From Grangetown to Penygroes, how did Cymru get a London accent?

Faisal Ali reflects on changes in his own accent, and the influence of Multicultural London English on a new generation of artists reinventing the Land of Song

Faisal Ali

My family moved away from Cardiff in the winter of 2003. I was eleven then and had no real say about the decision, but my father insisted that life in the big city would be better for everyone. Cardiff was remote, quiet and sleepy, and a move to London would give us an opportunity to immerse ourselves in the energy of a bustling metropolis. But of all the issues I expected I’d encounter, from finding a new school to making new friends, I hadn’t anticipated that my greatest concern in those early days would be my accent. 

I first discovered I spoke differently when a teacher responsible for guiding my integration into the new school said she could hear the ‘sing song lilt’ in my voice. ‘It’s almost melodic,’ she said – to my bewilderment. I didn’t think much of it at the time, and walked out with a shrug, but where adults make a virtue of concealing their true sentiments behind the gossamer curtain of politeness, children have an unvarnished sincerity that sometimes crosses over into spite. The truth was, as a classmate bluntly put it: ‘you speak weird.’ 

I didn’t realise I had an accent until that point, and it would become a source of intrigue and amusement for the other students. They’d tease the way I stretched the letter a in words like ‘charger’ (chaarj-uh) or ‘nasty’ (naa-stee). Whereas most other students said things were ‘well bad’, or ‘well fast’ to exaggerate a point, I would say it was ‘pure bad’ or ‘pure fast’. ‘Pure’ for me was pronounced ‘pee-yoor’. Pure Kahdiff.

Cardiff Bay and Senedd viewed from the south east (Wikimedia Commons)

What makes a Cardiff accent? Welsh writer and broadcaster Gwyn Thomas drew a contrast between accents in Cardiff and the nearby valleys as he sketched out its features. ‘The visitors from the hills speak with a singing intonation, as if every sentence is half-way into oratorio, the vowels as broad as their shoulders.’ Cardiff, he continued, was a mixture between the valleys and a ‘brand of High Bristolian’, giving the ‘impression of a worldly hardness.’ 

The docks, where I grew up, definitely had a ‘worldly hardness’ about it. The area experienced different migratory patterns, incubating a new culture isolated from the rest of the city. A combination of these factors inflected the more common accent heard in Cardiff with what Thomas describes as the ‘soft speech of a hundred tongues from Africa and the East.’ The result, he writes, is an ‘enchanting mixture of Somerset, Madagascar and Pontllanfraith.’ We peppered our sentences with the words lush, kusmeh (an Anglicised way of swearing an oath in a modified Arabic from Pakistan) and warya (an informal way to address a young man in Somali). 

We weren’t aware of it then but even at that tender young age we were skilful bricoleurs, rummaging through the scrap pieces of a culture our parents stuffed into their suitcases when they left their home countries. We were repurposing their languages, creating a living link with a fading past, whilst forging a new culture from our heirlooms. 

Professor Mercedes Durham, a linguist at Cardiff University who studies accents and dialects says this is called ‘accommodation’. ‘Naturally when we’re talking to someone and we want to make a connection, we tend to change the way we speak so we can understand each other,’ she told me in an interview. This process is an important part of building community. Language, how it sounds and the words we use are a proxy for identity, says Durham. ‘If you want to show you belong, you’ll try to sound like other people from that place.’ 

It makes sense. By the age of eight I spoke English and Somali fluently, and had a small vocabulary of Urdu and Arabic words often localised in strange ways. 

When we moved away to London, I had to acclimatise again. I started dropping the letters g and t, softened the h and mastered the distinctive glottal stops. The particular London accent I was most exposed to is what people today call Multicultural London English, (MLE), a dialect and accent spoken by the children of immigrant communities scattered around London, which reflects the mix of people who populate the city. 

As we travelled back to Cardiff every summer, friends and family began frequently commenting on how different I sounded to them. The difference was – excuse the pun – accentuated. But if speaking with a Cardiff accent in London was an idiosyncrasy with rural connotations, when I got back in Cardiff the opposite was true. 

London began spearheading a cultural movement which channelled the energy of a diverse new generation living mainly on the margins of Britain culturally and economically onto urban music platforms like Channel U and SBTV. It was assertive, hyperlocal and authentic. A trademark of music on Channel U were the grainy videos usually recorded on phones or small cameras, often set in the locations which served as a familiar backdrop for our lives: barbers, the ubiquitous chicken shops, and the towering estates. Whilst the roots of that culture and its early luminaries were Caribbean or of Caribbean descent, grime was adopted by artists across the city. 

What’s remarkable is not just how this culture emerged, but the phenomenal impact it had on the sound and character of music across the country. British grime and hip hop didn’t accommodate trends in mainstream UK music, but opened new vistas with rich new vocabularies and stories which better reflected our experiences. It was music from the margins by people on the margins, which was consumed by them too.

Dr Alex Baratta, a sociolinguist who studies how certain accents and identities get stigmatised, says that it has a lot to do with the distribution of power and prestige. Accents and dialects which are privileged are often linked to money and politics, and because London was the political capital, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that southern accents became considered proper, whilst other ways of speaking were viewed as provincial when they weren’t completely shunned. Whilst that has negative repercussions for people’s lives to this day – from job prospects to stereotyping – it also freed us to find more authentic ways to express ourselves, without having to succumb to the expectations of the mainstream. 

Definitions of power, however, also depend heavily on context – so what is undesirable in one context can be attractive in another, and this new culture in London developed a prestige of its own. ‘Language itself is neutral,’ says Baratta, ‘they’re just sounds, but it is society which decides what we value. So when we admire a group, we tend to imitate, and some of these musicians have millions of followers. So if that isn’t power, then what is?’ 

That influence became apparent to me during trips to Cardiff as my old accent and its mark on how I spoke permanently faded. But as I kept coming back to my home city I found London’s influence growing. I’d hear ‘wagwan’ (‘what’s going on?’ in Jamaican English), ‘fam’ (short for family, an endearing way to address a friend) and ‘akhi’ (an Arabic word for brother) across south Cardiff. 

Artists across the Welsh capital from communities with similar backgrounds to those in London similarly began experimenting with new ways to express themselves. They identified with the upstart, DIY manner in which these artists translated their experiences into music that put their neighbourhoods on the map. Rappers, grime and drill artists like Juice Menace, Sonny Double 1, Jukkie, DBS, Mace the Great and B Written have taken on those forms; and whilst the early sound of Cardiff mimicked London very closely, some artists have more purposefully attempted to forge a unique blend with more local sounds and themes.

Starv’s ‘Diff Boy’ (popular shorthand for Cardiff among many artists) barely conceals the local accent as his song and its remix celebrate the city. The video for Lemfreck’s ‘Foreign’ about his feelings of being an outsider are shot in an open field in the Welsh countryside. Sonny Double 1’s ‘Mo Farah’ showcased Grangetown and Riverside in a video with dozens of young people from the area: ‘She said do you start from the bottom? / I said I start from CF11.’ This trend has found its clearest illustration and most ambitious attempt at localisation with the work of Sage Todz, from Penygroes in Gwynedd, who creates drill music in Welsh. 

These artists operate in a kind of liminal zone between several cross-cutting cultures, harnessing that energy and its rich new vocabulary to better express what it means to be from Wales for them. That process paradoxically draws on something outside Cardiff, and elsewhere in Cymru, to give a voice to something local and very authentic. They’re using something which emerged in London, to give Wales a new sound. 

Faisal Ali is a Guardian multimedia journalist who grew up in Cardiff and lives in London.