1 of 1 DOCUMENT The Sun (England) July 3, 2010 Saturday Edition 1; Northern Ireland Oi,you're speaking the English slanguage! BYLINE: PAUL KERSWILL SECTION: NEWS; Pg. 6 LENGTH: 634 words YOU'LL never Adam and Eve it - the Cockney accent is leaving its traditional London home and is now more likely to be heard in Essex and Hertfordshire. In its place is a new dialect, Jafaican, with its roots in the Caribbean and Indian subcontinent - rapper Dizzee Rascal, above, is one well-known speaker. Its growth is part of a dramatic change in dialects and accents across Britain. Here language expert Paul Kerswill tells how the map of spoken English is being redrawn. COCKNEYS used to be born within the sound of Bow Bells - the bells of St Mary-le-Bow in the City of London. You won't hear Cockney from residents there now, though you will still hear it in the East End. However, increasingly in the East End, you will hear a new dialect spoken by youngsters of all ethnic backgrounds. They call it slang, some commentators call it Jafaican and linguists like myself call it multicultural London English. Its most famous speaker is probably Dizzee Rascal, who has become the emblem of this new way of talking. The East End has always been heavily influenced by influxes of immigrants - French Huguenots, Jews, West Indians and more recently Bangladeshis. As new people move in, so the more affluent move out. That has always happened but it has accelerated over the past 20 to 30 years. Up to 60 per cent of young people in the East End have parents who do not speak British English but rather speak Jamaican or Indian or some other form of English. Children learn from older children as well as from their parents. Typically when families move, parents keep their accent but children adapt to fit in with their new friends. Inner-city English, particularly in London's East End, has been transformed by immigrants from South America, the West Indies, Europe, Central Asia, South Asia, Arab countries, West Africa - everywhere, almost. The result is this new dialect as spoken by Dizzee Rascal. The word "face" is spoken by traditional Cockneys as "fice", while the new Cockneys say "fehs" with what sounds like a more northern accent. The phrase "go home" is spoken by traditional Cockneys in a much broader way than most people but the new way is to say something like "goh hohm". At the moment this is confined to people in their late teens and early 20s. Will they still talk this way when they are in their 30s and 40s? It's too early to say but the signs are that they will. Accents are constantly changing and the fact is that today if you want to hear what most people would regard as Cockney, you are better off going to Southend or the new town of Hemel Hempstead, both places where lots of Londoners have moved to, rather than the East End. Over Britain as a whole, dialects are levelling out - differences are disappearing. Some say this is due to TV but a stronger influence is greater mobility. In the south-east, stretching from Southampton in the south and west to Ipswich in the north and east, it is becoming increasingly hard to tell where people are from. In the north there has also been some levelling but the difference in accent between someone from Newcastle and someone from Sunderland is more marked than the difference between people from Southampton and Portsmouth. The big exception to this levelling is Liverpool. Like London, it has had large influxes of immigrants, mostly black. But the Liverpudlian accent has become stronger rather than weaker - for example in the way "water" is pronounced like "waser" and "hat" becomes "has". Language is constantly evolving. One of the interesting things about the new East End accent is that it is a sign of racial integration. The dialect says nothing about your ethnic background as it is spoken by young people of all colours and religions. One things is for sure. English as we know it will continue to change, whether we like it or not. Signs LOAD-DATE: July 3, 2010 LANGUAGE: ENGLISH GRAPHIC: TALKING POINT... regional accents are holding their own in areas like Liverpool, left, and Newcastle, below PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper JOURNAL-CODE: SUN Copyright 2010 NEWS GROUP NEWSPAPERS LTD All Rights Reserved