Novas prácticas lingüísticas dos falantes urbanos mozos de Londres e Madrid. Un estudo contrastivo baseado en corpus

Abstract

At the end of the twentieth century, London and Madrid became large cities with a high proportion of young, limmigrant population coming from different countries and cultures. This had a great impact on their linguistic landscape with the creation of a multiethnolect. As a result, a new language variety known as Multicultural London English emerged in London. In the case of Madrid, the conglomerate of speakers from different origins and linguistic minorities is not so visible although this condition also had a bearing on the variety of Spanish spoken here. This paper focuses on the role of language contact and cases of linguistic innovation. We analyse samples extracted from different youth language corpora, such as COLT (The Bergen Corpus of London Teenage English) and LEC (London English Corpus) for English, and COLAm (Corpus Oral de Lenguaje Adolescente de Madrid) for Spanish. The findings indicate that, in the case of Multicultural London English, there are many terms of Caribbean origin together with some others from Arabic, American English slang, Spanish, Italian, and French. In the variety of Spanish spoken in Madrid we also identify terms from other dialects of Spanish together with words from English and from other speakers belonging to marginal sectors of society. Examples of innovation in the use of quotatives as well as in the categories of intensifiers, invariant tags, vocatives, clipped forms, etc., are also singled out and discussed. This paper confirms that language contact plus a young and an ethnically diverse population constitute the perfect combination for innovation and language change.