Why US Diplomats Stationed in London Are Studying Urban Slang

I thought an American foreign service officer was kidding when she first told me, half-laughing, that she had spent her morning watching a UK drill video with subtitles open in another tab. She wasn’t. She was getting ready for a briefing.

Between a community gathering in south London and the embassy on Nine Elms Lane, she realized that the English she had been taught at Foggy Bottom didn’t exactly match the English being spoken around her.

This is occurring more frequently than one might anticipate. Urban slang has been subtly added to the list of subjects studied by US diplomats stationed in London, including political officers, consular staff, public affairs representatives, and the occasional intelligence liaison. It is not referred to as a formal course. It usually comes up during casual get-togethers, lunchtime discussions with local fixers, or evenings spent watching grime documentaries that their British counterparts have smirkingly recommended. There’s a feeling that a significant portion of London is just unattainable without it.

Multicultural London English, or MLE, is the dialect in question. It is occasionally grouped under the more general term Urban British English. For years, linguists at the University of York and King’s College London have been studying it. Tony Thorne, who oversees the Slang and New Language Archive at King’s, has spent decades cataloguing the ways in which young Londoners appropriate elements of American hip-hop, Cockney, West African languages, Arabic, and Jamaican Patois, then transform them into something entirely new.

Additionally, he has provided testimony in criminal proceedings where a single word, like “plug,” can mean both “supplier” and “stab.” Perhaps the diplomats are now interested in this very ambiguity.

Why would envoys from the United States care? It is operational in part. The US Embassy conducts outreach programs for young people, keeps an eye on social unrest, and reports to Washington on everything from housing policy to knife crime. In order to comprehend a security advisory regarding a recent stabbing in Croydon, a consular officer must be aware that a ramsey is a large knife, that corn means bullets, and that Londoners refer to the Metropolitan Police’s anti-gang unit as a trident. In a cable home, misreading a tweet or, worse, a court document can result in embarrassing situations.

Additionally, there is a softer motive that is more difficult to measure. Drill, grime, and the slang itself are examples of London’s cultural exports that have taken off across the Atlantic. Nowadays, American teenagers use terms like “peng” and “bait” without fully understanding their origins. Simply put, diplomats who are somewhat fluent in that language are more adept at their job as foreigners in a foreign capital. As this happens, one begins to suspect that the embassies that read a city’s cultural undertow the best are the ones that adjust to it the quickest.

Contrary to popular belief, slang does not quickly become outdated. Words like bare, peng, and gwop have been around for more than ten years, as Thorne has noted. Prime ministers have not lasted as long as them. They have traveled from Hackney to Leeds, from Leeds to Sydney, and now, it seems, into the briefing rooms of foreign diplomats attempting to understand a nation that no longer sounds quite like its own stereotype. It’s difficult to ignore the irony that those whose job it is to comprehend power are now studying the language that was once written off as the talk of outsiders with quiet seriousness.

It’s another matter entirely whether the diplomats are doing it correctly. A State Department primer is unlikely to fully unlock the code of slang, which is designed to keep some people out and others in. The attempt feels telling, though. The individuals sent to read it are finally reading it in a different way because London has changed.