Raptors Vs. Bucktees: the Somali influence on Toronto Slang*

• Autores: Derek Denis
• Localización: Journal of multilingual and multicultural development, ISSN 0143-4632, Vol. 42, Nº. 6, 2021, págs. 565-578
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Bucktee is one of several lexical items associated with ‘Toronto Slang’ – the emically-given name for an enregistered set of lexical items associated with Multicultural Toronto English (MTE), a multiethnolect spoken by young people in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), originating in the many and varied multicultural and multilingual areas of the conurbation – that is borrowed from Somali. This paper contextualises the influence of Somali on Toronto Slang and MTE: despite being spoken by a relatively small number of Torontonians, intersecting cultural discourses of race, place, gender, and more imbue words borrowed from the language with a desirable value. These cultural discourses and their links are described and mapped in an indexical field. Due to its desirable value and eventual place-based meaning, bucktee has spread well-beyond its source speech community and, in doing so, has undergone indexical bleaching of its ethnoracial origins. This has led to a tension between discourses of pride, the Canadian cultural mosaic, representation, and cultural appropriation.