Mark Sebba

• B.A, M.Sc., D.Phil.
• Lecturer at Lancaster University

The 2011 census in the UK was the first to ask questions about the use of languages other than the indigenous Celtic languages, Welsh, Irish and Scottish Gaelic. The resulting broadened inquiry included asking about the use of British Sign Language (BSL), the acknowledged language of the Deaf signing community in Britain. Official and public attitu...

This paper discusses multilingualism in three publications aimed at bilingual communities in Britain: speakers of Russian, Greek and Tagalog. Despite the fact that the editorial content in such publications is almost completely monolingual, they are sites rich in multilingual written practices. The focus here is on display advertisements, which mak...

Where censuses are concerned, politics and ideology are pervasive. The 2011 census in Scotland (a semi-autonomous part of the United Kingdom) was the first to ask a question about Scots, a close relative of English, which is historically the vernacular in many parts of Scotland. While at one time Scots had high status as the national language of Sc...

The 2011 UK Census was the first ever to ask a question about language in England. The period during which the census was planned coincided with a period of intense politicisation of the language issue, which had previously not been a major point of controversy. The census results showed that 98.3% of the adult population either spoke English as th...

The 2011 Census in England broke new ground, as a question about language had never previously been asked. After stakeholder consultations and a series of trials, the census authority decided on two questions based on earlier censuses in the USA: one about the respondent’s ‘main language’ and another about proficiency in English. This paper provide...

This paper discusses three processes relating to the social meaning of scripts and orthographies, all of which are potentially mediated by the role of script-as-image. One of these processes, iconisation , was introduced to the field by Irvine and Gal (2000) and is widely known. Attribution is a process which precedes iconisation, whereby a group o...

The contradiction presented within the above quote from a national Irish newspaper is actually a laconic articulation of the problem facing the Irish language revival movement in the Republic of Ireland (ROI) today. That is, despite there being less than 5 per cent of the population of the ROI who have Irish as their first language, virtually all I...

This paper analyses the way in which the text displayed on bilingual and multilingual currency (banknotes and coins) and stamps constructs and reproduces linguistic hierarchies, reflecting the relative status of the languages within the issuing country. The paper briefly discusses the selection of languages which appear on stamps and money, which i...

The chapters in this edited volume explore the sociolinguistic implications of orthographic and scriptural practices in a diverse range of communicative contexts, ranging from schoolrooms to internet discussion boards. The focus is on the way that scriptural practices both index and constitute social hierarchies, identities and relationships and in...

The study of spoken discourse in a mixture of languages, commonly called 'conversational code-switching', has a history of several decades, and a number of well-developed theories compete to account for it. A number of researchers have studied multilingual written discourse from different perspectives, but most of these studies have focussed on int...

Authenticity and ownership have been problematic for both linguists and users of Creole in Britain. In this paper we review the changing issues connected with authenticity and ethnicity, based on empirical research spanning the period 1981-2011. Second-generation speakers of Creole in London in the 1980s were conscious that they could not pass for...

NOTE: Please do not request the full text of this publication. As it is a book, the authors cannot make it available to download. "Code-switching," or the alternation of languages by bilinguals, has attracted an enormous amount of attention from researchers. However, most research has focused on spoken language, and the resultant theoretical frame...

Writing systems have attracted relatively little attention from sociolinguists, in spite of obvious connections with subjects of great sociolinguistic interest, such as ethnicity and identity. In fact, the literature contains a substantial amount of research on writing systems from a sociolinguistic perspective, but there is no recognised 'sociolin...

Midway through my undergraduate studies, a friendly lecturer warned me that the cosy truths I had learned in my first year would all have to be unlearned before I graduated. Perhaps that is also the message of this timely book, which seeks to challenge much of what we 'know' about creole languages: in fact, to test and critique many of the cosiest...

The origins of Caribbean creoles in Britain and British Black English: There have been Caribbeans living in Britain for several centuries, and cities such as London, Bristol, Cardiff and Liverpool have long-established Caribbean communities dating back to the era of slavery. However, the present-day African-Caribbean community dates mainly from the...

Over the last few decades, the study of bilingual and plurilingual talk has been an important focus for linguists. Data have been collected through projects, large and small, in many countries and involving many different languages and dialects. This has been in the form of monographs describing particular linguistic situations where codeswitching...

Spelling matters to people. In America and Britain every day, members of the public write to the media on spelling issues, and take part in spelling contests. In Germany, a reform of the spelling system has provoked a constitutional crisis; in Galicia, a 'war of orthographies' parallels an intense public debate on national identity; on walls, bridg...

Jamaican Creole, sometimes characterized as a ‘dialect’ of English, is the vernacular language of Jamaica and the first language of most Jamaicans. It is also understood and used by many people in Britain. Because of its origins, its historical relationship with Standard English (the language of administration and education) and the absence of stan...

In 2002 the Russian parliament passed a law requiring all official languages within the Russian Federation to use the Cyrillic alphabet. The legislation caused great controversy and anger in some quarters, especially in Tatarstan, the Russian republic whose attempt to romanise the script for the Tatar language provoked the new law. This paper exami...

"Ali G" is a British comedian who has attained wide popularity in the last two to three years. The performer, Sacha Baron Cohen, is white, a graduate, Jewish (this fact is almost always mentioned) and from an unremarkable town close to London. In his persona as Ali G, he is a gangland leader, of ambiguous ethnicity, who enjoys and indeed promotes d...

This volume sets out to foreground the issues of youth identity in the context of current sociolinguistic and discourse research on identity construction. Based on detailed empirical analyses, the twelve chapters offer examinations of how youth identities from late childhood up to early twenties are locally constructed in text and talk. The setting...

British Caribbeans manifest both a “global” and a “local” identity through complex language behavior including codeswitching. It is the Creole which most connects “globally” — to other speakers of Creole, to the British youth culture which now accepts Creole/patois as an element, and to the world-wide Black music culture. Meanwhile “English” for bl...

The research in this unique collection lies at the interface between the fields of bilingualism and literacy. It deepens our understanding of the significance of reading and writing as social practices and opens up new lines of inquiry for research on multilingualism. The authors incorporate theoretical and methodological insights from both fields...

This paper describes the construction of a corpus of spoken Sylheti. The corpus was created to examine difficulties in the creation of spoken language corpora in which features such as code switching (simply described here as the process of switching from one language to another during the course of an interaction; however, this description disguis...

This manual is designed to help researchers new to the work of transcription and coding bilingual data or for individuals who have done familiar work but have a new set of data waiting to be transcribed and coded. Describes step-by-step a way of carrying out the transcription and coding that provides many useful facilities and makes it possible to...

This paper concerns the orthography of Sranan, an English-lexicon creole spoken by a majority of the population in Surinam (South America), which also has many speakers in the Netherlands Sranan has a long written tradition and has had two official orthographies, but it is still often written informally using conventions;largely derived from Dutch....

We describe a project (the LIPPS project) whose purpose is to set up a computerized database of bilingual texts to be used by researchers in the field of “language interaction” (i.e., codeswitching, borrowing, and other outcomes of contact between varieties). Current work includes an adaptation of the CHILDES system(MacWhinney,1995) to take account...

The strength of this large volume is its diversity: There is a wealth of papers covering different sociolinguistic and pragmatic topics from different perspectives. The range is such that few researchers in the area of the social use of language will not want, sooner or later, to refer to one of the articles in this book. All of them are by establi...

Hypotheses about the syntax of codeswitching thus far have for the most part not taken into account such factors as the nature of bilingualism in the community where the switching takes place, the relative status of the languages, the nature of bilingualism in the community and other aspects of the social context. This paper argues that an adequate...

This paper discusses the orthography of an unstandardised written language variety, the English-lexicon Creole used in Britain by people of Caribbean heritage. Examples are drawn from a corpus of written Creole produced in Britain by writers of Caribbean heritage. Orthography is viewed here as a set of practices engaged in by writers as they try to...

1. Introduction: Creole comes to Britain 2. In search of "London Jamaican" 3. Continuum and variation - approaches to describing Creole 4. "London Jamaican"... 5. ...or Black London English? 6. Language within the family 7. Code switching in converstion 8. The many-personed speaker 9. Epilogue: Creole and the future - the language of education. App...

This paper is concemed with the written representation of British Creole (a local British variety of Jamaican Creole) which has no standard orthography. Original writing is published from time to time (and we can assume that much unpublished writing goes on as well) using modified Standard English orthographies made up by the original writers. The...

This monograph is about the chains of verbs commonly found in Creole Languages, West African languages, in particular the Kwa sub-group of Niger-Congo, Chinese and certain other languages and have acquired the name of 'serial verbs' in the literature. As a case study, the serial constructions of Sranan, a creole language of Surinam with an English...

Evidence is produced to show that in London Jamaican, a type of Jamaican Creole, Bradford Jamaican, another variety of Jamaican Creole, and the London English of Caribbean adolescents, the tags you know what I mean and you know are used to perform rather than to elicit agreements, as they do in better-studied varieties of English. The evidence rest...

Some linguists regard predicate adjectives in Sranan and other creole languages as stative verbs, one argument being the absence of a copula before such adjectives. An analysis by Seuren, on the other hand, treats predicate adjectives as true adjectives in Sranan: an underlying copula fails to surface before them. This paper argues for an analysis...

Participants in conversation have at their disposal many ways of showing that their speaking-turn is complete. An important resource for achieving this interactive task is provided by phonetic features. However, the precise role of these features has been obscured because analysts have relied too heavily on their intuitions, particularly about into...

Sranan uses reduplication, compounding and multifunctionality to extend its lexicon. Compounding is a regular and productive process. Reduplication is productive in the case of verbs and adjectives, but applies sporadically in the case of nouns, although some partially productive paradigms can be isolated. There are constraints on the occurrence of...