(Mis)interpreting urban youth language: white kids sounding black?

ABSTRACT

The language of young people is often viewed very negatively by some sections of the mainstream media and by some social commentators in the UK. While this is nothing new – older generations routinely despair of how the youth of today are ruining the language – what is different now is the added element of ethnicity, whereby young people of various ethnicities are perceived as using some kind of ‘ghetto grammar’ or ‘Jafaican’ which carry often explicit connotations of ‘sounding black’. This paper challenges the mainstream view by firstly introducing the linguistic take on this emerging Multicultural Urban British English, and then exploring the views of young people themselves on how they use language by taking qualitative data from a linguistic ethnography project involving 14–16-year-olds in a non-mainstream urban educational setting. The young people provide insights into their language that are in complete opposition to the views so often expressed in the media, and which instead suggest that linguistic features that were previously strongly associated with specific ethnicities are being used in new and innovative ways. Refreshingly, it would appear that for many young people ethnicity is simply not a consideration, at least in relation to language.

KEYWORDS:

• Language
• identity
• ethnicity
• sociolinguistics
• ethnography
• youth culture

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their very useful comments and suggestions. I would also like to thank Huw Bell at MMU for his editing advice. But most of all, I would like to thank all the young people and staff at the two learning centres. Without their support and good humour, the project would not have been possible.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Or black youth sounding white (cf. Fanon 1952).

2. Also relevant is Mezz Mezzrow – a white American clarinettist in the 1930s and 1940s who identified as a ‘voluntary negro’.

3. The traditional ‘sociolinguistic interview’ comprises a series of elements aiming to generate a range of speech styles from an interviewee (e.g. Labov 1972a).

4. To be fair, Lammy has simply argued that young people should be taught to speak ‘properly’ in an interview, whereas Johns has called for a wholesale change in the way young people speak.

5. A growing view within sociolinguistics is that all speech is performance to a degree, and there is no such thing as a natural way of speaking as it depends entirely on the context. I largely agree, yet I still feel there can be a more unguarded, unconscious way of speaking in which we are less aware of performing particular identities.

6. See' Dray’s (forthcoming) exploration of the practices of ‘banter’, ‘boyin’ and ‘chattin shit’.

7. It should be pointed out that ‘f’ for ‘th’ (known as th-fronting) is by far the most frequent pronunciation of words such as three, think, mouth, etc. So in this excerpt, ‘free’ should be seen as Abdou’s personal ‘standard’ pronunciation.

8. These data are currently being analysed more fully and will form the basis of another paper. They involve interviews with college recruitment staff, employers and organisations which help young people from disadvantaged backgrounds find employment.

9. A 2011 British comedy film about a young man in London. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1658797/

10. A 2006 British film about a group of 15-year-olds in London. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0435680/

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the The Leverhulme Trust under Project Grant [RPG-2014-059].