Mediatization and Sociolinguistic Change

Paul Kerswill

The objectification of ‘Jafaican’. The discoursal embedding of Multicultural London English in the British media¹⁵³

1 Introduction: Mediatization of new urban youth varieties

Since the 1980s, both lay commentators and academic experts have shown an intense interest in apparently new linguistic practices among young people living in multiethnic neighbourhoods in the major cities of northern Europe. Both kinds of observer note that the version of the national language used by these young people is a departure from what is ‘normal’ in that language. Kotsinas’s work (1988a, b) is an early instantiation of academic research on the phenomenon. Having noted a number of characteristic syntactic and lexical features in the Swedish of adolescents ...