Posted on 04/11/2006 4:10:43 PM PDT by Free ThinkerNY
'Jafaican' is wiping out inner-city English accents
by LAURA CLARK, Daily Mail
If you struggle to understand Cockney, Brummie, Geordie and Scouse, then stand by for an even bigger challenge.
It's called Jafaican and, slowly but surely, it is infiltrating the English language.
The multicultural hybrid, based on Jamaican but with undertones of West African and Indian, is not a totally new concept, of course. Ali G has been delivering his comic routines in his own colourful variant of it for some years.
But linguistic experts say it is becoming so common in the inner cities that it is beginning to eclipse traditional accents.
In some London boroughs, for instance, it has taken over from Cockney, the prevailing accent for generations, as inner-city white youths pick up the speech patterns of their black and Asian classmates. More than four out of ten London residents are now from ethnic minority backgrounds.
The Jafaican name, conveying the idea of 'fake Jamaican', was coined on the streets rather than in the research rooms. The academics prefer 'multicultural English'. But the message is constant.
"People are beginning to sound the same regardless of their colour or ethnic background," said Sue Fox, of London University's Queen Mary College, who is studying the phenomenon.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Nevertheless, if some Dominicans asked me for some baseball bats... No I won't go there... ;-)
London, Kentucky
London (population 5,692) is the county seat of Laurel County. The community began as a settlement on the Wilderness Road running north from the Cumberland Gap.
...until they sound like an inability to master one's spoken tongue.
I thought "Slump Tester" had a better sound to it than "Yield Checker" or "Procter Pounder". (I test RCC too.)
Like your tagline.
I agree with him and We rests his case ;)
Hey Mon, how many jobs you got?
I see. Any Cockeny revivals happening there in Kentucky? ;)
Thank you! I have hunted for just such a map of England.
England?
I don't believe it.
What, just a conspiracy of cartographers?
Rather off topic, but what a bizarre map of England you've unearthed! The 'regional' boundaries it shows correspond to no administrative or political boundaries in the real world, not even to the 'England of the regions' being foisted on us by Brussels. Some of them (but not all) are the boundaries of area Tourist Boards, but others seem simply to be the fruit of the cartographer's imagination!
Where did you get that map? A few million people in Manchester and Merseyside will be surprised to find they live in the West Midlands now.
Great - the next lingual fad. Someone call Madison Avenue and see what they can do to make money from this. Soon there will be white cracker boy wanna-bes from the suburbs speaking jibberish code while failing basic reading and composition.
The map was the first one I saw on Google that had London on it. I didn't take the time to look at anything else on it.
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