How do these discourses come about, and are they necessarily accurate? Could there be other ways of talking about the language practices of young people? These were some of the questions that this project addressed as it investigated how language and narratives about language are generated in the everyday lives of young people in Manchester, a major city in the north west of England. Taking an ethnographic approach, this project explored the language of young people (aged 14-16) as they interact with their peers and with adults in different contexts. Working with pupils who have been excluded from mainstream education as well as with pupils in a mainstream inner city high school, the project provided a description of youth language forms, sounds and meaning-making devices in Manchester in the early part of the 21st century.

Having been relatively neglected by linguists in the past, the project not only placed Manchester squarely on the sociolinguistic map, but also provided a resource for potential employers, policy-makers and practitioners involved in youth work and education. From an academic perspective the project drew on and informed areas such as linguistic ethnography, interactional sociolinguistics, variationist sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, conversation analysis, (socio)phonetics, dialectology, and pragmatics. The project was funded by a Leverhulme Trust Research Project Grant: ‘Expressing inner-city youth identity through multicultural Urban British English‘, and was highlighted in the Leverhulme Trust newsletter.