This edited volume is a welcome addition to the quickly growing body of literature on the characteristic language-contact varieties arising in cities where youth of different origins live alongside one another. Consisting of an introduction and eleven chapters, the volume surpasses its objective as a member of the series ‘Studies in language variation’—namely, to describe these linguistic phenomena from various methodological and theoretical angles—also serving as a theoretical capstone for an area of research that since the late 1980s has enjoyed few opportunities for geographical or theoretical comparison. In this spirit, Friederike Kern's introduction offers a concise survey of the terminology and methodologies that have been used to approach these new youth vernaculars or styles on both sides of the Atlantic.
The volume leads with four quantitatively conducted studies. Sue Fox, Arfaan Khan, & Eivind Torgersen's (Ch. 1) data point to the reality of “multicultural English” among youth in London and Birmingham and to the mediating role of friendship networks in the spread of this variety. In Ch. 2, Ulrike Freywald, Katharina Mayr, Tiner Özçelik, & Heike Wiese conduct a recognition study among different populations in Berlin to reaffirm that Kiezdeutsch is indeed a “multiethnolect” from a linguistic as well as a socioperceptual point of view. Moving to the suburbs of Paris, Zsuzsanna Fagyal & Christopher Stewart (Ch. 3) present a characteristic prosodic contour used among adolescents in mixed-origin neighborhoods, arguing from conversational data that significant prosodic style shifting takes place as audience changes from in-group peers to out-group others. Frans Hinskens (Ch. 4) traces Moroccan and Turkish youth ethnolects of Dutch in Amsterdam and Nijmegen, cogently arguing from phonetic analyses that his youth participants use “ethnolectally enriched” (119) speech for stylization purposes and not due to disfluencies in their Standard Dutch.
Chs. 5 and 6 by Margret Selting and Friederike Kern, respectively, draw on data from telephone conversations between young Germans of Turkish background. Selting describes a Turkish-German style distinguishable from the colloquial German of Berlin by its routine use of shorter prosodic units to highlight information in narratives, while Kern examines two rhythmic patterns occurring in Turkish German but not in colloquial German and how these features allow users of the style to organize narrative sequences. In Ch. 7, Yazgül Şimşek draws on both Turkish-German and Turkish data to demonstrate that Turkish and German lexical and prosodic resources are creatively deployed for information-packaging purposes. Lena Ekberg (Ch. 8) compares the discourse functions of two Swedish expressions in the speech of adolescents in Malmö and Stockholm, concluding that, while different, their use reveals the extent to which multilingual styles in Sweden are hearer oriented.
The volume comes to a close with three more ethnographically inclined studies. Ch. 9, by Inken Keim & Ralf Knöbl, features a comparison of the speech of one German youth of Turkish background across settings and audiences in illustration of his stylistic breadth. Lian Malai Madsen (Ch. 10), in turn, argues from data she collected among multilingual youth at a martial arts club in Copenhagen that their use of an urban style of Danish cues a heterosexual male identity rather than ethnic belonging. Lastly, Heini Lehtonen (Ch. 11) analyzes the linguistically mixed speech of more recently migrated youth through the Bakhtinian lens of polyphony, showing how their repertoires are composed of heritage language voices, a continuum of Finnish from Standard to a Helsinki slang register, and even tropic performances of a nonnative register of Finnish.
This lucid and timely volume will appeal to linguists and ethnographers, graduate students, and seasoned scholars alike.
