Infectious Disease or Linguistic Change?

Is Multicultural London English really ruining the English Language?

‘No-one spoke this way in my day!’, ‘Teach children to speak properly!’. Both are common arguments everyone’s heard at some point from ‘concerned’ adults, who seem convinced that the English language has seriously declined in quality since the ‘Good Old Days’ – but is there any truth to this, or is this claim the result of stereotyping?

Multicultural London English, or MLE, is a sociolect spoken mainly by young people in London which contains Jamaican Creole. This has caused stigma with adults because apparently, it’s ‘dumbing down’ the English Language, and will result in children growing up ‘thick’ and leave young people unable to get jobs. There are many reasons why this is ridiculous, but let’s start with the first: there is absolutely no proof that the quality of English Language is declining! This common prescriptivist view – meaning the opinion of a non-linguist – was explained by Jean Aitchison using the metaphor ‘crumbling castle’, which means that the English Language is a perfect castle we’re letting fall to ruins. Fun fact: this view is a myth. There has never been a point where the English Language was recorded to be ‘perfect’ – in fact, people have been complaining about the decline of it for centuries!

And yet, adults remain convinced that MLE is an ‘infectious superbug’, infecting young people and ruining their job prospects later in life. This brings me onto a second metaphor from Aitchison – the ‘infectious disease’ assumption, which, as the name implies, describes the view that people unwillingly pick up language change. Again, this is very wrong; no-one ever changes their language by accident. In fact, language change is often used to fit in. In this case, a teenager might start speaking MLE if their friends speak it to avoid being the odd one out. And guess what? These teenagers know when not to speak MLE! So, these people worry in vain if they think the next generation will walk into a job interview and speak MLE, and remain forever unemployed because of it.

This is not the first time adults have been convinced that the English Language is going down the drain – in 2012, the children’s show ‘Rastamouse’ received over 200 complaints for the use of Jamaican Creole by the characters, with complaints being centred around the fact that parents didn’t want their children to pick up on how the characters speak; mainly due to a stereotype that speakers of Jamaican Creole are uneducated. The stereotype is of course wrong; in the real world, nobody speaks exactly the same, as we all speak with a variety of different accents and dialects, and it doesn’t determine a person’s intelligence.

So, there you have it – MLE is not the downfall of our language, so why are we treating it like it is? Everyone is different, so it’s ridiculous to insist that we all must speak the same. We should celebrate the variety of our language, and embrace the changes!