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.