For a while, I have been observing a linguistic phenomenon in British English which I am sure was not prevalent when I lived in England (many moons ago).
It seems to have become fashionable for certain demographics to fail to pronounce the "T" in a word in well-nigh every dialect of British English, be it Cockney, South London, Kentish, Midlands, Newcastle, Cornish, Birminghamese(?), Mancunian, and all brands of Scottish and Welsh.
When I studied Linguistics at university (and I did!) we learned that the "T" that is omitted or rather swallowed from the ends of words, particularly in London dialects, is known as the "glottal stop", because it is articulated at the glottis. Thus you have words such as "didn" (didn't), "i" (it), "pla" (plate), "layou" (layout), "star" (start), and the wonderful "Gordon Benne" (Gordon Bennett), etc. The glottal also appears in other languages as a bona fide linguistic phoneme, rather than as a deviant in a dialect of the language.
Wikipedia informs me that this "T" that is omitted in the middle of words is an "intervocalic" T rather than a "glottal" T (for example, in the word "ci/t/y", or indeed, "Bri/t/ain"). Whatever it is called, it is missing presumed lost in extremely large numbers.
The missing T, combined with the H, which the same demographics seem to have deleted from their alphabet, and is similarly missing from the beginnings of words, must make it impossible for foreigners to understand what many British people are talking about. Throw in a bit of dialect vocabulary and current phrases and you might find yourself with one of the answers to why the British are becoming more and more insular.
The sad fact is that they are simply no longer completely understood outside of their island.
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