Saturday, June 26, 2021

KV - How the London working class accent is changing

 I came across these videos on Tik Tok recently and they are hilarious, but the new London working class accent is very interesting, even though I have trouble understanding it myself. 

London is now very multicultural, and the young West Indians, mainly from Jamaican descent, are now third generation, and their passed down Jamaican accent has combined with the white London working class accent to produce one of the harshest accent I've heard. 

English, when spoken properly, can be very beautiful. I've included an examples of both very beautiful English and American accents.

All languages are beautiful when spoken correctly. 

In this first video the boys are just acting and so speak quiet nicely at the start, which is probably their normal accent, but then they go into the new hybrid working class accent for the second part. 




This black guy here speaks very nicely, but he gets a shock. 

White working class Londoners do speak like this now in some parts of London. They had to put subtitles in so people could understand it, but the syntax is very different to and also difficult to understand. The youngsters love talking like this - street talk - and getting it right is important for status and acceptance. 



Some examples of very beautiful English accents. 

The content of these videos below are very interesting in themselves too. 


Why I dress as a Regency gentleman... everyday of my life - BBC News

Zack MacLeod Pinsent dresses as a British Regency gentleman every day, saying that the clothing is a "huge confidence builder".

He ceremoniously burned his last pair of jeans when he was 14-years-old and hasn't looked back since.

He's a tailor and has found a market for clients wanting historical pieces overseas






A very beautiful American accent, I thought. 





1 comment:

Joe said...

I love accents! America is boring in this respect, but British English is amazing.

But I gotta push back on the spoken "correctly" part. Native speakers, by definition, speak their own language correctly (of course barring the occasional slips of the tongue which they recognize as not "sounding right")... what makes a language "correct" or not is whether or not the speaker has the power and social standing to impose their dialect as prestigeous on others. It's nothing inherent to a language itself.

But this is all in good fun... Except for southerners, they definitely don't speak correctly lol, I swear a southern drawl drops the iq by at least 20 points.. and I swear the brits can't pronounce the names of their own towns.