The Secret Life of London’s Bilingual Street Vendors

A vendor selling Italian burrata is in the center of three concurrent talks on a Saturday morning at Borough Market, between the Korean fried chicken stand, which always has an equally competitive queue, and the Brindisa chorizo booth, which always has one. One is in English and features a Chicago visitor reading a description from his phone. One in Italian with an elderly man who appears to be very relieved after arriving from Rome last week.

And something that begins in French and develops into a sort of trade English, a working language created on the spot, with a woman who seems to be from Belgium or probably Switzerland and who seems more interested in the vendor’s viewpoint than his product specs. Nothing about this is noteworthy. Simply put, the market reaches its unique intensity on Tuesday at Borough Market, or more accurately, on Saturday before noon, at which point language ceases to be a barrier and becomes a tool that the better traders have honed to a particular edge.

Most individuals in the chorizo line would be surprised to learn how long multilingual selling has been practiced in London. The poem “London Lickpenny,” credited to John Lydgate and written in the early 15th century, depicts a stroll through Cheapside where vendors shout out their wares in English, Flemish, and French—the commercial languages of medieval European trade passing through the city’s main market thoroughfare.

Italian and Flemish language proficiency was necessary for traders interacting with Florentine banking institutions and Flemish cloth merchants in medieval London’s wool industry. Whether or not the official civic culture recognized it, the city has never been monolingual, and its marketplaces have always reflected that fact. The prevalence of several languages on London’s streets did not change during the 19th century; rather, it was the manner various languages started to mix and create something new.

The most obvious example is Polari. The street vendors who pushed barrows through the East End and South London markets, known as Victorian costermongers, created a working language that combined Italian, Romani, and English slang. This allowed vendors to negotiate discreetly in front of the authorities they were avoiding or the customers they were selling to, discuss prices, and make fun of the Metropolitan Police. The words weren’t chosen at random. In a setting where operational security was necessary for both corporate competition and police surveillance, the code was purposefully created for actual economic advantage.

Later, in the 20th century, it spread to the gay community in London as a protective coded communication—the same rationale, a new context—and was recorded by scholars who identified it as one of the more enduring instances of language formation motivated by social need at the street level. A vocabulary created to trick police is finally used for an entirely other form of self-defense, which has an almost exquisite quality.

The birth of “Hokey Pokey” is a lesser story, but it has a certain allure as an illustration of what happens when street languages mix without a common grammar to keep them together. As they moved their carts, Italian ice cream vendors in Victorian London shouted “ecco un poco,” which translates to “here is a little,” promoting a tiny portion of ice cream. The term “Hokey Pokey” became widely used for street-vended ice cream after English-speaking Londoners heard something that sounded like it.

This coinage persisted into the Edwardian era. It’s likely that the sellers were fully aware of what was happening to their phrase. Most likely, the buyers didn’t give a damn. The important thing is that both parties reached a mutually beneficial agreement, which is what street market language has always been designed to do.

Even the most multilingual Victorian costermonger could not have predicted the linguistic panorama of London’s markets in 2026. In areas like Brick Lane, where restaurant touts greet different passersby in different registers of the same language depending on where in Bangladesh they believe you are from, and where Bengali and English alternate mid-sentence on a Sunday afternoon, the practical linguistics of street selling have reached a density that defies simple description. The city is home to over 300 languages.

Vendors at international food stalls in Camden frequently speak five or six languages in a single trading hour, interpreting a customer’s background based on their direction of origin, the flag on their bag, and the greeting they used, and making the necessary adjustments. It’s difficult to ignore the fact that this ability—the fast, precise determination of which language to employ with whom—is hardly ever identified or instructed. It’s just what you create when your company depends on it and the place where you’re selling has always been this challenging.