English (BBE), which is a form that many members of Britain's Caribbean-heritage community have as part of their repertoire of styles. BBE combines elements of Standard British English with Creole (or Patois) forms. BBE varies from region to region, reflecting the local varities spoken in places such as Leeds, Birmingham and Bristol, for example. More recently, work by Cheshire et al (2008) has identified a new form of English emerging (predominantly amoung young people) from the melting pot of London's inner city and taking root far beyond: Multicultural London English (MLE). Given that it has now been identified in many other areas, some linguists are also starting to describe such forms as Multicultural Urban British English.

Strictly speaking, MLE is not a discrete variety of language (like Cockney or Scouse), because it does not have a uniform set of features shared by its speakers. Rather, it is a pool of langauge characteristics adopted to differing degrees by its users - depending on age, ethnicity, region and identity. MLE is more than just 'slang' - although elements of its vocabulary are slang terms and have moved into wider use - because it also consists of phonological, grammatical and discourse characteristics, such as:

• Vocabulary: 'bare' (a lot/very); 'beef' (disagreement, conflict)
• Phonology: most noticeably the dipthong vowel sounds of words such as 'face' and 'like' are pronounced /fes/ and /la:k/
• Grammar: there are few syntactical differences, but the use of 'dem' as a plural marker and 'man' as a new pronound to onself (as in 'man paid for my own ticket') are broader grammatical differences in MLE
• Discourse features: 'innit' as a tage question, 'you get me' as a confirmation check etc.

This pool of linguistic features varies from place to place, so a young person in East London might use some vocabulary items that are not in common use amoung MLE speakers in another part of London, while MLE speakers in Nottingham might use phonological features that are more common to that area than London. Local ethnic populations also have an impact on the pool of features, so a higher proportion of Ghanaian or Turkish-heritage English speakers in an area might produce more influence from those mother tongues.

Significantly to linguists, MLE is quite different from previous contanct langauages in the UK, beacuse the numbers are very different and, for perhaps the first time, the influence of the native language is not as strong a force as the influence of the second languages - meaning that the process of Anglicization is less noticeable - instead, a form of convergence is taking place between a numbder of different influecnes and creating a genuine and organic hybrid form of English. For those dismissing it as 'Jafaican', it should be clear that there's nothing fake and only a touch of Jamaican about it.

However it is defined, MLE is an important new area of research and study for linguists and has come under intense scrutiny in the media, revealing as it does so much about the changing nature of  British society and the langauge we use.

Code Switching and Style Shifting

Moving between different styles of language is not just an aspect of langauge and ethnicity: it is a common characteristic of most forms of daily communication. All speakers and writers have linguistic choices to make about which level of langauge to use in a particular situation. The notion of linuistic appropriacy is central here: in other words, which form of language is suitble or appropriate for a given situation. However, because of the centrality of ethnicity to many people's linguistic identity, switching and shifting between different forms of a language - or even totally different languages in the case of bilingual speakers - perhaps carries a greater significance. 

Code mixing refers to the occasional insertion of vocabulary items from one language into another, while code switching can be used to describe how speakers move from one langauge to another for more extensive periods of time.

Representations of Ethnicity

Langauge can create and shape representations around us. Many words used to label different ethnic groups have not been chosen by the groups themselves, but by others who have often been hostile or dismissive of the people labelled by these terms. The most extreme examples of racial epithets are rarely found in the mainstream media and tent to be confined to more extreme ends of social media. 

Historically, Creoles have been perceived by some as 'broken' or 'incorrect' English, a discourse that persists in the representation of other non-standard forms, dialects, sociolects and ethnolects. MLE has somtimes been referred to as 'Jafaican' and 'ghetto grammar' by non-linguists, and associated with gangs, violence and poor education by other.

Summary

• Ethnicity = cultural identity
• Nationality = which nation(s) you formally belong to
• Political correctness is particularly important when talking about a topic such as ethnicity, as you should display sensitivity to some of the issues
• Language can tell you a lot about a person's ethnicity
• Anglo-Saxons brought our 'English' the country during the 5th century
• French's influence increased after the Norman invasion in the 11th century
• Slave trade brought the arrival of more African people in the 16th and 17th century
• Irish immigration had an effect on the Liverpool accent and dialect
• The UK has a very diverse range of cultures
• Cultures that have moved into the UK have brought terms to the English language that have derieved from their practices e.g. 'kosher' from the Jewish language
• Who you are speaking with may affect your language use
• The way you choose to speak, no matter your ethnicity, is important in shaping you identity, and how you want to be perceived
• Even Multicultural London English has different variations due to the effect of different ethnic backgrounds
• The media does not tend to use negative ethnicity terms any more,