Article Summaries and Comparison

1. "All raait! It's a new black-white lingo" (Sunday Times-11/12/05)
http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/news/uk_news/article209405.ece

This article is about how the English language is evolving - different languages are influencing the terminology of young people across the country, creating a 'multi-ethnic dialect'.

The article heavily relies on the research of Professor Paul Kerswill (who is a sociolinguist at Lancaster University) to get its point across. Kerswill suggested that young people in London are developing a 'local dialect' by intertwining various words from other countries with English. For example words from the Indian language, such as "creps" which means trainers. Kerswill thinks young people are doing so to 'mark themselves out culturally and socially'; they are also thought to be influenced by music artists, for example, the rapper Dizzy Rascal. Kerswill believes that speaking in such a way will become a part of the everyday English language in the next 20 years.

We also learn from the article that some concerns, have, however, emerged over the use of the dialect. For example at a school in south London, this way of speaking has been banned in the classroom as the schools way of trying to 'improve results'.

The article is later concluded with a quote from the head teacher;he says that he wants to teach the children that there's a 'time and a place' for patois.


2. "From the mouths of teens" (The Independent-5/11/06)
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/from-the-mouths-of-teens-422688.html

This second article from the Independent discusses relatively the same points as the previous article but goes into a lot more depth with what all the slang words actually mean. The article starts with a conversation of two teenagers on a bus. This conversation shows a huge range of examples of slang words, for example, "Safe man", "What endz you from?" and "Wasteman".

Further on in the article, a 13 year old boy explains that everyone in his school speaks like how he boys on the bus did and he also explains how if you don't speak like it you will be uncool. 'Nobody wants to be uncool' he says. This shows that patois is becoming normal and, like the previous article its becoming a 'cool' thing to do;its becoming socially acceptable.

Just like the previous one, this article also uses quotes to get its point across. Sue Fox (a language expert from London University's Queen Mary College), states that young people from different backgrounds and origins all spoke with the same dialect. This suggests that the way young people are speaking is influencing other young people, making multi-ethnic dialect increasingly popular.

To conclude, both of these articles are very similar as they both explain what is happening to the modern English language today and what is influencing young people to speak in such a way.