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In this paper we consider whether ethnicity is a significant determinant of variation in the spoken English of young working-class people in London. We base our analysis on a corpus of 1.4 million words of informal speech from 100 people aged 16-19, from one inner London and one outer London borough. Many (mainly white) Londoners moved from the inner city (the ‘East End’) to the outer London borough and further afield, particularly Essex, in the 1950s; by contrast, the inner London borough has a high proportion of recent migrants from overseas. We explore whether the nature of a speaker’s friendship group is a key factor in the diffusion of linguistic innovations, and whether this interacts with ethnicity. We hypothesise that speakers draw on a range of linguistic forms that cannot necessarily, or at least can no longer, be attributed to specific ethnic groups.