Jenny Cheshire

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Jenny L. Cheshire is a British sociolinguist and professor at Queen Mary University of London. [1] Her research interests include language variation and change, language contact and dialect convergence, and language in education, with a focus on conversational narratives and spoken English. She is most known for her work on grammatical variation, especially syntax and discourse structures, in adolescent speech and on Multicultural London English.

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Career highlights

Cheshire completed the Certificat pratique de langue française at the Sorbonne in Paris. She earned her B.A. at the London School of Economics and her Ph.D. at the University of Reading. She has been a lecturer at the University of Bath and University of Reading, a lecturer and then senior lecturer at Birkbeck College London from 1983–91, and professor of English linguistics at the University of Fribourg and the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland from 1991-96. She is currently a professor of linguistics at Queen Mary, University of London. [2]

Since 2013 she has been the editor-in-chief of the prestigious peer-reviewed journal Language in Society . She has also served on the editorial boards for: Lynx, Te Reo, English World-Wide, International Journal of Applied Linguistics, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, Journal of Sociolinguistics, Language and Education, Multilingua.

Cheshire was elected as Fellow of the British Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences in 2011. [3] To honor her contribution to the field of Sociolinguistics, in 2011, Queen Mary, University of London set up the Jenny Cheshire Sociolinguistics Lecture Series. [4]

Research awards

Cheshire has received numerous research awards recognising her significant contributions to the field of sociolinguistics:

She has also served as a reviewer for many research grant applications from such organisation as: UK Economic and Social Research Council; AHRB/AHRC; Leverhulme Trust, British Academy; Canadian Social Science Research Council; New Zealand Foundation for Research, Science and Technology; New Zealand Public Good Research Council; Swiss Fonds National; USA National Science Foundation; Canadian National Science Foundation.

Notable contributions

Following are some of Cheshire's most notable contributions to the field of sociolinguistics:

Selected publications

Among her publications, she has written over ten academic books and over 90 articles in peer-reviewed international research journals and edited collections. Following are some of her most notable publications: [16]

Related Research Articles

The following outline is provided as an overview and topical guide to linguistics:

Historical linguistics, also termed diachronic linguistics, is the scientific study of language change over time. Principal concerns of historical linguistics include:

  1. to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages
  2. to reconstruct the pre-history of languages and to determine their relatedness, grouping them into language families
  3. to develop general theories about how and why language changes
  4. to describe the history of speech communities
  5. to study the history of words, i.e. etymology
  6. to explore the impact of cultural and social factors on language evolution.

Sociolinguistics is the descriptive study of the effect of any or all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on language and the ways it is used. It can overlap with the sociology of language, which focuses on the effect of language on society. Sociolinguistics overlaps considerably with pragmatics and is closely related to linguistic anthropology.

The voiceless uvular plosive or stop is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. It is pronounced like a voiceless velar plosive, except that the tongue makes contact not on the soft palate but on the uvula. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨q⟩, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is q.

In the field of dialectology, a diasystem or polylectal grammar is a linguistic analysis set up to encode or represent a range of related varieties in a way that displays their structural differences.

In sociolinguistics, a register is a variety of language used for a particular purpose or particular communicative situation. For example, when speaking officially or in a public setting, an English speaker may be more likely to follow prescriptive norms for formal usage than in a casual setting, for example, by pronouncing words ending in -ing with a velar nasal instead of an alveolar nasal, choosing words that are considered more formal, such as father vs. dad or child vs. kid, and refraining from using words considered nonstandard, such as ain't and y'all.

An interlanguage is an idiolect which has been developed by a learner of a second language (L2) which preserves some features of their first language (L1) and can overgeneralize some L2 writing and speaking rules. These two characteristics give an interlanguage its unique linguistic organization. It is idiosyncratically based on the learner's experiences with L2. An interlanguage can fossilize, or cease developing, in any of its developmental stages. It is claimed that several factors shape interlanguage rules, including L1 transfer, previous learning strategies, strategies of L2 acquisition, L2 communication strategies, and the overgeneralization of L2 language patterns.

An ethnolect is generally defined as a language variety that marks speakers as members of ethnic groups who originally used another language or distinctive variety. According to another definition, an ethnolect is any speech variety associated with a specific ethnic group. It may be a distinguishing mark of social identity, both within the group and for outsiders. The term combines the concepts of an ethnic group and dialect.

Gregory Riordan Guy is a linguist who specializes in the study of language variation and language diversity, including sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, phonetics, and phonology. He has a particular interest in the Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish languages.

Kiezdeutsch is a variety of German spoken primarily by youth in urban spaces in which a high percentage of the population is multilingual and has an immigration background. Since the 1990s, Kiezdeutsch has come into the public eye as a multiethnic language.

Multicultural London English is a sociolect of English that emerged in the late 20th century. It is spoken mainly by young, working-class people in multicultural parts of London.

A diaphoneme is an abstract phonological unit that identifies a correspondence between related sounds of two or more varieties of a language or language cluster. For example, some English varieties contrast the vowel of late with that of wait or eight. Other English varieties contrast the vowel of late or wait with that of eight. This non-overlapping pair of phonemes from two different varieties can be reconciled by positing three different diaphonemes: A first diaphoneme for words like late, a second diaphoneme for words like wait, and a third diaphoneme for words like eight.

Dialect levelling is the means by which dialect differences decrease. For example, in rural areas of Britain, although English is widely spoken, the pronunciation and the grammar have historically varied. During the twentieth century, more people moved into towns and cities, standardising English. Dialect levelling can develop by the influence of various types of media.

Linguistics is the scientific study of language. Linguistics is based on a theoretical as well as a descriptive study of language and is also interlinked with the applied fields of language studies and language learning, which entails the study of specific languages. Before the 20th century, linguistics evolved in conjunction with literary study and did not employ scientific methods. Modern-day linguistics is considered a science because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language – i.e., the cognitive, the social, the cultural, the psychological, the environmental, the biological, the literary, the grammatical, the paleographical, and the structural.

Penelope "Penny" Eckert is Albert Ray Lang Professor Emerita of Linguistics at Stanford University. She specializes in variationist sociolinguistics and is the author of several scholarly works on language and gender. She served as the president of the Linguistic Society of America in 2018.

Dialect levelling is an overall reduction in the variation or diversity of features, accompanied by an increase in the similarities, between two or more dialects in contact with each other. This can come about through assimilation, mixture, and merging of certain dialects, often by language codification, which can be a precursor to standardization. One possible result is a koine language, in which various specific dialects mix together and simplify, settling into a new and more widely embraced form of the language. Another is a speech community increasingly adopting or exclusively preserving features with widespread social currency at the expense of their more local or traditional dialect features.

A multiethnolect is a language variety, typically formed in youth communities in working class, immigrant neighborhoods of urban areas, that contains influences from a variety of different languages. Unlike an ethnolect, which associates one language variety with one particular ethnic group, speakers of a multiethnolect often come from varied ethnic backgrounds, and their language usage can be more closely attributed to the neighborhood in which they live than their nationality or that of their parents. The term "multiethnolect" was first coined by Clyne (2000) and Quist (2000). Research of multiethnolects has thus far focused primarily on urban areas in northwestern Europe, such as Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, and Great Britain, but the phenomenon is far more universal than that. Researchers Jacomine Nortier and Margreet Dorleijn call multiethnolects “a phenomenon of all times, that was only waiting for linguists to give it a name." In recent research, multiethnolects are often explored as a form of contact language, meaning a language that is used for communication between two speakers who don't share a native tongue.

Deborah Sue Schiffrin was an American linguist who researched areas of discourse analysis and sociolinguistics, producing seminal work on the topic of English discourse markers.

Paul Kerswill, FBA, is a sociolinguist. Since 2012, he has been professor in the department of language and linguistic science at the University of York. After completing his undergraduate degree and doctorate at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, he was a research assistant from 1985 to 1986 at the University of Cambridge, before working as a lecturer at the University of Reading until his appointment in 2004 as a professor at Lancaster University.

In sociolinguistics, covert prestige is a type of scenario in which nonstandard languages or dialects are regarded to be of high linguistic prestige by members of a speech community. This is in contrast to the typical case of linguistic prestige, wherein only the standard varieties of a speech community are considered prestigious.

References

  1. "Jenny Cheshire, Linguistics". Queen Mary University of London . Retrieved 7 September 2014.
  2. Debrett's People of Today. http://www.debretts.com/people-of-today/profile/21552/Jenny-CHESHIRE%5B%5D
  3. British Academy. Elections to the Fellowship "British Academy | Elections to the Fellowship - British Academy". Archived from the original on 1 February 2016. Retrieved 20 June 2016.
  4. "Jenny Chesire Sociolinguistics Lecture series". Queen Mary, University of London.
  5. Cheshire, Jenny; Fox, Sue; Kerswill, Paul; Khan, Arfaan; Torgersen, Eivind. "Multicultural London English: the emergence, acquisition and diffusion of a new variety". www.lancaster.ac.uk. Retrieved 6 February 2017.
  6. Cheshire, Jenny; Nortier, Jacomine; Adger, David (2015). "Emerging Multiethnolects in Europe" (PDF). Queen Mary Occasional Papers Advancing Linguistics. 33: 1–27.
  7. Cheshire, Jenny; Fox, Sue; Kerswill, Paul; Torgersen, Eivind (2008). Sociolinguistica Jahrbuch (2008) (PDF). Sociolinguistica. p. 1. doi:10.1515/9783484605299.1. ISBN   9783484605299. S2CID   10973301.
  8. Cheshire, Jenny (2003). "Social dimensions of syntactic variation". Social dimensions of syntactic variation: The case of 'when' clauses (PDF). IMPACT: Studies in Language and Society. Vol. 16. pp. 245–261. doi:10.1075/impact.16.17che. ISBN   978-90-272-1854-4. Archived from the original (PDF) on 11 February 2017. Retrieved 9 February 2017.{{cite book}}: |journal= ignored (help)
  9. Cheshire, Jenny (1999). "Taming the Vernacular: Some Repercussions for the Study of Syntactic Variation and Spoken Grammar". Te Reo. 8: 59–80.
  10. Cheshire, Jenny (2005). "Syntactic variation and beyond: gender and social class variation in the use of discourse-new markers" (PDF). Journal of Sociolinguistics. 9 (4): 479–507. doi:10.1111/j.1360-6441.2005.00303.x. Archived from the original (PDF) on 11 February 2017. Retrieved 9 February 2017.
  11. Cheshire, Jenny; Kerswill, Paul; Williams, Ann (2005). Phonology, grammar and discourse in dialect convergence. In P. Auer, P., F. Hinskens, and P. Kerswill, (eds.) Dialect Change: The convergence and Divergence of Dialects in Contemporary Societies. Cambridge University Press via https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=EV7xEqDys24C&oi=fnd&pg=PA135&dq=Phonology,+grammar,+and+discourse+in+dialect+convergence&ots=0DL_xyHDrj&sig=Sx4aP8iWUkXSCuYSoi-In54AcRc.{{cite book}}: External link in |via= (help)
  12. 1 2 Cheshire, Jenny; Gillett, Ann; Kerswill, Paul; Williams, Ann (1999). "The role of adolescents in dialect levelling". Final Report to Economic and Social Research Council.
  13. Cheshire, Jenny; Edwards, Viv (1998). "Lessons from a Survey of British Dialect Grammar". Links & Letters: 61–73. Retrieved 6 February 2017.
  14. Cheshire, Jenny; Fox, Sue; Kerswill, Paul; Torgersen, Eivind (2007). "Linguistic Innovators: The English of Adolescents in London" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 26 January 2016.
  15. Cheshire, Jenny (1991). English around the world: Sociolinguistic perspectives. Cambridge University Press. ISBN   9781316582350.
  16. "Jenny Cheshire". scholar.google.com. Retrieved 30 December 2021.