A nearly impenetrable series of videos on YouTube may well portend the future of the English language. These are videos made by teenagers hanging around in a giant London mall, and they are made for other teenagers. They are a private conversation; they make no effort to be intelligible to the middle class or the middle-aged. They are a gold mine of current working-class British slang and dialect, as well as a queasy-making insight into teenage sexual culture. They show us how English pronunciation evolves as a result of multiculturalism, and how fantastically sponge-like this language is.
The videos are shot in the giant Westfield Stratford City mall, in east London. (Similar ones are being made in Manchester and Birmingham, but London suits my purpose for this column.) They are hosted by one teenager with a microphone (there are a series of these hosts: My favourite channels are Koomz and Ash and 2Man TV.) They have as their theme "baiting out," which means publicly naming and denouncing someone. The host asks passing teenagers to bait out the biggest paigon they know, or the biggest bowcat or sket or sidechick or stunter or catfish. (Don't worry, I had to look up all those on Urban Dictionary too. Paigon means bad person but seems to be being used here to mean slut; bowcat – also written bocat – is someone who eagerly engages in oral sex; sket is an untrustworthy person; sidechick is a mistress; stunter is a fraud or faker; catfish – you actually knew this one! – is someone posing as someone they are not online.) Then a group of girls or boys, 14 to 16 years old, gigglingly insults someone they know, using hyperbolic obscenity.
They will describe the disliked girl's sex life in detail, for example. They will name her and say what part of London she lives in. (Koomz explains in one of his videos that all you need to get thousands of views is to "make girls feel bad.")
Everyone who participates in this casually cruel Saturday-afternoon activity understands it as performance: They almost all take the microphone from the host, look into the camera, and begin a rant that is unmistakeably rap-like. They are aiming for musical rhythms in their denunciations. In this, it is not unlike African-American traditions as with "the dozens," in which creative insults are competitively paraded.
The groups are all purely British, which is to say of widely varying ethnicity. Many appear to be of Caribbean descent, some of Pakistani. A few are white. One guy of East Asian descent, who calls himself Ling Ling, makes an appearance in several of these videos; he spends a lot of time at the mall. These kids don't advertise any ethnic difference because they all speak in the same Caribbean rap accent and with the same dialect words. This universal mallspeak must surely count as a new British accent to add to the many regional ones. What does it sound like? The accent is a mix of Jamaican and Northern English, but make no mistake, that mix is no less London than any other. Some of it is straight-out Jamaican patois – used with skill by the kids of North African and Chinese descent alike. There is a curious rising intonation in each sentence that I can't quite describe. The slang words are a mix of Caribbean and local. The word boy is pronounced bu-ey. Most sentences are peppered with "yeh," a sort of hesitation not unlike the Canadian "eh." The word "innit" has a similar use – it is an appeal to the listener to pay attention. The speakers also love the word "ovviously," which occurs almost as frequently as swear words. ("I seen dis bu-ey, yeh, an he such a stunter, yeh, ovviously, yeh, he says these are genuine Giuseppes, yeh, it isn't, innit, ovviously.")
The Urban Dictionary website, which is compiled by its users, offers fantastic sample sentences written in this dialect. Under paigon: "Drini sees Dina in the near by shop wiv sum of her frenz Drini thinks omg wot a PAIGON SHE LIED TO ME DAT BITCH." Paigon – sometimes written pagan – occurs in the song Dem Boy Paigon by London-based gangsta rapper J Hus. It just means enemy in this song. (J Hus has a lot of enemies. He was stabbed last summer, and posted an Instagram picture from his hospital bed, making a gang sign with his fingers. He got in trouble in the British media for promoting violence and gang culture. As if his songs alone didn't do that.)
Another British rapper, the white, Manchester-born Geko, sings in the same accent and dialect in his song Baba, which is a paean to the sexual possibilities of British multiculturalism. In it, the rapper addresses the mothers of girls of various ethnicities, and appeals to this older generation not to be "pagan" (i.e., a drag): "Baba why you bein a pagan/ I hope you know your daughter's amazin' …" Love this teenage macho style or loathe it, you have to admit that there is a new irony in the word pagan being used to disparage the religiously conservative.
English is the most absorbent language in the world. It hoovers up and digests foreign words voraciously; its accents are so disparate as to be frequently incomprehensible to other English speakers. But technology speeds up influences, it spreads slang and style faster than trading ships ever did. It melds, it makes new pidgins at lightspeed. In Canada, suburban youth whose parents immigrated from various countries are united by a style of speech that originates in U.S. hip hop; the accent itself is transmitted by music. We all understand American hip-hop slang now. In Britain, this rap-influenced vocal style has become the accent of the underprivileged; even in London, it is replacing cockney as the accent of the working class. I would never have heard this language if it were not for YouTube; soon we will all understand it perfectly.