New paper: Bigelow, Gadanidis, Schlegl, Umbal, and Denis (2020)

Most years, the second issue of Penn Working Papers in Linguistics (PWPL) is a special selection of well-received papers from the previous autumn's New Ways of Analyzing Variation conference. This year, following up from last year's NWAV in Oregon, one of the papers in PWPL 26(2) is about Multicultural Toronto English and represents a collaborative effort by Lauren Bigelow (Ph.D.), Tim Gadanidis (Ph.D.), Lisa Schlegl (Ph.D.), Pocholo Umbal (Ph.D.), and Derek Denis (faculty): "Why are wasteyutes a ting?"

This paper examines lexical enregisterment through TH/DH-stopping in Multicultural Toronto English (MTE), a multiethnolect emergent in the Greater Toronto Area. Sociolinguistic interview data from young MTE speakers reveals an overall ~10% rate of stopping, with teenage males being the primary stoppers. However, despite the presence of stopping in the vernacular of most speakers, certain terms referring to character archetypes - e.g. wasteyutes, mandem - have become sites of enregisterment of TH/DH-stopping in MTE rather than enregisterment of stopping in more frequent words or of stopping itself. We argue that this is because these lexical items implement reflexive tropes, as speakers thought to be stoppers are those who might be labeled wasteyutes or mandem: young, male, suburban, typically non-white, and typically low status. As such, performance of these stereotypical personae fosters indexical linking between sound (TH/DH-stopping) and culturally salient identities (wasteyutes, mandem), cementing enregisterment of these terms in MTE.