Miriam Meyerhoff*, Erik Schleef‡

& Lynn Clark*

Sociolinguistics and immigration:variation among Polish adolescents

living in the UK

Sociolinguistics and immigration:variation among Polish adolescents

living in the UK

* University of Edinburgh, ‡ University of Manchester

Polish immigration to the UK

• In 2004, ten new members were admitted to the EU.

• Poland was the largest ascension state

• Poland has contributed most a recent wave of immigration to the UK

• Language contact situation between Polish and English throughout the UK

Polish adolescents• The adolescent generation of Polish migrants

can help us to understand who immigrants become in the initial stages of contact

• They are adaptable and in constant contact with native school-age population

• Migrant children exist in a ‘research void’ (Ackers and Stalford 2004: 1)

• What do Polish adolescents do with (sociolinguistically constrained) variation in their L2?

Sociolinguistics and second language acquisition

• Adamson & Regan (1991) – first look at variable acquisition of native speaker patterns; (ing) variation among Vietnamese and Cambodian learners of English in the US.

• The majority of research on this question examines the acquisition of variation in French (esp. in Canada)– examples: Uritechu et al. (2004); Mougeon et

al. (2004); Nagy et al. (2004); Howard et al. (2006)

• L2 speakers can often display ‘partial mastery’ of the native-speaker norms of variation

Research question

• Are Polish adolescent immigrants acquiring the same constraints on variation as their local peer group?

• Possible outcomes:1. Replication of significant constraints and

ordering of factors within those constraints2. Replication of significant constraints but

different internal ordering of the factors 3. No replication of the significant constraints

Methods• Linguistic data (interview and reading passage) collected

from– 16 Polish adolescents from Edinburgh– 21 Polish adolescents from London– 21 Edinburgh-born adolescents– 24 London-born adolescents

• Perception data collected using the verbal guise technique (Ladegaard, 1998). See Clark (2009, in prep)

• All linguistic data orthographically transcribed using ELAN (www.lat-mpi.eu/tools/elan)

• All instances of (ing) : [ɪŋ] ~[ɪŋ] were extracted and coded – 1833 tokens of (ing) in Edinburgh; 1556 tokens of (ing) in London.

Previous findings on (ing) variation in English

• Usual linguistic constraints on (ing)– Grammatical conditioning

(Labov 2001: 79)– Regressive homorganic

assimilation (Houston 1985) [British English]

– Progressive homorganic dissimilation (Houston 1985) [British English]

– Priming (Abramowicz 2007)

• Usual social constraints on (ing)– Socioeconomic class (Labov

2001, chapter 3)– Stylistic effects (Labov 2001,

chapter 3)– Gender effects (Labov 2001:

chapter 8)

Constraints operating on (ing) among Edinburgh-born adolescents

Constraints operating on (ing) among London-born adolescents

Frequency of variants of (ing)

Hypotheses

• Possible outcomes:1. Replication of significant constraints and

ordering of factors within those constraints2. Replication of significant constraints but

different internal ordering of the factors 3. No replication of the significant constraints

• Result:– Combination of all three strategies

[GREY] = not significant BLUE = significant but different ordering of constraintsRED = exact replication of constraints GREEN = additional constraints for Poles

Grammatical category constraints in Edinburgh

Grammatical conditioning of (ing) among Edinburgh adolescents

Grammatical conditioning of (ing) among Edinburgh-Polish adolescents

[GREY] = not significant BLUE = significant but different ordering of constraintsRED = exact replication of constraints GREEN = additional constraints for Poles

[GREY] = not significant BLUE = significant but different ordering of constraintsRED = exact replication of constraints GREEN = additional constraints for Poles

Grammatical category constraints for Polish adolescents in London

Grammatical conditioning of (ing) (Labov 2001: 88)

Grammatical conditioning of (ing) among London-Polish adolescents

Returning to the research question• Q: Are Polish adolescent immigrants acquiring

the same constraints on variation as their local peer group?

• Yes, maybe...– some constraints are replicated completely,

some are altered and some are rejected/replaced

• BUT...– The most common tendency for Polish

adolescents living in Edinburgh and London is ‘re-interpretation’.

Discussion• Language contact and variationist linguistics• Discrimination between different kinds of

transfer type– weak transfer

• same factor groups are significant, order may be different– strong transfer

• same factor groups are significant, order of them is the same

– internal ordering of constraints within each factor group

(Meyerhoff 2009, Buchstaller & D’Arcy 2008)• Short-term contact phenomena exhibiting the

same sorts of outcomes as long-term language/dialect contact

Acknowledgements• ‘Thank-yous’ go to:

– the ESRC for funding this research (RES-000-22-3244)– our participants in Edinburgh and London for kindly

donating their time and voices– the staff at Tynecastle High School in Edinburgh and

Elthorne Park High School in London for helping us organise the data collection during school hours.

– Maddie Appleton, Elsbeth Helfer and Dave Arnold for their transcription work on the corpus

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