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 characterized 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.