Abstract

Increased ethnic diversity is a phenomenon with which many nations or states are now becoming familiar. Where such an emergence is long-standing within a region or country, a notion of high racial inter-mixing (as an everyday norm) may consequentially be ascribed by outsiders. This study shows that while popular claims of liberalism may exist, national policies and ethnic biases, with respect immigration etc., variously differ to suggest something else. The work confirms that national statistics can play a meaningful role in identifying social change, in terms of make-up. It further shows, in contrast, how those data do nothing to uncover the everyday realities of our isolation or exposure to differing speaker-types, ethnically. This study uses the valuable resource of participant data elicited from largescale work on speaker-foreignness and listener’s perceptions. With its empirical context being drawn from a medium-sized City, this research depicts the real extent to which any inter-ethnic fusion routinely occurs within a contemporary urban setting. Moreover, it presents a framework which uniquely helps us identify shifts in exposure under the two social domains which most powerfully shape linguistic and social outcomes for adults of disparate ethnic backgrounds or otherwise hyphenated identities.