Evaluate the idea that a person's language use is completely determined by their geographical location.

A person's idiolect has many different origins, however it is a well-established argument about the significance of certain origins. A person's geographical location is one of these origins, I would argue that it is a very important source of a person's dialect. A very good example of this would be Multi-Cultural London English, or MLE for short. This is a dialect sourced in the East End of London, and many people mistake it for a alternative version of Cockney, however, it is very different. In 1948, the Empire Windrush brought thousands of Caribbean immigrants over to the UK, as a way of sustaining it's work force so soon after World War Two. Because of this, the capital, London, has become a hot-bed of cultural and linguistic diversity. And so, speakers from parts of London such as Hackney, where the population of White British is at 47% from 2007, are most likely to speak MLE.
MLE is often categorised by it's monophthongisation, where a diphthong becomes a monophthong. This is most often seen in words such as like, where /laik/ becomes /la:k/. Furthermore, there is substitution process within MLE with the dental consonant /ð/ seen in words such as them or there, changes to become the alveolar consonant /d/ to become dis, dem, or dere. It is linguist Kerswill who believes that these features stem from the Jamaican heritage, however other linguists would disagree. For example, linguist Labov committed a study where he went into three different clothing stores in New York, each one to represent a different social class within society. He found that when going into the high end stores the use of a rhotic accent was more prevalent than in one representing the working-class. This shows that people change or alter their accents in order to fit there social standing, and therefore would disagree with the statement given. I believe this argument to be a rather one against the statement, however, it does not negate the fact that a person's social standing maybe altered by their geographical location, and so consequently their location still plays a vital role.