Yer 'avin' a Steffi, ain't yer? The old David brown bread in firty donkey's. Sez oo?
Says Paul Kerswill, professor of sociolinguistics at Lancaster University, who claims the cockney language will become extinct in three decades. He says that the traditional cockney accent and dialect spoken in London for more than half a millennium has slowly been transforming into a new hybrid language, which he describes as "multicultural London English". His research suggests that as the majority of traditional cockneys move out of the capital into the Home Counties, elements of cockney are merging with Bangladeshi and West Indian accents to create a new dialect. "Since the 1950s, more affluent East Londoners have been moving out of the capital and into Essex and Hertfordshire," Professor Kerswill explained. "People now in their forties will be the last generation to speak (the cockney dialect) and it will be gone within 30 years." Well, lor' luv a duck.