Received Pronunciation has changed in the last 50 years so that you very rarely hear anyone say hice for house

Received Pronunciation has changed in the last 50 years, so that you very rarely hear anyone say “hice” for “house”. Why some words are absorbed by one linguistic register, and some by others, is a mystery.Cockney, like every other dialect known to man, changes constantly under a vast number of different influences. Khaki just means “earth” or “dust” in Hindi; that became a part of correct English, just as “pukkah” went into slang. It was no doubt brought back by retiring English sergeant-majors and memsahibs, and was absorbed into the language in a sense quite unfamiliar to Hindi speakers.It shouldn’t be surprising that foreign languages contribute to slang and dialect as well as the formal language – and when they do so the words usually change their meaning. It was also one of two terms for sets of weights, like avoirdupois and troy in the imperial system, the larger of the two (the other was cutcha).From that point, it easily took on a metaphorical meaning of “authentic” or “superior” – Hobson Jobson, that marvellous 19th-century dictionary of Indian English, has plenty of examples from 1860 onwards.

In India under the Raj, the term was used for good-quality building materials as far back as 1756. “Pukkah”, revived by Jamie Oliver, goes back a good long way But all it means in Hindi is “ripe, mature, or cooked”. “Rasmallai”, for instance, a word both recorded and popularised by the television show Goodness Gracious Me as a term of appreciation of a sexy woman, is actually the name of a Punjabi sweet.Nothing shows the strangeness of such processes more clearly than a much older piece of favourite cockney slang – something which shows that it’s been going on for a good deal longer than this research admits. That’s quite a subtle borrowing, bending English grammar into parallel forms, and though initially it just sounds incorrect, in reality it is created by a valid, different grammatical sensibility.It is important, however, to remember that when vocabulary is borrowed, it hardly ever retains its original meaning. These days the “th” is closer to “d” and the vowel more like “ah” – a pronunciation of black origin.I suspect, too, that the fast-spreading invariable “innit” – “I went to the shops, innit?” – is borrowed from a similar invariant question tag in Bengali. Old-style cockneys would pronounce “the” with a “v” and a falling unemphatic “schwa” sound, the same sound of the first vowel in “orange”. It may be a word local to the Sylheti dialect, where most restaurant-founding Bangladeshi immigrants originally come from, or it may not be from any Bengali variant at all.Anyway, though there is a strong possibility that, in this particular case, the researcher was having her leg pulled, it doesn’t invalidate the general point.

Certainly, cockney as heard in London is being reshaped not only by Indian languages but by non-English rhythms of speech.In south London – a dialect historically distinct from east London cockney – it’s very common for white youths to adopt Afro-Caribbean rhythms and pronunciations. This piece of information suggests to me that more research needs to be done.Apart from the fact that “Bangladeshi” is a language unknown to science, I tried out the word “nang” on my partner, whose first language is Bengali, and he had never heard it. For instance, it is reported that young people, of whatever ethnic background, living in the East End, have started using the word “nang” to mean “cool” or “excellent”.
This, we were told, was a word from “Bangladeshi”, reflecting the large community of Bangladeshi immigrants which settled around Brick Lane. The cockney of 30 or 40 years ago is being replaced by conspicuously multi-ethnic ways of talking. It’s probably not very surprising to anyone who has thought much about language, but it’s interesting all the same The influence comes in more than one way The easiest to study is vocabulary.

A very interesting piece of linguistic research has shown that cockney is on the move. The old-style white British dialect is being strongly influenced by immigrant communities and, in parts of London, the local dialect of white, Asian and black people is drawing from a single melting pot. “It seems that to qualify as so-called ‘moderates’, Muslims are required to remain silent about Israeli crimes in Palestine, otherwise they are automatically labelled as ‘extremists’,” it wrote in a recent press release.They would not be the first to fall foul of a cynical alliance of secular liberals and hard-line Zionists seeking to draw political advantage from 7/7. After 7/7, the question of where Muslims fit into British society is being reduced to two criteria: their willingness to downscale the importance they attach to their religious values, and the extent to which they support the Palestinians in their unequal struggle against the Israeli state.In as far as Muslims refuse to do either, they will continue to find themselves on the receiving end of a modern-day Inquisition.Faisal Bodi is the news editor of the Islam Channel. What then, one wondered, was the object of this interrogation, which also took in Sacranie’s decision to attend a memorial service for Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the founder of the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas?The MCB believes that it is the victim of a concerted political campaign to blackball it for its opposition to Israeli oppression. The MCB’s stated reason for declining was the exclusivist nature of the ceremony, focusing as it did on simply Jewish victims – it had argued for the event to mark all genocidal campaigns and victims of occupation, especially those in the Muslim world.Leaving aside the exploitation of the Holocaust by Israel and its supporters to perpetuate Palestinian suffering, the MCB’s more inclusive position is one that is held by Muslims and non-Muslims alike. The programme makers had decided the standard they wanted Islam to meet and anybody who didn’t was an extremist.The strongest example came when the head of the MCB, Iqbal Sacranie, was challenged about his organisation’s “extremist” refusal to attend the national Holocaust remembrance service earlier this year.

Sunday’s programme was a hatchet job cum propaganda piece, based on demolishing decontextualised beliefs, and demonising those who hold them in the court of secular liberalism. Isolate the leadership and the disciples will follow reads one of Tony Blair’s “changing” rules of the game.The policy appears to have been taken up with a vengeance by the makers of BBC’s Panorama programme, the latest instalment of which sought to expose the Muslim Council of Britain as a wolf in sheep’s clothing. As influential Muslim opinion formers, outspoken imams, dubbed “hate preachers”, were among the first culprits to be fingered.Alleged to be the intellectual stimulus for potential suicide bombers, they have been earmarked for removal. Whether it’s Salman Rushdie arguing for an Islamic reformation or the Metropolitan Police Commissioner Ian Blair asking the community to get on side in the war against terrorism, a determined effort is afoot to keep Muslims and their faith in the blame frame, and our politicians out.
So far, the wave of Islamophobia has taken in Muslim schools, multiculturalism and dodgy mosques. Notwithstanding fitful spurts of interest in foreign policy, “the problem with Islam” has become the dominant narrative. That’s an apt description of the political and media reaction to the July bombings. Instead of directing the heat at politicians whose neo-colonial and Islamophobic motives led Britain into a quagmire in Iraq, the chattering classes have been digging the nation into an ever bigger hole by pointing the finger at its Muslim minority.