Jenny L. Cheshire is a Britishsociolinguist and professor at Queen Mary University of London. Her research interests include language variation and change, language contact and dialect convergence, and language in education, with a focus on conversational narratives and spoken English. She is most known for her work on grammatical variation, especially syntax and discourse structures, in adolescent speech and on Multicultural London English.
Cheshire has received numerous research awards recognising her significant contributions to the field of sociolinguistics:
European Commission: 'ATheME: Advancing the Multilingual Experience' in collaboration with Adger, Borer, Stockall and Cotter.
Economic and Social Research Council: multiple awards with respect to her research on Multicultural London English, in collaboration with Kerswill, Williams, Fox, Gardner-Chloros, Birkbeck, and Gadet.
British Association for Applied Linguistics: 'Applying Linguistics,' in collaboration with Sue Fox.
Arts and Humanities Research Council: 'The Grammar of Spontaneous Spoken English'.
Following are some of Cheshire's most notable contributions to the field of sociolinguistics:
Multicultural London English: principal investigator, working with Paul Kerswill and others, in identifying and defining a new typological language variety, multiethnolect, spoken by young, working-class people in London as well as by multiethnic youth across Europe, including Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, and France.
Adolescent Friendship Groups: Cheshire, Kerswill, Fox and Torgersen showed that adolescent ethnicity interacts with patterns of friendship to create dense, multi-ethnic "friendship networks" which determine an individual's "choice and degree of use of certain linguistic features". In addition, these researchers identified "a cluster of life-style indicators which seem to be shared by most of the individuals as potential linguistic innovators."
Syntactic Variation: Through multiple variationist studies, Cheshire has shown how analysing the social distribution of a variable syntactic construction sheds light on the nature of pragmatic functions, which provides more insights into the social aspects of language use. Cheshire et al. have shown the syntactic variation is of a very different nature than phonological or morphological variation. 'Syntax is so central to the construction of discourse that we have to look beyond any superficial alternation to examine what speakers do with their grammar – in other words, to focus on social interaction'.
Dialect Levelling: Cheshire, Kerswill, Williams, along with many others, have uncovered significant amounts of dialect levelling in Britain, i.e., "the replacement of local features by others with a wider geographical currency," through the increased use of non-standard variants in phonology, morphology and syntax occurring throughout the major urban centres of Britain.
World English: Cheshire's edited volume on brings together varieties of English across 60 countries, covering such typologically distinct varieties as standard English, non-standard dialects, pidgins, creoles, and new Englishes, and describes how linguistic variation and change is happening on a far greater scale than has ever been seen in the world's linguistic history.
Selected works
Among her publications, she has written over ten academic books and over 90 articles in peer-reviewed international research journals and edited collections. Following are some of her most notable publications:
2005. Phonology, grammar and discourse in dialect convergence. In P. Auer, P.,F. Hinskens, and P. Kerswill, Dialect Change: The convergence and Divergence of Dialects in Contemporary Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 135–167.
2005. In U. Ammon, N. Dittmar, K. Mattheier and P. Trudgill Sociolinguistics: An Introductory Handbook of the Science of Language and Society. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 1552–1563.
