Research task
Accent
When we talk about accent, we need to remember that this doesn’t relate to grammar or vocabulary, but instead pronunciation and intonation instead, this is going to be very important. Two people speaking the same language, who use the same grammar and word choices will always be interpreting things slightly different due to how the words they use for certain things changes. While we listen we naturally pick up these interpretations of people from different regions about people’s ethnic, socioeconomic and geographical background, experiments from researchers have shown that listeners can also judge on others’ intelligence, warmth and even how tall they are just by listening to recorded accented speech.
Slang
London English has a new pronoun, Young people living in multicultural areas of the inner city use man as an alternative to I, this is used very frequently in hose multicultural areas as they are all trying to fit in with one another. Sometimes the meaning could be indecisive in the fact it is not quite clear why they are using it: some people would say ‘man don’t want to do that’, this is used as a sentence quite a lot, alongside the fact it is included in a line of a multicultural song – this does not help. The word ‘man’ is just one example of words used instead of the correct word to fit in, which represents slang in itself.
Man is not the only new plural form of the noun: mens, mans and mandem are also heard in London, as well as the expected men. Mandem seems a straightforward borrowing from Jamaican culture, as if you came across any Jamaican people you may here these words very regularly in their normal speech. The other forms result from the way that children acquire English in linguistically diverse inner city areas – in an unguided, informal fashion, in their friendship groups.  Many different varieties of English are used in these groups, resulting in much linguistic variation and linguistic flexibility.
As a plural noun, man always refers to a group of individuals: either to people who are there with the speaker or to a group of people that the speaker has just been talking about. This paves the way for the development of the pronoun, since this is exactly how pronouns are used: I refers to a person who is there (the speaker), while he or she refer either to another person who is there or to a person the speaker has just mentioned. Since the plural noun man refers to a group of people, speakers can present themselves as symbolically belonging to that group. This again is used a lot in multicultural places, used more in my opinion the closer and closer into London you get.
Linguistic changes in different regions – Scotland:
Jane Stuart-Smith, Gwilym Pryce, Claire Timmins and Barrie Gunter investigated the possible factors involved in the spread of some linguistic changes in Glasgow, Scotland, and also the ways in which people from different regions like Scotland change the way they speak. They focused on two changes that have been underway for the last 60 years but which have recently increased in usage in the vernacular of working class Glaswegian youngsters:  saying ‘f’ instead of ‘th’ in words like think and mouth and pronouncing the ‘l’ in words like milk and people as a type of vowel, for example as miwulk or peepul . This is the typical pronunciation of what many of us would consider a traditional London ‘Cockney’ accent, although it is now mainly heard in Essex. The researchers were interested to find out whether these two changes were indeed taking place and if so, why this was happening.  They conducted their research in an area of Glasgow that is characterised by low unemployment and urban deprivation, concentrating on 48 young people over a period of 18 months.  They collected recordings of spontaneous conversations and readings from wordlists and conducted interviews with the adolescents.]
They found that the pronunciation of ‘f’ for ‘th’ and ‘l’ as a vowel sound were both used mainly by speakers who didn’t like conforming to correct school uniform, preferring the look of Glasgow street style, and also by those who regularly watched and engaged with television shows, especially Eastenders.  The ‘f’ pronunciation was mostly used in spontaneous speech at the end of words (such as mouth) rather than at the beginning of words like think.]
So, both of these changes seem to be linked with the development of Glasgow street style and its visible appearance: wearing tracksuits, trainers with socks over trousers, jewellery and particular hairstyles and especially with trying to introduce elements of this into school uniform instead of conforming to the rules.  Speakers who are adopting these pronunciation changes and this particular street style seem to be trying to say, through their looks and speech, that they are ‘not posh’; rather,  they are ’cool youth’ and ‘urban tough’.
From my point of view I found this all very interesting as it allowed me to understand more why and how the different regions change the way they pronounce words when they speak, and also the way in which they talk. I'm used to just the basic Essex accent and pronunciation as that is where I am from, so it was interesting for me to look at another regions pronunciation and they way in which they talk.