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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