Exploring the foundations of intonational variation in (Multicultural) London English

Recent work on London English has documented a highly systematic new phonological system in inner city areas, Multicultural London English (MLE), which is argued to have arisen out of intensive, multiethnic social contact. Segmental properties of MLE have been extensively researched, but, despite anecdotal reports of an ‘MLE intonation’, this possibility is yet to be systematically explored. This paper revisits generalisations made in the only available description of the inventory of nuclear contours in inner city London intonation, which was based on a subset of read speech data from IViE corpus London speakers. We apply landmark registered fPCA analysis of F0 in the original IViE data subset, by the original published prosodic contour labels, and by sentence type, with a focus on yes/no questions, wh-questions and declarative questions. We also explore for the first time patterns observed in questions extracted from unscripted data from the same London speakers, based on auditory labelling of nuclear contours. The results show that the five contours listed reported for the London speakers and reflected in published IViE labels are not all differentiated in predicted curves from fPCA analysis, but instead only four distinct contours emerge. Nevertheless, the distribution of broad contour types across sentence types visualised in the fPCA results mirror those reported from the results of auditory transcription. In our exploration of contours in unscripted speech, we find a similar pattern across sentence types also, but with more use of fall and rise-fall contours.