| Although English is the official national language in the
UK, 275 separate languages are actually spoken in the nation’s
multicultural capital. It is perhaps surprising, then, that the
acquisition of a second European language remains a low priority
among most of the native population. A typical London accent is
characterised by a dropped ‘h’ at the beginning of
words, a glottal stop instead of ‘tt’ in the middle
of words and the elongation of ‘a’ to ‘i’.
Professor Higgins (Rex Harrison) famously tries to cure Eliza
Doolittle (Audrey Hepburn) of this habit in the film, My Fair
Lady (based on George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion), by
making her recite ‘The rain in Spain falls mainly on the
plain’ and not ‘The rhine in Spine falls minely on
the pline’. Cockney rhyming slang emerged in the nineteenth
century as a means for East End residents to communicate without
being understood by the police. The most commonly used phrases,
such as ‘dog and bone’ for phone, ‘plates of
meat’ for feet and ‘apples and pears’ for stairs,
have since passed into the national vernacular.
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