Welcome

This website provides information about an ESRC-funded project called “Sociolinguistics and immigration: linguistic variation among adolescents in London and Edinburgh” (RES-000-22-3244). This project investigates the acquisition of sociolinguistic competence in English among adolescent Polish immigrants living in London and Edinburgh.

 

Motivation for this project

Over the last decade, the UK has experienced some significant changes in population demographics and labour market trends. In May 2004, ten new members were admitted to the European Union. Eight of these were from Central and Eastern Europe and have become known collectively as the (CEE) A8 group. The UK was one of only three countries (with Ireland and Sweden) to allow citizens of the CEE A8 virtually unrestricted access to its labour markets. This created the “largest single wave of in-migration that the British Isles have ever experienced” (Salt and Millar 2006: 335). Poland was the largest ascension state with a population of over 40 million. This, coupled with Poland’s weak economic position in the EU, led to significant Polish immigration to the UK. From a linguistic perspective, this is interesting because “immigration presents us with some of the most extreme cases of dialects and languages in contact” (Chambers 2003: 98). We therefore have an opportunity to study the linguistic consequences of this unique and intense language contact situation that now exists across the UK between Polish and English. We are particularly interested in exploring the language of adolescent Polish immigrants because the adolescent generation are of an age at which they are especially adaptable and in constant contact with their native English-speaking peer group. To do this, we collected and analysed language data from British-born and Polish-born adolescents living in Edinburgh and London (see the methods section for further information).

 

Goals of this project

We are interested in finding out what adolescent Polish immigrants do with the sociolinguistically constrained variation that exists in the English that they hear around them. Do they attach social meaning to it? Do they pick it up and copy it? Or do they do something else? Specifically, we ask the following 4 research questions relating to variation in perception and production:

  • PERCEPTION
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    1. Can adolescent Polish immigrants identify different varieties of English?
    2. Do adolescent Polish immigrants share similar social evaluations of varieties of English as their native-speaker peer group?
  • PRODUCTION
    1. Are adolescent Polish immigrants using the same frequency of variation in English as their native-speaker peer group?
    2. Is the variation in the speech of adolescent Polish immigrants constrained by the same social and linguistic factors as for their native-speaker peer group?

Further details of the methods we used in collecting and analysing the data for this research project can be found here. Published results and outputs from this project can be found here.