The Historical Enregisterment of London English

• Applicant: Dr. Johanna Gerwin
• Subject Area: Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
• Term: from 2020 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 442826119

This study traces the ‘enregisterment’ (Agha 2003, Johnstone et al. 2006) of the three London varieties traditional Cockney, "Estuary English" (EE), and Multicultural London English (MLE) from the beginning of the 19th century until the present. The term ‘enregisterment’ describes the processes through which a way of speaking (a bundle of linguistic features) becomes differentiable within a language to ordinary speakers by being linked with social values and meanings, i.e. how a variety becomes a 'register'. These processes involve metapragmatic activities such as meta-discursive labelling (e.g. “Estuary English”, “Multicultural London English”, “Jafaikan” etc.), the production of (humorous) dialect dictionaries and literature, and the public discussion and cultural treatment of ways of speaking (e.g. in newsmedia, online forums, or by the entertainment industry) in general, as well as the creation of speaker personae representing the social values of a register. The first part of my study on traditional Cockney deals with the enregisterment of Cockney from the beginning of the 19th century onwards, when Cockney variants were first represented in literary works. The following research questions are addressed: which linguistic features were considered part of the Cockney linguistic repertoire and by whom? How did these linguistic stereotypes change throughout the 19th century? Which social meanings, values, and contexts did these features index diachronically? And which language ideologies influenced the enregisterment processes of traditional Cockney? The second part of my study continues these questions into the 20th and 21st centuries, when two other ways of speaking enter the metadiscourse, EE and MLE. The emergence of these three registers is historically related and, in the case of EE, illustrates how non-linguist discourse can prompt a general acknowledgement of a new way of speaking, even in the absence of new structural/linguistic features. Following an analysis of the public metadiscourse about these registers as represented in six daily national newspapers and selected other cultural products, a field study involving sociolinguistic interviews with London speakers is to determine how the three varieties are currently enregistered by local non-linguists, i.e. which linguistic features are used to define the registers, which social values/meanings/stereotypes are linked to the use of these features, and to which extent metadiscursive labels for registers and its speakers are known, and how public metadiscourses are reflected by more private ones. The interview material is meant to feed into a questionnaire survey of a wider group of participants, which can then also be analysed quantitatively. The aim of this study is to present a comprehensive historical analysis of London registers and its speakers with a focus on the social meanings and perceptions of variables.

• DFG Programme: Research Fellowships
• International Connection: United Kingdom
• Host: Professorin Devyani Sharma, Ph.D.