The Newcastle striker Alexander Isak was born and raised in a settlement just north of Stockholm city centre called Solna. He played football in his native Sweden, followed by stints in Germany and Spain, before moving to Newcastle last year. He has never lived in London. You would not guess this from his voice.
In a recent clip in which he is speaking English, Isak sounds as if he were raised in Lewisham or Tottenham, Croydon or Bethnal Green. To use a modern idiom, he sounds like he is from the endz. Which is another way of saying that Isak speaks English with a multicultural London English accent (MLE), the dialect of young ethnic minority people in London and the south-east of England, popularised by grime music and TV shows such as Top Boy.
