The New Cockney: New Ethnicities and Adolescent Speech in the Traditional East End of London

The New Cockney provides a sociolinguistic account of speech variation among adolescents in the 'traditional' East End of London. The study takes account of the social and economic upheaval in the area since the 1950s, primarily concentrating on factors such as the immigration of the Bangladeshi community and its effect on the Cockney dialect. By paying attention to the particular, this book contributes to a better understanding of the more general concerns of linguistic variation. With a focus on the interaction and social practices of a group of adolescents attending a youth centre, the study highlights some of the possible mechanisms for language change.

Social Salience and the Sociolinguistic Monitor: a Case Study of ING and TH-fronting in Britain

This article examines the role of social salience, or the relative ability of a linguistic variable to evoke social meaning, in structuring listeners’ perceptions of quantitative sociolinguistic distributions. Building on the foundational work of Labov et al. (2006, 2011) on the “sociolinguistic monitor” (a proposed cognitive mechanism responsible for sociolinguistic perception), we examine whether listeners’ evaluative judgments of speech change as a function of the type of variable presented. We consider two variables in British English, ING and TH-fronting, which we argue differ in their relative social salience. Replicating the design of Labov et al.’s studies, we test 149 British listeners’ reactions to different quantitative distributions of these variables. Our experiments elicit a very different pattern of perceptual responses than those reported previously. In particular, our results suggest that a variable’s social salience determines both whether and how it is perceptually evaluated. We argue that this finding is crucial for understanding how sociolinguistic information is cognitively processed.