Social class across borders: Transnational elites in British ideological space

Abstract

Studies of generational dialect change in diaspora communities have tended to find that local forces outweigh transnational ones: parent varieties are rejected as too saliently foreign, and transnational effects fade in later generations. Examining the speech of second-generation British Asians, I document this initial shift away from the low status of Indian English, but also unexpected long-distance adoption of Indian English more recently, in both ideology and routine use. Why choose a stigmatized variety 50 years on? To answer this, I revise the classic triangular class hierarchy of British dialects and model diasporic languageideological space as a meeting of two such systems. Young British Asians selectively adopt features of educated Indian English, a variety with increasing global status, at the apex of an Indian hierarchy. For some British Asians, this new exogenous form of symbolic capital is an alternative to the struggle for class mobility within the British system. These new cross-border acts of affiliation empower formerly subordinated speakers, but also reinforce new hierarchies. In closing, I discuss current and historical parallels where a diasporic imaginary can feed local language change.

Sociophonetic Analysis of the Characters' Speech in "Troubled Blood" by R. Galbraith

“…However, the present study suggests that this kind of study can also be done from fictional texts. Well-written novels offer plenty of data for researchers to analyse about stigma and dialects (Oblak & Pagliaro, 2022), social dialects (Hodson, 2016), and social class dialects (Sharma, 2021). The representations of people's speech in novels are not merely tools to portray…”

A critical sociolinguistic study of diasporization among Hungarians in Catalonia

“…Furthermore, sociolinguistics can address the issues of how boundaries are created, maintained, and negotiated through discursive and (meta)linguistic means. The sociolinguistic literature in recent years has entailed a wide range of topics related to diasporization: the media practices and the communicational patterns of diasporic connectivity , Theodoropoulou 2021, the conviviality of diasporic communities (Márquez Reiter & Patiño Santos 2021), the inner variation of diasporic groups (Sharma 2021, Mesthrie 2021, and the images of the homeland and the host-land (Karimzad & Catedral 2021, Mayoma & Williams 2021. This is why in my research, I opted to conduct an ethnographically informed sociolinguistic study in order to observe the circulating discourses, the locally embedded practices, and the resources which play key roles in the process of diasporization.…”