Patois got your tongue?

Spawn of the Daily Mail and favoured Tube-travel rag of my youth, the Evening Standard, has a bee in its bonnet. Apparently the good old Cockney vocabulary is on its way, out, replaced by a new, multicultural (read ‘foreign’) patois known as ‘Jafaican’.

Desperately trying to hide its disapproval of outside influences having a bearing on the London lingo, the Standard dissects the way that white children in London have adopted slang based on Jamaican words. The implication is that something unique, desirable and special is on its way out.

Well, yes, it is easy enough to romanticise the East End of London as a 1940s theme park where the taps run warm beer, jellied eels are served for breakfast, lunch and dinner and everyone remembers the Blitz. Easy enough, that is, if you’re white, over fifty and have the box set of ‘Goodnight Sweetheart’ on DVD. But it is barely more than an illusion.

The infiltration of Jamaican slang has been around for a good decade, maybe longer, now. I can still remember the middle-class accountants’ sons at my school swaggering along, clothed in their maroon and black private school uniform, uttering Yardie expressions they didn’t know the origin of. At the time it was laughable, so obviously put on that it couldn’t last.

North London independent schools though, are no measure of youth culture. While Jafaican was taking hold in the predominantly white, moneyed society I knew, it was already an established part of the language in the more racially and socially mixed areas of London.

This is no bad thing. Language is, after all, organic. It grows and is modified based on social factors, reflecting the atmosphere in which it is used. Perhaps this is what the Standard is scared of. If Jafaican really is replacing Cockney, does this mean the end of other British institutions? The good old British Bulldog to be overrun by hordes of Chihuahuas? Bubble and Squeak to be replaced by curry? Holidays in Barbados instead of Bognor? But wait a minute, those last two have already happened. In fact, outside influences are what has made post-colonial Britain what it is: a hotpot of mutually beneficial cultures.

So what is it about Jafaican that so worries the nice folks at the Standard? Perhaps it is simply nostalgia for a commonly remembered phenomenon. After all, who can help but miss the lovable rhyming slang the Kray brothers used as they extorted, stole and killed. Or perhaps they are motivated by a modicum of fear about their popularity in the coming years.

After all, as London grows ever more diverse, racially and culturally, is there really a place for a newspaper that takes 10 years to catch on to what the ‘yoots’ are doing?