New Immigrant Languages in European Cities? | Multiethnolects Explained 

Have you come across any of these varieties before?

Native Turkish speaker here. When distant relatives who live in Germany come to visit, they speak Turkish in a very bizzare accent that is a mixture of a German accent and the regional accent they had when they left in the 60s. After the 60's in Turkey, regional dialects were sort of "ironed out" in the public school system and watered down to the point where they could be easily understood by other Turkish speakers. The Turks in Germany, however, weren't really around for that development.

So basically, the new era of Creole languages.

The question statement/affirmation of "wallah" is present in Arab American communities as well.

Hello Hilbert. I grew up in Bradford in a street with kids of parents from all over Europe. The kids had Yorkshire accents, but would struggle if I had spoken dialect. The kids at school, of West Indian and South Asian parents, also spoke with a Yorkshire accent. Today most of the kids are of Pakistani origin and have an accent that over time has included more of this, even when their parents speak with the same accent as me. In cities with more mixed cultures, I am reminded of a scene from "Blade Runner".

One example I know of is the code-switching between Turkish and German, which is common amongst Turkish diaspora communities not just in Germany, but also in Switzerland and Austria.

This explains a lot about the way my children sometimes speak, and the mistakes they made in their schoolwork. They are native Dutch speakers, but we live in the Randstad, which has a very multicultural population.

Small correction: Wallah is originally used in all arabic dialects to affirm and question not just to swear to god.

Being a fluent Ponglish speaker (Polish English lmao) i never realised how many of these fake languages actually exist. Ponglish actually has two dialects as the one based in US, mostly Illinois and Wisconsin area, is extremely "developed" (IMO its more of a linguistic regression) while our Ponglish in the UK isnt. Whats weird about it is using English words while speaking Polish but with a heavy Polish accent despite being a native English speaker, it kinda makes these words take a new meaning and make them separate from their original English counterpart. Although not as developed, i had a moment when i realised it is in essence a dialect of Polish and not just a funny term when speaking witb my mother who lives in Poland and does not speak English, at some point she had to stop me in the middle of my story as she did not understand anything from it, went something like "Lookałem w Funciaku (Funt = pound, Funciak = Poundland, British store) za Rizzlami, zadzwonił (super)visor z officu się zapytać czemu na shiftcie mnie nie ma, wyszło że zmienił rotę i dostałem warninga" - the interesting part of this sentence is that its more likely for one of my British friends to understand it over someone like my mom who has no exposure to English language and culture, despite me technically speaking Polish, or a variation of it at least... It gets even more interesting when i noticed "Polonising" English words which aint even English, just like in the multicultural London accent - meaning i would be speaking to someone in Poland while using words which originated from Jamaica, India or Pakistan... all languages have been adopting words from their neighbours and Polish is no exception with hundreds of words adopted from German, Yiddish, French, obvs other Slavic languages - but over the centuries it was always big nearby countries, and now in the era of globalisation and internet, we get it from all over which makes you think how our languages will change in the next 100 years.

I'd have thought that there would be at least some Polish influence in these, since there's still a lot Polish immigrants in the countries mentioned. But honestly it ain't that surprising that there's no such influence, as knowing my compatriots, they usually stay isolated from other groups when they emmigrate.

Language will and always will be Fluid!

I've often heard this claim about MLE having monophthongal GOAT and FACE vowels, but it's completely wrong. They are monophthongal in Caribbean and some Asian accents, which MLE speakers may occasionally code-switch to, but they're absolutely diphthongs in MLE, and you usually won't hear monophthongal GOAT and FACE from anyone who's not an immigrant speaking they're own accent, or someone from an immigrant family code-switching with family/friends to their "home" accent. Still, great video, was v. interesting to learn about other such accents!

this also happens in saudi arabia with urdu.

hearing you go into MLE for a moment was great

This is absolutely fascinating. Thank you for this deep dive on immigrant languages, Hilbert! This also shed a lot of light for me on Straattaal, where I wasn't so familiar with it before due to living further away from the largest Dutch cities.

People use "wallah" as a question and affirmation in Arabic countries too. It's not just a western immigrant thing.

Switzerland’s ethnolect of german is interesting too, so it’s sad how it is barely studied. Generally, the biggest influences are english, standard german, turkish, albanian and serbian, with some arabic

Hilbert you are one of my favorites on UT. I'm from Germany and find your content always very, very interesting. In our cities the kids and teens often use Arabic grammar in German,sounds funny.. 😂

At least they aren’t speaking German

last time I was this early, these languages didn't exist

I'm a native English speaker who spent 3 years in Sweden and my Swedish is very much Rinkeby Swedish because all my fellow classmates/friends in Swedish class spoke like that as well.

In Hungary we have Hunglish, which is not a unique naming, considering this play of words have been done with every langauge, BUT our Mixed urban hungarian, "hunglish" is unique in execution: First, our grammatic rules are really foreign to indo-europeans (wovel harmony, free word order etc...) but our inc. of english words is still done by our grammatic rules. For example I've hear 'duble plural' A LOT; by this I mean we keep the original english, german etc. word IN plural form, then we give it a hungarian plural. There are loose, but rules that I've also found to this: 1. This mostly happens to words with the plural ending "s" and not "en", but with exeptions on both sides, because this rule is only based on the sounding of the word. 2. This happens with words that are mooostly used in plural froms in english speech obviously the hungarians get used to the plural form of the word instead of the singular. From this there are two paths of reasoning why to duble plural it: 2.1 The hungarian speaker doesn't speak english, or only speaks it a bit so they don't know or just don't realise that they are duble pluraling. 2.2 The person who uses the duble plural form is 101% lives by and with irony in their veins. Or it WAS started as irony and nowadays it has become normalised. An example would be: Ranger-> In hungarian plural it would be Ranger + ök (plural), but instead take the english plural Rangers + ök (hungarian plural). In vocabulary we also started to borrow a lot of foreigner words, buuut there were some that we have used in the 17-19th c. before the nig Language Reform when we got rid of foreign words. So we also have a new english word, that same word but from german or italian origin and we have the hungarian one. We also have an expending magyarization (hungariasation) of foreign words wich is I kid you not fuled by pure irony and extreme Shitposting. Because the shitposters replace the foreign word with a new hungarian one for the laughs of shitpost, then it gets used ironically, then it is normalised. Now we have two and a half word for meme: "mém" (the phonological writing of meme) "énén" (lietarly me-me (me=én)) and "fost" (created by butchering "fostalicska" -> "fost(alicska)" which is the name of the shitposting subreddit). Altough "fost" means shitpost nowadays the majority of memes are shitposts so it started to stick to meme aswell (like shit to a stick). As a uralic language with used türkic and iranian influance it is very dificult to see trough the development of our lang in this see of indos. edit: Oh we also have different Hunglishes. For example I'm a speaker of the Mezőségi hungarian dialect and we have our own little twist of hunglish, because we didn't really fully borrow the hunglish of the central hungarian dialect but we developed our own one which is more like a next evolution of the "korcs" or Romano-mezőségi mixed language.

I don't know about any of the others, but tge most common forms of Dutch straattaal have tgeir own very specific grammar rules. They literally are a new language. Which makes sense, as that is exactly how most, if not all, modern languages came to be.

19:53 love that for u fam 😭😭😭

That American British flag is absolutely cancer

Something interesting to point out is that the sranan tonga words also enter belgian cité taal through Dutch straattaal. (We use these terms interchangeably as well) So you can still hear words like duku in belgium/flanders

The Bergen Dialect of Norwegian was originally a Multi ethnolect between Norwegian and Low German

Ahh, the classic city speak, if not inverted creole

I think it's cool that natural language further develops over time and that new languages are being created. Looking at the other comments I am disappointed about some of the fellow commentars.

Thx for seeing us Kurds

"Voila!" "Wallah?" "Wallah."

Did you just use the British Raj flag instead of the Indian tricolour, while using other 2 correct South Asian ones?

isn't this basically what happens with Spanish in most Latin American countries?

So in essence, they speak anything except the correct local tongue?

I think the argument about adolescent varieties of the language having more mistakes than pre-school children having them indicating that they are intentional seems kind of off. Children have been proven to be more capable at acquiring new languages than adolescents, so it seems only logical to me that they would make less mistakes.

damn theres so much racism in the comments section rn. i don't have anything to say about that other than hoping it gets better over time as more people see the video and comment less incendiary things :P what I really am surprised about is the fact that no one has brought up how similar Singlish is to these multiethnolects from Europe. Singlish is like a colloquial version of English spoken in informal contexts in Singspore, and it incorporates Malay, Chinese, Teochew, Cantonese, Hokkien and also some Tamil and Hindi. iirc, it also borrows sentence structure from Chinese (not sure tho, but there is definitely a diff in sentence structure), which makes it sound curt to non-Singlish speakers, tho we Singaporeans find it efficient hehe. Its something that a lot of Singaporeans speak alongside, not instead of, formal English. If u haven't already made a video on Singlish, I think it wld be interesting if you did; it seems up ur alley! :)

Wallah has these same question & affirmation meanings in Hebrew, where the words came long before these immigrant waves from north Africa to Europe, so I'm not sure how original it is, especially since Israel has a rather large group of Arabs, so this usage is also always reflected back at the native speakers who could reject it of ot were in a strange context...

16:10 as a lative swedish speaker I would say "jag var sjuk igår". But that may be dialectal thou

it is Sprache not Sprak so it is called "Kanakensprache" not "Kanakensprak"

I’m glad to see this comment section isn’t anywhere near as racist as the Kebab Norsk one was

I do not get why people in the commentsection are upset with immigrants and the existence of these new immigrant languages. Language is always evolving into new forms and languages can fuse together to form new hybrid languages. I personally would love to see more language and dialect variety instead of hear people speak only the national language.

Can be Yiddish considered as ethnolect then? Being based on german, with huge influence of hebrew and slavic languages

what the hell is up with this comment section

New Languages that was forced upon us.

Like the Belters in The Expanse.

as someone who grew up in the netherlands and subsequently the uk i refuse to pronounce the 'T-H' sound

As someone studying linguistics, seeing the racist reactions people are having to this is troubling. These people are not corrupting or speaking the languages incorrectly, it’s merely a different register and it’s completely natural

A little correction. Surinamese creole is called Sranan Tongo. Sranan = Suriname Tongo= tongue/language

Very good video, but I have one point. I live in Norway and am a lot in kebabnorsk communities, but I’ve never heard of “siktir lan”. An example of a phrase that we’ve borrowed and that I’ve also heard could be “che tori” which is Persian for “how are you”. An example of a swear word in kebabnorsk could be bhanchod/panchod, and if you’re Punjabi you’ll know what that means 😂 I know of kız, but only because of Swedish rap music. I’d mostly use mæbe when being respectful and kæbe if I were angry at the woman in question, although some people find mæbe to be also disrespectful. Maybe it was more disrespectful in the older times than what it is now… I also have some more information on wallah in kebabnorsk. We wouldn’t really say “Did you go to the shop? Wallah?”, but a conversation with wallah would go more like this: A: I think Sarah is attractive B: Say wallah! A: Wallah And that’s how you know that he’s not lying. Hope this made sense, and I’d love to see more on this theme in the future.

There won't be any immigrant new languages in Europe and I can say that because the vast majority of Europe is getting fed up with their governments and fed up with the immigrants😅 so in the meantime they will be sent home in the future well the rest of Europe gets their governments reorganized keep your eyes on France😊

I reckon it's proper sick how language evolves over time, innit? And new ways of chattin' are comin' up. Check me out, bruv! Man's typin' in MLE right this sec!

bantufication of native euro culture.

In modern Hebrew, which of course has a lot of influence from Arabic (Both Palestinian from the local Palestinians and other varieties from Jews who immigrated from various Arab countries), the word "wallah" is used in the same meanings as you demonstrated here in the scandinavian dialects. So maybe this does exist in some forms of Arabic after all.

Linguistically speaking (haha) its pretty normal, but it just sounds so bad hearing the weird creole that's been created. I grew up in an area with a lot of immigrants and they not only mixed my native language with Somali or Arabic, but often threw in a quarter of English as well. Kurds and Turks were an exception for some reason, felt like they at least tried to speak the standard variety.

This is really cool.

Something thats really been annoying me is you using the flag with the ف which i assume is representing persian (farsi) but call it arabic. Another mistake is at 15:30, the 2nd form of wallah is also used in Straattaal/cité taal.

I'm wondering where all the outrage over linguistic corruption is over Yiddish and Dutch loanwords in NY English or Spanish loanwords in the American Southwest 🧐

I wonder if Spain has a similar migrant ethnolect, since it has many Moroccan immigrants like the Netherlands

I'm not convinced by the video's thesis. I'd guess that such features would diffuse back into the host community as a regional linguistic speciality rather than form a creole. Creoles require an insular, coherent, and systematically segregated and disenfranchised community to create the conditions for passing down the pidgin language down through generations to make creole. I think such variations will be more like the minor italian influence on new England accents in the US, the minor germanic influence on Midwestern accents, or mexican spanish on SoCal accents.

Wrong flag for the Citétaal. The base language is Dutch and while the prestige in Limburg is Belgian Standaard Nederlands, commonly called "Flemish", the correct local dialect is Limburgish with of Dutchified but definitely not closely related to West-Vlaams or Oost-Vlaams. People in Limburg don't speak Flemish or (really Brabant) Tussentaal, they speak Limburgse Tussentaal.

0:11 The letters joining the sentence 🤯

People are talking about the corruption of languages, but ignoring the influence of for instance the Normans on the English language, the influence brought on by the Hugenots or th influence of Yiddish on the Dutch language, etc. New languages like modern English are formed when cultures mix, just as old languages like old English or Latin die out when they no longer fulfill the purpose of mutual communication. This is a natural consequence of our urge to move around and form new communities.

A kind of MLE seems to be growing in Toronto as well

How about discussing how the older version of London English, Cockney, is now no longer spoken in the bounds of London, but is now to be found in Essex and Kent? Surely that is a relevant point. A whole way of speaking and identity that has been associated with London for 4 or 5 hundred years has gone. A complete change in a city's culture in less than 50 years. While it's true that languages change over time and it is impossible to try and legislate against, this has got to be the first time in history where native dialects have been misplaced by incoming groups though deliberate acts of policy by inept governments rather than by cases of invasion, occupation, or war. While some may well celebrate the new versions of English that have been spawned by the growth of Castells' mega cities, others will also lament the death and decline of London's historical communities. Many commenting here seem to argue that it is racist to point out that London has changed immeasurably in recent years. Yet, I think such a massive change just seems to be a clear and visible fact, whether you like it or not, this new way of speaking didn't exist, especially across the whole of London, not even as recent as the 1990's.

The west has fallen

15:00 sorry but thats wrong hilbert of course formally in Standard MSA it doesnt have that because its inappropriate in literature etc but the spoken language does in fact use it almost for everything from question to statments etc and thats found everywhere where the langauge is spoken or the word is used like in youth langauge in germany and sweden etc. Also its not something unusual to use god in speech just like in english "my god" in english and other various forms of usage of god + something related same in german and basically any langauge that has common usage of their word for "GOD"

he's got balls to add the kurdish flag in the thumbnail

Interesting. I think in 100 years the French in France will be much more Arabized and closer to the French spoken in Central Africa, German will be on the wane in Germany being supplanted by Global English, Turkish, and future Creole of English, Turkish, Syrian Arabic, and German. Spanish is probably secure due to the large number of Spanish speakers worldwide but it will come more to resemble the Spanish of Latin America, particularly that of Central America. The same thing will happen with Portugal and their Portuguese, it will probably become "Brazilianized". The UK will still speak English but it may become more US-American and influenced by the Indic languages and the English of sub-Saharan Africa. A lot of smaller (I thinking of the Scandinavian languages and maybe Greek) or minority languages will die out or and be replaced with Global English or new immigrant languages like Arabic, Hausa, or Pashto but of course, some remnants of the old languages will remain as part of these. Polish and Italian may be large enough to survive but their languages may atrophy and be replaced either by new creoles or by Global English. Even where the old languages survive the immigrant accents will eventually become the norm and possibly the prestige accents.

always thought of it as pidgin accent

as someone from the US, where this happens all the time and has been happening for our whole history, i love to see Europeans becoming more multicultural

as long as i can understand it. i am more worried if they don't even know the local language at all but that is rare.

in trondheim tiller where i went to school they would say it differently like "did you go to the store?" "yes i did" "say wallah" "i swear wallah" whihc made me not understand and when they say this in norwegian kebabnorsk i didnt understand anything but this was only in tiller i found out later

Dutch here. I am particularly shocked that 'Dutch' white young people from the big cities also use street language. Then you see a young white girl from Amsterdam or Rotterdam speaking street language with a Moroccan-Arabic accent. In addition, many slang words have also become established in the Dutch language or are generally known to Dutch people. Such as (Surinamese)doekoe (money), faka/fawaka (how are you). (Moroccan) kech (whore), wajo (how cool).

Try Camfranglaise.... an Afro-Franco-English street-based creole spoken in Cameroon.... Try Franco-Congolese... congolese based french creole...

Reminds me of what happened to Old English when the Vikings and the Normans came over.

Bye-bye Europe

Already scared of these comments 💀

😢

This appears to be a deeply concerning development which results from a lack of integration. All nations must enforce laws to protect their own language from corruption.

Remember Ebba Åkerlund

🇵🇰

This is disgusting

Europe is dying

Promo'SM

Wallah 🤮

680th person to watch this and the 55th comment

Should be banned

In short: Ebonics.

Mans got da ting an dat yea

Mach mal kein Auge diggah

France dont ever change

best integrated muslims