From Cockney to Jafaican

My mother always had a keen ear for slang and lazy pronunciation when I was growing up. Because my siblings and I were working class and attended an absolutely dreadful school in the North-east in the 1960s and 1970s, my parents made sure we were as educated as we possibly could be in manners.

My father, a proud northerner, has always taken umbrage at what he calls ‘Cockney’ (in reality just phrases popular among Londoners such as ‘at the end of the day’, ‘basically’ and ‘strike a light’.) Over the past decade, however, the Cockney of my generation has been replaced with the street slang known as ‘Jafaican’, a form of patois picked up by black yout’ in London and eventually by kids from pretty much all ethnic and social backgrounds in towns and cities throughout the UK.

Like all such trends, Jafaican has been picked up by the middle-class, middle-aged and well-educated as well as teenagers. Indeed, it has been suggested by experts in linguistics and dialect that Jafaican will have completely replaced Cockney by 2030, and there have been attempts to argue that the appropriation of such slang by posh folk reflects both a lack of confidence in British cultural values and a crush on ghetto authenticity. Remember David Starkey, for example, causing a kerfuffle for claiming that white working-class people are ‘becoming black’?

The yout’ appear to be selective as to when they use street slang. My neighbour, a black teenager with aspiring, well–spoken parents, gives it large with the, ‘Hey blad, you looking buff in dem low batties’ (My friend, those trousers that are hanging impossibly down below your backside held up by who-knows-what and showing your under-crackers look really nice on you), and ‘Check dis’ da Feds are in I’s yard’ (Listen to me my friends, the police are in my house) when outside hangin’ with his homies, but at home sounds as middle-class as you like.