Thursday 16 June 2022 08:58 AM Wagwan with our language? As urban dialect takes over, IRAM RAMZAN says not all ... trends now
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Wagwan, mandem. I ain’t chirpsing, though you do look peng. Confused? You’re clearly not from a ‘diverse’ area of London — and perhaps you’re of a certain age. Many people under 30 in parts of the capital would have understood me perfectly.
And if you thought that I sounded more like Sacha Baron Cohen’s spoof rapper Ali G, sadly this isn’t a joke. Experts at Oxford University believe Multicultural London English (MLE), a dialect that emerged in the early 1980s among Jamaican immigrants and soon spread beyond those communities, is set to become far more common. Some reports have even suggested it could become the ‘dominant’ form of English within a century.
Its vocabulary includes ‘wagwan’ (what’s going on?) ‘bare’ (very/a lot of) and ‘peng’ (attractive). A ‘wasteman’ is not someone who collects your bins, but a loser. Meanwhile, ‘chirpsing’ means flirting, and ‘mandem’ or ‘gyaldem’ refer to a group of men or women. A car is a ‘whip’ and ‘lips’ means kiss.
Experts at Oxford University believe Multicultural London English (MLE), a dialect that emerged in the 1980s among Jamaican immigrants, is set to become far more common. Pictured is the faculty of linguistics, philology and phonetics at Oxford University
Dr Matt Hunt Gardner, departmental lecturer in sociolinguistics at Oxford, told the Mail this week that these words would ‘enrich’ our common tongue.
‘Language changes naturally, so . . . there’s nothing we can do to stop it,’ he added.
Well, frankly I despair! This sort of slang degrades our beautiful language.
The young have
