Prosodic Patterns in Sylheti-English Bilinguals: A Glimpse into East London’s Future

You’ll hear something that linguists find truly fascinating if you stroll through any Whitechapel street market on a Saturday morning. A grandmother uses Sylheti to call to her grandchild; the tonal rise in her voice is distinct, melodic, and rhythmically South Asian. With an accent that is halfway between East London and the classroom across the street, the child answers in English.

However, if you pay more attention, you’ll notice an odd phenomenon. The rising lilt is also present in the grandmother’s English. When the grandchild’s Sylheti arrives, it lands where it should. Even though they belong to the same family and speak the same language, they are using their voices in nearly opposing ways acoustically.

This is essentially what a group of researchers at Queen Mary University of London, under the direction of Kathleen M. McCarthy, set out to record. Their research, which was published in Studies in Second Language Acquisition in 2021, concentrated on prosodic prominence, or how speakers use pitch, duration, and intensity to highlight syllables within words. A prominent syllable in English usually has a lower pitch. The pattern is reversed in Sylheti, where prominence increases. Although the difference in acoustic terms is slight, it has significant implications for understanding how language changes over time.

Participants in the study were split into three groups: first-generation Sylheti speakers who came to the UK as adults, first-generation speakers who came as children, and second-generation speakers who were born in Britain to Bangladeshi parents.

In retrospect, the pattern that surfaced seems almost predictable, but it is actually much more intricate than that. Adults who arrived in England later and had already developed their pitch patterns retained Sylheti-like prominence in their English. That is not wholly unexpected. What transpired at the other end is more startling.

The only group with an English-like falling contour in their Sylheti was the second generation of bilinguals who were born in the United Kingdom. It was to be expected that they would speak in their native tongue at home, at the mosque, and over dinner, rather than in their English. It implies that you don’t have to give up a language in order to modify it, something that scholars have been quietly observing for years. It is still possible to carry it with you while gradually and unintentionally changing its internal shape.

It’s difficult to avoid seeing something both commonplace and profound in this. In many ways, the Bangladeshi community in East London is among the most linguistically diverse urban groups in the United Kingdom. Families reside close to one another. Compared to other diaspora groups, the use of heritage languages is still quite high. Even so, Sylheti’s acoustic signature is changing, bending toward the sounds of the street outside rather than vanishing. The researchers discovered that the best indicator of a speaker’s prominence realization was language use patterns rather than age of arrival or years spent in Britain. A speaker’s pitch patterns in both languages became more English-like the more English they used on a daily basis.

This type of discovery has a longer history. Similar drift has been observed in longitudinal studies of German-English bilinguals, with pitch peaks in a speaker’s German increasing and widening after decades in North America, moving toward English norms in ways the speaker most likely never consciously chose. It has been demonstrated that bilingual Turkish-German children simultaneously incorporate the prosody of both languages. During a period of widespread immigration in the early twentieth century, Argentine Spanish seems to have absorbed Italian intonational patterns. In other words, prosodic contact is a well-documented phenomenon, but every community creates its own version of it, influenced by social pressures specific to that location and time as well as density and identity.

The community itself and the gap in the research record are two factors that make the Sylheti-English case worthwhile. A significant section of the British Bangladeshi population speaks a regional dialect called Sylheti, which is distinct from Standard Bengali. Prior to this study, its prosodic structure had received very little formal scholarly attention. Before they could examine how Sylheti prominence changes, the researchers had to determine what it truly looks like from the ground up. The paper is unique just because of that baseline work.

It is still unknown if this trend will continue into a third or fourth generation. There are reasons to believe that the preservation of heritage languages in densely populated areas is more resilient than it first appears. Additionally, there are indications that the acoustic drift reported here will intensify. The research does not, and does not attempt to, pass judgment on any of this. It’s not exactly a loss when a rising tone turns into a falling one. It is a record of interaction, closeness, and the common reality that languages spoken by the same people in the same city will eventually start to sound more alike. It has always seemed to be the culmination of everything that came to East London. It seems to do so every time.