The old East End dialect is moving out to Essex, says one academic. Come back and chill, cockneys
The East End done changed, blud. All the cockneys moved out. They decided that the only way was Essex and they dusted. They left the ends, taking their rhyming slang with them. Now the East End ain't cor-blimey-apples-and-pears-let's-ave-a-butchers – or so Queen Mary, University of London, thinks anyway.
Rhyming slang moving east of east ain't a par. It's just real life, you get me. I thought that social mobility and all that reh-teh-teh was a good thing. If anything, cockneys now span a larger area than they did before – Essex, and the home counties. If anything, it's grown.
The East End is a mirror of Britain at any given time. Now, like the rest of the country, the East End is a much more multicultural place to be. With all those different races, cotching together. And that ain't a bad thing. It's more representative of who we are as a nation.
People from Asian communities (south, south-east, the whole continent, standard), from African communities, from the Caribbean, hell, from Europe and from South America and all the trendies and hipsters with their fixies and beards, they're all here and it's hectic. We all need a new language, ya get me? A language that represents us and our manors, our yard, our ends. Cockney rhyming slang's too extra for us.
Cockney never updated. Not properly. And why should it? It never changed with the times. It's a capsule of a there and a then, a quirky and particular part of history. It's not dead though. It's shifted geographic. A migration. And they migrated a language with them. It's the same way my Gujarati family all talk in a language that hasn't been updated since they came over here in the 1960s.
All these linguist wastemen need to understand that language is also a sign of the times. Just because it's spoken in a different place to where it started, doesn't mean it's not dead. It's just moved. Think about how much of cockney comes from different languages anyway, like Yiddish ("kosher"), German ("shtoom"), Romany ("wonga"). My mum always said that loads of cockney came from Hindi. "Pukka" is from the Hindi, meaning solid. "Blighty" is from the Hindi bilati, meaning foreign land. "Bandana" is from the Hindi bandhana, to tie. "Cushti", again, from the Hindi khush, or happy. Bish-bash-bosh ... No one knows where that one comes from. Except Danny Dyer.
The language of the East End now comes from grime, from hip-hop, from the internet. It comes from patois and it comes from digital Esperanto. From people like Wiley or P-Money, or whoever is currently big on road. It comes from Twitter and Facebook, from shortened words like LOL and OMFG and abbreviations like totes, and new words like humblebrag. We're absorbing content all the time, be it through free grime mixtapes or blogs and Twitter streams, and that's what's changing our language. It means something to us, who we are. That's bait.
Seeing as the East End is a multicultural place for everyone to come and cotch, don't feel like it ain't your ends anymore, cockneys. Come back. Come and chill. It's a place for everyone, innit. Just update your rhyming slang to make it more relevant. Make it more current. That ain't a bad thing. I mean, some of your rhyming slang's still used. We still say Marvin when we're hungry, or drum to mean our yard. We still drop our ts an' all.
I have some suggestions for you. Wanna do a Will this weekend (Will.I.Am = scam)? I just downloaded this criss new Leaky (leaky tap = app). Yes, blud, follow me on banana (banana fritter = Twitter). I listen to a lot of Chico mixtapes (It's Chico Time = grime). The East End will always have the bells of Bow, the 24-hour Beigel Bake in Brick Lane, the memories of fighting bare fascists on Cable Street. It'll always welcome change and be the most vibrant, diverse part of the country. That's its beauty. The cockneys dashed the East End to a next generation. And that's nang. Innit.