Estuary English
Estuary English is an English accent associated with the area along the River Thames and its estuary, including London. Phonetician John C. Wells proposed a definition of Estuary English as "Standard English spoken with the accent of the southeast of England". Estuary English may be compared with Cockney, and there is some debate among linguists as to where Cockney speech ends and Estuary English begins.
Name
The scholar Alan Cruttenden uses the term London Regional General British in preference to the popular term 'Estuary English'.The names listed above may be abbreviated:
- Estuary English → EE
- London Regional General British → London General, London Regional GB, London RGB
Note that some other authors use the name Popular London to refer to Cockney itself.
Status as accent of English
The boundary between Estuary English and Cockney is far from clearcut. Several writers have argued that Estuary English is not a discrete accent distinct from the accents of the London area. The sociolinguist Peter Trudgill has written that the term "Estuary English" is inappropriate because "it suggests that we are talking about a new variety, which we are not; and because it suggests that it is a variety of English confined to the banks of the Thames estuary, which it is not. The label actually refers to the lower middle-class accents, as opposed to working-class accents, of the Home Counties Modern Dialect area". Peter Roach comments, "In reality there is no such accent and the term should be used with care. The idea originates from the sociolinguistic observation that some people in public life who would previously have been expected to speak with an RP accent now find it acceptable to speak with some characteristics of the London area... such as glottal stops, which would in earlier times have caused comment or disapproval".state "All of its features can be located on a sociolinguistic and geographical continuum between RP and Cockney, and are spreading not because Estuary English is a coherent and identifiable influence, but because the features represent neither the standard nor the extreme non-standard poles of the continuum". In order to tackle these problems put forward by expert linguists, argues that Estuary English should be viewed as a folk category rather than an expert linguistic category. As such it takes the form of a perceptual prototype category that does not require discrete boundaries in order to function in the eyes of lay observers of language variation and change.
Features
- Non-rhoticity.
- Use of intrusive R: pronouncing in places where etymologically no is present to prevent consecutive vowel sounds. For example, drawing is pronounced.
- Presence of several vowel splits:
- * Wholly–holy split, so wholly is pronounced differently from holy.
- * Foot–strut split so foot does not rhyme with strut.
- * Trap–bath split so trap has a different vowel to bath.
- * Another split that has been reported is the split, which causes board to be pronounced differently from bored. appears before consonants, and appears at a morpheme boundary. However, states that both and may have the same monophthongal quality.
- T glottalisation: the non-initial, most-commonly final is a glottal stop instead of an alveolar stop: can't.
- Yod-coalescence, the use of the affricates and instead of the clusters and in words like dune and Tuesday. Thus, the words sound like June and choose day, respectively.
- Realization of non-prevocalic different from that found in traditional RP; four variants are possible:
- * L-vocalisation, the use of,, or in places that RP uses in the final positions or in a final consonant cluster: sold. In London, that may even occur before a vowel: girl out. In all phonetic environments, male London speakers were at least twice as likely to vocalize the dark l as female London speakers.
- * According to, the vocalized dark l is sometimes an unoccluded lateral approximant, which differs from the RP only by the lack of the alveolar contact.
- * Coda pronounced as clear, as in most accents of Irish English. notes that in her study, "all four Essex speakers have a clear in pull." In New Zealand English, word-final clear, as opposed to usual in that variety vocalised, has also been reported for some speakers. A reverse process, clear realised as dark, has not been reported in Estuary English.
- * Alternation between the vocalized, dark non-vocalized and clear non-vocalized, depending on the word.
- It has been suggested that th-fronting is "currently making its way" into Estuary English, for example those from the Isle of Thanet often refer to Thanet as "Plannit Fannit". However, this feature was also present in the traditional dialect of Essex before the spread of Estuary English.
- Vowel changes:
- * can be realised as, or, with the first two variants predominating. Before the dark l, it is sometimes a centering diphthong.
- * can be realised in many different ways, such as monophthongs,,,,, and diphthongs,, and. Front pronunciations are more often encountered in female speakers. Before the l, it is always back.
- * can be central near-front, or simply near-back, as in RP. Only the last variant appears before the dark l.
- * , according to, can be pronounced in two different ways: diphthongal in closed syllables and or in open syllables and monophthongal. According to, it is either or before consonants, and either or at a morpheme boundary.
- * can be realised as,,, or, with being predominant. The first two variants occur mostly before. The last two variants are more often used by females.
- * can be realised as,,, or. A somewhat retracted front has been reported for some speakers in Reading.
- * may be realised in a couple of different ways. According to, it is any of the following:,, or. The last two are more often used by females. She also notes a fully rounded diphthong , as well as two rare monophthongal realizations, namely and. According to, Estuary may be pronounced or, with the first element somewhat lengthened and much more open than in RP and the second element being near-close central, with or without lip rounding.
- * , according to, can be realised as,, or, with and being predominant. According to, it can be realised as,,, or.
- * can be realised as,,,, or.
- * can be realised as,,, or. denotes a front onset, not a central one.
- Vowel mergers before historic :
- * merges with .
- * merges with .
- * merges with .
- * Other possible mergers include the following:
- ** can merge with . Since merges with, it also participates in this merger.
- ** can merge with both and .
- ** can merge with both and .
- ** can merge with .
- ** can merge with .
- ** can merge with .
- H-dropping in stressed words
- Monophthongal realization of .
Use
Some adopt the accent as a means of "blending in" to appear to be more working class or in an attempt to appear to be "a common man". That affectation of the accent is sometimes derisively referred to as "Mockney". A move away from traditional RP accents is almost universal among middle-class young people.
Traditional Essex and Kent
Older rural dialects were once mainly confined to Kent and the north and the east of Essex, which showed a few early features of, as well as some features distinct from, the modern Estuary dialect that has since spread through the region. Certain features associated with rural East Anglian English were common: the rounding of the diphthong of , yod-dropping in Essex, and non-rhoticity, although Mersea Island was rhotic until the mid-20th century. Modern Estuary dialect features were also reported in traditional varieties, including L-vocalization e.g. old as owd and th-fronting in Essex and yod-coalescence in Kent. The pronunciation of /iː/ as in words like been or seen was also once a feature of both counties.There are audio examples available on the British Library website and BBC sources for the older Kentish dialect, and an Essex Dialect Handbook has been published; the Essex County Records office has recorded a CD of the sounds of Essex dialect speakers in an effort to preserve the dialect. The Survey of English Dialects investigated 15 sites in Essex, most of which were in the rural north of the county and one of which was on Mersea Island—an unusually high number of sites, being second only to Yorkshire. Many of the first English books to be published were by Kentish writers, and this helped spread Kent dialectal words to the rest of the country. The pattern of speech in some of Charles Dickens' books pertain to Kentish dialect, as the author lived at Higham, was familiar with the mudflats near Rochester and created a comic character Sam Weller who spoke the local accent, principally Kentish but with strong London influences.