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https://www.itv.com/news/2013-09-25/28-of-britons-feel-discriminated-against-due-to-accent/

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https://www.englishandmedia.co.uk/e-magazine/articles/15180

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English & Media Centre | English and Media Centre

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English and Media Centre (EMC) is an educational charity providing CPD and innovative & award-winning teaching materials to secondary English & Media teachers

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If you can't embrace regional dialect, you can kiss my chuddies | Katy Guest

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The Oxford English Dictionary's inclusion of regional terms shows off what the UK has in common - linguistic ingenuity, says writer and editor Katy Guest

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Fairly soon after her marriage to Prince Harry in May 2018, articles about Meghan Markle started to appear - in the BBC, Mirror, Daily Star and Daily Express - reporting a change in her speech. Apparently the American actress has taken on a "British" accent along with her membership of the royal family.

Markle, a native of Los Angeles, appeared in public with Prince Harry for the first time in September 2017. They became engaged in November the same year and tied the knot in the following May. By July The Express was reporting "people claiming they could hear a British lilt developing" when Markle spoke in public.

People picking up different accents when moving to a new place is not uncommon. In linguistics we call this process "accommodation" - which largely translates to "unintentional imitation". Talkers accommodate to one another in how fast they speak, the vowels they use and other features. Accommodation also happens non-verbally: in gazing or body posture, for example. Why do we accommodate? Because similarity between people is perceived as attractive and increases efficiency of communication.

This kind of accommodation typically happens unintentionally. A 2007 study showed that speakers accommodate to speech without realising if it is simply played in the background as ambient noise. A study from 2010 showed that when some New Zealand English speakers read positive statements about Australia they used more Australian English vowels. Keep in mind, though, that Markle is an actor - and actors have the skills to change accents intentionally. However, without interviewing her on this issue, we'll never know if that's what's going on.

How can one measure accommodation? This depends on the level of language one wants to study. Here we focus on pronunciation, and a discipline called phonetics. For this article, we analysed a sample of Markle's speech prior to her engagement to Harry (see above, on Yahoo Style in February 2015) and compared them to more recent ones after she married Harry.

Markle is clearly a practised speaker. In what is billed as her first speech as a member of the royal family, the first clip (above) shows her speaking at a launch event in September 2018 for Together: Our Community Cookbook, for which she has written a foreword. She speaks in a relaxed manner - "with no notes".

The next clip (below) features her speaking at a more formal occasion: the Endeavour Fund Awards in early 2019. She does have notes this time, but her speech is still very natural sounding, with pauses on occasion for dramatic effect.

Tongue twister

We limited our analysis to these recordings because the audio quality is adequate (acoustic analyses are delicate). We compared three vowels: the vowels in words like "thought" and "talk" and in words like "lot" and "sock" - which are often merged together in California English - and the vowel in words like "price" and "bite", using three to four examples of each vowel for each of the videos at different points in time. We chose these vowels as, listening to dozens of recordings on YouTube, we felt there may be some change in how she produced them.

The figure below shows something called a vowel plot, which allows us to graph acoustic measurements of the vocal tract resonances from different vowel productions. The Y-axis (vertical) roughly corresponds to the height of the tongue when producing a vowel, and the X-axis (horizontal) shows whether the tongue is front or back in the mouth.

Our preliminary analysis shows that Markle's articulation of the word "thought" remained virtually identical between 2015 and 2019, while her production of "lot" actually became more similar to "thought" over this period - which is closer to the pattern we might expect in California English. This is arguably the opposite of what we'd expect if Markle was sounding more British.

As for the vowel in "price" - which, technically, is a combination of two vowels, starting somewhere around the southern British English vowel in "strut" and ending closer to the vowel in "kit" - in 2015 (red), her tongue starts relatively fronted and low (starting point of the arrow), which is what one would expect of Californian English. In 2019 (turquoise), her tongue position starts higher than in 2015. The starting point of her 2019 "price" vowel may be moving towards the same vowel sound found in southern English.

A little more talk

So, is Markle really beginning to sound British? The differences reported here are very small, based on a reduced set of (uncontrolled) data, and using only two time points. We certainly can't deduce from this evidence that she is now speaking with a British accent.

To make more robust claims we need substantially more recent high-quality data - which, at this time, is not available. Furthermore, we would need to expand our analyses to include other vowels and other linguistic domains, such as speech melody, choice of words, or conversational markers - given that "picking up a new accent" is more than merely using different vowels.

New problems, emerge, however: comparing speech melody, for example, between two time points would require us to have recordings of Markle in similar conversational settings at the different times - as a speaker's melody, or "intonation" as we call it in phonetics, is heavily dependent on conversational context. While we've got recordings of Markle speaking to people at public events in the UK since becoming the Duchess of Sussex, we have not been able to find anything like this for her pre-Harry days.

Markle seems to be a woman with a pretty well-defined sense of self. It is unlikely, we feel, that we are going to see profound changes in her accent at this early stage. But anything can happen. And as she says in the cookbook video, she's keen to celebrate what connects people, not what divides them ... and maybe that's what the media is picking up on.

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Meghan Markle: reports of her 'British accent' sound like journalistic licence, say linguistics experts

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Fairly soon after her marriage to Prince Harry in May 2018, articles about Meghan Markle started to appear - in the BBC, Mirror, Daily Star and Daily Express - reporting a change in her speech. Apparently the American actress has taken on a "British" accent along with her membership of the royal family.

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hen I was a child, my great-grandmother, whom we called Daa, came to live with my family in Umuahia in south-eastern Nigeria. My father had spent most of his infancy in her care, mostly during a period when his mother was preoccupied with her role as one of the founders of a local Assemblies of God church. As Daa grew older and weaker, he felt it was his turn to take care of her. After much persuasion, he finally convinced her to leave her humble dwellings in a village far from where we lived and come spend her last days in the comfort of our modern home.

Each time I watched her shuffle one foot in front of the other, her back bent almost double until her head nearly touched the top of her walking stick, it was hard to imagine my father's descriptions of a Daa who was once one of the tallest and most stunning women around. The story went that the colonial-era arbitrator who presided over the dissolution of her first marriage found her so beautiful that he decided on the spot to take her as one of his wives. "How can you maltreat such a beautiful woman?" he was said to have asked the errant husband.

Daa's favourite pastime turned out to be watching American wrestling matches on TV. She had lived almost an entire lifetime with no television; and yetno other entertainment that the channels had to offer caught her fancy. With her ashen legs stretched stiff in suspense, she stared agape, chuckled loudly and gasped audibly as Mighty Igor and his ilk beat each other up on the small screen. Daa also enjoyed telling stories. But, apart from popular words like "TV" and "rice", she knew no English. Her one and only language was Igbo. This meant that her storytelling sessions often involvedvivid gesticulations and multiple repetitions so that my siblings and I could understand what she was trying to say, or so we could say anything that she understood.

None of us children spoke Igbo, our local language. Unlike the majority of their contemporaries in our hometown, my parents had chosen to speak only English to their children. Guests in our home adjusted to the fact that we were an English-speaking household, with varying degrees of success. Our helps were also encouraged to speak English. Many arrived from their remote villages unable to utter a single word of the foreign tongue, but as the weeks rolled by, they soon began to string complete sentences together with less contortion of their faces. My parents also spoke to each other in English - never mind that they had grown up speaking Igbo with their families. On the rare occasion my father and mother spoke Igbo to each other, it was a clear sign that they were conducting a conversation in which the children were not supposed to participate.

Over the years, I endured people teasing my parents - usually behind their backs - for this decision, accusing them of desiring to turn their children into white people. I read how the notorious former Ugandan president Idi Amin, in the 70s, brazenly addressed the United Nations in his mother tongue. The Congolese despot Mobutu Sese Seko also showed allegiance to his local language by dumping his European names. More recently, the internationally acclaimed Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, after a successful career writing in English, decided to switch almost entirely to writing in his native Gikuyu. Upholding one's mother tongue over English appeared to be the ultimate demonstration of one's love of people and country - a middle finger raised in the face of British colonialism.

ee Kuan Yew, the first prime minister of Singapore, thought differently. When he replaced Chinese with English as the official medium of instruction in his country's schools, activists accused him of trying to suppress culture. The media portrayed him as "the oppressor in a government of 'pseudo foreigners who forget their ancestors'," as he explained in his autobiography, From Third World to First. But he believed the future of his country's children depended on their command of the language of the latest textbooks, which would undoubtedly be English.

"With English, no race would have an advantage," he wrote. "English as our working language has ... given us a competitive advantage because it is the international language of business and diplomacy, of science and technology. Without it, we would not have many of the world's multinationals and over 200 of the world's top banks in Singapore. Nor would our people have taken so readily to computers and the internet." Within a few decades of independence from Britain in 1965, Singapore had risen from poverty and disorder to become an economic powerhouse. The country's transformation under Lee's guidance is often described as dramatic.

My parents shared Lee's convictions. They hoped English would give their children an advantage. But, as potent as that reason might be, my father admitted to me that it was secondary. He had an even stronger motivation for preferring English: "We spoke it to set ourselves apart," he said. "Those of us who were educated wanted to distinguish ourselves from those who had money but didn't go to school."

Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani with her father and brothers in Umuahia in the early 1980s. Photograph: Courtesy of Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani

A perennial issue among the Igbo of south-eastern Nigeria is the battle between the mind and the purse; between certificate and cash. All over Nigeria, the Igbo are recognised for their entrepreneurial spirit and business acumen. From pre-colonial times to today, a majority of the country's successful traders and transporters have been Igbo. Many of them began as apprentices and worked their way up, never bothering with school. The Igbo are also known for ostentatiousness and flamboyance - those with great wealth usually find it difficult to be silent about it. While the moguls flaunted their cash, the educated members of my parents' generation flaunted their degrees, many from British and American schools. They might not have had the excess cash to fling at the masses during public functions or to acquire fleets of cars, but they could speak fluent English - an asset that was not available for purchase in stores.

I still remember strangers staring and smiling at us in wonder whenever my family talked among ourselves in public. Speaking English was just one way of showing off, especially when one lived, like my parents, in what was then a small, little-known town. Some of my parents' contemporaries distinguished themselves by appending their academic qualifications to their names. Apart from academics and medical doctors, it was common to hear people describe themselves as Architect Peter or Engineer Paul or Pharmacist Okoro.

My father's first degree was in economics, while my mother's was in sociology. They met during the civil war between the government of Nigeria and the secessionist Igbo state of Biafra, and they spoke to each other in English throughout their three years of courtship, long before any of their children were born. "That was one of the things that attracted your daddy to me," my mother said. "The way I spoke English fluently." Back then, villagers made fun of my father for his choice of wife. They sneered that his determination to marry a university graduate had blinded him to the choice of a woman who was so skinny that she could surely never carry children successfully in her womb. Even if female university graduates were scarce, couldn't he marry an uneducated woman and then send her to school?

he simmering resentment betweenthose with certificates and those with cash exploded to the surface in the 1990s, when the Nigerian economy plunged. Suddenly, it was not so difficult to find an educated wife willing to marry a man who could also take on the responsibility of her parents' and siblings' welfare. Whether or not he could speak English or read and write was immaterial. Around that same time, a significant number of uneducated but daring Igbo men found infamy and fortune by swindling westerners of millions through advance fee fraud, known locally as 419 scams. There were stories of learned men - professors and engineers and accountants - being openly scorned during community meetings. "Thank you for your speech, but how much money are you going to contribute?" they would be asked. "We are not here to eat English. Please, sit down and keep quiet." There were also stories of 419 scammers sneering back at those who mocked their incorrect English and inability to pronounce the names of their luxury cars. "You knows the name, I owns the car," they would say.

This longstanding battle between the mind and the wallet is probably why Igbo has suffered the most among Nigeria's three main languages. The other two, Yoruba and Hausa, despite facing threats from English as well, seem not to be doing as badly. Yoruba is one of the languages on a list of suggestions for London police officers to learn, while the BBC World Service's Hausa-language operation has a larger audience than any other. Meanwhile, Igbo is among the world's endangered languages, and there is a rising cry, especially among Igbo intellectuals, for drastic action to preserve and promote our mother tongue.

Many of the children who admired people like my family grew up determined that their own children would also speak English. My parents spoke excellent English - my father certified as an accountant in Britain, while my mother acquired a PGCE in education and then taught in London primary schools. They quoted Shakespeare and used words like "effluvium" in everyday speech. Not many of the new generation of parents speaking English to their children have a command of the language themselves. Unfortunately, the public school system in Nigeria has continued to deteriorate, and few parents can afford the private education that could provide their children with good English lessons. There is now an alarming number of young Igbo people who are not fluent in their mother tongue or in English.

y difficulty in communicating with Daa was not the only disadvantage of not being able to speak Igbo as a child. Each time it was my turn to stand and read to my primary school class from our recommended Igbo textbook, the pupils burst into grand giggles at my use of the wrong tones on the wrong syllables. Again and again, the teachers made me repeat. Each time, the class's laughter was louder. My off-key pronunciations tickled them no end.

But while the other pupils were busy giggling, I went on to get the highest scores in Igbo tests. Always. Because the tests were written, they did not require the ability to pronounce words accurately. The rest of the class were relaxed in their understanding of the language, and so treated it casually. I considered Igbo foreign to me, and approached the subject studiously. I read Igbo literature and watched Igbo programmes on TV. My favourite was a series of comedy sketches called Mmadu O Bu Ewu, which featured a live goat dressed in human clothing. After studying Igbo from primary school through to the conclusion of secondary school, I was confident enough in my knowledge to register the language as one of my university entrance exam subjects.

Everyone thought me insane. Taking a major local language exam as a prerequisite for university admission was not child's play. I was treading where expert speakers themselves feared to tread. Only two students in my entire school had chosen to take Igbo in these exams. But my Igbo score turned out to be good enough, when combined with my scores in the other two subjects I chose, to land me a place to study psychology at Nigeria's prestigious University of Ibadan.

Eager to show off my hard-earned skill, whenever I come across publishers of African publications - especially those who make a big deal about propagating "African culture" - I ask if I can write something for them in Igbo. They always say no. Despite all the "promoting our culture" fanfare, they understand that local language submissions could limit the reach of their publications.

Nwaubani's parents as a young couple in Nigeria, circa 1970. Photograph: Courtesy of Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani

Indigenous works form an essential part of a people's literary heritage, and there is definitely a place for them - but not, it seems, when it comes to world domination, or pushing beyond the boundaries of our nations and taking a place of influence on the world stage. Every single African writer who has gained some prominence on the global scene accomplished this on a platform provided by the west, to whom our local languages are of absolutely no significance.

Africans are no longer helplessly watching outsiders tell our own stories, as we did in past decades, but foreigners still retain the veto over the stories we tell. Publishers in Britain and America decide which of our narratives to present to the world. Then their judges decide which of us to award accolades - and subsequent fame. The literary audiences in our various countries usually watch and wait until the west crowns a new writer, then begin applauding that person. Local writers without some western seal of approval are automatically regarded by their compatriots as inferior.

The west is also where our books scoop the easiest sales. The west has better marketing and distribution structures, while those which exist in the majority of African countries are simply abysmal. Nigerians in Punxsutawney can have access to my novels if they so desire, and so can those in Pontypridd. But in my country, where online shopping is still an esoteric venture, my books are accessible to the public in only a handful of cities.

Over the past decade alone, a number of major literary prizes have been awarded to writers of African origin. Ngũgĩ has been rumoured as having been considered for the Nobel prize in literature. That would hardly have happened had he begun his career writing in Gikuyu. He would probably not even have been known beyond the peripheries of Kenya, where the prevalence of that local language begins and ends. As the Nigerian author Chinua Achebe noted in a 1964 essay: "Those of us who have inherited the English language may not be in a position to appreciate the value of the inheritance. Or we may go on resenting it because it came as part of a package deal which included many other items of doubtful value and the positive atrocity of racial arrogance and prejudice ... But let us not in rejecting the evil throw out the good with it."

Perhaps Ngũgĩ and some other African writers care little about westerners being able to read their works. It could be that Nobel prizes and sales figures mean absolutely nothing to them. Maybe they are quite content with a local audience - but the local audiences themselves may not be able to read the authors' books written in Gikuyu or Igbo or Chi.

Africa currently has the world's lowest literacy rates. Unesco reports that more than 1 in 3 adults in sub-Saharan Africa are unable to read and write, as are 47 million young people (ages 15-24). The region accounts for almost half of the 64 million primary school-aged children in the world who are not in school. Not even the English are born with the ability to read their language. They are taught - usually in schools.

I wonder how many literate Gikuyu speakers can read their language. I wonder how many have read Ngũgĩ's work. My parents, who have spoken Igbo their entire lives, can hardly read and write their mother tongue fluently. They were never taught. At the time they went to school, the colonials, whom we detest so much, were probably still busy transcribing our own mother tongues for us - from ideograms to the more universal Roman letters - to enable us begin to read and write our own local languages.

aa eventually got weary of modern life and sulked until my father allowed her to return to her village, where she eventually died peacefully in her sleep. But it was not until the 2000s that I finally understood her fascination with US wrestling, after a former colleague told me of how her aged grandmother, while visiting from her village and watching Jerry Springer for the first time, suddenly exclaimed in shock: "Ah! So white people fight?!"

All those years ago, Daa was probably equally intrigued to see white people punching each other on TV. Living in Umuahia, where the sight of a white person is still today so rare that it draws a crowd in the street, meant that the few Caucasians Daa had glimpsed in her lifetime were probably missionaries and colonial officers - most of whom were models of civilisation, poster boys of higher breeding. When she came to stay with my family, she must have been shocked by the uncharacteristic sight of white people acting so savagely on TV.

That said, having one language to dominate others must have reduced conflict. If, for example, we decided to dump English and use a mother tongue as the language of instruction in local schools, which of the at least 300 tongues in Nigeria or the 70 in Kenya or the 120 in Tanzania (and so on) would those countries use to teach their children? This would be more difficult than ever today, when many African societies are becoming urbanised, with different ethnic groups converging in the same locality. Which language should schools select and which should they abandon? How many fresh accusations of marginalisation would arise from this process?

Lee Kuan Yew pointed out in his book how a multitude of mother tongues could have been a major hindrance to Singapore's national security. Without a unifying language, the country's armed forces faced a huge risk: "We were saddled with a hideous collection of dialects and languages," he wrote, "and faced the prospect of going into battle without understanding each other."

In Africa's case, it would not just have been going to battle without understanding each other, but going to battle because we do not understand each other. The many wars around Africa are usually fought along ethnic lines. The lack of a common language would have further accentuated our differences, giving opportunity for yet more conflict. Languages like English have made Africa a more peaceful and unified region than it might have been. The contemptible colonials at least gave us an easy means of communicating with one another, preventing a Tower of Babel situation on the continent.

I attended a school in Nigeria where speaking your mother tongue was banned for that very reason. Shortly after the Nigerian civil war, which was instigated by venomous tribal sentiments, my country's government hatched the idea of special schools in every state. A quota system would ensure that as many ethnic groups as possible were represented in each of the "unity schools". For the first time in Nigeria's history, children from every region would have the opportunity to mix and to get to know one another beyond the fog of tribalism. We were taught to see ourselves as Nigerian, not Igbo or Hausa or Yoruba or whatever. Local languages were part of the curriculum, but speaking them beyond the classroom was a punishable offence.

It was not until university that I at last began to speak the language. In Ibadan, away from Igbo land and from the laughing voices, away from those who either did not allow me to speak Igbo or who did not believe I could speak it, I was finally free to open my mouth and express the words that had been bottled up inside my head for so many years - the words I had heard people in the market speak, the words I had read in books and heard on TV, the words my father had not permitted around the house.

Speaking Igbo in university was particularly essential if I was to socialise comfortably with the Igbo community there, as most of the "foreigners" in the Yoruba-dominated school considered it super-important to be seen talking our language in this strange land. " Suo n'asusu anyi! Speak in our language!" they often admonished when I launched a conversation with them in English. "Don't you hear the Yorubas speaking their own language?"

Thus, in a strange land far away from home, I finally became fluent in a language I had hardly uttered all my life. Today, few people can tell from my pronunciations that I grew up not speaking Igbo. "Your wit is even sharper in Igbo than in English," my mother insists. Strangely, whenever I am in the presence of anyone who knew me as a child, when I was not permitted to speak Igbo, my eloquence in the local tongue often regresses. I stammer, falter, repeat myself. Perhaps my tongue is tied by the recollection of their mockery.

Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, or sign up to the long read weekly email here.

This article was amended on 18 March 2019 to correctly render Lee Kuan Yew's name on second mention as Lee, rather than Yew, as per the conventions of names of Chinese origin.

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'We spoke English to set ourselves apart': how I rediscovered my mother tongue

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hen I was a child, my great-grandmother, whom we called Daa, came to live with my family in Umuahia in south-eastern Nigeria. My father had spent most of his infancy in her care, mostly during a period when his mother was preoccupied with her role as one of the founders of a local Assemblies of God church.

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Is this the end of Cockney? Hybrid dialect dubbed 'Multicultural London English' sweeps across the country

Linguistics professor identified the 'new cockney' hybrid dialect

It has West Indian and South Asian, Cockney and Estuary roots

The dialect is most prevalent in East London, among people with few opportunities

Can you Adam and Eve it? Cockney rhyming slang is being driven out by a new language sweeping across the country.

The hybrid dialect, which, like cockney, combines slang with a different pronunciation, has been dubbed Multicultural London English by linguistic researchers.

It was originally nicknamed Jafaican - fake Jamaican - but scientists have now said it is a dialect that been influences by West Indian, South Asian, Cockney and Estuary English.

Paul Kerswill, professor of socio-linguistics at York University, said: 'There are two things going on: youth slang, which a lot of people use.

'But there are [also] core users of MLE and to them it is a dialect and an accent. It doesn't have to have slang in it.

'It's a new kind of Cockney in a way.'

Rap artists such as Dizzee Rascal and Hackney-born actor Idris Elba have helped to popularise the dialect in the UK.

Though much of the slang is Afro-American or Jamaican in origin - with words such as 'blud' meaning friend and 'ends' meaning neighbourhood - the pronunciation is often not.

In MLE 'like' is pronounced 'lahke', but this 'ah' sound in place of the 'i' is not West Indian.

Mr Kerswill told the Sunday Times: 'It is an extension of just using the slang.

'BLUD, YOUR ENDZ IS BARE COTCH' - VOCABULARY FOR MLE LEARNERS

'All of these features have arisen out of the huge mix of languages and accents heard in some parts of London. This means they are home-grown.

'It's the slang that gives it a Caribbean or American feel and its use in British hip-hop adds to this impression, too.'

Like cockney, MLE users will omit or replace certain letters in words. The letters 'th' are usually replaced by an 'f' or 'v', as in 'fink' or 'muvver'.

But unlike cockney, MLE users do not drop their aitches.

The language is often picked up at a young age, and particularly in schools where 50 per cent of pupils have English as a second language.

Variants of MLE have also emerged in multicultural cities such as Birmingham and Manchester, Mr Kerswill said: 'A lot of the core speakers are in the East End of London, where they have low opportunities, and so one of the mechanisms when people find themselves unable to make progress in life or [are] discriminated against is to speak differently, to use that as an exclusionary strategy.'

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No more Cockney? 'Multicultural London English' sweeps the country

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Linguistics professor identified the 'new cockney' hybrid dialect It has West Indian and South Asian, Cockney and Estuary roots The dialect is most prevalent in East London, among people with few opportunities Can you Adam and Eve it? Cockney rhyming slang is being driven out by a new language sweeping across the country.

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Emily Ashton: Learn Jafaikan in two minutes

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Emily Ashton: Safe, man. You lookin buff in dem low batties. Dey's sick, man. Me? I'm just jammin wid me bruds. Dis my yard, innit? Is nang, you get me? No? What ends you from then? If this language sounds familiar, the chances are you're from inner-city London, where a new multicultural dialect is emerging.

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What accent do you like best? What accent would you most like your doctor to speak with?

The UK is lucky enough to have a fantastically wide range of accents and dialects (the two are different - accent refers specifically to the way you pronounce words, whereas dialect includes vocabulary, grammar and all aspects of language). We're also very sensitive to other accents, for many reasons. The great diversity itself is one reason: people speak so differently in places really not that far away, you can't help but notice it. Perhaps another is that our society is (and was even more so until recently) class-based, and 'having an accent' (i.e. speaking an accent other than Received Pronunciation) used to mean you were working-class. This was a Bad Thing if you were looking to get on in life, but equally 'speaking posh' could get you ridiculed among your peers.

Thankfully times have changed and now a regional accent shouldn't hold you back from getting that well-paid job or place at Cambridge. But we do still unconsciously make judgements about people based on the way they speak. This is a topic that's been extensively researched, and the results consistently come out the same. If you ask people to make judgments about a speaker based solely on their voice (under controlled conditions known as a 'matched guise' test), you find that people with accents like Yorkshire, Geordie and Glaswegian are considered to be friendly, honest, but not the sharpest tool in the box. Conversely, people who speak with an RP accent are thought to be haughty and unfriendly, but authoritative and intelligent.

For this reason, call centres are commonly based in places where the people speak with an accent that other people like and consider to be friendly. That's why half of Newcastle works in a call centre. Likewise, Irish always comes out well in popularity surveys. However, you'll not find many call centres deliberately using Birmingham, London or Liverpool speakers (personally, I've nothing against these accents, but they always get judged as 'thick' or 'untrustworthy' or just plain 'horrible'). Incidentally, 'Asian' was one accent cited by the BBC Your Voice site as one that people find 'unpleasant to listen to', which might actually be a result of the number of call centres outsourced to India. I can't imagine that people actually dislike the accent that much; it's a reaction to the associations it has. And actually, this is more generally the case:

"American listeners, who do not recognise a Birmingham accent when they hear one, who know nothing about Birmingham and who probably don't even know where it is, do not find the Birmingham accent unpleasant at all. And everything they know about London leads them to find London accents highly attractive." (Bad Language, page 136: Andersson and Trudgill, 1990)

Anyway, I've recently had reason to think about this because I've been spending an inordinate amount of time talking to people in call centres. I had quite a lot of problems with my broadband (it was rubbish) and before I could get out of my contract, Virgin needed me to do the same things (changing the name of the network, plugging it into a different socket, etc.) over and over again with about six different 'technical advisors'. None of this worked, of course, but because I talked to so many different people, I noticed that they all spoke with a strong Welsh accent (I'd guess South Wales, I think).

I don't know if it was a deliberate decision on the part of Virgin to locate their call centre in Cardiff/Swansea/wherever - a few years ago the Welsh accent was not a popular one, but I think that's changed now, when more celebrities have a Welsh accent (Alex Jones, who presents the One Show on the BBC, springs to mind). I recall noticing similarly that BT's technical support (though not all their call centres) was in Ireland. Now, all right, these accents are liked and the speakers thought to be friendly and down-to-earth. But you'll recall, they are not thought to be intelligent. When I talk to a technical person, I want to think that they are authoritative and know what the hell they're doing when they're getting me to scrat about on the floor plugging different cables into things. This would indicate that technical bods should be recruited from among speakers of RP (or as close as it gets these days).

Now I've moved to Plusnet (going well so far, so fingers crossed it stays that way) which makes a big thing about being a Yorkshire company. In fact, they're a subsidiary of BT, and when I rang I spoke to a non-Yorkshire person, but anyhow. It's their big selling-point, and they say things like 'Good honest broadband from Yorkshire' and 'By 'eck that's good'. They're selling their brand as being good value, honest, salt-of-the-earth, not-like-those-cheating-buggers-from-the-South. They advertise that they have UK-based call centres (not Yorkshire-based). I hope never to have to speak to someone in their technical department but I'd be interested to know where it is.

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What accent do you like best? What accent would you most like your doctor to speak with? The UK is lucky enough to have a fantastically wide range of accents and dialects (the two are different - accent refers specifically to the way you pronounce words, whereas dialect includes vocabulary, grammar and all aspects of language).

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The changes in the accent can even be noted in the Royal Family.

While older members such as the Queen and Prince Charles still use traditional RP, younger royals like the Duke of Cambridge and Prince Harry now speak the younger form.

In fact, such are the changes that linguists have suggested that the Duke of Cambridge's accent is now less refined than that of his wife, who speaks in more traditional RP.

The changing nature of the accent has been highlighted by an ongoing study at the British Library.

Researchers there have amassed a database of 15,000 readings by members of the public of the children's book Mr Tickle. The story book, by Roger Hargreaves, was chosen because it provides a good range of all the vowels and consonants that vary according to accent. Those taking part could submit a recording online, or by visiting the library.

They believe it gives an excellent sample to record the changes that RP, described as the regionally neutral middle class accent of England, is undergoing.

Jonnie Robinson, a curator and linguist at the library, said: "RP isn't dying out. It is simply changing as a linguistic entity. Just like a Yorkshire accent now will be different from one from a century ago, it is still defined by the same things.

"RP has changed quite dramatically over the last 50 years. Now, people are speaking a more relaxed, modern RP."

Speakers of the more modern variety include Fiona Bruce and Emily Maitlis, the BBC broadcasters, while more traditional RP speakers include Joanna Lumley, the actress, Jeremy Paxman, the broadcaster, and Boris Johnson, the mayor of London.

Mr Robinson suggested that also among "modern RP" speakers were the Prince Harry and the Duke of Cambridge, but possibly not his wife, whose pronunciation of certain vowel sounds are more traditional RP.

He added: "The Duchess of Cambridge is arguably posher than her husband and his brother. William and Harry are more modern in their interests. They are quite clearly still RP, but not particularly posh RP.

"Kate has focused on her voice. She always strikes me as more careful. They are both clearly RP but given that he is a royal and she isn't, you would expect him to be posher, but I'm not sure he is."

Previous analysis on changes to RP have focused on the more obvious use of the glottal stop, replacing the "t" sounds in words like "bottle". But linguists believe that is a more self-conscious affectation by RP speakers, to make their voice less posh, than the loss of the dipthong.

Although it is one of the most scrutinised and best known of all English accents, RP has only ever been spoken by around three per cent of the population.

Many middle class people in southern England with seemingly neutral accents share many of its aspects in their speech, but use some regional vowel sounds that distinguish them from true RP speakers.

The accent is actually relatively young in linguistic terms having emerged from nineteenth century public schools.

The advent of broadcasting technology and the BBC ensured its cultural spread in the early twentieth century, as it became the standard voice heard on the corporation.

It was adopted by the expanding middle class and represented an aspirational symbol of social status.

But just as the BBC has encouraged a wider range of accents in recent decades, experts have claimed RP has been on the decline, in the face of a rise of so-called estuary English, a resurgence of other regional accents and the creep of American pronunciations and intonation.

Melvyn Bragg, the broadcaster, is among those to have predicted its demise, having studied the accent for a BBC Radio 4 series.

What type of RP do you speak?

Poor

Poo-er - Traditional

Paw - Modern

Mature

Matchewer - Traditional

Matchoor - Modern

Beer

Bee-er - Traditional

Bih - Modern

Near

Knee-er - Traditional

Nih - Modern

Foot

Fut - Traditional

Fooot - Modern

Roll

Rowel - Traditional

Rowol - Modern

Old

Eweld - Traditional

Oweld - Modern

Hair

Heeh-er - Traditional

Heeh - Modern

Good

Good - Traditional

Gud - Modern

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Prince William's cut-glass accent is a little less polished than Kate Middleton's

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The changes in the accent can even be noted in the Royal Family. While older members such as the Queen and Prince Charles still use traditional RP, younger royals like the Duke of Cambridge and Prince Harry now speak the younger form.

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From the London Evening Standard, 4 March 1999. This article was triggered by Beryl Bainbridge's demand that regional accents should be eradicated -- and particularly Scouse, the accent of Liverpool, where she comes from.

The novelist Beryl Bainbridge believes that all children should have elocution lessons to wipe out their regional accents. In receiving an award on Tuesday, she said that being taught to abandon her own Liverpool voice had helped her career no end. As for the kids on Brookside, "They don't speak the English language," she said.

Audrey Hepburn as Liza Doolittle
learns her 'a' from her 'eh'
from Rex Harrison's Mr Higgins

Ms Bainbridge is a writer. How her writing was improved by elocution is a mystery, but this we must take on trust. More to the point is her falling into the Pygmalion trap. Speaking intelligibly, which means with coherent grammar, is quite different from speaking with a particular accent. What, for instance, would she do about London?

I heard Ms Bainbridge speak last month at the Ken Livingstone rally at Central Hall. She used the slightly flattened vowels of educated Camden, yet she referred to her adored Ken as the "real voice" of London. I wonder what she would do to his accent. Mr Livingstone has made something of a trademark of his voice. It is not cockney, neither is it the cockney refinement now called estuary. It has a slightly nasal Midlands twang, as of pre-Irish northwest London. Indeed if I were Shaw's Professor Higgins I would place Mr Livingstone as white-collar-London-and-Birmingham-Railway.

Higgins, of course, was the master of snobbish phonetics. From hearing Pickering talk he could reel off his pedigree as "Cheltenham, Harrow, Cambridge, India". He rudely demanded of Eliza, in Covent Garden, "How do you come to be up so far east? You were born in Lisson Grove." All she had said so far was, "Keptin, n'baw ya flahr orf a pore gel ... Will ye-oo pie me f'them?" He boasted he could name anyone's neighbourhood to within two miles, indeed within two streets. For an appropriate fee he could turn Kentish Town into Park Lane, or take Eliza from Covent Garden to her "Bucknam Pellis".

But Higgins, like Ms Bainbridge, was struggling after a "London voice" that has simply ceased to exist. In the North of England, a London accent tends to mean anything posh. Sometimes London is code for "received" or "standard" or BBC English. Yet it can also be code for the opposite. In a Costa del Sol identity parade, London means yobbish. The Queen's own English is now wonderfully archaic. Dearly is still pronounced "deahleah" and people take tea on teebles and cheers. But when Eliza Doolittle's father talks of being "in me prime", as would his descendants today, it was equally London. It is no more wrong than the pukka "sez" is wrong for "says".

In the film Sliding Doors all eyes may have been on the face of the American Gwyneth Paltrow, but all ears should have been on her voice. She had studiously attuned it to that of an upwardly mobile west London career girl. Her "Notting Hill" English was a welding of a debased "Princess Diana" to the diphthongs of working-class London: "I've go'a'geh'on with my work." The voice is that of thousands of young people eager for a voice that can merge into the verbal Muzak of the city. They must pass muster at dinners and weddings, yet they will strangle their vowels and clip their consonants not to seem out of place in a pub or workplace. Tracing these chameleons across the map of London would test even a Henry Higgins.

Such accents have much to do with the subtle gradations of class in a big city. In London, accent is a way in which groups and neighbourhoods define and defend themselves against newcomers. I am told that old-established residents of Whitechapel regard cockney as aristocratic alongside the near-incomprehensible Bengali-cockney of Brick Lane. But such accents and dialects are neither right nor wrong. Only grammar can be judged in those terms. We do not regard Scotsmen or Irishmen as not speaking properly because of their distinctive accents. So why an East Ender?

I am all for teaching grammar. Speaking clearly is the key to writing clearly and spelling correctly, until, that is, Bernard Shaw's campaign to rationalise spelling comes to glorious fruition (or glorius frewishon). But accent is different. It is not about clarity or meaning but about family and locality. London's accents have always been the building blocks of English, drawn from the entrepts of the docks and the markets. Like that ultimate verbal melting pot, cockney, they take on the colouring of the city's passing tribes, using, adapting and discarding at will. London English is incomparably the richer for such ethnic imports as clobber and conk, sucker and bunkum, pal, moll, bloke and boozer. It may be that nobody says cor blimey, guv any more. But effing and blinding are working up the social scale. Young Londoners now use West Indian slang as if it were their own: like ... man ... fat ... cool ... wicked.

Some London dialect is charmingly Old English, as in "He was that stuck up" or "I give 'im what for". Some is overtly ethnic, like the Jewish "already". Some of these are anthropological gems. But as William Matthews says in his book Cockney Past and Present, today's London English is England's English tomorrow. Words and pronunciations enter the language through London. They are tested there, in street and pub, before being received as somehow official.

Aristocratic England used to talk with a regional accent, as most of aristocratic Scotland still does. But like the upper-class voice a century ago, the nation's middle-class voice is now merging with middle-class London, as if to give itself national colouring. I find that a pity. It deadens local variety and standardises an aspect of English culture that has no need of standardisation. But then London English is itself becoming standardised. It, too, is killing variety and blurring the boundaries between class and ethnic origin. We are all saying "awrigh" for all right, yeah for yes, or Tony Blair's "Amean ... lessfaysit ... innit?"

The fun of London English has always been its variety and its resistance to the likes of Higgins and Bainbridge. Keep it that way. By all means teach grammar: give young people the weapons to make words their servants, not their masters. But God forbid that the national curriculum should ever get its hands on the kaleidoscope that is the London voice. Wassrong? Issokay, innit?

Associated Newspapers Ltd., 04 March 1999

Back to the Estuary English page

Placed on the web 1999 03 05 JCW

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From the London Evening Standard, 4 March 1999. This article was triggered by Beryl Bainbridge's demand that regional accents should be eradicated -- and particularly Scouse, the accent of Liverpool, where she comes from. The novelist Beryl Bainbridge believes that all children should have elocution lessons to wipe out their regional accents.

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The distinctive accent of upper-crust Britain is in danger of extinction, neglected by its owners and threatened by rougher accents off the streets. No wonder some want to put it in a zoo, where it can be studied and admired before it expires.

Last week the actress Prunella Scales said she had been to the National Sound Archive to make a library of "posh" speech, to help young actors play characters in Wilde, Coward and Shaw, whose voices are increasingly remote from their own.

She may be too late. Once, people aspired to speak posh: it was the voice of the people in power - in the law, in the City, in the Establishment. Now there are plenty of people who would be ashamed to speak like that. A posh voice is seen as naff and unfashionable. The most chic tones reflect the timbre of the newly powerful. The voice of the moment is that of Zoe Ball and her ilk.

There never was just one "posh" accent. Crispin Jewitt, director of the archive at the British Library, has tapes of numerous subclasses going back as far as Gladstone. "But," says Jewitt, "people's expectations may not be quite met by what we find to be authentic." In other words, Eliza Doolittle and Henry Higgins would not have sounded as we imagine them in Pygmalion -- and certainly not as they did in the Hollywood film My Fair Lady.

Andrew Wade, head of voice at the Royal Shakespeare Company, supports research to find appropriate accents for a particular piece, but warns that, among young actors, accents are a delicate matter. As, indeed, they are for everyone.

Actors of Prunella Scales's generation tend to sound like Laurence Olivier and Joan Plowright, even when they were brought up in one room in Bermondsey. The training process stripped them of all audible signs of class and regional origin. Now the pendulum has swung again, and nobody is proud to speak posh. Instead they want to declaim their origins as much as does the blank verse of the Bard. Actors, says Ward, want to "come from their root sound": to take their own natural accent, be it Geordie or Brum, as their starting point. And the RSC accommodates them: Shakespeare no longer has to speak Received Pronunciation (RP) - and hardly anyone else wants to do so either.

RP is the educated English accent, of which "posh" is only one variant. It may well be on the wane after 400 years of cultural dominance. First identified by name in 1869, RP was standardised in the public schools in the 19th century. But it had begun in the 16th century, as a court- based variant on the London speech of the day.

Modern linguists have noted different strains. The upper class voice, still used by older members of the royal family, is called "U-RP", the U presumably coming from the U and Non-U craze of the 1950s. It has a curious kinship with Cockney: both prefer "buggah orf!" to `bugger off!'.

The posh accent won't die out completely as long as Television's Two Fat Ladies command an audience. It continues to echo round the doggy halls and flagstoned kitchens of the nation's country "hices". It shrieks in the editorial offices of some of our leading magazines. Sometimes it is turned on the unfortunate shop assistants of Cheltenham.

But its institutional presence is reduced. The speaking clock is no longer a schoolmarm. The disembodied voice on the London Underground now says "Mind the gap" rather than "Mend the gep".

Auntie BBC spoke RP as late as the 1960s, especially on its children's programmes. But most RP speakers have adopted a compromise form called "mainstream" or "modified" RP, and it is that which the BBC reserves for news and funerals. Elsewhere, of course, it sounds like everything from a stroppy teenager to a football hooligan to a kind health visitor wondering whether you'd like your food cut up.

Traditional RP is spoken by only some 3 per cent of the population: it is much more popular with the 1.5 billion speakers of English abroad - which is why the "best" English is sometimes said to be spoken in Calcutta. Some commentators, notably Beryl Bainbridge, fear that if RP dies, our common culture will go with it. Is this clutch of phonemes all that keeps us from the Dark Ages?

All accents change, says Dr Clive Upton, lecturer in English Language at the University of Leeds, who supervises pronunciation for the Oxford dictionaries. A modern Henry Higgins, except that his vowels retain a touch of his native Warwickshire, his work records how people speak different accents to their parents. They change accents during their own lives. They also speak differently for different audiences, even without going so far as Tony Blair.

In the 1960s, Upton notes, Princess Anne was known to her mother as "Enn". But she has always pronounced her name "Ann". When Prince Andrew married, he gave his name as "Andrew". The Archbishop of Canterbury, from an older generation, persisted in calling him "Endrew".

Upton applauds the "democratisation" of RP, which is no longer the language of a "tight little Establishment group". He is wary of overtly political arguments, but notes that some have suggested that "posh" RP - with its non-phonetic behaviour, difficult "pure" vowels, distinctive "U" vocabulary and traps for the unwary - was ideally suited for the task of separating Us from Them.

U-RP was the tribal dialect of an inward-looking social group who needed to command but rarely to mix. But life has changed. To speak to people outside your circle, and get them to employ you, you sometimes have to speak their language.

In any case, all accents are changing. Working people are speaking a "near-RP" because they now have to deal with people all over the country. The old regional dialects were fine for working the same fields as your grandparents, but less effective in a computerised call centre.

Village-by-village linguistic variation, recorded as late as the 1950s, has given way to vague regional accents. Some suspect that RP itself will be replaced by Estuary English, the near-Cockney employed across the whole of the Southeast and generously spread across the nation by the broadcasters. But television and radio, says Upton, can't permanently change people's accents. To learn an accent, you have to speak it.

Dorothy Daniels is an elocution teacher in Cheltenham. Her clients sometimes want to lose their native accents: one wanted to make herself less obviously South African.

"She wanted to blend in," she recalls, and that is a common motivation. People enter new lives, and they want to fit. "A lot of them don't make it," she says. "It's not an easy thing to lose an accent. It's like the nose on your face. You can change it ever so slightly, but there's not a great deal you can do with it."

But accents characterise a person, often unfairly. And their associations change. It is not long since Scouse meant native wit and charm: now it is associated with fecklessness. Brum sounds miserable. Cockney sounds devious and aggressive. West Country speakers, among whom I proudly include myself, sound like simpletons. How did the late Lord Denning get where he did while sounding like someone who'd come round to cut the hedges?

Some RP speakers complain that their accents make them the subject of prejudice. But those with pronounced regional accents have always experienced that. At Bristol Grammar School in the early 1970s, one boy was kept out of "Top of The Form" team because his Bristolian voice was declared by the school to be "unsuitable for broadcasting". I know this to be true, because I'm only just getting over it.

Those who cling to the notion of RP as "correct", "clear", "beautiful" speech are not telling the whole truth. In its upper-class form it is none of these, being full of irrational elisions and slack articulation. It thrived because it was the language of the dominant class: Estuary, the language of footballers, Spice Girls and DJs, may succeed for the same reasons.

What really matters is clarity of communication, which is why elocution continues to earn its crust now that the Rain in Spain has dried up and the Brown Cow has gone off for rendering. "Good speech should not be noticeable," insists Daniels, whose own speech is admirably clear - and a long way from Prunella Scales as HM the Queen. "You should notice what's being said, not the way it's being spoken."

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Focus: The accent that dare not speak its name

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The distinctive accent of upper-crust Britain is in danger of extinction, neglected by its owners and threatened by rougher accents off the streets. No wonder some want to put it in a zoo, where it can be studied and admired before it expires.

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Accent on common ground as Miliband takes on Russell Brand's estuary twang

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Labour leader swapping his north London speech for Brand's mockney shows he really wants to get on with comedian, and presumably his 9.5m Twitter followers

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1 IN 5 PEOPLE CHANGE THEIR ACCENTS ACCORDING TO WHO THEY ARE WITH

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1 IN 5 PEOPLE CHANGE THEIR ACCENTS ACCORDING TO WHO THEY ARE WITH

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According to a survey published last week, much to the horror of some commentators, one in five British people changes their accent depending on whom they're speaking to.

I'm horrified too. One in five? Is that all? The true figures are lower even than that, since a significant proportion of the accent-changers are thickening their existing accent because they're so proud of it, which doesn't count. I would have hoped to see at least 70% of my compatriots adjusting their voices from sheer self-loathing.

I remember once going to play in a private poker game at Aspinalls, run by a group of charming aristocrats. I walked there with an old bookie friend; we littered the pavement with Hs and Ts from Marble Arch to Mayfair. If you dropped as many stitches as we dropped consonants, you'd have knitted a piece of string.

Arriving at the elegant, members-only gaming club, awed by its glittering chandeliers and sweeping staircase, I heard myself say to the top-hatted doorman: "Hellair, we're har for the game upstars." Transformed, by a mere doorway, from Dick Van Dyke to the Duchess of Devonshire.

But that's normal, isn't it? You change the way you speak, usually without even noticing, because you assume the person you're talking to is better than you are. Imagine assuming the opposite! Dreadful! That's a level of confidence suitable only for racing drivers and the French. (Or "zee French", as I call them when I'm in France.)

You pretend to be like other people. Whether they're posher or less posh than you, more or less northern, more or less southern, they're not you so they're bound to be a bit less of a tit.

The British are supposed to be self-doubting rather than self-righteous - since the dissolution of empire, anyway. It's one of the things I'm most patriotic about. From our awkwardness and embarrassment has sprung a complexity of literature, comedy and pop music that no other country can touch, for all their sunny weather and expressive street carnivals. You don't get Fawlty Towers, Morrissey and Martin Amis from a nation that likes itself.

The estuary twang from a public school boy, the refined little "haitch" from a Hyacinth Bouquet, the mysterious vowels of someone pretending not to be from Birmingham: these are all friendly little signs saying: "I'm no threat to you, honestly; given half a chance I'd erase my entire self and start again."

Where has it gone, this pavement-staring, this apologising, this fear of not being good enough? I'm sure it started with Big Brother. Over its first, groundbreaking couple of series on Channel 4, a truism spread that its contestants should "just be themselves". That was the way to win, to be liked.

By its third, fourth and fifth series, the contestants (like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, when he's lost all sense of how to let things happen naturally) had stopped demonstrating that they were "just being themselves" and started simply stating that to the camera.

"That's just me," they would say. "It's how I am. Speak as I find. Tell it how I see it. I'm like that, me."

Soon, reality TV had taken over the airwaves like a virus; every programme featured "normal people" insisting that they were "just being themselves". Pretending to be something you're not, the culture decided, was the very worst of crimes.

Meanwhile, daytime talk shows championed the principle of "pride in yourself", with everyone on them, whether they were size 24 or sleeping with their brother's girlfriend, shouting: "I'm proud of who I am! I won't live by anyone else's rules!" - and usually getting a standing ovation for it.

By the time The Apprentice came along, contestants were openly stating their best qualities. "No point telling a lie: I'm just brilliant. I'm a hard worker, a great thinker, a natural leader. I just am. That's me."

On Come Dine With Me, the honesty became open rudeness. "I'm a great cook. Cheryl is crap. And her house is poky and her dog's too small."

It stands to reason: the more you "believe in yourself", the worse others seem. If you're not looking inside at your own faults, you're looking out at others'. As self-deprecation disappears, it is replaced by a million fingers on internet keyboards calling strangers ugly, stupid and wrong.

There is never any need to change your accent, obviously. As long as you're comprehensible, all speaking voices are fine. I hope we are long past the point where anyone hears natural authority in a posh accent, or servility in its opposite. I'm just grateful for any sign, in these days of rock-hard public confidence, that a person is a little unsure of themselves.

That is why, last week, I felt a wave of affection for George Osborne. In a remarkably old-fashioned move, he went all mockney-sparrer for a speech to Morrisons workers in Kent. If you haven't heard it, do Google it. Look out especially for the line: "We've 'ad a system where people oo do the right thing felt penalised for it."

Why, he's human! He's not one of those crazy-eyed sociopaths who are fuelled to power by an unshakable certainty that everything about them is right! He's noticed that people laugh at him for being a toff and he's felt stung. He's self-conscious. When he hears his own voice, now, it echoes round his head like an impression of the Queen on speed.

Standing up in front of a crowd of supermarket workers, at least half of whom he probably fears are manlier than he is - he bets they can do stuff like plumbing and sexy vest-wearing - he's tried to rub the edges off.

OK, it's come out like Robin Askwith in Confessions of a Window Cleaner, but I love him for it.

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George Osborne, gawd bless yer | Victoria Coren

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According to a survey published last week, much to the horror of some commentators, one in five British people changes their accent depending on whom they're speaking to. I'm horrified too. One in five? Is that all?

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1 IN 5 PEOPLE CHANGE THEIR ACCENTS ACCORDING TO WHO THEY A

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1 IN 5 PEOPLE CHANGE THEIR ACCENTS ACCORDING TO WHO THEY A

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Stephanie McGovern, who now works on BBC Breakfast, said she was viewed by "some in the organisation" as unsuitable, because of her Teesside voice.

She claimed one editor finally "took a gamble" on her even while other managers believed the decision to be "mad".

"Despite being a business journalist at the BBC for ten years, working behind the scenes on our high-profile news programmes, I was viewed by some in the organisation to be "too common for telly"," she told the Radio Times.

"I remember at the end of one BBC job interview being told by the manager: 'I didn't realise people like you were clever'. Sad, but true."

The presenter added viewers now comment on her voice "every day, without fail", with one telling her to "get back to my council estate and leave the serious work to the clever folk".

She said many assume she "can't use the English language correctly", adding: "It's inevitable that not everyone will like me, and that some will find me annoying. That's fine. All presenters deal with that.

"What's scary is the ignorance about what having a regional accent means, or indeed doesn't mean. It certainly doesn't equal ignorance."

McGovern added there are still some viewers who will not accept that "someone with my accent can have a brain", meaning she receives regular abuse about it.

She said: "I've had tweets questioning whether I really did go to university because surely I would have lost my accent if I did; a letter suggesting, very politely, that I get correction therapy; and an email saying I should get back to my council estate and leave the serious work to the clever folk."

Follow @Telegraph_TV

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BBC news presenter thought 'too common for telly' because of northern accent

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Stephanie McGovern, who now works on BBC Breakfast, said she was viewed by "some in the organisation" as unsuitable, because of her Teesside voice. She claimed one editor finally "took a gamble" on her even while other managers believed the decision to be "mad".

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At the back of a London bus, two teenagers are engaged in animated conversation. "Safe, man," says one. "Dis my yard. It's, laahhhk, nang, innit? What endz you from? You're looking buff in them low batties."

"Check the creps," says the other. "My bluds say the skets round here are nuff deep."

"Wasteman," responds the first, with alacrity. "You just begging now." The pair exit the vehicle, to blank stares of incomprehension.

Later, this dialogue is related to Gus, a 13-year-old who attends an inner London comprehensive; he wastes no time in decoding it.

''Safe just means hi,'' he says briskly. "Your yard is like your home, where you're from. Nang just means good. Your endz is your neighbourhood. Buff is, like, attractive. Low batties are trousers that hang really low on your waist. Creps are trainers. Bluds are your mates. Skets are sort of slutty girls. Nuff means very. Deep is the same as harsh or out of order. Wasteman is what you say to someone when you're fed up with them. And begging," he concludes, with a flourish, "means chatting rubbish."

There's more: butters means ugly, hype is excitement, bare is a lot, cotching is hanging around, and allow it is a plea to leave something or someone alone. "Everyone in my school speaks like this," says Gus, a little wearily. "It's because you hear the cool kids saying these words and then you have to do it too. You've got to know them all and you've got to keep up. Nobody wants to be uncool," he adds, with a shudder. "That's, like..."

Sick?

"No, sick is good," he says patiently. "I guess it would just be, you know, deep."

Gus and his ilk have been caught up in an emerging linguistic phenomenon. Researchers have found that, while most traditional cockney speech patterns have followed traditional cockneys as they've migrated out to Essex and Kent and other points beyond the M25, teenagers in inner London, one of the world's most ethnically diverse areas, are forging a separate multi-ethnic youth-speak based on common culture rather than ethnic or social background. Multiculturalism may have become a political hot potato for everyone from Daily Mail leader writers to Trevor Phillips, but anyone passing a metropolitan playground will realise that, linguistically at least, the melting-pot patois is already a reality from Tooting to Tower Hamlets.

"It is likely that young people have been growing up in London exposed to a mixture of second-language English and varieties of English from other parts of the world, as well as local London English, and that this new variety has emerged from that mix," says Sue Fox, a language expert from London University's Queen Mary College, who's in the middle of a three-year project called Linguistics Innovators: The Language of Adolescents in London, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. Fox and her colleagues have studied the speech patterns of a sample of teenagers across the capital. "One of our most interesting findings," she says, "was that we'd have groups of students from white Anglo-Saxon backgrounds, along with those of Arab, South American, Ghanaian and Portuguese descent, and they all spoke with the same dialect. But those who use it most strongly are those of second or third generation immigrant background, followed by white boys of London origin and then white girls of London origin."

The dialect is heavy with Jamaican and Afro-Caribbean inflections; words are clipped, as opposed to the cockney tendency to stretch vowels (thus face becomes fehs, as in "look a' mi fehs"), and certain words - creps, blud (thought to relate to blood, as in brother) and sket, are Jamaican in origin. This has led some in the media to invoke Ali G and Radio 1 DJ and "wigga" Tim Westwood, and dub the patois Jafaican, though Fox points out that Indian, West African, and even Australian slang (nang is an Aussie term, as is dag, meaning uncool) are just as much in evidence, as are new variants - saying raaait in lieu of right, for instance - whose origin remains obscure.

"The term Jafaican gives the impression that there's something fake about the dialect, which we would (omega) refute," she says. "As one young girl who lives in outer London said of her eight-year-old cousin who lives in inner London, 'People say he speaks like a black boy, but he just speaks like a London boy.' The message is that people are beginning to sound the same regardless of their colour or ethnic background. So we prefer to use the term Multicultural London English (MLE). It's perhaps not as catchy," she says, "but it comes closer to what we're trying to describe."

In the half-century since teenagers first came of socio-cultural age as a distinct demographic, their relationship to the rest of society can be described as a tense stand-off punctuated by howls of hormonal turbulence. "Don't laugh at a youth for his affectations," said the US essayist Logan Pearsall Smith. "He is only trying on one face after another, to find a face of his own." Over the years, the faces have included provocations ranging from skinheads to hoodies, but the advent of MLE is believed to mark the first time that teenagers have consciously used language to stake out their own territory ("I can't understand a word he's saying sometimes," bemoans Gus's mother, in perfect following-the-script style). Professor Paul Kerswill of Lancaster University, who is leading the Linguistics Innovators study, believes it's no accident that teenagers should be the early adopters of MLE.

"Adolescence is the life stage at which people most willingly take on new visible or audible symbols of group identification," he says. " Thus, fashions specific to this age group change rapidly. Fashion and music often go together, and these in turn are often associated with social class and ethnicity. The same is true of language. It's most obviously observable in terms of slang and new ways of expressing themselves, such as the substitute of 'I'm, like' for 'I said' or 'I thought' a few years ago." (This was the most blatant manifestation of Rising-Interrogative Valley-Girl speak - as in "I'm, like, so over him? But he's, like, totally bugging me?" - that was the preferred lingua franca among teenage girls before the rise of MLE). "What we're seeing with MLE is qualitatively different," continues Kerswill. "It's a real dialect rather than simply a mode of speech, and there's already evidence that it's spreading to other multicultural cities like Birmingham, Bristol and Manchester. It'll become more mainstream through force of numbers and continued migration, and because it's considered cool."

Kerswill and his fellow researchers believe a "perfect storm" of circumstances has arisen to ensure the rapid dissemination of MLE: a nexus of immigration, population mobility, and a wave of successful London garage stars (and MLE speakers) such as Lady Sovereign and Dizzee Rascal. The face of MLE could well be MIA, a Sri Lankan-born rapper raised on an estate in Hounslow, west London; her single Galang contains the refrain "London calling, speak the slang now".

"You can hear this music on a national basis," says (omega) G Money, a DJ at 1Xtra, the BBC's urban radio station. "It's not something you have to search for on the pirate networks any more. And it's definitely having an influence. I was in Watford recently and the kids there were no different to the ones you see in London. They all dress the same and they all speak the same."

The rise of MLE is happening at a time when Kerswill and his team are seeing a general trend across the UK toward dialect levelling - the process whereby people in different parts of the country sound more and more like each other as their local accents and dialects die out and everyone, from the Prime Minister downwards, speaks a form of elided-vowel Estuary English. " Dialect levelling is strongest in new towns such as Milton Keynes" says Kerswill. "Local accents - what we call dialect solidarity - tend to s urvive in close-knit communities, most of which are working class. It's interesting, for example, that Liverpool seems to be getting more scouse. Population make-up would be a factor, as well as what some linguists would call 'neighbour opposition' with its arch-rival Manchester. It's a question of identity."

Kerswill believes that levellings versus solidarities will have a bearing on the future of MLE. Concerns have already been raised about its ubiquity, with the Lilian Baylis School in Kennington, South London, banning the patois as part of a government pilot project to improve results. "We're not trying to devalue it," says Gary Phillips, the school's head. " We're trying to teach the kids that its time and place is not in the standard English world of formal essays or debates." But the crunch for MLE could come when its adherents move out of their close-knit teen community and enter the dialect-levelling world of adulthood.

"We don't quite know whether kids will un-acquire MLE as fast as they've picked it up," concedes Kerswill. "The indications are that it depends very much on people's social networks and aspirations. Those who go into university or highly-paid jobs will change their speech. Those who remain where they are will most likely retain a lot of it. Most people are doubtless somewhere in the middle, and will change to some extent. But that will open the way for MLE to lead to changes in the English language in its spoken form, at least. One conclusion that we have definitely drawn from this study," he concludes, "is that English is one of the most dynamically protean of all languages."

Back at the sharp end of the socio-linguistic coal-face, Gus would have to agree. "The words change all the time," he says wearily. " It's, like," (even in his out-of-school Standard English, he pronounces this "laaahhhkk") "you have to learn a whole new vocabulary every few months just to keep on top of it. It's like, just recently, swag now means bad."

And that's not nang?

"Allow it," he proclaims, switching effortlessly into standard MLE. "It's all getting bare swag."

Slang Dictionary Not getting props in the hood? Then read on, blud

Air

Definition Something that's rubbish. Also used to describe being ignored

Usage "You got air"

Other terms dissed

Bait

Definition Obvious, stupid

Usage "You're so bait man"

Other terms Waste, clown

Ballin'

Definition Making or having lots of money

Usage "What you ballin' now?"

Other terms Flossing

Bare

Definition Lots, many and good; high in quantity and quality

Usage "I got bare jokes man"

Other terms Nuff

Blud

Definition Friend

Usage "What's happenin' blud?"

Other terms Bredrin, fam, man dem

Boyed

Definition Being insulted, publicly put-down or humiliated

Usage "You got boyed!"

Other terms Chiefed, hotted, had up

Brapp!

Definition Exclamation of approval, usually accompanied by "throwing" gun-shaped hands in the air to mimic some Jamaican badman's habit of firing gunshots in the air to show the DJ their approval

Usage "Brapp! Brapp! That bar was heavy!"

Other terms Zoop! Zoop!

Breading

Definition Sucking up to someone, kissing arse

Usage "Why you breading?"

Other terms On his balls

Bubblin'

Definition Feeling the vibe

Usage "Yeah, I'm bubblin'"

Other terms On this ting

Bustin'

Definition Wearing something

Usage "My man's bustin' his trousers low"

Other teams Rocking, pushing

Choong

Definition Attractive

Usage "That girl is choooong, blud"

Other terms Buff, fly

Chops

Definition Jewellery

Usage "I can't find my chops!"

Other terms Bling, ice, chaps

Clown

Definition Derogatory term - idiot

Usage "Shut up, clown"

Other terms Joker, wasteman/woman

Cotch

Definition To kick back and relax at home alone or with close friends, to do as little as possible

Usage "I'm been cotchin' in my crib for time"

Other terms Chill

Creps

Definition Trainers

Usage "Yo, fresh creps, blood"

Other terms Kicks, boogers, sneaks

Cussin'

Definition Insulting

Usage "Why you cussin' for?"

Other terms Burying, burnin', ripping

Deadout

Definition Something that's rubbish or that's getting no love

Usage "You're deadout"

Other terms Air, dead

Draw

Definition Marijuana

Usage "I'm gonna get draw"

Other terms Weed, score, tens

Duppy

Definition Being attacked or killed (originally patois for "ghost" ). Duppy can also be a derogatory term for white people

Usage "Man got duppyed"

Other terms Kill off, murked

Endz

Definition Local area, estate or neighbourhood

Usage "Grime is big on the endz"

Other terms Hood, ghetto, road

Far

Definition Shortened way of saying something is too far away or too much of a hassle to get to. Requires extra emphasis.

Usage "Deptford is far, blud"

Other terms Long

Flow

Definition Describes the speech pattern, speed and style used when someone raps

Usage "His flow is tight, G"

Other terms Delivery

Freestyle

Definition Rapping without any pre-written lyrics. Nowadays used to describe lyrics that aren't in song format, not necessarily unprepared

Usage "Drop a freestyle man"

Other terms Bars, spitting

Garms

Definition Clothes

Usage "Yeah, nice garms, blud"

Other terms Threads

Gash

Definition Term for girls with not particularly nice sexual origins, but not necessarily meant as derogatory - like "birds"

Usage "I get bare gash man, for true"

Other terms Brud, link, tings, booty

Grime

Definition Genre of music indigenous to the UK, performed by the likes of Dizzee Rascal (right). Mostly mid-tempo, stripped-down, minimal style of music comprising of beats and bass with simple rhythms

Usage "Yeah, I do grime"

Other terms Eski, dark garage, sub-lo

Grimey

Definition Positive term for something or someone that appears raw and tough, but not necessarily related to grime music

Usage "This beat is over grimey"

Other terms Fierce

Grind/Grinding

Definition Working hard to make ends meet.

Usage "I've been grinding for time man"

Other terms On the grind, struggle, hustle

Hype

Definition A good artist with a big fan base who is getting lots of interest. Also used to describe someone who is either excited or excitable

Usage "This MC is hype!"

Other terms Blowing up

Ish/Shiz

Definition Self-censoring alternative for "shit", meaning stuff. Originates from clean versions of explicit rap songs that reverse offensive words.

Usage "That's some heavy ish"

Other terms Shizzle

Jacked

Definition Being robbed

Usage "My man's got jacked last night bruv"

Other terms Boyed

Jokes

Definition Used as an adjective to mean ridiculous or rubbish

Usage "That show is jokes, man"

Other terms Waste

Licking off

Definition Shooting a gun

Usage "He's licking off shots"

Other terms Busting, bursting, spraying

Long

Definition Overly complicated, boring, difficult or time-consuming. Requires particular emphasis

Usage "Homework? Nah, that's long, man"

Mans/Mandem

Definition Men, friends or brothers

Usage "Wait here for mandem"

Other terms Bruv, cuz, bredren

Over

Definition Very or highly, can be used in both positive and negative contexts

Usage "Those garms are over grimey"

Other terms Bare

Reach it

Definition Going to a place

Usage "Yeah, I'm gonna reach it"

Other term Touch it

Regs

Definition Often, frequently - short for regular

Usage "I juice on the regs"

Repping

Definition An MC will represent or big up their area or crew to show they have not forgotten where they have come from

Usage "I'm repping my endz, blud"

Other terms Shouts

Road

Definition Localised area, alternative to "from the streets"

Usage "Kano is big on road"

Other terms Endz, yard

Shiffed/shift

Definition Caught by the Police, arrested

Usage "I got shiffed outside the KFC"

Other terms Nabbed, Pulled up

Shower

Definition Used nowadays to mean good or very street. Derives from Jamaica's showerman crew, the notorious yardie gang

Usage "That tune is shower!"

Other terms Showerman, showerwoman

Sterling

Definition Money

Usage "Still stacking the sterling?"

Other terms Doe, notes, queen heads, papers, paperspread

Swag

Definition Rubbish

Usage "That's swag"

Other terms Waste

True/true-dat

Definition Term of agreement

Usage "Yeah, that's for true"

Other terms For real

Wack

Definition Not very good

Usage "That's wack"

Other terms Shit, waste

Wasteman

Definition Insult to describe a worthless, useless or unreliable individual. Also wastewoman or wastegash

Usage "You're a wasteman"

Other terms Poomplex

Yard

Definition House, home turf. Or to mean back home in Jamaica: " back-a-yard"

Usage "I'm hitting yard now man, that long man"

Other terms Crib

Yute

Definition Young person (aged one to 18 years old)

Usage "How's your yute these days"

Other terms Minor, youngers, pickneys

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A 'perfect storm' of conditions has seen teen slang from inner-city London spread across the country. But where does this new language originate from? And, if you can't stop kids from speaking it, is there any way to decipher what the words mean?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
At the back of a London bus, two teenagers are engaged in animated conversation. "Safe, man," says one. "Dis my yard. It's, laahhhk, nang, innit? What endz you from? You're looking buff in them low batties."

"Check the creps," says the other. "My bluds say the skets round here are nuff deep."

"Wasteman," responds the first, with alacrity. "You just begging now." The pair exit the vehicle, to blank stares of incomprehension.

Later, this dialogue is related to Gus, a 13-year-old who attends an inner London comprehensive; he wastes no time in decoding it.

''Safe just means hi,'' he says briskly. "Your yard is like your home, where you're from. Nang just means good. Your endz is your neighbourhood. Buff is, like, attractive. Low batties are trousers that hang really low on your waist. Creps are trainers. Bluds are your mates. Skets are sort of slutty girls. Nuff means very. Deep is the same as harsh or out of order. Wasteman is what you say to someone when you're fed up with them. And begging," he concludes, with a flourish, "means chatting rubbish."

There's more: butters means ugly, hype is excitement, bare is a lot, cotching is hanging around, and allow it is a plea to leave something or someone alone. "Everyone in my school speaks like this," says Gus, a little wearily. "It's because you hear the cool kids saying these words and then you have to do it too. You've got to know them all and you've got to keep up. Nobody wants to be uncool," he adds, with a shudder. "That's, like..."

Sick?

"No, sick is good," he says patiently. "I guess it would just be, you know, deep."

Gus and his ilk have been caught up in an emerging linguistic phenomenon. Researchers have found that, while most traditional cockney speech patterns have followed traditional cockneys as they've migrated out to Essex and Kent and other points beyond the M25, teenagers in inner London, one of the world's most ethnically diverse areas, are forging a separate multi-ethnic youth-speak based on common culture rather than ethnic or social background. Multiculturalism may have become a political hot potato for everyone from Daily Mail leader writers to Trevor Phillips, but anyone passing a metropolitan playground will realise that, linguistically at least, the melting-pot patois is already a reality from Tooting to Tower Hamlets.

"It is likely that young people have been growing up in London exposed to a mixture of second-language English and varieties of English from other parts of the world, as well as local London English, and that this new variety has emerged from that mix," says Sue Fox, a language expert from London University's Queen Mary College, who's in the middle of a three-year project called Linguistics Innovators: The Language of Adolescents in London, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. Fox and her colleagues have studied the speech patterns of a sample of teenagers across the capital. "One of our most interesting findings," she says, "was that we'd have groups of students from white Anglo-Saxon backgrounds, along with those of Arab, South American, Ghanaian and Portuguese descent, and they all spoke with the same dialect. But those who use it most strongly are those of second or third generation immigrant background, followed by white boys of London origin and then white girls of London origin."

The dialect is heavy with Jamaican and Afro-Caribbean inflections; words are clipped, as opposed to the cockney tendency to stretch vowels (thus face becomes fehs, as in "look a' mi fehs"), and certain words - creps, blud (thought to relate to blood, as in brother) and sket, are Jamaican in origin. This has led some in the media to invoke Ali G and Radio 1 DJ and "wigga" Tim Westwood, and dub the patois Jafaican, though Fox points out that Indian, West African, and even Australian slang (nang is an Aussie term, as is dag, meaning uncool) are just as much in evidence, as are new variants - saying raaait in lieu of right, for instance - whose origin remains obscure.

"The term Jafaican gives the impression that there's something fake about the dialect, which we would (omega) refute," she says. "As one young girl who lives in outer London said of her eight-year-old cousin who lives in inner London, 'People say he speaks like a black boy, but he just speaks like a London boy.' The message is that people are beginning to sound the same regardless of their colour or ethnic background. So we prefer to use the term Multicultural London English (MLE). It's perhaps not as catchy," she says, "but it comes closer to what we're trying to describe."

In the half-century since teenagers first came of socio-cultural age as a distinct demographic, their relationship to the rest of society can be described as a tense stand-off punctuated by howls of hormonal turbulence. "Don't laugh at a youth for his affectations," said the US essayist Logan Pearsall Smith. "He is only trying on one face after another, to find a face of his own." Over the years, the faces have included provocations ranging from skinheads to hoodies, but the advent of MLE is believed to mark the first time that teenagers have consciously used language to stake out their own territory ("I can't understand a word he's saying sometimes," bemoans Gus's mother, in perfect following-the-script style). Professor Paul Kerswill of Lancaster University, who is leading the Linguistics Innovators study, believes it's no accident that teenagers should be the early adopters of MLE.

"Adolescence is the life stage at which people most willingly take on new visible or audible symbols of group identification," he says. " Thus, fashions specific to this age group change rapidly. Fashion and music often go together, and these in turn are often associated with social class and ethnicity. The same is true of language. It's most obviously observable in terms of slang and new ways of expressing themselves, such as the substitute of 'I'm, like' for 'I said' or 'I thought' a few years ago." (This was the most blatant manifestation of Rising-Interrogative Valley-Girl speak - as in "I'm, like, so over him? But he's, like, totally bugging me?" - that was the preferred lingua franca among teenage girls before the rise of MLE). "What we're seeing with MLE is qualitatively different," continues Kerswill. "It's a real dialect rather than simply a mode of speech, and there's already evidence that it's spreading to other multicultural cities like Birmingham, Bristol and Manchester. It'll become more mainstream through force of numbers and continued migration, and because it's considered cool."

Kerswill and his fellow researchers believe a "perfect storm" of circumstances has arisen to ensure the rapid dissemination of MLE: a nexus of immigration, population mobility, and a wave of successful London garage stars (and MLE speakers) such as Lady Sovereign and Dizzee Rascal. The face of MLE could well be MIA, a Sri Lankan-born rapper raised on an estate in Hounslow, west London; her single Galang contains the refrain "London calling, speak the slang now".

"You can hear this music on a national basis," says (omega) G Money, a DJ at 1Xtra, the BBC's urban radio station. "It's not something you have to search for on the pirate networks any more. And it's definitely having an influence. I was in Watford recently and the kids there were no different to the ones you see in London. They all dress the same and they all speak the same."

The rise of MLE is happening at a time when Kerswill and his team are seeing a general trend across the UK toward dialect levelling - the process whereby people in different parts of the country sound more and more like each other as their local accents and dialects die out and everyone, from the Prime Minister downwards, speaks a form of elided-vowel Estuary English. " Dialect levelling is strongest in new towns such as Milton Keynes" says Kerswill. "Local accents - what we call dialect solidarity - tend to s urvive in close-knit communities, most of which are working class. It's interesting, for example, that Liverpool seems to be getting more scouse. Population make-up would be a factor, as well as what some linguists would call 'neighbour opposition' with its arch-rival Manchester. It's a question of identity."

Kerswill believes that levellings versus solidarities will have a bearing on the future of MLE. Concerns have already been raised about its ubiquity, with the Lilian Baylis School in Kennington, South London, banning the patois as part of a government pilot project to improve results. "We're not trying to devalue it," says Gary Phillips, the school's head. " We're trying to teach the kids that its time and place is not in the standard English world of formal essays or debates." But the crunch for MLE could come when its adherents move out of their close-knit teen community and enter the dialect-levelling world of adulthood.

"We don't quite know whether kids will un-acquire MLE as fast as they've picked it up," concedes Kerswill. "The indications are that it depends very much on people's social networks and aspirations. Those who go into university or highly-paid jobs will change their speech. Those who remain where they are will most likely retain a lot of it. Most people are doubtless somewhere in the middle, and will change to some extent. But that will open the way for MLE to lead to changes in the English language in its spoken form, at least. One conclusion that we have definitely drawn from this study," he concludes, "is that English is one of the most dynamically protean of all languages."

Back at the sharp end of the socio-linguistic coal-face, Gus would have to agree. "The words change all the time," he says wearily. " It's, like," (even in his out-of-school Standard English, he pronounces this "laaahhhkk") "you have to learn a whole new vocabulary every few months just to keep on top of it. It's like, just recently, swag now means bad."

And that's not nang?

"Allow it," he proclaims, switching effortlessly into standard MLE. "It's all getting bare swag."

Slang Dictionary Not getting props in the hood? Then read on, blud

Air

Definition Something that's rubbish. Also used to describe being ignored

Usage "You got air"

Other terms dissed

Bait

Definition Obvious, stupid

Usage "You're so bait man"

Other terms Waste, clown

Ballin'

Definition Making or having lots of money

Usage "What you ballin' now?"

Other terms Flossing

Bare

Definition Lots, many and good; high in quantity and quality

Usage "I got bare jokes man"

Other terms Nuff

Blud

Definition Friend

Usage "What's happenin' blud?"

Other terms Bredrin, fam, man dem

Boyed

Definition Being insulted, publicly put-down or humiliated

Usage "You got boyed!"

Other terms Chiefed, hotted, had up

Brapp!

Definition Exclamation of approval, usually accompanied by "throwing" gun-shaped hands in the air to mimic some Jamaican badman's habit of firing gunshots in the air to show the DJ their approval

Usage "Brapp! Brapp! That bar was heavy!"

Other terms Zoop! Zoop!

Breading

Definition Sucking up to someone, kissing arse

Usage "Why you breading?"

Other terms On his balls

Bubblin'

Definition Feeling the vibe

Usage "Yeah, I'm bubblin'"

Other terms On this ting

Bustin'

Definition Wearing something

Usage "My man's bustin' his trousers low"

Other teams Rocking, pushing

Choong

Definition Attractive

Usage "That girl is choooong, blud"

Other terms Buff, fly

Chops

Definition Jewellery

Usage "I can't find my chops!"

Other terms Bling, ice, chaps

Clown

Definition Derogatory term - idiot

Usage "Shut up, clown"

Other terms Joker, wasteman/woman

Cotch

Definition To kick back and relax at home alone or with close friends, to do as little as possible

Usage "I'm been cotchin' in my crib for time"

Other terms Chill

Creps

Definition Trainers

Usage "Yo, fresh creps, blood"

Other terms Kicks, boogers, sneaks

Cussin'

Definition Insulting

Usage "Why you cussin' for?"

Other terms Burying, burnin', ripping

Deadout

Definition Something that's rubbish or that's getting no love

Usage "You're deadout"

Other terms Air, dead

Draw

Definition Marijuana

Usage "I'm gonna get draw"

Other terms Weed, score, tens

Duppy

Definition Being attacked or killed (originally patois for "ghost" ). Duppy can also be a derogatory term for white people

Usage "Man got duppyed"

Other terms Kill off, murked

Endz

Definition Local area, estate or neighbourhood

Usage "Grime is big on the endz"

Other terms Hood, ghetto, road

Far

Definition Shortened way of saying something is too far away or too much of a hassle to get to. Requires extra emphasis.

Usage "Deptford is far, blud"

Other terms Long

Flow

Definition Describes the speech pattern, speed and style used when someone raps

Usage "His flow is tight, G"

Other terms Delivery

Freestyle

Definition Rapping without any pre-written lyrics. Nowadays used to describe lyrics that aren't in song format, not necessarily unprepared

Usage "Drop a freestyle man"

Other terms Bars, spitting

Garms

Definition Clothes

Usage "Yeah, nice garms, blud"

Other terms Threads

Gash

Definition Term for girls with not particularly nice sexual origins, but not necessarily meant as derogatory - like "birds"

Usage "I get bare gash man, for true"

Other terms Brud, link, tings, booty

Grime

Definition Genre of music indigenous to the UK, performed by the likes of Dizzee Rascal (right). Mostly mid-tempo, stripped-down, minimal style of music comprising of beats and bass with simple rhythms

Usage "Yeah, I do grime"

Other terms Eski, dark garage, sub-lo

Grimey

Definition Positive term for something or someone that appears raw and tough, but not necessarily related to grime music

Usage "This beat is over grimey"

Other terms Fierce

Grind/Grinding

Definition Working hard to make ends meet.

Usage "I've been grinding for time man"

Other terms On the grind, struggle, hustle

Hype

Definition A good artist with a big fan base who is getting lots of interest. Also used to describe someone who is either excited or excitable

Usage "This MC is hype!"

Other terms Blowing up

Ish/Shiz

Definition Self-censoring alternative for "shit", meaning stuff. Originates from clean versions of explicit rap songs that reverse offensive words.

Usage "That's some heavy ish"

Other terms Shizzle

Jacked

Definition Being robbed

Usage "My man's got jacked last night bruv"

Other terms Boyed

Jokes

Definition Used as an adjective to mean ridiculous or rubbish

Usage "That show is jokes, man"

Other terms Waste

Licking off

Definition Shooting a gun

Usage "He's licking off shots"

Other terms Busting, bursting, spraying

Long

Definition Overly complicated, boring, difficult or time-consuming. Requires particular emphasis

Usage "Homework? Nah, that's long, man"

Mans/Mandem

Definition Men, friends or brothers

Usage "Wait here for mandem"

Other terms Bruv, cuz, bredren

Over

Definition Very or highly, can be used in both positive and negative contexts

Usage "Those garms are over grimey"

Other terms Bare

Reach it

Definition Going to a place

Usage "Yeah, I'm gonna reach it"

Other term Touch it

Regs

Definition Often, frequently - short for regular

Usage "I juice on the regs"

Repping

Definition An MC will represent or big up their area or crew to show they have not forgotten where they have come from

Usage "I'm repping my endz, blud"

Other terms Shouts

Road

Definition Localised area, alternative to "from the streets"

Usage "Kano is big on road"

Other terms Endz, yard

Shiffed/shift

Definition Caught by the Police, arrested

Usage "I got shiffed outside the KFC"

Other terms Nabbed, Pulled up

Shower

Definition Used nowadays to mean good or very street. Derives from Jamaica's showerman crew, the notorious yardie gang

Usage "That tune is shower!"

Other terms Showerman, showerwoman

Sterling

Definition Money

Usage "Still stacking the sterling?"

Other terms Doe, notes, queen heads, papers, paperspread

Swag

Definition Rubbish

Usage "That's swag"

Other terms Waste

True/true-dat

Definition Term of agreement

Usage "Yeah, that's for true"

Other terms For real

Wack

Definition Not very good

Usage "That's wack"

Other terms Shit, waste

Wasteman

Definition Insult to describe a worthless, useless or unreliable individual. Also wastewoman or wastegash

Usage "You're a wasteman"

Other terms Poomplex

Yard

Definition House, home turf. Or to mean back home in Jamaica: " back-a-yard"

Usage "I'm hitting yard now man, that long man"

Other terms Crib

Yute

Definition Young person (aged one to 18 years old)

Usage "How's your yute these days"

Other terms Minor, youngers, pickneys

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A 'perfect storm' of conditions has seen teen slang from inner-city London spread across the country. But where does this new language originate from? And, if you can't stop kids from speaking it, is there any way to decipher what the words mean?

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Regional accents across England are slowly fading, and are being replaced nationwide with a more 'southern' way of speaking, according to research.

The accent data was gathered from 30,000 users of the English Dialects app, created in January by Cambridge University academics, and compared to the results of a dialect survey carried out in the 1950s.

People from across the country answered the survey through the app, which asked them to specify how they said certain words like 'scone', and how they referred to certain things, like a 'splinter'.

The app has been in use for a few months, taking in the accents of people from 4,000 cities, towns and villages across the country.

After analysing the results, the researchers have found that more people speak with accents similar to those in London or south-east England than they did 60 years ago.

"When it comes to language change in England, our results confirm that there is a clear pattern of levelling towards the English of the south-east," said Dr Adrian Leeman, a Cambridge researcher who worked on the project.

"More and more people are pronouncing words in the way that people from London and the south-east do."

The University of Bern's Professor David Britain, another researcher, said: "People in Bristol speak much more similarly to those in Colchester now than they did 50 years ago. Regional differences are disappearing, quite quickly."

A few parts of the country are holding out, however. Newcastle and Sunderland, in the North East, stood out as areas where local words and pronunciations still dominate.

Northern ways of speaking may even be spreading down the country - the pronunciation of words like 'last' with a short vowel, rather than a long one, is typically a part of northern accents. But the study found it is now common in the Midlands and the West Country, even though it wasn't traditionally a part of the accents in those areas.

As well as shedding light on the changing way we speak, the information gathered through the app will now allow current English dialects to be compared with those in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, countries which were not surveyed in the 1950s study.

Tam Blaxter, a Cambridge PhD student who worked on the analysis, believes the 'levelling' of English accents may be due to increased mobility.

People move around the country for work and education a lot more than they did 60 years ago, exposing them to a much wider range of accents.

Analysis of the survey results will continue, as the researchers look at the social reasons behind the 'flattening' of accents in England.

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The English accent is dying out (unless you're from London)

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Regional accents across England are slowly fading, and are being replaced nationwide with a more 'southern' way of speaking, according to research. The accent data was gathered from 30,000 users of the English Dialects app, created in January by Cambridge University academics, and compared to the results of a dialect survey carried out in the 1950s.

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A level English Language- Age theories Flashcards | Quizlet

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Start studying A level English Language- Age theories. Learn vocabulary, terms, and more with flashcards, games, and other study tools.

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Nellyarda, zhoosh the riah, titivate, schlumph your Vera down, and palare that omee for the bevvies because I've nanti dinarli.

(Translation: Listen, style your hair, make yourself look pretty, drink up your gin, and talk to that man to get a drink because I'm skint).

The words you've just read are Polari words. Polari encompasses a lost linguistic world. It was pugnacious, camp, and racy - so if you blush easily, click away now. You're about to encounter some Billingsgate (bad / puerile language).

Some gay people - men in particular - did indeed used to speak their own language. Of sorts. It was less a language and more of a cant - a coded lexicon used exclusively to avoid detection by unwanted outsiders. That could've been the police, disapproving conservative society, or simply the group on the table next to you that you were bitching about.

So the short answer is - gay people don't speak their own language any more. But, in 1960s Britain, gay men in large cities - particularly London - came close to doing so. It's now archaic because the oppressive conditions which brought it about have, encouragingly, evaporated into equality in Britain. But there's a move from language lovers like myself to preserve and promote Polari as a kind of linguistic artefact - so the toils, battles, and cheeky, resilient character of those who spoke it are remembered and respected. I particularly enjoy using the Polari app, which gives etymologies and explanations of the full Polari lexicon as far as records exist. Every time you shake your phone, a randomizer flashes up a new Polari word on your screen. Fantabulosa!

Polari was used in the early 20 th century in larger cities in a very priggish Britain. It was predominantly the domain of gay men. In linguistics, as in many other areas, lesbian visibility was problematic.

Jennifer Justice, Orderly Daughters, and Hilda Handcuffs: making light of the law

You'll see from the Z-A boxout (done backwards in Polari's subversive tradition) that many Polari words had common themes. It's no accident that there were several coded names for the police - I've listed six below ( Sharpering Omees; Jennifer Justice; Orderly Daughters; Hilda Handcuffs; Betty Bracelets; Lily Law). The use of female names for what was, back then, a predominantly testosterone-charged force cheekily undermines their authority and bravado. Polari was spoken at a time when homosexuality was illegal in Britain so avoiding detection was as important as expressing a contempt for the law and its enforcers.

Polari sits in the same bracket as other cryptolects. A cryptolect is a secretive language used to confuse and exclude others and affirm the character and solidarity of a marginalized subculture. In that sense, hip hop rap, cockney rhyming slang, and Polari are all cousins. Each had their own semantic weapon which was devised to confound the expectations of the group that used it. Cockneys used clever rhymes, proving that the working classes could compete in terms of intellect. A great example, like many cockney rhymes, was adopted by Polari proponents themselves: Haris / aris means 'arse'. Aris is short for 'Aristotle', which rhymes with 'glass and bottle', shortened to just 'glass', which rhymes with 'arse.' Wonderfully convoluted. Hip hop, meanwhile, uses slang and patois about bling and success to defy racial poverty and underclass stereotypes. All three cants emerged for a similar reason and from similar conditions: a linguistic revolution to challenge the middle / upper class male, pale, and stale power holders in conservative society, and the police who upheld this unequal status quo.

The power of camp and preserving Polari

Polari's weapon was camp - turning on its head the idea that 'camp' was effete and submissive, instead transforming it into something powerful and defiant. It did this by imprinting a flamboyant flair and strange panache using a complete mish-mash of words - borrowed from cockney rhyming slang, backslang (when a word is pronounced backwards such as the Polari riah, esong, and emag - hair, nose, and game), Yiddish, Italian, theatre slang, and naval slang. You might have dropped a Polari word into a sentence to surreptitiously show the attractive man you were talking to that you're gay - or test if he was. Or to avoid disapproval - even arrest. Or simply to bitch, and get away with it.

Polari shows its age with some casual racism ( Schvartza for black man; Schinwhars for Chinese person; Kosher homie for Jewish man) but it was also a cheeky way of speaking sexily in public without attracting attention - Kerterver cartzo so nanti arva (I can't have sex because I've got an STI) - was hardly something you'd broadcast. Similarly, Nada to vada in the larder (small penis) was a phrase you'd keep on the down low.

Professor Paul Baker, from Lancaster University's Department of Linguistics, is a world expert on Polari. I asked him if Polari should be treated like an endangered language - and should we therefore preserve it? Professor Baker says: 'Yes, it should be preserved - that's why I did my PhD in it and created an app for it; I didn't want the voices of the men and women who lived through that period to be forgotten. So often history is of the powerful, not the disempowered. But preserving something isn't the same as reviving it. I don't want the conditions which brought it into being to be repeated. We never need to hide our sexuality from anyone. We have nothing to be ashamed of.'

From Round the Horne to alphabet soup

Polari was popularized by the 1960s BBC radio series Round the Horne, featuring two camp Polari-speakers, Julian and Sandy. Once it gained popularity, the cat was out of the bag. 1967 saw the decriminalization of homosexuality in Britain - making Polari redundant.

Due to the internet and dating apps that now allow you to connect to others in different countries, the modern gay lexicon is no longer isolated to one place and time. It has become a universally understood and adopted code within a large community. Today's version of Polari seems to focus on mainly shrouding in secrecy the peccadillos, put-downs, and peculiar fetishes of some members of the gay community, away from the judgment of outsiders. More similarly coded, quirky terms are likely to spring up and spread quickly so gay people can speak to (/about) each other in further exclusive and interesting ways.

To many, today's alphabet soup of the initialism LGBTQQI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, questioning, intersex) makes the gay community seem, at the least, idiosyncratic. But what it really shows is something more encouraging: a vibrant diversity and warm inclusiveness that, endearingly, wants to see nobody feeling like an outsider. The semantics of equality may not be as sexy, catchy, or witty. But they reflect a community that has moved from marginalized and ostracized to mainstream - and even celebrated.

Now you're speaking my language.

A quick guide to some of the best Polari words, running, in the subversive tradition, from Z-A

Zhoosh the riah (style your hair. Riah is backslang for 'hair.')

Vadavision (TV)

Vaggerie (to go)

Trundling cheat (a car)

Titivate (to make oneself look pretty)

Sweat chovey (the gym)

Strillers omee (a pianist)

Shietel (a wig)

Sharpering-omee (a policeman)

Sharda! (what a pity!)

Schlumph your Vera down (drink up your gin)

Scapali (to run / escape)

Riah shusher (a hairdresser)

Palone-omee (a lesbian)

Palare the omee for the bevvies (talk to the man to get a drink)

Orderly daughters (the police)

Ogle filters (sunglasses)

NTBH (ugly - acronym of 'not to be had')

Nada to vada in the larder (small penis)

Nix my dolly (never mind)

Nix mungaree (nothing to eat)

Nish the chat (stop talking)

Nanti pots in the cupboard (no teeth)

Montel (watch)

Meshigener (crazy)

Mauve (someone who appears to be gay)

Matlock mender (dentist)

Mary-Ann (a gay Catholic man)

Manly Alice (a masculine gay man)

Mais oui ducky (oh yes)

Lullaby cheat (a baby)

Lily law (the police)

Ling grappling (sex)

Lau your luppers on the strillers bona (play something nice on the piano)

Lattie on wheels (a taxi)

Lattie on water (a ship)

Kerterver cartzo (a venereal disease)

Kerterver cartzo so nanti arva (I can't have sex because I've got an STI)

Joggering omee (an entertainer)

Jennifer Justice (the police)

I've nanti dinarly (I've got no money)

Hilda handcuffs (the police)

Groinage (jewellery)

Gildy (fancy)

Gardy loo (look out - from French 'gare l'eau' - beware of the water - when a chamber pot's contents were thrown out of a window)

Fungus (an old man)

Fortuni (gorgeous)

Ferricadooza (a knock down blow)

Fantabulosa (wonderful)

Esong (nose - from backslang, the backwards spelling of nose)

Emag (a game - also derived from backslang)

Dry martini (left hand. Right hand = sweet martini)

Duchess (a rich or grand gay man)

Dorcas (one who cares - from The Dorcas Society - a ladies' Church association in the 19th century which made clothes for the poor)

Cut the cackle (shut up)

Cosy (costume - from the Australian for swimming costume)

Cold calling (to walk into a pub looking for company)

Charpering omie (a policeman)

Catever (bad)

Carnish ken (a restaurant)

Cake the eke in slap (apply make-up - eke is derived from the backslang for face - ecaf)

Buvare (a drink)

Bona vardering (good looking)

Bona to vada! (nice to see you!)

Bona nochy (good night)

Bona dish (nice bum)

Bodega (a shop)

Billingsgate (bad language - named after the fish market in London where foul language was common)

Betty bracelets (the police)

B-flat omee (a fat man)

Auntie (older gay man)

And no flies (Honestly!)

Guest Blogger

Gary Nunn specialises in writing about language. As a regular Guardian columnist, his monthly 'Mind your language' column made linguistics accessible by using news hooks, humour and anecdotes. As a journalist, Gary writes language-themed pieces for British and Australian media outlets. Twitter: @garynunn1

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Is Polari its own language? | OxfordWords blog

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Nellyarda, zhoosh the riah, titivate, schlumph your Vera down, and palare that omee for the bevvies because I've nanti dinarli. (Translation: Listen, style your hair, make yourself look pretty, drink up your gin, and talk to that man to get a drink because I'm skint). The words you've just read are Polari words.

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"Bona to vada your dolly old eek!"

That may seem like a string of nonsense words from Dr Seuss's The Cat in the Hat or Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange but it's a real-life greeting gay men in the UK would say to each other in the 1950s and 60s. It means "Good to see your nice face."

Until 1967, homosexual sex was illegal in England and Wales. To avoid imprisonment, gay men used Polari, a language that the Oxford English Dictionary says is "made up of Italianate phrases, rhyming slang and cant terms." It had sprung up in the 1700s and 1800s as a secret language vagrants, itinerant performers, sailors and "gypsies" - many of its words, in fact, derive from the Romany people scattered across Europe.

British comedian Kenneth Williams often spoke Polari in his performances on BBC radio and TV programmes in the 1950s and 60s, some of which had up to 20 million listeners at a time, introducing the language to a much wider audience. Watch the video above to find out more.

If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our page or message us on .
And if you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called "If You Only Read 6 Things This Week". A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Capital and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.

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Polari: The code language gay men used to survive

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"Bona to vada your dolly old eek!" That may seem like a string of nonsense words from Dr Seuss's The Cat in the Hat or Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange but it's a real-life greeting gay men in the UK would say to each other in the 1950s and 60s.

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The secret language of polari - Merseyside Maritime Museum, Liverpool museums

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The secret language of polari, from the 'Hello Sailor! Gay life on the ocean wave' display at Merseyside Maritime Museum, Liverpool. This was originally an exhibition held from 25 August 2006 to 25 March 2007, which toured the country before returning and becoming a permanent display. Part of the National Museums Liverpool group.

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Polari (also seen as 'Palare') is a gay slang language, which has now almost died out. It was more common in the 1960's when gays had more need of a private slang. When I started to research Polari, it was difficult to find any written material about Polari as what little used to exist was out of print.

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With words like "shade," "tea," and "kiki" prominent in queer culture, sometimes it feels like it's impossible for straights to understand gays...literally. But once upon a time, that was exactly what British gays wanted.

Called Polari, the gay slang is composed of back slang, circus slang, and broken Yiddish and Italian. The "secret language" was used heavily by gays in the circus, navy, and theater, and arose out of the need to discuss gay matters under a clever guise, due to homosexual acts being illegal in Britain until the passage of the Sexual Offenses Act in 1967.

Thus, a quirky and campy way of speaking was born. Here's some of the amusing slang:

Basket - the bulge of male genitals through clothes

Fantabulos-wonderful

Ecaf - face (backslang)

Dolly Ecaf - pretty face

Chicken - a young guy

Some Polari words still exist in modern gay slang. Words like camp, trade, and butch are all Polari slang.

The slang gained mainstream popularity in the 1960s when it was featured on the popular BBC radio show, Round the Horne, in which the effeminate character, Julian, would deliver dazzlingly confusing lines to mainstream audiences like, "Let us put our best lallie forward and with our eeks shining with hope, troll together towards the fantabulosa futurette!"

Just as much as Round the Horne advanced Polari's popularity, it also contributed to its demise. As gays began to fight for acceptance and rights, they made a concentrated effort to remove the British society's one-dimensional view of all gays as being overly campy and effeminate. Consequently, Polari was slowly discarded and forgotten about.

But today, British linguists and queer activists are trying their hardest to preserve and promote the slang. A 2015 short film featuring two men in 1962 meeting on a bench and engaging in a Polari conversation gained fame on YouTube.

An app, Polari Mission, was launched, which features a Polari dictionary and the King James Version of the Bible completely translated into Polari. Check it out here.

The Atlas Obscura points out, Polari was a great self-performative outlet for British gays to not only express themselves but also easily identify and connet with fellow memebers of the queer community. Perhaps us fruits should all meet up together and create a 2016 Polari. Sound dolly?

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Learn Polari, the Secret Language of the Gays

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With words like "shade," "tea," and "kiki" prominent in queer culture, sometimes it feels like it's impossible for straights to understand gays...literally. But once upon a time, that was exactly what British gays wanted. Called Polari, the gay slang is composed of back slang, circus slang, and broken Yiddish and Italian.

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GAY SLANG IS BEING REVIVED! FANTABULOSA!

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GAY SLANG IS BEING REVIVED! FANTABULOSA!

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Colin Richardson: Polari, the gay slang, is being revived.

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Colin Richardson: Polari, the gay slang, is being revived. Camp is being rehabilitated. Fantabulosa!

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Last Sunday, Downton Abbey returned for its sixth and final series. I could watch Downton until the hunting dogs came home, and would love Julian Fellowes to carry on churning out episodes and twisting plots around his pen. Since it started in 2010, I have excused Fellowes for introducing modern phrases into 1910s and 1920s aristocratic England, for his killing off of great characters and for the (occasional) wooden acting, because Downton is a comfort blanket of a programme which lulls you into benign forgiveness.

But a few minutes into Sunday's episode, my loyalty was stretched to breaking point when a Liverpudlian chambermaid walked into the abbey grounds.

I say Liverpudlian, but the closest the actress's Scouse accent got to Liverpool was the Runcorn Bridge: in one scene, it drifted down the M6 to Bromsgrove before getting the coach to somewhere near Leeds. I couldn't have winced more if Mrs Patmore had spent the whole episode scraping a silver egg spoon down the back of her new fridge. But my real beef isn't with Nichola Burley, the actress who played the maid, Miss Bevan. Very few people from outside Liverpool can pull off a decent Scouse accent. Even those of us who have left our home town find it difficult to tune ourselves back in.

No, it was the character of Miss Bevan that enraged me. The chambermaid is a thief and a blackmailer, who tries to extort £1,000 from Lady Mary over her dirty weekend at a Liverpool hotel with Tony Gillingham in series five. So, of course, she was from Liverpool.

Why is it generally the case that Scousers in popular culture are portrayed as thieving lowlifes? You may think this is classic Liverpool paranoia, or what Simon Heffer (in Boris Johnson's voice) memorably called "victimhood" in The Spectator. You may think, as someone suggested on Twitter on Sunday evening, that Fellowes had no choice other than to make this chambermaid Liverpudlian because Lady Mary's "sketching" weekend had been at a Liverpool hotel.

The answer to this is: of course he had a choice. He could have decided that this woman was from anywhere else in the country but who happened to be working at a hotel in the city. But it is simpler for a writer or producer to give a bad character a Scouse accent because this is the easiest, laziest stereotype around. It's not racism - of course not. But because it's not racism, it makes it easier to fire off a minor part in a mega-series without much thought.

Some may say the negative portrayals started with Boys From The Blackstuff, Alan Bleasdale's gritty series about Liverpudlians on the dole in the early 1980s. But what Bleasdale wrote was an honest and necessary account of the decline of this once booming industrial city under Margaret Thatcher.

For me, it was Carla Lane who - while not, perhaps, inventing the stereotype - allowed it to flourish when she created Bread in the 1980s, featuring thieving, idiotic, scrounging Scousers under the disguise of comedy.

Since then, the Bad Scouser has been everywhere - turning up in Coronation Street, Midsomer Murders and Mersey Blues, a 1990s BBC documentary series which had the tagline "a city where crime is practically a career option".

Most insidiously, the Bad Scouser turned up the other day on the popular CBeebies animated series Octonauts. Think I am joking? One episode, as I discovered in horror as I watched with my daughter, featured a group of walruses with Scouse accents - which would only have been an amusing reference to the Beatles' I Am The Walrus, had these long-toothed marine mammals not been also stealing from the heroic Octonauts. I can imagine the writers of this cartoon thinking: "Shall we give these thieving walruses Scouse accents? That would be amusing to grown-ups." And so it goes on.

Jack Straw thought he was being funny when he said Scousers were "always up to something", but that's the problem with this stereotype: it is always meant as a joke. I know we Scousers are supposed to have a great sense of humour, but I just don't find it funny any more.

You could say that Downton Abbey is an entire checklist of stereotypes, from the Dowager Countess downwards, that Fellowes is only fulfilling what the continuing success of his award-winning drama demands - a sort of Sunday-night-TV-by-numbers which racks up millions of viewing figures. Perhaps. Just don't expect me to carry on enjoying it.

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Come on. Haven't we had enough of the 'Bad Scouser?

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Last Sunday, Downton Abbey returned for its sixth and final series. I could watch Downton until the hunting dogs came home, and would love Julian Fellowes to carry on churning out episodes and twisting plots around his pen.

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David Beckham has changed his speech over the past decade to "sound less working class", University of Manchester academics have concluded.

The study examined footage of the footballer before and after 2007, the year the Beckhams moved to Los Angeles.

David dropped his H sounds at the start of words far less often than before the move to the US, the study found.

And in a separate video study of wife Victoria, the ex-Spice Girl was found to be "definitely getting posher".

'Cockney vowels dropped'

A university spokesman said the research was part of a study into "how changing circumstances affect the way we pronounce words".

Researchers contrasted the way Beckhams spoke before and after their move to the US, when David signed for Los Angeles Galaxy.

Charles Boorman and Alix Roberts looked at changes in David's speech, while Naomi Proszynska and James Pickett investigated how Victoria spoke.

The research revealed that David dropped the H in words such as "him" and "has" 80% of the time before the move to the US, but only 20% of the time afterwards.

Mr Boorman said it was "clear that Becks, once a broader Cockney, nowadays speaks with more of a standard English accent".

"In fact, he's even hyper-correcting himself, because he puts Hs into words when it's not really required - in America, they use the H sound more, which explains how he acquired it.

"But my guess is that his dropping of those Cockney vowels was linked to his ambassadorial role for the Olympics and his subsequent high social status."

'Classic Essex girl'

Victoria - dubbed Posh Spice during her days with the Spice Girls - was found to correctly pronounce Ls in words such as "all" 25% of the time in 1997, with the figure rising to 46% in 2012.

"All" can be pronounced "awe" by "working-class people in the south-east of England", the researchers said.

Pronouncing Hs and Ls

H-dropping is more common with pronouns such as "him" and "her" and auxiliary verbs such as "had" and "has"

Some people also drop it from nouns such as "house" and "heat"

The L sound in all is often pronounced as "awe" in the South East

Source: University of Manchester

Ms Proszynska said: "In 1997, her speech resembled what we associate with the classic Essex girl but, by 2012, her speech no longer so strongly represented her Essex roots.

"We think this may be connected with the fact that she's forged a different career as a widely respected fashion designer."

Linguistics lecturer Dr Laurel MacKenzie said pronunciation was not "static" in adults.

"The general assumption is that once we pass puberty our way of speaking is fixed," she said.

"But recent research has revealed the extent to which we can be chameleons in the way we speak, even into adulthood.

"Factors such as social mobility and geographical location can have an impact on the way adults pronounce words."

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David Beckham has changed his speech over the past decade to "sound less working class", University of Manchester academics have concluded. The study examined footage of the footballer before and after 2007, the year the Beckhams moved to Los Angeles.

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In a tented theatre at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, an enthusiastic audience shout out their favourite pieces of business jargon.

"Could we park that idea," says one. "Direction of travel", suggests another.

Then from the back comes "solutionise", prompting a widespread groan from the crowd.

How we communicate at work and get the story of a business out to the wider world has never been more important.

Yet the language of business - and more particularly when it descends into jargon - is often the stuff of humour.

Think "low-hanging fruit" (an easy, achievable goal), "shoot the puppy" (do the unthinkable) or perhaps "think outside the box" (be creative).

Writers Jamie Jauncey and John Simmons have been sharing some of what they believe goes into really effective business communication.

Room 121

As well as training and writing for business, Mr Jauncey also writes fiction. Mr Simmons comes from a background in branding.

The two men have been publicising their book Room 121, but that is just part of their wider view that business communication needs to be more human.

Mr Jauncey explained: "Business has lost its way with language.

"It's lost its personality - that's the big problem - therefore it doesn't make a good connection with its audiences.

"It's long-winded, it's alienating, it's impersonal. It uses a lot of abstractions and it's just difficult language to work with and it isn't very effective in terms of good communication."

But is a personality-filled piece of writing always appropriate in a business setting?

"I think you'd be surprised at how appropriate it is on how many different occasions," argued John Simmons.

'No brainer'

"Why would any company want to come across as boring and faceless - it's a no brainer really," he said.

"How do you build a bridge between your organisation and the audiences out there that you're trying to reach and trying to influence? You only do it by sharing universal principles of humanity and that's effective communication."

Outside the theatre, people chatted about what they had heard.

"I think we're all guilty," said one. "When it comes to writing, you take on a different mindset at work and think, 'I've got to write in a certain way'."

Mr Simmons and Mr Jauncey believe that being natural and authentic is key to good business communication.

Along with fellow business writer Stuart Delves, they also run the Dark Angels programme - creative writing in business courses.

They believe that developing a person's personal, creative writing will put personality into what they write at work.

"We use a lot of poetry and literature as the basis of our exercises and things like observation," said Mr Delves.

"In many ways there are similarities with a creative writing course that you might do with a poet or a playwright, but I think what's unique about what we do is making that bridge between that kind of writing, into the world of business.

"That's what I've been doing for 25 years, whenever I possibly can - to breathe life into writing."

'Linguistic clothes'

Kirsty Regan is a businesswoman who has been on the course.

Her Edinburgh-based company, News Direct, helps organisations keep track of what politicians and others are - or are not - saying about them.

She said some of her previous business writing felt like she was using language she felt obliged to use. But that has changed.

"We're comfortable in our own linguistic clothes if you like," she commented.

"We know what we have to say, we know where we come from, what our services are based on, what are the principles of what we do.

"Certainly I feel that I've got the language to express that more usefully."

For a final word on their view of good communication, John Simmons recalled his grandmother answering the phone - a machine which for her was unfamiliar and slightly strange.

He explained: "Sometimes she'd be called to the phone and you'd sit in the other room and think, 'who is that on the phone, I don't recognise that voice' - and it was my poor old nan putting on this posh voice.

"And that's what happens in business with business writing - people put on that equivalent of the posh telephone voice.

"They think it does them good - actually it makes them just seem rather ludicrous and pompous, so laugh at it, cut it out, move on," he added.

You can hear more about business jargon on BBC Radio Scotland's Business Scotland programme on Sunday at 10.05 BST, and later by free download.

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In a tented theatre at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, an enthusiastic audience shout out their favourite pieces of business jargon. "Could we park that idea," says one. "Direction of travel", suggests another. Then from the back comes "solutionise", prompting a widespread groan from the crowd.

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Every industry has its jargon which baffles outsiders, but some buzz-words are leaving even those who use them foxed.

Jargon can be used to exclude and confuse others, as well as mask inexperience and lack of expertise

Paul Jacobs, Office Angels

A survey has found that one in five office workers admits they are confused by "blue sky ideas", would not know what to do with "low hanging fruit" and think "a helicopter view" involves Anneka Rice.

What is more, some employees are using corporate-speak to get one over on their baffled colleagues who dare not ask what the phrases mean.

The study carried out by secretarial firm Office Angels, involved 1,000 employees.

Low hanging fruit: Easiest targets

Blue sky ideas: Ambitious plans/uncharted territory

E-tailing: Internet retailing

Helicopter view: Overview

Drool Proof: Technical advice for those who think their CD-ROM is a cup-holder

Gap analysis: Assessing untapped opportunities

It found that these staff attend an average of one meeting a day at which 65% said they regularly encountered business jargon.

Many of the phrases appear to be American in origin, often seeming to find their way into the UK via the internet or management gurus.

The report said: "One in five employees felt obliged to use 'in' phrases to keep pace with their colleagues even thought they admitted they didn't actually know what many of the phrases meant."

A third of those polled said they used terminology to liven up meetings but two out of five said they were distracted and irritated by the use of "meeting speak".

Paul Jacobs, director of corporate communications at Office Angels said corporate lingo can be used to "help bring people and teams together in an almost tribal way as companies develop their own specific jargon.

"Or it can be used to exclude and confuse others, as well as mask inexperience and lack of expertise."

Offices in the south east of England were found to be most likely to use business-babble.

It is reportedly common in creative sectors such as advertising and sales but is also finding its way into financial institutions.

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bbc news world uk international foreign british online service

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BBC News | UK | Jargon 'baffles' office workers

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Every industry has its jargon which baffles outsiders, but some buzz-words are leaving even those who use them foxed. Jargon can be used to exclude and confuse others, as well as mask inexperience and lack of expertise Paul Jacobs, Office Angels A survey has found that one in five office workers admits they are confused by "blue sky ideas", would not know what to do with "low hanging fruit" and think "a helicopter view" involves Anneka Rice.

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Where is everyone in a lab coat a "boffin"? Where is "bubbly" either "guzzled" or "glugged"? Where do "drunken yobs" go on "booze-fuelled rampages"? You know the answer: in Britain's newspapers. Just under a year ago, a late-night comment on Twitter led me to become an accidental collector of "journalese", the language of reporters. It's a world in which unnamed backbench MPs are always "senior", where any adjustment of policy is a "humiliating U-turn". Where the police "launch probes", presumably with Nasa's help. Where two people who disagree "clash", typically after one of them has "slammed" the other.

Journalese has become my obsession. Every time I note an example, people send me 10 more. It's everywhere, and once you understand it, it changes how you see the world. Last week, I turned on the radio to learn that "momentum is building for an attack on Syria". To a non-speaker of journalese, that might sound exciting. I knew the real meaning: "the story hasn't changed since last night."

I can tell you all the things that are wrong with journalese: it's clichéd; lazy writing betrays lazy thought; good stories don't need it; it's a code. And there are phrases I hate: "tragic tot" is an awful, glib way to write about a dead child, and its use should be a criminal offence. But I have a "shameful secret". The more I see, the more I like it. That's why I don't see my collection as an attack on fellow reporters. If I thought it was under threat, I would campaign for government protection. Perhaps we could demand road signs in two languages, as in Wales: "Accident Ahead - Long Queues"/"Horror Death Smash - Nightmare Jam".

Happily, journalese shows no sign of going away. Here are a few of my favourite examples:

Brutal dictator One who kills his opponents slowly. If he just has them all shot, use ''ruthless dictator''. If our government could easily ''topple him'', but can't be bothered, use ''tinpot dictator''.

Clamour We've written two editorials about this. If there's one in today, refer to a ''growing clamour''.

Coffers Where organisations of which we disapprove keep money.

Considering The all-purpose unfalsifiable policy story. No one will ever be able to convincingly deny that they've considered something.

Deepened What happened to people's difficulties last night.

Eleventh hour The time at which one should start expecting "last-ditch" negotiations or "last-gasp" interventions.

Facing charges They haven't been charged with a crime, they may never be charged with a crime, but they could be charged with one.

Ill-fated Frankly, it was inevitable that anything that ''started as an innocent day out'' would turn out to have ''ended in tragedy''.

Influential Any group that can get a letter printed in a national paper.

Mystery surrounds In time, it may deepen. Right now, we don't have a clue what's going on.

Perfect storm Two bad things have happened to someone at the same time.

Pooch A dog, of any size or breed, that has lived up to the best traditions of its species by faithfully leading children out of danger or helping a pensioner cross the road. Not a synonym for devil dog.

Potentially fatal Well, potentially. I mean, a peanut is potentially fatal.

Quintessentially British Barbour jackets, Elgar and understated demonstrations of approval.

Set to Sounds like it means ''will'', but if it turns out the story is wrong, you can point out it only actually means ''may''.

Special Investigation A normal investigation, but with a picture byline for the reporter.

Sporadic gunfire I was woken up seven times last night.

Troubled Small country currently enjoying a lull between civil wars.

War-torn Anywhere foreign correspondents know a decent bar for every night of the week.

Robert Hutton is UK political correspondent for Bloomberg News. 'Romps, Tots and Boffins - The Strange Language of News' is published this month by Elliott & Thompson

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My 'shameful secret': I've learnt to love clichéd journalese

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Where is everyone in a lab coat a "boffin"? Where is "bubbly" either "guzzled" or "glugged"? Where do "drunken yobs" go on "booze-fuelled rampages"? You know the answer: in Britain's newspapers. Just under a year ago, a late-night comment on Twitter led me to become an accidental collector of "journalese", the language of reporters.

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Medical lingo can be confusing-but maybe ignorance is bliss. In his new book, The Secret Language of Doctors, Toronto-based ER physician Brian Goldman decodes the slang that doctors and nurses use to talk about their jobs, patients, and each other-and some of it is far from flattering.

Of course, not all slang is derogatory. In some cases, it's a way to pack a lot of information into a single phrase, or to warn colleagues about a potentially difficult patient. A surgeon might say "High Five" when entering the OR to let other staff know they'll be operating on someone with HIV. Sometimes slang helps hospital staff sound more professional during awkward situations; a nurse might refer to "Code Brown" during a miserable shift with a man who is having constant diarrhea in bed.

In other situations, the book reveals, slang is therapeutic, a form of comic relief that builds camaraderie between overworked doctors and nurses, and which helps them get through long, emotionally heavy days. "The inability to laugh on rounds in an environment like our ICU, where there's very little to laugh about, is going [to] be tragic and injurious to safety and to the quality of care," one respirologist told Goldman. "You need to have those moments where you take a little break and reset." In any case, check out a selection of lingo below, all pulled from Goldman's book, so that the next time you're in the hospital you know what your doctor really thinks of you.

The bunker: This is a room in the hospital where medical students, residents, and their attending physicians meet behind closed doors to rest and talk about their days. There, one might laugh about the patient in the "monkey jacket," or hospital gown, who had a case of "chandelier syndrome," practically leaping up toward the ceiling in surprise when she felt the cold stethoscope. A surgeon might cringe while recalling a "peek-and-shriek," an operation in which she opened a patient's belly to find something unexpected, like cancer, and quickly stitched up again.

Cowboys and fleas: Doctors don't only bad-mouth their patients; they also bad-mouth each other. Hospitals are full of rivalries between departments, Goldman writes. Surgeons may be called "cowboys" to imply they operate first and think later, while internists can be criticized as "fleas," an acronym for "fucking little esoteric assholes," as one doctor put it. Urologists might take offense at being calling "plumbers," and anesthesiologists for being referred to as "gas passers." FOOBA, which means "found on orthopedics barely alive," is another insult suggesting that orthopedic surgeons successfully fix bones while missing other signs of disease.

Discharged up: After "calling it" and stopping resuscitation efforts, a patient may be "discharged up," "discharged to heaven," or sent to the ECU (the "eternal care unit"). Someone who is dying but still holding onto life is "in the departure lounge" or "entering the drain," and if he can't be saved he's "circling the drain," Goldman writes. Doctors might note the O Sign, when a person is so close to the end that his mouth stays open like the letter O, or the Q Sign, when his tongue sticks out.

DOMA: "Day off, my ass," when residents aren't allowed to leave work until noon and have to be back the next day.

FLK: Funny-looking kid, referring to the facial characteristics of a child with a genetic or congenital condition.

Frequent fliers: These are people who show up at the emergency room again and again, even for nonemergency complaints, potentially because they have nowhere else to receive care. Frequent fliers are often homeless people, known as "curly toes," because their toenails are so long they've curled, Goldman writes. If they don't have insurance, they may suffer from "nonpayoma" or a "negative wallet biopsy." If they bring a bag with clothes, determined to stay even before receiving a diagnosis, doctors may note with annoyance their "positive suitcase sign" or "positive Samsonite sign," in reference to the luggage maker. When doctors "turf," they're looking for any possible justification to refer a patient to a different department in the hospital, and if that patient is "bounced," they are returned back to the original department.

GOMER: Made popular by the 1978 satirical novel, The House of God, GOMER is slang for "get out of my emergency room," for chronic patients who are admitted with tricky conditions that cannot be cured and need long-term care. (Since these patients are often elderly, GOMER can also stand for "grand old man of the emergency room," Goldman adds.) But actually, this term is passé. "GOMER has been used on TV shows including Scrubs and ER," he writes. "When that happens, it's no longer insider slang, so it gets discarded." Instead, doctors may refer to "status gomaticus," or to the "bed blockers" who take up space in acute-care hospitals when they really need placement in a rehabilitation or long-term care facility. They may bemoan an elderly patient's "failure to die," inspired by the term "failure to thrive," used for infants who are too small.

Harpooning the whale: Some physicians are not exactly delicate when it comes to describing overweight and obese patients. A surgeon might use the euphemism "excessive soft tissue" to refer to the layers of fat she needs to cut through before reaching the muscle, writes Goldman, or she might say the patient is "fluffy." OB-GYNs might talk among themselves about "harpooning the whale," or inserting an epidural catheter, which provides pain-relief medication, into an obese woman's spinal canal during the late stages of labor. Since it can be tough to locate the insertion point through fat, one hospital even created a "Prince of Whales Award" for the resident who placed epidurals "in the most tonnage in one shift," Goldman quotes an anesthesiologist as saying. Some doctors may say they charge a "beemer code," slang for an additional fee to care for an obese patient, maybe one who's "two clinic units," or 400 pounds.

Hollywood code: From Grey's Anatomy or ER you may be familiar with Code Blue-an emergency code indicating that someone needs immediate resuscitation. But sometimes doctors might realize there's no way to save the patient. In that case, they may call a "Hollywood Code," also known as "Show Code," "Light Blue Code," or "Slow Code." Rather than dropping everything and sprinting to the patient's bed, they stroll to the scene, slowly check for a pulse, and begin their intervention, Goldman explains. "It's a play for time until it's acceptable to pronounce the patient dead," he writes.

Incarceritis: The condition of a prisoner who fakes an illness to go to the hospital. If that prisoner is looking for drugs to peddle later to their cellmates, they may have ADD-not attention deficit disorder, but "Acute Dilaudid Deficiency," with Dilaudid being one of the strongest prescription narcotics. He might try to "cheek" his pills, hiding it in his cheeks while the nurse isn't looking and then saving it for later sale. Then there are the "swallowers," people with a mental illness who sometimes swallow objects like forks and nails.

SFU 50 dose: The amount of a sedative or anti-anxiety medication that causes 50 percent of patients to shut the fuck up.

Social injury of the rectum: A euphemism first used in the American Journal of Surgery in 1977, for people who wind up in the hospital after inserting candles, billiard balls, and other objects into their anuses for erotic pleasure. One doctor told Goldman about the time he treated a patient with a florescent light bulb up his rectum. "It broke inside of him," the doctor said.

Status dramaticus: In a play on the real medical term "status asthmaticus," an intense asthma attack that doesn't respond to an inhaler, doctors have come up with the phrase "status dramaticus" for stressed-out patients who believe they're extremely sick or dying but actually aren't. Patients who exaggerate their symptoms, acting like they're in pain to get a response, are "dying swans," an allusion to a 1905 ballet, The Dying Swan. Or they're "a Camille," like the heroine who passes away with great drama in her lover's arms during La Dame Aux Camélias , by Alexandre Dumas.

Whiney primey: A pregnant woman who keeps returning to the hospital because she thinks she's in labor but isn't. When the baby comes, she'll be "frozen" when she receives an epidural for her pain, and if the epidural stops active labor she'll become an "ice cube."

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You're not paranoid-your doctors really are talking trash about you when you pass out

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Medical lingo can be confusing-but maybe ignorance is bliss. In his new book, The Secret Language of Doctors , Toronto-based ER physician Brian Goldman decodes the slang that doctors and nurses use to talk about their jobs, patients, and each other-and some of it is far from flattering.

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Secret Teacher: jargon is ruining our children's education

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Ugly words - such as learning objectives, non-negotiables and targets - are meaningless to young pupils and put too much pressure on them too soon

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MPs on a Commons committee today criticise politicians and civil servants for their poor command of the English language. The misleading and vague official language epitomised by Sir Humphrey Appleby in Yes Minister has a detrimental impact on democracy and public services, MPs on the public administration select committee concluded.

In its report, Bad Language: the Use and Abuse of Official Language, the committee criticises the use of unclear language that distorts meaning. "The unlovely language of this unreal world floats along on a linguistic sea of rollouts, step changes, public domains, fit for purposes, stakeholder engagements, across the pieces, win-wins, level playing fields and going forwards," the report says.

Although they sought examples of good and bad use of language by politicians and public servants, the MPs elicited "no examples of good language, but plenty of examples of bad language". These included euphemisms routinely used by politicians and civil servants such as "downsizing" and "efficiency savings" rather than budget or staff cuts.

Jargon came in for particular attention.The report said jargon could be used to "hide the fact that the speaker or writer doesn't really understand what they are writing or talking about".It cites several examples of "sterile jargon".

An extract from the Cabinet Office's 2008-09 annual report was singled out for its excessive use of obscure terminology.

The extract said: "Savings on the core grant-in-aid delivering the Change-Up programme, against the counterfactual of an inflationary increase and reprioritisation of the OTS budget to fund a wider range of investment programmes from the 2007-08 baseline amount to around £4.8m realised in 2008-09."A letter from the minister of state for care services to Roger Gale MP, meanwhile, about attempts by "pacesetters" to tackle health inequalities described how "successful innovations will be mainstreamed" to ensure the "long term sustainability of equality and diversity into core business," is similarly opaque and confusing.

Even the House of Commons's own official language did not escape censure. This passage from its business plan for 2008/09 was singled out as a particularly good example of obfuscation: "Objectives ... to ensure a risk management system is embedded within business processes, allowing for risks to be escalated up and down the organisation as necessary."

The report argues that bad language of such a kind is damaging because it can prevent public understanding of policies, and deter people from getting access to public services and benefits.

"Long, complex official forms, officious letters and confusing requests for information can all deter individuals from attempting to deal with public authorities," the committee concludes. "This is particularly worrying when it prevents people from getting the benefits or services to which they are entitled."

The committee calls for tough action to tackle bad official language, with penalties for misleading or confusing language which results in harm, such as preventing someone from receiving benefits or public services. "Politicians and public servants should be required to communicate with people in a straightforward way, using language that people understand, the report recommends, while good political language should be encouraged and bad language exposed and condemned," the report concludes.

Tony Wright, chairman of the committee, said: "Good government requires good language, while bad language is a sign of poor government.

"We propose that cases of bad official language should be treated as 'maladministration', as for any other type of poor administration. Complaints made on this basis must be dealt with properly. This would help ensure that government takes seriously its responsibility to use good, clear and understandable language."
Topics

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Not fit for purpose? The jargon-laden language of politics

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MPs on a Commons committee today criticise politicians and civil servants for their poor command of the English language. The misleading and vague official language epitomised by Sir Humphrey Appleby in Yes Minister has a detrimental impact on democracy and public services, MPs on the public administration select committee concluded.

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Skepta's Mercury Prize win brings grime back into the mainstream, and in doing so shines a spotlight on the ever-changing language of Britain's urban youth. Perhaps this is the beginning of a more linguistically tolerant age.

Grime is a style of music that developed out of early 2000s East London, and spread through mixtapes, word of mouth, and London's vibrant pirate radio stations. Sometimes mistakenly viewed as a subgenre of hip-hop, its real roots lie in UK garage, bashment, drum and bass, jungle, and dancehall. Yes, there are similarities to hip-hop - both involve rapping for a start - but grime has a specifically British flavour, both in style and attitude, that separates it from its US-dominated cousin.

For some, grime, by its very nature, can only really exist at street level; enjoyed and shared by a like-minded community of urban youth, a disenfranchised community who can relate to each other's experiences, struggles and realities. "Selling out" by gaining commercial success at the perceived expense of the art form is, to put it mildly, frowned upon among certain established artists.

For a grime artist to win the Mercury Prize, therefore, is a potential double-edged sword. Can an individual ever really stay true to their roots (and continue to rap about those shared experiences) when success has elevated them into the mainstream?

In Skepta's case, the likely answer is yes. Skepta preaches a message of independence and self-belief; independence from the music industry, and a belief in one's own abilities and entrepreneurship that goes beyond making music. In this, above all else, he embodies an important and recurring theme of the genre.

Skepta's winning album, Konnichiwa, is resolutely British in style, both in terms of content and language. And it is this language of grime - the Multicultural Urban British English that can be heard in cities across the UK - that adds a whole extra layer of interest to the genre. It's not just the words, such as bro, bruv, fam, bare, peng, gwop, that can be heard throughout grime that serve to identify it, but the pronunciations, too - the "t" for "th", the "flatter" vowel sound in words such as "like" and "price". Often mistaken for a faux Jamaican accent, it is in reality so much more complex.

Music of the streets

There is always a question around the extent to which musical performers of any genre "put on" the speech style in which they sing, be that in relation to The Beatle's accent experimentations, or Iggy Azalea's "blaccent". Yet grime, for the most part, is performed using the same linguistic repertoire as the source material - the language of the streets and neighbourhoods of multicultural urban Britain.

This is not to say that there is not an element of linguistic performance when rapping, or that Bugzy Malone talks to his mum in the same way that he talks to his mates. Far from it - this is all part of the natural stylistic variation that we all possess, and grime artists are no different. But what sets grime apart from other musical genres is the participatory nature of what is, essentially, a social practice. Grime is, for the most part, not something that is passively consumed, it is something that is actively engaged in and interacted with. In many ways, it is one of the most democratic and equal forms of music there is, open to anybody with a phone and access to YouTube.

The history of grime is one of young men going round to each other's houses and making tapes of themselves spitting lyrics, and it is no different now. The people I've worked with through my own research into the language of young people who have been excluded from mainstream education are doing exactly the same. But more than this, the spitting bars (rapping) is part of their everyday interaction, with the more accomplished individuals switching seamlessly mid-conversation.

Break-time can see them huddled around a tinny phone speaker trading lightning-fast lyrics over a familiar beat. It's no wonder, then, that speech styles are so interwoven. With no clear line between "normal conversation" and "performance", it's impossible to assign particular speech features to either style. After all, isn't all speech "performance" to some degree?

This participatory nature is often negatively portrayed in some sections of the mainstream media. The narrow-minded will then likely maintain the link between language and criminality that is so often (and so thoughtlessly) made, and continue in their belief that there are good and bad (or right and wrong) ways of speaking.

But the broad-minded, and those who take the time to engage with the young people themselves, will appreciate how articulate, eloquent, and linguistically inventive many of them are.

Skepta winning the Mercury Prize is a good thing for him as an individual (definitely), for grime in general (probably), and for increased awareness and acceptance of the language of young people (hopefully). So next time you hear some spitting in the street, pay attention and show some respect - you may be listening to the next big thing.

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Skepta, grime and urban British youth language: a guide

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Skepta's Mercury Prize win brings grime back into the mainstream, and in doing so shines a spotlight on the ever-changing language of Britain's urban youth. Perhaps this is the beginning of a more linguistically tolerant age. Grime is a style of music that developed out of early 2000s East London, and spread through mixtapes, word of mouth, and London's vibrant pirate radio stations.

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"Why some words skyrocket to popularity, only to crash and burn-for example, the unfortunate 'fleek,' or my generation's 'joshin' and 'betty'-while others have a longer lifespan is a mystery," Kohn told me. "'Dude' in its current meaning has been present for at least a century. If a word spreads too quickly from a subgroup to the mouths of moms or television actors, it will likely no longer serve the purpose of creating in-group identity, dooming it to failure."

My colleague James Hamblin made a similar argument in a eulogy for the word "bae" in 2014. "The commercial appropriation of a word signals the end of its hipness in any case," he wrote, "but as Kwame Opam at The Verge called it, 'appropriation of urban youth culture' can banish a term to a particularly bleached sphere of irrelevance." (However, now that "bae" has been rejected by the mainstream, Robin Boylorn wrote for The Guardian last year, black people can reclaim it.)

All this underscores how language can be as much a way to communicate who you aren't, as it can be used to signal who you are. Culturally, people often draw those lines generationally. Linguistically, it's another story.

One infamous example of a failed attempt by outsiders to infiltrate a linguistic subculture was a 1992 New York Times story about grunge slang. The newspaper reported a list of terms based on a single interview with a 25-year-old who worked at a Seattle record label. It was later revealed that she had made up the terms she defined for the Times -including "wack slacks," "lamestain," and "swingin' on the flippity-flop," to name a memorable few. The paper ended up printing the phrases as real examples of popular slang.

More often, though, words and expressions shift in and out of popular use gradually, without much notice. Sort of the way "yeah" and "yes" have made way for "yessssss" and "yaaaaas" and "yiss," a phenomenon my colleague Megan Garber explored last year. Kohn offered an example of a once-scandalous neologism that is today utterly mundane: "While Oscar Wilde's peers may have lamented the death of English when youth waited for the bus, instead of the omnibus, modern audiences would find the longer word stilted and strange."

And the thing about linguistic changes is they can't exactly be stopped in any sort of deliberate way. ("Stop trying to make 'fetch' happen," only works if fetch was never going to happen in the first place.) Even old-school grammar geeks are warming up to "they" as an acceptable gender-neutral pronoun, understanding that culture doesn't just trump language rules, it creates them-then destroys them, then creates new ones again.

Oft-spoken terms either peter out or they stick around. "As if!" becomes "I can't even." And the tendency for older adults to criticize younger generations for how language changes is its own form of establishing identity or staking a space in a social group. Which is, let's face it, pretty budge. Blatantly.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

Adrienne LaFrance is the executive editor of The Atlantic. She was previously a senior editor and staff writer at The Atlantic, and the editor of TheAtlantic.com.

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"Why some words skyrocket to popularity, only to crash and burn-for example, the unfortunate 'fleek,' or my generation's 'joshin' and 'betty'-while others have a longer lifespan is a mystery," Kohn told me. "'Dude' in its current meaning has been present for at least a century.

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English & Media Centre | English and Media Centre

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English and Media Centre (EMC) is an educational charity providing CPD and innovative & award-winning teaching materials to secondary English & Media teachers

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English & Media Centre | English and Media Centre

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English and Media Centre (EMC) is an educational charity providing CPD and innovative & award-winning teaching materials to secondary English & Media teachers

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
English & Media Centre | English and Media Centre

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
English and Media Centre (EMC) is an educational charity providing CPD and innovative & award-winning teaching materials to secondary English & Media teachers

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no, not me, no way, no how!

It's well known that negation is more frequent in spoken language than in writing. This is hardly surprising: after all, speech acts such as denials, refusals and rejections are typical of face-to-face interaction. It seems more surprising, though, to learn that in spoken English teenagers use negatives more frequently than adults do.

The reason, Martínez suggests, lies at least in part in the nature of teenage language. About one third of the teenagers' negatives occurred in imperatives, commands, orders, strong suggestions, directions, instructions and refusals. Martínez argues that this is because teenagers like to be direct, straightforward and spontaneous when they are talking to each other. The adults, by contrast, tended to use more roundabout expressions to carry out the same kinds of speech act, which resulted in a lower number of negatives overall. The teenagers were just as direct when expressing an opinion, and this also often led to their using negation. Adults were more inclined to hedge their opinions using indefinite or vague expressions.

A further characteristic of the teenagers' speech was the use of several negatives in a string, which increased the force of the negation. The example in the first box shows a string of this kind.

this geezer from Bedlam yeah got stopped the other day in this car, yeah, he was pissed, he was tripping and he was speeding yeah, no not, no licence; no tax, no ruddy insurance yeah

The second box contains an example of another tendency found in the teenage corpus: this is the use of negatives as a kind of ritualized play, where one speaker immediately contradicts the other.

J: and ever since then, face it S!

S: no shut your mouth! Shut up!

Although both adults and teenagers sometimes used fixed negative expressions to strengthen the negative force of what they were saying, the particular expressions differed. Adults tended to use not at all as a stronger term than no, whereas teenagers preferred no way. Teenagers also used idioms such as I couldn't give a toss, and negative forms such as nope, nah and dunno. They also used innovative forms like uncool (meaning the opposite of being trendy or fashionable). Negative concord (e.g. I didn't get no matches) was more frequent in the teenage corpus too, as was nonstandard never (e.g. Vernon never called for me yesterday), though Martinez points out that this may reflect the social class or regional origins of the speakers, which he could not take into account in his analyses. Social factors such as these may interact with the psychological development of adolescents, which accounts for their tendency to be direct and to experiment and play with language, but all these issues need further investigation.

_________________________________________________________

Martínez, Ignacio M. Palacios (2011) The expression of negation in British Teenagers' Language: A Preliminary Study. Journal of English Linguistics 39: 4-35.

doi 10.1177/0075424210366905

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no, not me, no way, no how! It's well known that negation is more frequent in spoken language than in writing. This is hardly surprising: after all, speech acts such as denials, refusals and rejections are typical of face-to-face interaction. It seems more surprising, though, to learn that in spoken English teenagers use negatives more frequently than adults do.

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People often think that using as a discourse marker is typical of teenage talk. like Christopher V. Odato's research, though, finds that children as young as 4 use like in this way.

Odato recorded children playing together, choosing one pair of girls and one pair of boys in seven age groups - 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 10. He identified three stages in their use of like as a discourse marker. At first (stage 1), children use like infrequently and in only a few syntactic positions - mainly in front of a determiner phrase (beginning with a word like a or the,as in she had like a part right here) or at the beginning of a clause (like you deserve to get a spanking). As their language matures, they reach stage 2. At this point they use like more often and in a greater number of positions, though still more often before a determiner phrase. By stage 3 their overall frequency of like has continued to increase and they now use it more frequently in other positions, such as before a prepositional phrase ( look at how mine landed like in the crack of the chair).

Although boys and girls follow similar developmental trajectories, Odato found that girls become more sophisticated users of All thegirls in the 4-6 year oldpairs used like at an earlier age than boys. like, but only half the boys of the same age used it; and those boys who did use like did so infrequently. The girls moved from stage 1 to stage 2 at about the age of 5, but the boys did not move on to stage 2 until they were 7. Girls showed a dramatic increase in their use of like between the ages of 4 and 6, but for boys a comparable increase in frequency was not seen until the ages of 7 and 8. Finally, boys aged 7 and 8 were still preferring to use like before a determiner phrase, whereas the girls were using it less often in this position and more often in a range of other positions.

Odato points out that research on other discourse markers has also found that 4-7 year old girls use these forms more frequently and with more global pragmatic functions than boys of the same age. It's been suggested that this is related to gender differences in play: boys tend to prefer active games that do not require so much speech whereas girls more often plot and act out pretend play situations.

Intriguingly, the different syntactic positions in which children use like as their ages increase follow approximately the same order as the historical development of like as a discourse marker in English. Odato points out, though, that the frequency with which adults use like also coincides with the history of the form. Children probably wait to hear enough evidence that like can be used in a certain syntactic position before they start to use it that way themselves, and obviously this will take longer for the less frequent positions. However what we know about adults' use of like is based on adults talking to adults, and we can't assume that this is how adults use like when they are speaking to children. As so often, more research is needed!

Odato, Christopher V. (2013) The development of children's use of discourse like in peer interaction. American Speech 88(2): 117-143.

doi:10.1215/00031283-2346825

This summary was written by Jenny Cheshire

For English Language teaching resources and a suggested English A level language investigation related to this topic click

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People often think that using as a discourse marker is typical of teenage talk. like Christopher V. Odato's research, though, finds that children as young as 4 use like in this way. Odato recorded children playing together, choosing one pair of girls and one pair of boys in seven age groups - 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 10.

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Who?

Penelope Eckert is a professor of Linguistics at Stanford University.

What was she researching?

Penelope Eckert's input into sociolinguistic research emerged in response to criticisms of William Labov's studies. People questioned whether Labov's focus on people in terms of their demographic categories (age, gender, ethnicity, social class) was really the biggest influence on language use.

So along came Eckert with the idea of the role of social practice.
A 'social practice' is what we share when we, as speakers, engage in an activity together. So, if you and someone else you know play football together, you are sharing a social practice.

When?

2000

Where?

Detroit, in the U.S state of Michigan.

Her research method:

What Eckert did in her research was define groups in terms of the social practices the speakers engaged in. She did this by observing friendship groups in a school in Detroit; this method of detailed observation of a community is known as ethnography.

What she established were two very different groups in the school, the jocks and the burnouts, each containing individuals with a mix of social class (parental occupation, housing etc.)

The jocks were a group in the school who actively engaged in and enjoyed school life. The diagram below shows their key characteristics.
The burnouts were quite the opposite of the jocks, choosing not to become involved and interactive with the goings-on of the school and engaging in rebellious behaviour.

What did she find out?

Eckert found that people tend to speak more like their friends - those who shared social practices together - than others belonging in the same demographic category as them, ie. social class.

If you had to observe the language of these two people from two very different social groups (so don't share social practices), but from the same social demographic (age, ethnicity, class), what would you expect the result to be?

Would you expect the speech of the girl in the top picture to be greatly different from the speech of the boy in the bottom picture? Would you expect the topic of conversation to be about school in a negative or positive way? Who do you think would be more polite and respectful towards others?

KEY TERMS

Social Practice: the shared activity speakers engage in together

Ethnography: a study method involving detailed observation

References

Eckert, P., (1989). Jocks and Burnouts: Social Categories and Identity in the High School. New York: Teachers College Press.
Eckert, P., (2000). Linguistic Variation as Social Practice: The Linguistic Construction of Identity in Belten High. Malden. MA: Blackwell.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Penelope Eckert - High School Ethnography

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Who? Penelope Eckert is a professor of Linguistics at Stanford University. What was she researching? Penelope Eckert's input into sociolinguistic research emerged in response to criticisms of William Labov's studies. People questioned whether Labov's focus on people in terms of their demographic categories (age, gender, ethnicity, social class) was really the biggest influence on language use.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Distinguishing linguistic change at the community level ('generational change') from linguistic change at the individual level ('age grading') is "one of the major issues in contemporary sociolinguistics" (Tagliamonte 2012:247). This article gives a

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Who?

Penelope Eckert is a professor of Linguistics at Stanford University.

What was she researching?

Penelope Eckert's input into sociolinguistic research emerged in response to criticisms of William Labov's studies. People questioned whether Labov's focus on people in terms of their demographic categories (age, gender, ethnicity, social class) was really the biggest influence on language use.

So along came Eckert with the idea of the role of social practice.
A 'social practice' is what we share when we, as speakers, engage in an activity together. So, if you and someone else you know play football together, you are sharing a social practice.

When?

2000

Where?

Detroit, in the U.S state of Michigan.

Her research method:

What Eckert did in her research was define groups in terms of the social practices the speakers engaged in. She did this by observing friendship groups in a school in Detroit; this method of detailed observation of a community is known as ethnography.

What she established were two very different groups in the school, the jocks and the burnouts, each containing individuals with a mix of social class (parental occupation, housing etc.)

The jocks were a group in the school who actively engaged in and enjoyed school life. The diagram below shows their key characteristics.
The burnouts were quite the opposite of the jocks, choosing not to become involved and interactive with the goings-on of the school and engaging in rebellious behaviour.

What did she find out?

Eckert found that people tend to speak more like their friends - those who shared social practices together - than others belonging in the same demographic category as them, ie. social class.

If you had to observe the language of these two people from two very different social groups (so don't share social practices), but from the same social demographic (age, ethnicity, class), what would you expect the result to be?

Would you expect the speech of the girl in the top picture to be greatly different from the speech of the boy in the bottom picture? Would you expect the topic of conversation to be about school in a negative or positive way? Who do you think would be more polite and respectful towards others?

KEY TERMS

Social Practice: the shared activity speakers engage in together

Ethnography: a study method involving detailed observation

References

Eckert, P., (1989). Jocks and Burnouts: Social Categories and Identity in the High School. New York: Teachers College Press.
Eckert, P., (2000). Linguistic Variation as Social Practice: The Linguistic Construction of Identity in Belten High. Malden. MA: Blackwell.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Penelope Eckert - High School Ethnography

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Who? Penelope Eckert is a professor of Linguistics at Stanford University. What was she researching? Penelope Eckert's input into sociolinguistic research emerged in response to criticisms of William Labov's studies. People questioned whether Labov's focus on people in terms of their demographic categories (age, gender, ethnicity, social class) was really the biggest influence on language use.