Episode 55 - Christian Ilbury and online language

Lexis

Here are the show notes for Episode 55, in which Jacky and Dan talk to Dr Christian Ilbury, Lecturer in Linguistics and English Language in the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences at The University of Edinburgh about:

• Being an online linguist

• Social media and language change - why it’s complicated

• Why ‘slang’ is an unhelpful word and why ‘internet vernacular’ is a better term for the kind of styles he is looking at

• Appropriation and diffusion

• Media discourses about young people, online language and technology

• His continuing work on MLE and why ‘MLE’ is still a useful term

Christian’s University of Edinburgh profile: https://www.ed.ac.uk/profile/christian-ilbury

Some appearances in the media that we mention: https://theconversation.com/theyre-serving-what-how-the-c-word-went-from-camp-to-internet-mainstream-210214

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2024/apr/09/bait-ting-certi-how-uk-rap-changed-the-language-of-the-nation

“You have quite a long history of British vernaculars being exported through British cultural forms,” says Christian Ilbury, a lecturer in sociolinguistics at the University of Edinburgh – from Scouse accents with the Beatles to Arctic Monkeys and the presence of industrial working-class accents in indie music. “Grime essentially became the vehicle in which we perceived MLE.” Those kids in suburban England, he says, “don’t speak this variety because of where they grew up. They’re using it to align with a cultural orientation that they appreciate.”

https://linguistics-research-digest.blogspot.com/2019/10/

‘Slay’, ‘yaas kween’, ‘squad’ – if you’re a keen social media, you might be familiar with some of these words. Originally from African American Vernacular English (AAVE) – a variety of English spoken by some Black Americans – these terms have quickly become part of the internet grammar. But, how and why have these terms entered our lexicon and what does the use of AAVE in internet communication mean? This and other questions are examined by Christian Ilbury in his recent paper.

The episode of Lexis that we mention in which we interviewed Shivonne gates about MLE in East London: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5leNPWkgQTMFzZ2UHRktnC

Christian’s book recommendation can be found here:

Homegirls: Language and Cultural Practice among Latina Youth Gangs. London: Blackwell.

“In this ground-breaking new book on the Norteña and Sureña (North/South) youth gang dynamic, cultural anthropologist and linguist Norma Mendoza-Denton looks at the daily lives of young Latinas and their innovative use of speech, bodily practices, and symbolic exchanges that signal their gang affiliations and ideologies. Her engrossing ethnographic and sociolinguistic study reveals the connection of language behavior and other symbolic practices among Latina gang girls in California,and their connections to larger social processes of nationalism,racial/ethnic consciousness, and gender identity.”

https://www.norma-mendoza-denton.com/books

Contributors

Lisa Casey

blog: https://livingthroughlanguage.wordpress.com/ & Twitter: Language Debates (@LanguageDebates)

Dan Clayton

blog: EngLangBlog & Twitter: EngLangBlog (@EngLangBlog)

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/englangblog.bsky.social

Jacky Glancey

Twitter: https://twitter.com/JackyGlancey

Raj Rana

Matthew Butler

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MatthewbutlerCA

Music: Serge Quadrado - Cool Guys

Cool Guys by Serge Quadrado is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. From the Free Music Archive: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/serge-quadrado/urban/cool-guys