Talking Polari: How the secret language of Polari was embraced by the LGBT+ community and why it's being kept alive today

manchestereveningnews.co.uk:

Lancaster University, has been researching and working with Polari for the last 20 years.“I became interested in the language after my friend played me some audiotapes of Round The Horne when they were re-released in 1997," Paul tells the M.E.N.“I did my PhD topic on Polari in Linguistics as I thought it’d be something interesting to look at particularly as I didn’t know anyone who spoke it and I wanted to know why it died out so quickly.”The exact origins of Polari aren’t fully known, but there’s evidence to suggest it was being used as a form of slang by merchants, sailors and theatrical performers as early as the late 1800s.With many homosexual men working in the theatre, Polari was eventually picked up and adopted as part of early queer.