The rise and fall of Jafaican

The study in a sentence

This case study explores different discourses ('ways of talking about') the multi-ethnic youth speech style which sociolinguists call Multicultural London English (MLE) - and which is often referred to as 'Jafaican' in print and broadcast media. It is an example of enregisterment: how a language variety becomes an index of a social group and, later, of a set of social characteristics.

Shop fire during London riots, 2011. Andy Armstrong CC BY-SA

The question

The quotation we cite starts at 1:20 into this clip.

In the case of Jafaican/MLE, the perceived relationship between linguistic form and behaviour reached its peak with the London riots of summer 2011. Many of the rioters were characterized as speaking MLE and displaying the attributes associated with it by the media, in particular, behaving violently and being black. Even though linguists have never associated either of these things with MLE – there is no relationship between behaviour and features of MLE, and MLE seems to cut across ethnicities – the media’s enregisterment of MLE was such that famous commentators such as David Starkey saw the use of MLE as directly correlated with violent behaviour: 

The whites have become black. A particular sort of violent, destructive, nihilistic, gangster culture has become the fashion, and black and white, boy and girl, operate in this language together, this language which is wholly false, which is this Jamaican patois that has been intruded in England, and that is why so many of us have this sense of, literally, a foreign country. 

(David Starkey, Newsnight, 13 August 2011)

Key concept

What is Multicultural London English? Read more on Paul Kerswill's Multicultural London English page.

 Who gets to decide how a particular variety of English is evaluated? 

And how do varieties come to be socially indexed in a particular way?

Chart of when the term Jafaican was used in UK newspapers
Figure 1 (p439) from Kerswill, Paul The objectification of ‘Jafaican’ : the discoursal embedding of Multicultural London English in the British media. In: Androutsopoulos, Jannis, (ed.) The Media and Sociolinguistic Change. de Gruyter , Berlin , 428–455.  

Methods

Paul Kerswill's chapter "The objectification of ‘Jafaican’ : the discoursal embedding of Multicultural London English in the British media" reports the results of a mixed methods approach:

The answer

Use of the term 'Jafaican' varies over time, with the term first emerging in 2006 then falling out of use, but resurfacing in 2010 and 2011. 'Jafaican' is frequently collocated with the verb 'dubbed'  (as in, "dubbed Jafaican") which suggests some writers recognise that it is an informal term.

The discourse analysis reveals a range of ways of talking about Jafaican in the media, including:

Classroom activities

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Lead in task

Comparing attitudes to 'Jafaican' in two blog posts from the Telegraph

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Extension task

Discourse analysis using a media pack of nine texts

In more detail

A longer explanation of the research study

Jafaican > IMD

Meet the author

Paul Kerswill


Paul teaches modules in sociolinguistics including World Englishes and Advanced Topics in Language Variation and Change 

Read the paper

Kerswill, P. (2014). The objectification of ‘Jafaican’: The discoursal embedding of Multicultural London English in the British media. In J. Androutsopoulos (Ed.), Mediatization and Sociolinguistic Change (pp. 427–456). Berlin: De Gruyter. download pdf