Get ready for REAL TALK East London merchandise!

Faithful followers will remember our London Talks stall at last year’s Festival of Communities at Queen Mary University, where we handed out hundreds of tiny badges with London slang words. As we were observing how much people enjoyed those words, discussed and rated them, and came up with more iconic dialect words and expressions Caitlin (a PhD student at QMUL and one of my helpers at the Festival) and I started fantasizing about a full merchandise line of London dialect and slang words, involving t-shirts and hoodies, bags, hats, kitchen towels, wristbands…you name it.

Of course, the idea is not terribly original. Many villages, cities and regions have come up with some signature dialect merch: Shout out, at this point, to the tasteful and funny nowttowear and linesbehind up north! The practice to put iconic dialect on merchandise to be sold is called ‘commodification’ of a dialect, which means that the dialect adds market value to a saleable commodity.

The first linguists to describe the phenomenon were Barbara Johnstone at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who studied t-shirts, mugs, bumper stickers and postcards including expressions of the newly formed dialect ‘Pittsburghese’, and Joan Beal of the University of Sheffield, who looked at the commodification of Geordie and ‘Sheffieldish’ in the form of mugs, tea towels and souvenir ‘birth certificates’ written in dialect for those born locally (and proud of it). Dialect commodities allow people to wear their origins and identity literally on their sleeves; it gives them a feeling of being in the know (if they are able to figure out the meaning of the words) and to identify with a place (that they have either discovered as tourists or have long left as natives). It is not surprising that dialect merchandise has sprung up in so many places, given that people have become ever more mobile and adventurous, yet harbour a desire to connect to certain places – even if only through a clever mug on their office desk.

Take a stroll through the London souvenir and museum shops and you’ll be surprised to find absolutely nothing including London dialects. The only item I found between piles of LONDON, UK jumpers and Union Jack and royal periphernalia (The ‘My-relative-went-to-London-and-all-I-got-was-this-lousy-X doesn’t seem to be a thing anymore…) was this sad little Cockney Rhyming Slang booklet:

Thankfully, after a bit of grant-writing and community-organising, we were awarded a QMUL Small Grant to get our REAL TALK merchandise brand started. We teamed up with Nurull Islam from the Mile End Community Project in Tower Hamlets, just around the corner from Queen Mary University, and organised an outreach event to source slang terms that people actually use and enjoy right now from the local community. Our goal is to involve locals in all of the steps, from sourcing the terms, to designing, producing and selling the items, with all potential sales revenue feeding back into the community via the Community Project.

Our first event on 26 April 2023 was a great success. People stopped by the Community Project on their way from school or pick-up, interrupted their building work, or ventured out of the neighbouring shops to share their favourite East End slang words with us. Lisa from the Isle of Dogs, for example, provided the lovely ‘PUKKA’; Adam gave us ‘SICK’, a school boy wrote down ‘BRUH’. When asked which word or phrase represents the East End, a young man answered: ‘It’s MADNESS, bruv, innit?’. A favourite of ours was ‘TOMORROW, TOMORROW’, meaning ‘not now, later, or never’.

The pics show some impressions from our event. Questions that we asked were: Which slang represents Tower Hamlets/East London? What’s your favourite local slang? And which slang would you wear on a T-shirt? In keeping with this year’s disappointing spring, it looked like it was going to rain, but didn’t, so many people stopped by. We rewarded our young and older informants with ice pops, lollies, biscuits and custom-made slang badges (until the badge press sadly broke).

After a couple of hours, when passers-by and biscuits started to run low, we managed to engage some especially bright and cool kids, who come to the Community Project regularly, to help us sort through the slang terms and create a selection of words that they would like to see and wear on specific items. Shout out to Adam and his sister for sticking around and giving us (1 aging, 1 aging+German & 1 young-but-not-young-enough) the heads-up on the actual word on the street!

A local graphic designer and acquaintance of Nurull’s, who also created our wonderful logo, is currently designing the most original and amazing fonts for our collection, which will go on t-shirts, tote bags, bucket hats and stickers. The selection of dialect words and the designs are currently East London’s best-kept secret, but we’re planning to present our first batch of merchandise at this year’s QMUL Festival of Communities on 10-11 July, where participants of our activities around London dialects can win items from our first, limited collection. And don’t worry, London dialect fans, there will also be an online sales option from mid-June!

So stay tuned and follow REAL TALK on Twitter and Instagram for updates! The first REAL TALK East London collection will look amazing!