An all-purpose word that can be tacked on to the end of any sentence whilst you're in London, innit. It's now become so commonplace that it's not unheard of for visitors to the city to think that the correct pronunciation is "Londoninnit". Although innit may once have derived from isn't it? -- and ultimately from the second- and third-generation Asian immigrant population's overuse of that phrase -- it no longer really has that meaning. A similarity can be drawn with the technique of adding "you know" to every other sentence.

Innit is used as a general-purpose placeholder to stand in for the appropriate form of a negative-question suffix. For example:

We're going to the pictures, aren't we? -> We're going to the pictures, innit?

That was really good, wasn't it? -> That was well wicked, innit?

This comes from English requiring specific forms of the negative question. In Swedish, one can say 'eller hur?' ('or how?'), and in French, 'n'est-ce-pas' (literally, 'isn't it?'), no matter what the verb, tense or number of the preceding phrase. Speakers of languages such as Welsh, and numerous Indian languages (which have links to Welsh, incidentally) naturally adapt this usage to English. While this is probably a Good Thing and part of the development of the language, it's confusing right now. Gritchka informs me that the usage is principally Cockney, but of Indian/Welsh origin.

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