ABSTRACT

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.

摘要

Bucktee是与“多伦多俚语”相关的几个词项之一——这是与多伦多多元文化英语 (MTE) 相关的一组注册词项的主位名称，这是大多伦多地区 (GTA) 的年轻人所说的多民族语言，起源于大都市的许多不同的多元文化和多语言地区——这是从索马里借来的。本文将索马里语对多伦多俚语和 MTE 的影响置于语境中：尽管被相对较少的多伦多人使用，但交叉的种族、地点、性别和更多从该语言借来的具有理想价值的词的文化话语。这些文化话语及其联系在索引字段中被描述和映射。由于其理想的价值和最终的位置意义，bucktee已经远远超出了其源语言社区，并且在这样做的过程中，对其种族起源进行了索引漂白。这导致了骄傲话语、加拿大文化马赛克、代表性和文化挪用之间的紧张关系。