Fuelled by music fandom and social media, young British people’s slang is evolving to include words with pidgin, patois and Arabic roots – even where strong regional English dialects exist

There’s a video format spreading on TikTok. Recorded in towns across suburban England, teenage interviewers stop their peers on the street, fielding questions that range from fashion choices to humorous hypotheticals and local neighbourhood dramas, in the process building a large social media following and showcasing their patch of land to the world. “950 [pounds] for that, you know my ting,” a teenage white boy says about his Canada Goose jacket in a video recorded in Bury St Edmunds. “We’re checking his drip, ya dun know, you heard my man,” someone says in another video.

Both the hosts and many of the interviewees speak with this distinct drawl – Multicultural London English (MLE), a dialect born in London’s African-Caribbean communities in the 1970s and 80s. (Some now argue that “Black British English” is a more fitting term.) It’s rooted in Jamaican patois with influences from cockney, and more recently Arabic, the US and West African Pidgin English.

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Bòrd na Gàidhlig’s language protection scheme holds on to 27 workers thanks to financial lifeline

Scottish ministers have given emergency funding to save a network of Gaelic community workers who faced being laid off because of government cuts.

Gaelic activists, MSPs and community leaders were dismayed after it emerged last month that Bòrd na Gàidhlig (BnG), the body charged with protecting Gaelic, was removing 27 development worker posts across the country.

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After a decade in Germany, I was still anxious talking to native speakers – then I realised my language skills weren’t the problem

I have prefaced every conversation with, “ Entschuldigung, mein Deutsch ist noch nicht so gut ” (“I’m sorry, my German is still not very good”) since I moved to Hermsdorf, a little village in east Germany in 2015. Its purpose was to act as a disclaimer upfront so that the German person I was talking to wouldn’t expect me to articulate complicated ideas or respond promptly and accurately to everything that was said. But mostly, my opening line was a plea for mercy, a signal that I was still learning the language and would greatly appreciate it if they spoke more slowly and clearly. They would always graciously reply: “ Ja, Deutsch ist eine schwere Sprache. ” German is a difficult language, they all agreed. And for the longest time, that was true.

Growing up in Kuala Lumpur as Malaysian Chinese, I speak English almost natively, given that Malaysia was once a British colony. I also speak Malay, Malaysia’s official language, and Mandarin and Cantonese because I needed to communicate with my grandparents. Before moving to Germany, I already spoke Italian after working on board cruise ships for years alongside Italian officers, and conversational French after dating a Frenchman. Then, I met the man who would later become my husband in a bar on the 63rd floor of a building in Singapore and a thought occurred to me: “Wouldn’t it be funny if I have to learn German this time?”

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Up to 27 Gaelic development officers based on Hebridean islands and in rural counties and cities to be laid off

Gaelic-language campaigners and MSPs have protested furiously about plans to axe a network of Gaelic community workers, raising fresh fears about the survival of the language.

Up to 27 Gaelic development workers based in Hebridean islands, rural counties and Scotland’s major cities are being laid off after the Scottish government cut funding to Bòrd na Gàidhlig (BnG), the body charged with protecting and reviving Gaelic.

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They lost the last of their ancestral lands to the Aswan Dam in the 1960s, and now their language is dying too. But a new generation is harnessing the internet to help keep Nubian alive

Born and raised in Nubia, southern Egypt, the 29-year-old Jehad Ashraf is the first in her family to grow up not understanding the Nubian language. “I lived in Aswan my whole life”, she says, “but none of my family spoke Nubian to me at home.”

In just two generations the language, once spoken everywhere in the region, has almost vanished. In her village, a date-farming community on the banks of the Nile, “the youngest who speak Nubian are 61 or 62. It is becoming extinct,” says Ashraf.

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