| Submit your comments on this article |
| Britain |
| Cockney to be replaced by Jafaican |
| 2010-07-02 |
| Even Professor Henry Higgins — rarely lost for words — would be dumbfounded. New research shows that the cockney dialect he battled so hard to beat out of Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady will disappear from London's streets within a generation. As its traditional speakers emigrate to Essex and Hertfordshire, the 650-year-old accent is dying off in London, to be replaced by multicultural London English, heavily influenced by West Indian patois, Bangladeshi and remnants of old cockney. The dialect won't die off altogether. It will survive in the descendants of those Home Counties émigrés. You can hear it happening today: teenagers in Essex speak like Henry Cooper and Barbara Windsor; in Lambeth, they are more likely to sound like Ali G. |
| Posted by:ed |