Multicultural London English

INTRODUCTION

My breakdowns are structured around accent features and influences described by Knight-Thompson Speechwork, a 21st-century, skills-based approach to speech and accents that celebrates language diversity. KT Speechwork offers the “4 Ps” below as a framework for exploring many different facets of an accent:

    • PEOPLE. Who speaks with this accent? Where does this accent come from, historically? What common cultural elements might influence people’s manner of speaking?
    • POSTURE. What is the habitual shape of the vocal tract for speakers of the accent? We all have a habitual way of resting our mouths that allows us to move it into the speech actions of our accent as economically as possible. The posture of this accent might be different from your habitual one.
    • PRONUNCIATION. What are the sounds of this accent? I’ll be using both recordings and the International Phonetic Alphabet to describe speech actions and the sounds they produce. As you listen and read, listen with your mouth–can you make the shapes the speaker is making as you listen?
    • PROSODY. What are the musicality and rhythm of the accent like? What are the intonation, stress, and pitch patterns that speakers might use? This is the soul of the accent. We could nail the pronunciation, but it’s not a manner of speaking until we find how it flows.

 

PEOPLE

Multicultural London English (MLE) is a dialect of English used primarily by young speakers in ethnically and culturally diverse neighborhoods of London. Linguists sometimes describe it as a multiethnolect because it is spoken by people from a variety of backgrounds and contains many different dialect and language influences. MLE’s unique grammatical, lexical, and pronunciation features have roots in the languages of immigrants to the United Kingdom from the Caribbean (you might hear MLE called “Jafaican”), South Asia, West Africa, and Southeastern and Central Europe. These languages merged with and influenced the “Cockney” English spoken by largely white, working-class East Londoners to create a new, hybrid dialect primarily associated with youth culture and its music, poetry, and media. Features specific to MLE became identifiable as early as the 1990s, and by the early 2000s it was the predominant dialect among young, urban, multiethnic speakers in London and increasingly in other major English cities.

History and context of MLE:

    • Thony Thorne is a linguist who has done a lot of interesting work on MLE. Here is his very readable overview of the history and social context of MLE.
      • Chris Nott, Thony Thorne’s student, created this beautiful and informative handbook on MLE (click the link to download a PDF) with many photos of the neighborhoods where you might hear MLE spoken. Here is more information about Nott’s work.
    • The Common Tongue of Twenty-First-Century London _ The New Yorker (click the link to download a PDF). This article contains a useful introduction to who speaks MLE and where it comes from, interspersed with a first-person reflection from a London-to-New-York-and-back-again ex-pat on how much our language use reflects who we are and who we want to be.

Listen to MLE:

    • This video contains some interviews with MLE speakers, contrasted with Cockney and other English accents:
    • Listen to Laura telling a story.
    • Listen to Alex telling a story.
    • Rapper Central Cee, from Shepherd’s Bush, London and with Guyanese and Chinese heritage, speaks a very recognizable variety of MLE with many common features of the accent.
    • George the Poet is a great example of MLE. He has a fantastic podcast in which you’ll hear his accent and his conversations with many MLE speakers, but due warning: the content is engaging and artfully produced, so you might have a hard time paying attention to the accents!
    • Akala is a spoken word artist and social commentator. In the linked video, you’ll hear his accent, which is MLE (the white interviewer is closer to a London accent called Estuary English), and he also has a lot to say about England and empire that will give you a sense of the social forces and human migration that produced MLE.
    • Here is Michaela Coel’s acceptance speech at the BAFTAs. She won for the Netflix series Chewing Gum, which centers MLE speakers.
    • The Oscar-nominated short film Black Sheep is narrated by a speaker of MLE. Content warning: racism, violence.

 

POSTURE

It’s often helpful to think about your own starting vocal tract posture to help you find the posture of a different accent. I’ll compare MLE to American vocal tract posture, and specifically Maryland posture, because that’s where many of my students are from. But you might need to adjust my descriptions to suit your own physical starting place.

Relative to Maryland accents, the general vocal tract posture of MLE is forward and close. Perhaps paradoxically, though, there is a nimbleness in the accent that allows movement to bounce rapidly between the front and back of the mouth.

    • jaw: raised, as compared to Maryland accents, but not tense — there is a looseness that allows for nimbleness and a lot of movement
    • lip corners: very involved and more willing to round than in Maryland
    • tongue tip and front of the body of the tongue: active and precise, as in “Received Pronunciation” (“Standard British”) — this accent differs from Cockney in that it includes a lot of the consonant detail and crispness that Americans think of when they think of a “typical” English accent
    • back of the body of the tongue: there can be a lot of space for open back vowels, and there may even be some tongue root retraction

Ncuti Gatwa is an actor with a rich language background. Born in Rwanda, he grew up in Scotland. His accent is a hybrid, but his many language influences have settled his oral posture in a place very comparable to MLE. As you watch the gif of him below, try mirroring the placement of his jaw and the movement of his lips:

  • As you watch and mirror the gif, an image might help: think about chewing bubble gum. There’s a lot of movement between front and back, and between open and close. There’s also a kind of punctuation to the movement, a staccato rhythm. And every now and then, everything flows forward when you blow a bubble.

Sometimes filler or hesitation sounds like uh and um are useful for finding an accent’s “home base.” I would transcribe MLE’s filler sound forward and fairly open: /a̠/.

This recording is of two of Michaela Cole’s hesitation sounds from the above YouTube video. You’ll hear the sound first at regular speed, then slowed down 50%. Can you listen with your mouth? In other words, try echoing the sound you hear and look for the same shape in your mouth.

 

PRONUNCIATION

I’ve created practice recordings of key MLE sounds for you. As you play the practice recordings below, listen with your mouth. Try the speech gestures physically. Take them slowly at first, then build up to fluency. Know, too, that I am not a native MLE speaker. The practice recordings of me modeling the accent are a step in the process, but eventually your goal should be to listen to the native speakers above and try echoing their pronunciation and prosody.

CONSONANTS

/ɹ/ → [ɹʷ]

Like most English accents, MLE is non-rhotic: post-vocalic /ɹ/ is not pronounced. In the initial position (at the beginning of words), after a consonant, and between vowels, /ɹ/ is pronounced, perhaps with some additional lip rounding: [ɹʷ].

 

/l/ → [ʊ]

An /l/ in the final position (at the end of a word or syllable) is often so “dark” that the tongue tip doesn’t contact the alveolar ridge, producing a vowel [ʊ]. But, if the /l/ is in the initial position or medial position (between two vowels), speakers use a “clear” /l/, an alveolar approximant with a relaxed tongue body, which might be different from your Maryland “dark” /l/ [ɫ], an alveolar approximant with some raising of the back of the body of the tongue.

 

Reversal of H-dropping

Initial /h/ is typically dropped in Cockney, but MLE speakers pronounce the /h/.

 

/t/ → [ʔ] or [tʰ]

There is a lot of variation here, even within the use of a single speaker. In the medial and final positions, /t/ may be realized as a glottal stop [ʔ], but quick and light. Or it may be the alveolar plosive with some aspiration [tʰ].

 

Yod coalescence

Where an alveolar plosive /d/ or /t/ is followed by a palatal approximant or yod /j/, it is realized as [t͡ʃ] or [d͡ʒ].

 

Th-fronting and Th-stopping

When unvoiced, the dental fricative /θ/ may be “fronted” to the labiodental fricative [f] or “stopped” to the dentalized stop plosive [t̪]. When voiced, the dental fricative /ð/ tends to be fronted in the medial position (in the middle of words) as [v] and stopped in the initial and final positions: [d̪]. There is free variation among these realizations.

 

/ŋ/ → [n] or [ŋk]

As in many English dialects in the UK and America, -ing suffixes may be pronounced [n], or the /ŋ/ may be released, producing the plosive /k/: [ŋk]. Both possibilities are in the recordings below.

 

/k/ → [q]

“Backing” of the unvoiced velar plosive /k/ to the unvoiced uvular plosive [q] usually happens before a back vowel.

 

VOWELS

To organize the vowel sounds I’m introducing, I’ll be using a linguistics tool called “lexical sets.” These sets, created by J.C. Wells, are lists of words that tend to share a vowel sound. For a full linguistic discussion of lexical sets, see Accents of English I: An Introduction by J.C. Wells (Cambridge University Press 1982). Or, for something geared specifically toward actors, check out Eric Armstrong’s (new!) open-source book, Lexical Sets for Actors. Or just google it! Believe it or not, the Wikipedia article on lexical sets will give you a decent introduction.

 

FLEECE → [ə̯i]

This set may have a very subtle onset and is quite close.

 

GOOSE → [ʉ]

This set is “fronted,” and may actually sound similar to some Baltimore accents.

 

BATH/PALM (and START) → [ɑː]

First, a note for Americans: you likely use the same vowel in the TRAP and BATH sets, maybe something like [æ]. In other words, these sets are merged. Many English accents use a different vowel in TRAP than in BATH; the sets are split. English people intuitively know whether a word uses a TRAP or a BATH vowel; American speakers won’t have this intuition. Enter the brilliant Eric Armstrong to the rescue! His chapter on the BATH set explains a bit about why these sets merge or split, and if you scroll to the bottom, he has a list of words in the BATH set. That’s right: if you have a word in your script and you don’t know whether it’s TRAP or BATH, you’ll need to look it up.

 

TRAP → [ɐ] 

Once again, if you don’t know whether it’s TRAP or BATH, look it up. Just to upset you: can is TRAP, but can’t is BATH.

 

LOT/CLOTH → [ɒ̹]

Americans will need to remember to round their lips a lot. Is it LOT, CLOTH, or THOUGHT? Look it up! LOT. CLOTH. THOUGHT.

 

THOUGHT (and NORTH/FORCE) → [ɔ̝]

This vowel is raised and quite round. Is it LOT, CLOTH, or THOUGHT? Look it up! LOT. CLOTH. THOUGHT.

 

GOAT → [oˑ]

This is realized as a monophthong or perhaps a diphthong with a very short central coda.

 

FACE → [eˑ] or [eɪ̝̆]

Like GOAT, this is realized as a monophthong. If it’s a diphthong, the coda is very short.

 

PRICE → [ɐɪ̯]

The onset is centralized, or this set may simply be realized as the monophthong [ɐ].

 

MOUTH → [ɐʊ̯]

Like PRICE, the onset here is centralized.

 

COMMA (and LETTER) → [ɐ]

 

NON-RHOTIC VOWELS: NURSE, NEAR, SQUARE, CURE

These are the non-rhotic vowel sets that we haven’t yet discussed (we already looked at START, NORTH/FORCE, and LETTER because they are merged with other sets). Remember to drop the r-coloring that might be your American habit.

 

BITS’N’BOBS

There’s a pretty active community of linguists on Wikipedia, so I find that the articles on language variety tend to be a pretty good place to start (watch out! not always so with Wikipedia). The Wikipedia page on MLE contains a fun list of vocabulary and phrases that’s worth checking out. Your playwright is responsible for giving you the words, while you’re responsible for pronouncing them, but for fun, I recommend checking out the list.

 

PROSODY

Some languages, like most dialects of American English, are stressed timed, meaning that some syllables have relative stress — they “weigh more” than other syllables. And some languages, like the Caribbean dialects that influenced MLE, are syllable timed, meaning that there is a more even, equal stress pattern throughout words and phrases. In this recording of the native MLE speaker Alex, you can hear both of these influences coming together. The stress pattern has a rapid-fire, almost staccato evenness. You can also hear that he is willing to use higher pitches to emphasize words, rather than simply volume as is more typically American.

This breakdown of MLE has an excellent discussion of Prosody under the heading “Stress and Intonation” at the bottom of the page, complete with recordings to illustrate. It’s worth spending time with the whole breakdown, just note that its authors transcribe pronunciation slightly differently from me because they are writing for a largely British audience, so don’t get too hung up on the phonetic symbols.