Social Change in Britain
and the Challenge to RP
Cockney, Estuary English and
Mockney
Social Change in Britain
and the Challenge to RP
Cockney, Estuary English and
Mockney
Estimates of speakers of ‚world’ languages
(U.S. Census Bureau 2010)
Mandarin - 1,365,524,982
English - 1,277,528,133 (lingua franca, globlish)
Spanish - 420,469,703
French - 347,932,305
Arabic - 347,002,991
Internet
• From 90% 20 years ago to around
half of web pages in English
• Internet as curtailing the domination
of English?
A protean language
• Creolization
• Nativization
• Hybridity(Spanglish, Franglais,
Chinglish)
Globalisation of English =
• Linguistic homogenisation?
or
• More language diversity?
Globalisations ‚revenge’?
English (standard) itself to be the language
most affected?
Language as a marker of ethno-cultural
identity
Undermining the position of the native
speaker – declining authority, prestige &
control over the language?
Language change in UK:
Estuary English
• The importance of accent (regional, class)
• Changes to class and occupational structures
• Informalisation/proletarianisation
• Anti-elitism and democratisation
• General trend: from RP to EE
3 ASPECTS
1. Cockney - as exemplary form of
working class speech
2. Estuary English - an informalised
version of standard English with
Cockney elements
3. Mockney – mock cockney as
performance
Cockney
• Traditional dialect of working classs
Londoners (now being replaced by
MLE)
Cockney pronunciation: glottal
stops
Extreme use of in, e.g.,
bu(tt)er,
daugh(t)er,
fa(tt)er,
we(t)
Dropped initial H.
health = ‘ealf;
hate = ‘ate;
hot = ‘ot;
happy = ‘appy
TH fronting.
three = free;
thought = fought (fort)
TH backing.
worth = worf ;
with = wiv;
month = munf
L vocalisation (dark
L, pronounced w)
milk = mi(w)k;
ankle = ank(w)e;
Millwall =
Mi(w)wa(w)
Grammar
Double negatives.
e.g. ‘I haven’t done anything’ = ‘I
ain’t done nothing (nuffin/k)”.
Me for My. e.g. ‘Where’s me
shoes?’ ‘I ain’t seen me mum’.
Interrogatives/Question Tags
Isn’t it? = ain’t it? = innit?, unnit?,
ennit?
Know what I mean?
Vocabulary: Rhyming Slang
a word is replaced by a pair of words, the
second of which rhymes with the one replaced
e.g. wife =
trouble and strife =
trouble (and strife)
Old classics
• north (and south) = mouth
• apples (and pears) = stairs
• Ruby (Murray) = curry
• plates of meat = feet
More recently
• Ronan (Keating) = central heating
• Britney (Spears) = beers
• See: cockneyrhymingslang.com
Estuary English
First noted by
• Wells (1982)
• Young middle class people near London
using a ‘roughened up’ form of speech
• Use of less stigmatised elements of
Cockney (e.g. pronunciation & rhyming
slang but not glottaling)
Estuary - the discussion
• The ‘complaint’ tradition
• Dumbing down v
Democratisation?
Dumbing Down
• Part of a general lowering of standards
of speech and a levelling down of culture
• The transformation of the old middle
class
• A reversal of influence: from down to up
Democratisation
• Socially, EE allows speakers from either end of
the continuum to calibrate their speech
according to differing working and social
environments.
• The more fluid nature of the class structure in
contemporary Britain – EE is an accent more
socially neutral than RP
Democratisation
• This means that RP speakers can (could?)
moderate their accent ‘down’, in order to
sound less elite and privileged, and vernacular
speakers can moderate it ‘up’, in order to
avoid stigmatisation as unrefined proletarians.
• For non-RP speakers climbing the social or
career ladder this represents an important
innovation in British life: it enables them to
compromise but retain, rather than lose,
their original class-linguistic identity
(Scott 1995)
Mockney
• Mockney is a less complex linguistic phenomenon than Estuary English, being simply
‘sham Cockney’, or the deliberate imitation of that dialect by well educated speakers from
RP backgrounds
• Came to the fore in the 1990s
• A well established way of speaking in the popular mass media
• E.g.s Jamie Oliver, Guy Ritchie
•
Linguistic drag
Hipness, coolness, ‘street
credibility’
Abandoning RP and assuming a
more proleish accent and
persona
The suggestion of a privileged
background is to be avoided
Heavier glotalling than is usually
found in Estuary English and
generous helpings of rhyming
slang
Standard grammar is otherwise
generally adhered to
Mockney as code switching
• A form of deliberate code switching less
subtle than that found in Estuary English
(which has become naturalised), rather
than a new dialect
• Tony Blair, with his crystalline RP in
international relations but experiments in
Mockney for certain domestic audiences, was
an interesting case (Wheatcroft 1999).
Conclusion
•
Estuary English and its regional variants may be well on
their way to dislodging RP as the national form of
pronunciation of standard English
•
This expresses three broad phenomena:
•
the protean, restless character of the language
•
processes of post war social change - the expansion and
fragmentation of the middle classes
•
the rise of an anti-elitist, liberal-progressive political
ideology and cultural tone
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