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Incremental Sound Change in Oslo (ISC-Oslo)

Project description

The role of multiethnolects in language change

It has been proposed that children raised in working-class households are one of the main drivers of language change. While their lexical, syntactic and phonetic innovations are considered slang, these innovations can result in change within pre-existing dialects. According to American linguist William Labov, this process is named ‘changes from below’. The most usual changes from below are phonetic. However, modern industrial cities have considerable numbers of immigrants who create a multiethnolect environment within the working-class youth. The EU-funded ISC-Oslo project will explore the socio-demographic origins of five ongoing phonetic changes in the city of Oslo. The project seeks to understand the emergence of the new sociolect spoken among non-Western second- and third-generation working-class youth of immigrant descendants.

Objective

"The project ""Incremental Sound Change in Oslo"" (ISC-Oslo) will investigate the socio-demographic origins of five ongoing phonetic changes in a post-hoc phonetic analysis of two corpora from the early 2000s.

Working-class children and youth have been identified as one of the main sources of language change. Their lexical, syntactic or phonetic innovations are often disregarded by non-linguists as slang, but it has been shown that these innovations can lead to change within pre-existing dialects and even new social dialects. Due to the fact that these innovations often at first escape social monitoring, this process is referred to by Labov as ""changes from below"" and has been identified in a number of urban studies.

The most common – yet, elusive – changes from below are phonetic. These types of changes accumulate generation after generation and result in the evolution of new dialects and languages. What is poorly understood, however, is the role of multiethnolects in this process. These are new varieties formed by the ethnically diverse speakers in Europe’s urban neighborhoods. Like many European cities, Oslo is witnessing the emergence of a new working-class sociolect spoken by the second and third generation descendants of non-western labor and refugee migrants.

Multiethnolects have typically been examined within the lens of youth argot or second-language acquisition. ISC-Oslo, however, takes a different point of departure. It seeks to apply Labov’s theory on speakers of multiethnolects, who often have the same socioeconomic profiles as the innovators describes in his studies.

The main focus of ISC-Oslo will be twofold. First it would develop an automatic phonetic aligner to phonetically annotate two large corpora collected in the early 2000s. Second, it would analyze the production of five innovative features that are circulating today to identify whether they originated from youth of migrant origin in the early 2000s."

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MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)

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Call for proposal

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(opens in new window) H2020-MSCA-IF-2019

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Coordinator

UNIVERSITETET I OSLO
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 202 158,72
Address
PROBLEMVEIEN 5-7
0313 Oslo
Norway

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Region
Norge Oslo og Viken Oslo
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
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Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

€ 202 158,72
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