'All Raait! It's a new black-white lingo'

Ever heard a young person introduce a word that you've never heard before? 'Wha gwan' or 'dope' or something different that seems alien to you? Well Steven Swinford and Laura St Quinton have investigated into slang as a universal language for the youths of today. An article in the Sunday Times written 10 years ago expresses data and information collected over the past years.

The overall verdict from this article is that young people are creating a whole new language. "Words and sounds from Cockney, Jamaican creole, Bengali and other languages" are making their way into this new way of communication. 

Professor Paul Kerswill, a sociolinguist, led a study to investigate the language of younger people. "In one group we had students from white Anglo backgrounds along with those with Arab, South American, Ghanaian and Portuguese backgrounds and all spoke with the same dialect."

I think that young people are always finding a way to relate and communicate whether it may be through social media or even over hearing a conversation. That's the beauty of it!

Even though social media does have a huge impact on the way we speak, it's not just things like Twitter or Facebook affecting us. "The spread of the dialect is being encouraged by a wave of successful London rap stars" - Dizzee Rascal being one of them. It is well known that artists like Dizzee Rascal commonly use slang originally from a different continent. The article says "Music is responsible for its spread" because so many people listen to it and are influenced by it. 

Another experiment that Kerswill carried out included "analysing the conversation of 32 teenagers ages 16 to 18" from a variation of backgrounds. "The vocabulary included words originating from the Indian subcontinent such as 'nang', meaning good" as well as "Traditional cockney words such as 'manor', also meaning home, were still in use." This shows that the younger generations are merging old and new dialect, an amazing thing.

Concluding this article, I think it's fair to say that youths are building a bridge across the "racial divide" that was once very present. Kerswill said "They all dress the same and speak the same - isn't that the beautiful thing?" Yes. Maybe the stereotypes that the older generations decided for us are being challenged, because, who are the ones converging to accommodate others?