From 'multi-ethnic urban heteroglossia'to 'contemporary urban vernaculars.' 2011 (original) (raw)

Research on crossing and stylisation in the everyday practice of young people in multi-ethnic urban areas of Britain during the 1980s and 1990s pointed to the destabilisation of inherited ethnicities, to a good deal of ground-level anti-racism, and to the emergence of new ethnicities. Recent reassessment of these data has brought out the social class underpinnings of these heteroglossic/polylingual processes, and this is also in line with the findings of a growing body of sociolinguistic research in European cities. Indeed, there is compelling evidence that these kind of mixed language practices have been a stable feature of the urban working class sociolinguistic landscape for at least 30 years.