Where does MLE come from?

"Wagwan fam?" a famous contraction of "what is going on" and "family". We are all familiar with this "chavvy" greeting. It is from MLE (Multicultural London English), which is a dialect that emerged in the late 20^th century. It has African language, Caribbean language and cockney roots that have fused together as a result of multilingualism (using multi languages). This was as a result of creolization whereby, as defined by Robin Cohen (Emeritus Professor and Principal Investigator of the Leverhulme-funded Oxford Diasporas Programme, University of Oxford), new mixed cultures emerge forming new identities and language to become different to those they possessed in the original cultures.

MLE is a pidgin language which has become the mother tongue of a community, also known as a creole, as defined by David Crystal in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of language. It contains elements of Caribbean, mostly Jamaican language and cockney (London slang) as a creole emanates from two or more languages being mixed together. It gradually took its status as a creole as young people growing up in London were exposed to this pidgin language or multiple languages spoken all at once and after some generations it became consolidated as a mother tongue. Every language has features of lexicon, grammar, dialect and phonology.

Grammatically, the verb, "to be", is regularised with "was" becoming universal for all conjugations (verb forms that go with each pronoun) and "weren't" likewise for "was not", a negative conjugation i.e "I was", "you was", "he was" and "I weren't", "you weren't". Tag questions are limited to "Isn't it", comprehended as "innit". This is a feature of Robin Lakoff's 10 assumptions on women's language hence it can be said to be overt prestige as women tend to use this kind of language to gain appear as having a higher social status and because of this unlikely feature of MLE it shows that it is a mixture of informal and formal languages. The newly formed adjectives, which modify a noun or a pronoun, "buff", "piff", "lush", "peng", are used in place of "good". This makes the language hard to decode by a non-member of the group hence it follows Basil Beinstein's assumptions, it is restricted code whereby speakers have background knowledge and share common understanding.

Similar to British English MLE is non-rhotic the letter, "r", is not pronounced e.g "Most words are pronounced from the front of the mouth (fronting)  of /ʊ/ is less advanced in London than in periphery, lack of fronting of /ʊ/ in inner city is conservative, matching Caribbean Englishes. This is an example of covert prestige as an accent is put on to show 'membership' to a community giving MLE "street cred. The speakers cannot help but reveal their low social class. The onset of "face" is raised resulting in variants like [eɪ] and /aɪ/. There is the H-dropping e.g "ting" for "thing" and "owever" for "however". Most commonly, MLE has glottal stops (leaving a gap between vocals) e.g /bʌʔn̩/ for "button" similar to cockney language showing that it contains features of multiple languages.

Msiziwethu Mbiba