Generations of London English

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London today

Mapping the sounds of the modern city

The different audio clips on this page are a snapshot of the different sounds and styles of speech in London today. You can hear people of different ages, backgrounds and from different areas of the city, and the multiple social and cultural factors that influence how they speak.

East London

East London schools brought together working-class children from many different ethnic backgrounds and gave rise to Multicultural London English, drawing heavily on Black British English as well as speech features from their communities. Some East Londoners with migrant heritage have converged on the new Multicultural London English accent, while others retain more identifiable markers of their individual heritage or social background.  

Although Multicultural London English developed throughout East London, and Cockney speakers generally moved further East, to Essex, we can still hear traditional varieties of vernacular London speech in some neighbourhoods of East London. Older speakers, and a few younger speakers, still have the older vernacular dialect.

Newham

In this first clip, we hear three young men discussing what the future will be like. This clip is packed with classic features of Multicultural London English. The speakers come from different backgrounds (Vietnamese, South Asian, Ghanaian) but they are close friends and their dialect is similar. You may nevertheless be able to hear slight differences, based on the heritage languages and varieties of English in their different communities.   

Here we hear a young woman who is a third generation Londoner of Caribbean ancestry. Her speech has many similarities with speakers of Multicultural London English, but a few aspects of her accent suggest it is a more established variety of Black British English that developed earlier than Multicultural London English.  

This young woman grew up in Newham but retained a Cockney accent, showing that although the strongest Cockney is no longer heard very widely, it is still maintained in some families. We particularly find that White British women maintain it, possibly because the more masculine associations of MLE spread to men first.   

One of the speakers here arrived from Romania at age eight. Despite this, we hear no trace of his first language in his strong Multicultural London English accent. Young children in working class communities whose main English input has been at school rather than at home are exposed to fewer forms of English and often acquire the most innovative or advanced version of the new local accent, as their main English input is through interacting with peers.   

This young man from the North East of London reminds us that Standard Southern British English can occur in all parts of London—the accents of London are stratified by social class, not just neighbourhood. His recording also serves as a reminder that many other dimensions of social identity influence our speaking style, including gender identity and sexual orientation.    

Hackney

This older Black tradesman acquired Cockney growing up in Hackney, at a time when it was the dominant vernacular in the area.

This speaker reminds us that, depending on one’s friendships, social class, and cultural orientations, it is possible to grow up as a White East Londoner and acquire the full Multicultural London English variety as well. 

Tower Hamlets

This young woman speaks a version of Multicultural London English that reflects her Bangladeshi heritage. Her voice also signals her gender identity and subtly even her life trajectory, moving into a professional career. 

This young tradesman, from a White British background, has maintained a traditional London accent despite major changes in dialect around him during his lifetime. This does not mean he has no contact with other ethnic groups; his recording describes the often close friendships across cultures in East London. 

This young man speaks a variety of Multicultural London English that shares many features with the speech of the woman above. But again, the melody he uses and some of his consonants retain traces of growing up around Nigerian languages and Nigerian English. Again, like the woman above, he also uses his voice to style his gender identity and how he engages with the world around him, in his case, a teenager studying for a Sports qualification.  

North London

Like all parts of London, North London encompasses very diverse cultural histories. Alongside long-standing White British residential areas, there is a large Jewish community, historically linked to the East London Jewish community, as well as more recent cultural groups such as Caribbean, African, and Eastern European.

Barnet

This middle-class, middle-aged woman from North London speaks in a Standard Southern British English accent. This accent tends to be harder to associate with a specific region. Although her speech is quite standard, it can be possible to pinpoint it to London from tiny details that may differ from other Southern Standard speakers, say in Kent or Oxfordshire.  

Haringey

This North Londoner’s parents grew up in Nigeria. He has a university degree and is working in a middle-class professional job. This speaker represents a large cohort of young Black British English speakers in London, many of whom are of more recent African heritage, rather than older Caribbean heritage. Many have experienced significant social mobility in their lifetime, moving from more modest childhoods into professions such as law and finance. This social change has been accompanied by an ability to ‘code-switch’ between their vernacular London variety and a more standard variety of English depending on their interactional situation.  

The accent of this older speaker resembles many older men from London’s Orthodox Jewish community. His accent combines a core London dialect with influences from his bilingual use of Yiddish, which can also serve to signal his Jewish identity. 

Central London

Central London has a diverse mix of residents, with a higher concentration of Standard and middle-class speakers, given differences in real estate prices. Their accent often reflects a childhood around other Standard English speakers and sometimes a private school education, which can in turn confer a very standard Received Pronunciation accent.

Westminster

The young man in this clip is from North-West London and was educated in a private school. His speech style combines Standard accent features with some slight influence from contemporary London vernacular.

South London

South London also has an extraordinary range of speech styles that developed over the past century in distinct communities. The well-established Black British accent in London arose out of London Jamaican speech styles that had their largest concentration in South London in the 1960s. It is at least three generations old and so predates the formation of Multicultural London English. Indeed, it formed the base for Multicultural London English.   

Lambeth

These two clips provide examples of South London English. These two young men share many linguistic similarities, and are both second generation Londoners who grew up in London, yet one has parents from West Africa (Ghana), and the other from West Europe (Portugal). The similarity of their speech shows how a new urban dialect can lead to convergence on a new way of speaking that eventually has very limited influence from heritage languages.

The South London accent used by this young mixed-race girl reflects a long-established and stable third-generation accent of London. 

This young woman is a third generation Londoner who grew up in South London, with White British and Nigerian ethnicity provides another example of Black British English that shows very little influence from heritage languages.

This young woman is a second generation Londoner whose parents grew up in the East of Africa. This clip reminds us that relatively standard speech styles can be found throughout different parts of London, in this case for a speaker who grew up in Peckham.

Croydon

This young London-born man of Ghanaian ethnicity uses a recognisably South London accent. East London accent has been studied in more detail than South London, and our current project examines the long-established dialect of South London in more detail. The varieties in South London communities again reflect specific heritage cultures, but also the emergence some decades ago of Black British English alongside more traditional South London vernacular.

West London

Some parts of West London have more long-standing middle class British residents, as newer immigrants often settle in more affordable areas. Other parts served as the original hub for migrants from South Asia from the 1950s onwards. The examples from Ealing below illustrate how the South Asian community accent has shifted, and how gender plays a role in this. This contrasts with the Standard accented middle-class speaker from Wimbledon. 

Ealing

Older men in the West London Asian communities often developed a command of multiple accents, with great skill at switching between them. This was because of their involvement in their fathers’ transnational businesses, skirmishes with anti-immigrant sentiment in schools, and engagement in British politics as the first generation of British Asians.  In these two recordings, you can hear one man speaking in very different styles. He uses a more Asian English style when speaking to an Indian about Asian food, and a markedly more British variety when speaking to a white customer service representative about business.   

The next generation of British Asians in this community showed a gender reversal, where the younger men were more local to the community, speaking a kind of fused British Asian style that you can hear here. This speaker uses a broadly British accent with some very salient Asian consonants mixed in. Like the older woman in the clip below, his accent fuses, his accent fuses these styles and he does not notably change his way of speaking across situations.

The lifestyle of women in the first generation of this community, born and raised in the UK, subtly reflects the gendered patterns of the Asian cultures they came from. They tended to work very locally and get married relatively young. So their range of speaking was more limited to a mixed British Asian style, unlike their male counterparts. This middle-aged woman uses some traditional vernacular British vowels but also some Asian consonants and vowels mixed in.
Younger British Asian women showed a wider repertoire of speaking styles than younger Asian men. They gained a higher level of education and tended to take up jobs further outside the community. Some of them reported that this helped them benefit from both ‘worlds’ they lived in. Many therefore developed a very standard speech style but still retained an Asian style to use at home and with friends. Unlike the older woman, this younger woman switches between a more Asian and a more British style, like the older man did. She uses extremely standard middle class British English when speaking in an interview, despite an Indian interviewer, but has a more London Asian style at home with her brother.

Wimbledon

This West Londoner grew up in an affluent area and speaks with a very Standard British accent. His speech features few of the recent accent changes that have arisen in East and South London.