Of the many visuals associated with the Cockney dialect, the pearlies are the most arresting. Catch a glimpse of these old-time Londoners at a charity event or a knees-up in a pub – their black attire bedecked with a thousand mother-of-pearl buttons, smiles as wide as Tower Bridge – and you’ll be smiling yourself.

The way people speak is as much about identity and belonging as it is vowels and glottal stops. Recognising as much has seen the London borough of Tower Hamlets recently designate Cockney a “community language”.

The council’s accompanying pamphlet features stately pearly queens wearing, variously, a wide-brimmed hat with roses and feathers or a black niqab festooned with pearlescent stars and crescents. As sociolinguist Christopher Strelluf, who has advised on the council’s strategy, puts it, “Cockney is not a reductive, monolithic identity, but rather a multifaceted one.” Highlighting that all varieties of English spoken in the borough are equal goes some way to combatting discrimination.

Further linguistic delight awaits in this popular music scholar’s deep dive into the potential of the boring lyric. And, in the latest instalment in our series on gut microbes, a microbiologist details the maternal blessing that is Bifidobacterium breve, from which every newborn benefits.

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