A London arts centre is compiling an archive of poetry and phrases in the city’s historic Cockney dialect as a study shows the accent is being driven out of the capital by the multicultural “Jafaican”.
The study, by Paul Kerswill, Sociolinguistics professor at Lancaster University, suggests that traditional Cockney is moving from London’s streets to the nearby commuter areas of Essex and Hertfordshire. “Cockney in the East End is now transforming itself into Multicultural London English, a new, melting-pot mixture of all those people living here who learnt English as a second language,” said Mr Kerswill. The new dialect, termed “Jafaican” in slang, or slanguage, is a hybrid of various languages and accents, created as a result of mass immigration and demographic changes in London’s East End, the traditional Cockney heartland.
“Ever since the 1960s these areas of London have become home to immigrants from the West Indies, the Indian subcontinent and many other places, from South America and Africa to Central Asia and the far East,” said Mr Kerswill.
“This means that children were no longer learning their English dialect from local Cockney speakers, but from older teenagers who themselves had developed their English in the linguistic melting pot.” Cockney, which has been spoken in London for over 500 years, was immortalised by the 1964 film My Fair Lady, featuring Rex Harrison’s Henry Higgins trying to rid Audrey Hepburn’s Eliza Doolittle of her conspicuous accent. One of its features is the use of rhyming slang. “Jafaican” can be heard in the voices of British rapper Dizzee Rascal and in comedian Sacha Baron Cohen’s tongue-in-cheek creation Ali G. The project will include a future spoken word event at London arts venue Kings Place, while the accumulated Cockney data will contribute to Mr Kerswill’s study.