Only the immigrants can speak the Queen’s English these days’ but all kids have a Jamaican accent: overcompensation vs. urban slang in multiethnic London

According to surveys carried out in the past two decades (M. Sebba 1993, P.L. Patrick 1999, Sue Fox 2005) the urban slang spoken in London is less and less identifiable with Cockney or with other variants of vernacular London English (LE) and is increasingly influenced by dialects imported by immigrants, especially English-lexicon ones like Jamaican Creole, with inflections of Bangladeshi, Gujarati, and even Arab. The process is mainly the outcome of the huge immigration of Afro-Caribbeans and Asians occurred from the 1950s onward, which has resulted in language or dialect contact between white and second or third-generation black children, adolescents and teenagers. Also literature and music have given voice to this language change. In White Teeth (2000) Zadie Smith, a novelist of Jamaican background, has tried to reproduce in her characters’ utterances the interacting varieties of English that characterise the contemporary multiracial vernacular spoken in London. She has also highlighted cultural, social and metalinguistic aspects connected with the use of English in a post-colonial, globalised world. Similarly, UK grime music has adopted a multiethnic slang and tackled in its texts the issue of globalisation, with special reference to the competing world of US rappers. On this account, the perception and use of American English, both in its standard and in its nonstandard forms, is of crucial importance. Starting from a study of direct speech in Zadie Smith’s novel and a corpus analysis of grime lyrics broadcast by the London-based Channel U in 2006, this essay aims at investigating some of the most relevant linguistic and cultural phenomena that have taken place in multiethnic London, exploring related and interconnected aspects (Cortese and Hymes 2001), such as code-switching, hypercorrection and a creative use of language (Crystal 2004). References: Cortese, G., Hymes, D. eds. (2001), “Languiging in and Across Human Groups. Perspectives on Differences and Asymmetry”, Textus. English Studies in Italy, vol. XIV, N° 2. Genova: Tilgher. Crystal, D. (2004) The Language Revolution. Cambridge: Polity Press. Patrick, Peter, L., (1999) Urban Jamaican Creole: Variation in the Mesolect. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co. Sebba, Mark (1993) London Jamaican: Language Systems in Interaction. London: Longman. Smith, Zadie, White Teeth, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 2001