Letter: Cockney, innit

Sir: Creole English in the playground innit? (report, 17 May). Not nohow. Fifty years ago my mother used to exclaim about the lingo of the young cockney women she worked with - with their "innit" and "arxed" and enough glottal stops to fill the Dickens of a novel. They would have learnt to talk like that at school in the early 1940s. Readers who are older than I can tell you how much farther back in living memory this cockney patois goes.

Norwegian researchers are always welcome to delve into London's tribal dialects, but they wants to arx thems as knows more from way back when, innit.

ARTHUR POTTERSMAN

London NW3