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Rasinger is keen to emphasize that over the past few decades, the impact that immigration has had on the English language is relatively minimal. "Immigrants bring their language with them and we quite often find that people will use their own language but not with a native English-speaking population. They'll speak it with people from their own country, or within their community."However, this is changing, as the children of immigrants are born and raised in the country. Post-war Afro-Caribbean communities started entering the UK because there was work in Britain. From 1951 to 1961, the number of people in the country born in the West Indies grew from 15,000 to 172,000. After the fall of communism in 1989, there was a steady flow of Polish immigrants to the UK which sped up in 2004 when Poland joined the EU, opening up borders for the free movement of workers. They were initially a strong blue collar labor force, providing skill for the building trade and service sectors.Nang or nanging: meaning cool or good. Identified as part of a new inner London dialect emerging among young people as a mixture of English and Bangladeshi from 2005
Professor Paul Kerswill, who specializes in language and linguistic science, says that when people settle in certain areas they have to "sort it out linguistically" and acquire a way of speaking that they understand. That means adapting English, along with what they already know. And that spreads. "In some schools in London in the last few decades, you've had immigrant-descent children who are learning English as a second language alongside the first-language speakers, so non-native words end up in the latter's English as well." For example, dupa, which means 'bottom' in Polish, has come to mean 'ass,' 'girl,' or 'girlfriend' in some inner city circles.Read on Broadly: Inside China's Last Matriarchy
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"We think it probably was started by black communities," explained Kerswill. "It's an accent as well as slang. The first people to use it were Afro-Caribbean. Nowadays, all ethnic communities use it in east or south London, and white kids too. It's not ethnically marked. We've got some recordings of different ethnicities of young people speaking, and asked other Londoners what the ethnicity of the person is, and they can't tell. It's highly mixed, it's not racially determined. It depends on your social networks, who you know, who you go to school with." In his 2012 paper 'Green MLE,' Dr. Jonathon Green likens it to Cockney in its uniqueness and spread.Pukka: meaning first class or genuine. From the Hindi word pakkā meaning ripe or cooked. Popular throughout the nineties
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What about more recent immigration trends? What about Poland? As Kerswill points out, there haven't been any studies on Poles and language in almost a decade—and those who were studied all that time ago were only learning English as a second language at that point. The first generation of English-born Poles haven't yet grown up. When this happens, Kerswill explained, we'll have a better picture of what the eastern European influence has been.Ultimately, if there is any significant change to the English language, it is likely to be so slow that we'll be too dead to know about it. According to Rasinger, "Huge changes to language generally take a very long time. If you're looking at major changes to the English pronunciation or grammar, we're talking 100, 200… in some cases, 500 years. It's not something that happens overnight."It's impossible to know in which direction it will go, either. "It depends what happens to migration in this country in the next 100 years," Kerswill said. "With the Syrian refugees, all of a sudden there's a new picture. If we end up taking as many refugees as Germany, we'll have many more people learning English as a second language and then transmitting that to their kids. That could change things for the longer term."Follow Hannah Ewens on Twitter.Dekko: meaning look or peep; example, "Give that girl a dekko." From the Hindi dekho meaning to look and dekhnā, to see.