Teenagers in east London are forming their own brand of English and pushing out traditional Cockney slang, according to language experts.

A study by Sue Fox, from London’s Queen Mary’s College, found words such as “nang” - meaning good - were commonly used by youths in inner London.

Ms Fox said this “Multicultural London English” was influenced by a variety of languages such as Jamaican and Indian.

Youths in outer London had a stronger association with the Cockney accent.

Researchers attributed this to the population movement out of London.

A BBC News article on-line

yesterday

.

Sue Fox, a researcher on sociolinguistic variation and change, is a lucky girl.  The BBC loves her and her work.  It must, because it remembered her - and it – all of eight months after the BBC Press Office circulated this:-

Popular TV shows about East London might need to rethink the accents of their characters after new research revealed by the BBC Voices project shows that the cockney accent is dying out in parts of the East End.

Speaking in an exclusive interview for BBC Voices, Sue Fox, a sociolinguist at the Queen Mary College, University of London, says a new dialect is emerging to replace cockney and that it’s a mixture between English and Bangladeshi.

She says the new variety of speech - particularly vowel pronunciation - sounds closer to Received Pronunciation (Queen’s English) than traditional cockney.

Other experts suggest that the phenomenon is repeating itself elsewhere in cities across the UK.

Fox’s findings are the result of her research into the way that cockney is being influenced by the speech of Bangladeshi and other communities in Tower Hamlets.

In the interview with the BBC, Fox says: “This is very exciting for linguists – the language of London is changing…

“The majority of young people of school age are of Bangladeshi origin and this has had tremendous impact on the dialect spoken in the area.

“What I’ve actually found with the young people in Tower Hamlets is that they are using a variety of English which is not traditionally associated with cockney English - it’s a variety that we might say is Bangladeshi-accented.

“And in turn what I’ve found is that some adolescents of white British origin are also using these features in their speech as well.”

Fox told BBC Voices the new variety of speech includes words such as ‘nang’ meaning good, ‘creps’ for trainers and ‘skets’ for slippers - and that the more mixed and integrated an area is, the more the new accent was likely to be heard.

So this is an old, self-generated BBC item which treats of our happy, happy Brown New World as positively as can be, and features lots of positive comment from excitedly positive academic fruitcakes.  It’s evidently all so excitingly positive some excited BBC employee decided it had to go out with the real news, and never mind the cobwebs.

Which is strange when you consider that there is no place in the real news for Charlene or, heaven forbid, for this latest claim about the events of 7/7.

In its way, of course, the BBC’s decision to run the Fox piece after so long is as hypocritical and politically-biased as its announcement, very early in the police investigation, of a racial element to the killing of Anthony Walker or its initial squeamishness over the racial identities of Mary Ann Leneghan’s six killers.  Everything tends in the same Marxian direction.

Two weeks ago I e-mailed the BBC, the Telegraph and the Times asking tersely and in a politically neutral voice why they had not yet covered the murder of Charlene Downes.  None has replied, of course.  How could they?