[1][2] According to another definition, an ethnolect is any speech variety (language, dialect, subdialect) associated with a specific ethnic group.
The term was first used to describe the monolingual English of descendants of European immigrants in Buffalo, New York.
[4] The term ethnolect in North American sociolinguistics has traditionally been used to describe the English of ethnic immigrant groups from non-English speaking locales.
Linguistically, the ethnolect is marked by substrate influence from the first language (L1), a result of the transition from bilingualism to English monolingualism.
[6] Ethnicity can affect linguistic variation in ways that reflect a social dimension of language usage.
Studies have found speakers who have melded linguistic features of separate communities together in order to create a mixed ethnic identity.
African Americans in rural western North Carolina have been found to adopt both local pronunciation and AAVE vocabulary in their speech.
Common in new migrant families of non-english language background, ethnolects can be used by the younger generation to communicate with their elders.
[1] The use of ethnolect may also address bilingual communication in the home, where there is a discontinuity in the language that parents and their children use.
These distinguished linguistic features are present in areas such as phonetics, grammar, syntax and lexicon.
It generally refers to the ethnolect primarily spoken by working or middle-class African-Americans in more informal conversations.
[16] Some salient features of Greek Australian English include: Ethnolects are typically employed by speakers to either decrease or increase social distance with others.
Often, speakers hypercorrect due to the social prestige associated with the different language varieties.
According to these scholars, this may inaccurately posit ethnicity as the central explanation for linguistic difference, when in fact there may be other variables which are more influential to an individual's speech.
[22] The way one speaks can vary widely within any ethnic group on a continuum of styles that could be mixed across variants.
For example, elements of AAVE are used by people who have little association with African Americans because of the language's influence in hip-hop.