Ride the Storm: Navigating Through Unstable Periods / Katerina Rudko (Belka G...
Acquisition of Manchester dialect features by Roma migrants
1. Do you speak Manchest[ʌ]?
Romani acquisition of Manchester English
Gerry Howley
g.m.howley@edu.salford.ac.uk
http://twitter.com/gerryhowley
2. Research questions
Do Roma adolescents in Manchester acquire
local dialect features?
If so, do they have the same patterns of
variation as MCR speakers?
Where there is acquisition, what social factors
impact upon this acquisition?
3. ‘Roma’
Europe’s largest minority group, estimated at
between 10 and 12 million people
‘Romani’ or ‘Romany’ is an umbrella term
My participants self-identify as ‘Roma’
8. Previous research
‘Non-native’ speakers can acquire variants of L2, e.g.
English variants of the (ing) variable: [ɪn] and [ɪŋ]
(Adamson and Regan 1991; Drummond 2010; Schleef
et al. 2011)
Some also acquire ‘native’ patterns of variation, i.e.
sociolinguistic competence (Major 2004; Mougeon,
Rehner and Nadasdi 2004)
Some don’t acquire these things…………why?
Social networks and orientation towards values of
communities may have an impact (Wolfram et al.
2004; Schleef et al. 2011)
9. How can we investigate this?
Bayley & Regan 2004; Bayley 2005 call for
more mixed methods research
Use techniques and methods found in
monolingual sociolinguistics,
e.g. Eckert 2000
11. The school and local area
Index of Multiple Deprivation 2010
4thmost deprived ward in Greater Manchester
top 1% of the most deprived areas in England
worst area in Manchester for quality and value of
housing
7.5% unemployment (Manchester 5.7%; National
average 4.1%)
Shorthill Manchester England
Sale price £69,500 £100,000 £143,500
(Terraced house)
Rental price (2 £464 £703 £1,003
bed property)
12. Methods
Ethnography began July 2011
Participant observation of break times,
lunchtimes, and classes
Speech data from conversational interviews
Friendship pairs
13. Participants
ID Age Stream AoA LoR
EV 11 EAL 7 4
AL 12 EAL 5 7
AD 12 Mainstream (all) 5 7
LO 12 Mainstream (all) 7 6
DA 16 EAL 12 4
SI 16 Mainstream (3) 7 9
TA 14 Mainstream (2.5) 10 4
AM 14 Mainstream (2) 9 5
14. The variable: lettER
Plurals: [ə]
Singular phrase final position:
back and slightly lower the
vowel to something like
[ʌ](Ramsammy & Turton 2012)
So letters vs letter:
[lɛtəs] vs [lɛtʌ]
15. Results: erPL
1500
1000
Group
F2-F1 (Hz)
Anglo
OldMS
YoungEAL
YoungMS
500
Roma MCR
0
EV AD LO SI TA AM HO KA RU RY
Speaker
19. Adolescence is ‘both short and intense – a
social hothouse’ (Eckert 1997)
12 yrs: orientation shifts to peer group
11-13 yrs: ‘turning point’ for
bilingual children
14-17 yrs: stabilisation of
vernacular
20. Hypothesis
Combination of older Roma girl’s maturational
stage and relative isolation from other Roma
girls in their classes results in them making
stronger and closer connections with MCR-
born teens.
This increased number of MCR speakers in
their social networks is a key factor in their
backed realisation of the lettER vowel.
21. Thanks for listening
g.m.howley@edu.salford.ac.uk
http://twitter.com/gerryhowley
Thanks to:
Janet Watson
Sam Kirkham
Danielle Turton
Editor's Notes
LAST CHANGE = mcr sound files
Since 2007 influx of Roma migrants and their families. gives us a chance to study the Roma’s acquisition of English dialect features, a previously unstudied phenomenon. So I set out to ask: Do Roma adolescents in Manchester acquire local dialect features?If so, do they have the same variation that MCR speakers have? Where there is acquisition, what social factors impact upon this acquisition?
The participants in this study are members of the Romani community, history has been traced back to India through their Indo-Aryan language history is one of migration, often forced. now make up Europe’s largest minority group (10 -12 million)Romani is used as an umbrella term for and by all Romani groups, my participants call themselves Roma, and so do Iemic nature of my study.
Manchester context, brief look at previous research, my project methodology preliminary results
What do you know about MCR? What springs to mind?LocationMusic – bands on imageFootball
MCR: city North West long history of immigration and racial diversity being a very multicultural and multilingual city2006 census the non-white ethnic groups of Manchester made up 23.2% of the population, compared to a national average of 11.3%.2007-8, a number of Eastern European countries entered the EU. Roma families were able to leave where they had settled in Romania. Most from Ţăndărei in southeast Romania by 2009, around 50 Romanian Roma families made up the community to the south east of Manchester City Centre.
Lot of rx into DA done in L1Also done in L2 but often EAL context rather than migrants living in countryV brief summary of some findings here
Previous research suggests that non-native speakers can acquire variants of a second language (L2), such as the English variants of the (ing) variable: [ɪn] and [ɪŋ] Some learners acquire native speaker’s patterns of variation, e.g. in English, the apical variant [ɪn] is favoured most in progressives (e.g. he’s walking) and least in nouns (e.g. ceiling) In a L1, knowledge of these patterns of variation is part of a speaker’s sociolinguistic competence, therefore in order to become fully proficient in the target language, language learners must also acquire patterns of variation.Acquisition of sx competence is probably of greater importance to immigrants as it is to EFL students abroad. Migrants have to communicate effectively with speakers of English and other language backgrounds in order to live, attend school, and potentially work in the UK.So we know that some speakers acquire vernacular dialect features in a second language, but what remains unclear is why there can be such a difference in acquisition across speakers - why some acquire much more of these features than others. A number of studies have shown that social networks and orientation towards the cultural values of the communities around them impact on the acquisition of vernacular variants
[6 MINS APPROX] majority of studies in L2 dialect acquisition used techniques of first wave variationist research: assign speakers to pre-determined social categories; no length of time spent with participants; putting things down to single factors rather than trying to unravel the complexity of many factors impacting (see pic!); etc.calls for more studies that combine qualitative and quantitative analysis. mixed methods, e.g. ethnography and quant used by scholars of monolingual sociolinguistics such as Eckert (2000) and Zhang (2001) may help our understanding of such differences and further our knowledge of both sociolinguistics and SLA (Bayley & Regan 2004).This is what I’m doing
high school in Manchester large population of non-locally born students – EAL classes nothing new.In 2007/8, when a number of Eastern European countries joined the EU, the school began to see a large influx of Roma students that they had never had before. Unique challenges: Reading writing probs. Not been sch before.Already had a lot of interest in my research from teachers and people working with the community: therapists, police etc.
quick idea of the area where the school is:According to the 2010 Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD), Shorthill ranks as the fourth most deprived ward in Greater Manchester in the top 1% of the most deprived areas in Englandworst area in Manchester for Living Environment Deprivation that considers quality and value of housing Property purchase and rental prices are under half the average for the rest of the UK and considerably lower than Manchester The low cost of living and accommodation is a motivating factor for many of the Roma who come to Manchester For unemployment, Manchester is 3rd most deprived local authority National average of 4.1% (MCC). Manchester’s unemployment 5.7% in 2010 Shorthill 7.5%
[10 MINS APPROX]Ethnography began in July 2011. break times, lunchtimes, and eventually in class conversational interviewsfriendship pairs, Manchester-born friend, Where hasn’t been possible, with a friend of their choosing = most casual atmosphere possible, given the fact that the recordings were being done in school idea about certain topics: living in Manchester, school life, activities outside of school, friendship networks, home life, etc., encouraged to talk freely; not constrained to the topics
7 speakersatm – will get more2 age gps – yr 7 & 10/11Streams – EAL or “English as an Additional Language” /ms (Maths, science, english); classroom supportEV AL: young EAL, girls.AD and LO: young, always been mainstreamDA: 16, can see came to UK at 12, English is actually very low level in general & not many MCR featsSI: also 16, interesting cos of older has been in m/s longest and been in UK longest of all Roma spkrs. TA and AM: have the most MCR features. Both girls, both 14, and I’ll talk a bit more about them later.
merged with the comma set in most British English non-rhotic usually produced with schwa e.g. letter [lɛtə]. MCR speakers produce something around [ə] when -er appears before a plural: letters, but produce a backed and slightly lowered variant something like [ʌ]absolutely phrase finally: I posted a letter.(hopefully going to play them audio of MCR speaker doing both of these here) --> slide 12So, in order to determine whether my Roma speakers are acquiring this variation and therefore sociolinguistic competence, I have analysed their speech for -er phrase finally and erPL phrase finally.
Mean formant frequency measurements for F1 and F2 are extracted from each realisation of the letter or letters environment. To obtain the acoustic distances between vowels, I calculate the Euclidean distance of the F1 and F2 (referred to as space-values).Hypothesised Roma speakers would produce something similar to the Anglo speakers for the PLhave the [ə] vowel in their own language ‘standard’ British form, so probably heard most frequently. Here I have charted all the space-values for the erPL environment. MCR speakers on right Roma speakers divided into age and stream to the left. And We can see in the bar chart that in general MCR and Roma speakers pattern together
Scatter plot of vowel space – all about same, bit loweredColours same – anglos/MCR; older MS; younger MS; younger EALWhat really interested in is er##...
[16 MINS APPROX]Space values:2 older MS girls close to MCROther Roma higher space values – fronted, including older m/s boy.Want to see if this pattern happens w/ more speakers and vblesSI: v popular; talks to lots of gps; has Roma boy with him;Said 800 friends, but observation shows close friends and spends most time with Roma boys Ethnography important
See he is with other Roma, so that confirms what the space value chart told us, but…2 older m/s girls who pattern really closely to the Anglo speakers. why they in particular do this, especially when the boy doesn’t. The boy knows lots of people a small amount, but spends the vast majority of his time within the Roma community. girls are very Roma community oriented, but only a very small number of Roma girls left in their year groupsSo, in classes, they have to sit next to, work with and talk to MCR girls. Whereas the boys always have a number of other Roma boys to interact with in their classes. This spills over to a certain extent outside of the classroom too and as a result, the girls have many more MCR speakers that are close to them in their social networks.If we relate this to their adolescent life stage and what is happening linguistically as they mature…
Quote. Adolescence marks a time when individuals start to differentiate themselves from the adjacent life stages of childhood and adulthood. Children slowly gain sociolinguistic maturity and as young adolescents, at around 12-year-old, they approach the age when their orientation shifts from the family unit to their peer-group. This orientation is symbolized, among other things, by allegiance to non-standard speech (Romaine 1984:107, Chambers 1995:169, Kerswill 1996a; Kerswill & Williams 2000). At secondary school, you begin to be expected to take part in extra curricular activities and peer groups become more tightly embedded into school experience (Eckert 1989:12). The older they get, the more integrated into peer-groups they become. Evidence 11-13 yrs bilingual kids reach a ‘turning point’ when they stop speaking primarily the lang of their parents and start speaking the lang of their peers (Poplack 1978:90)Stabilization of the vernacular is believed to occur between the ages of 14 and 17 (Chambers 2009: 175; Labov 2001: 447; Taglimonte & D’Arcy 2009: 66)The 2 girls who pattern closest to the MCR speakers are 14, so they are deeply embedded into their peer group, they want to mark themselves as being a part of their peer group, which happens to have a severe lack of other Roma girls. As a result, they have MCR girls closest in their social network at school. And so they produce the MCR vowels.
I hypothesise that the combination of the girls’ stage in maturation, where they want to align themselves with their peer group in many ways – the way they dress, what activities they participate in, their likes in music, and they way they speak, combined with their relative isolation from other Roma girls in their classes means that they have more MCR girls in their social networksThen, as a result of them having more MCR speakers in their social networks means that they produce a more MCR realisation of the letter vowel. They are using the linguistic resources available to them, i.e. the MCR variants, to assert their identity and show their membership of the local community.Need to test hypothesis with more speakers and more variables(happY; u: fronting; centering diphthongs; (ing); the-fronting; h-dropping; glotalisation)I have been able to identify a difference in the social network structure of the older Roma m/s boy and the 2 girls, and this has contextualised the results I found through quantitative analysis of speech data. Without my ethnography, I would not have had access to the detailed, local information about friendship groups. This only adds weight to the argument for an increase in mixed methods research as well as giving further evidence of the key role that social networks play in migrants’ language acquisition.
![Do you speak Manchest[ʌ]?
Romani acquisition of Manchester English
Gerry Howley
g.m.howley@edu.salford.ac.uk
http://twitter.com/gerryhowley](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/accentsfinal-121205012107-phpapp02/85/Acquisition-of-Manchester-dialect-features-by-Roma-migrants-1-320.jpg)
