Annual Research Day at Southbank Centre -23rd may

The LAHP Annual Research Day took place on 23rd May 2018. This year, we decided to go back to the elegant Southbank Centre as we had such a good time there last year and we really wanted to encourage our students and supervisors, from all cohorts, to come along, have lunch, and think about their research collectively.

The theme of this year’s event was ‘Multicultural London and its Languages‘, the population of London is one of the most ethnically diverse in the world and there are over 200 languages spoken in the capital. Historically, too, London has always been a place of cultural and linguistic encounter.

Keynote speaker: This year’s keynote lecture was delivered by Prof. Jenny Cheshire (QMUL) speaking on ‘Multicultural London English’.

Language changes all the time, but in ethnically mixed, multilingual areas of London the English language has changed more dramatically and more rapidly than ever before: Cockney has given way to Multicultural London English. There are new forms of pronunciation, grammar, and discourse-pragmatic features that for some young people are part of a new English dialect, and for others a ‘cool’ street style that they dip into only sometimes. The talk considered how and why English can have changed so rapidly, whether the new forms of English result from the same kinds of language change that have affected the history of English in the past, and whether they are likely to persist into the future.

Back to the top