New phonetic and grammatical varieties of London English have emerged in the East End over the past 20 years, following very high levels of immigration in some of theboroughs. The new pronunciation include 'face' sounding like fehs and 'home' being pronounced hohm, instead of Cockney fice and howm. They have arisen in an unusual situation where the majority of young children are learning their local variety of English from adolescents whose parents are speakers of another variety of English (such as Caribbean) or who are not first-language speakers of English. There is strong evidence that this 'Multicultural London English' is already becoming a permanent part of the capital's speech, and is transforming it.

Kerswill has worked on this projectwith Eivind Torgersen (Lancaster) and Jenny Cheshire, Sue Fox and Arfaan Khan (Queen Mary, University of London).