Linguistic South of England

regional and Social varieties of english

Linguistic South of England

Why ?

pronunciation distribution of daughter and night

​the place of RP

​RP is phonologically a south-eastern accent, it is in principle impossible to tell the provenance of an RP speaker. It is a non-regional accent of a more socio-economic nature.

conservative RP

Alison: And what kind of breakfast did you sit down to at that time?

Lady Silvia: An enormous breakfast: grandpa used to have fish; there was either fish or eggs and cereal to begin with; scones, marmalade and jam. And my grandfather invariably ended his large meal with a boiled egg which he cooked himself on a plated egg-boiler exactly timed for three minutes. He then poured cream on top of the egg, after which he ended with some scones and fruit. There were at least eight baskets of different fruit on the table that the head gardener, Mister Patterson, was very famous for his vegetables and fruit, including melons and grapes etcetera.

Alison: So you must've been absolutely stuffed after breakfast: I'm surprised you could all move!

Lady Silvia: I don't think we ate as much as my grandfather did. Of course, we didn't have such grand meals in the nursery, but it was quite adequate. And it was only when we grew up, in other words eighteen, that we were allowed to eat with the grown-ups in the dining room. And that was rather a terrifor [sic], terrifying ordeal for a young girl when one had to make conversation to one's elderly neighbour during six courses. It was considered rude not to talk and grandpa occasionally made very cutting remarks to any young person sitting silent, such as, “Have you lost your tongue?"

Features to observe in the snippet :

• tapped r

• ​no happY tensing

• æ in TRAP sound

• no yod-coalescence

Open Ended

What other features (or lack of thereof you expect in RP) did you notice in the snippet?

EVOLUTION OF RP

​Now, listen to a snippet of modern RP and near-RP .

Estuary English

​The ‘estuary’ in question is that of the Thames. The term was coined in the 1980s to identify the way features of London regional speech seemed to be rapidly spreading throughout the counties adjoining the river (especially Essex and Kent) and beyond.

It is something of a misnomer, for the influence of London speech has for some time been evident well beyond the Thames estuary, notably in the Oxford – Cambridge – London triangle and in the area to the south and east of London as far as the coast.

Estuary English can be viewed as a continuum with Cockney at one end and Received Pronunciation at the other as it probably resulted from upward mobility of Cockneys (thus raising its social prestige) and negative appeal of sounding 'posh' (RP).

how dialect spreads

The top map shows the distribution of words for a ‘food-trough in a cow-house’, the bottom map — main routes of communication connecting London to population centres along the coast.

What's the implication?

EStuary dialect

• ​The glottal stop in certain positions, especially replacing /t/ at the end of a word or before a consonant (Gatwick airport).

• The replacement of final /-l/ by a short [u] vowel, so that hill is pronounced [hIʊ].

​Accent

​Grammar

• The ‘confrontational’ question tag, as in I said I was going, didn’t I.

• Never referring to a single occasion, as in I never did.

• The omission of the -ly adverbial ending, as in You’re turning it too slow.

• Generalization of the third person singular form as in I gets out of the car.

• Nonstandard prepositional uses, such as in I got off of the bench; I looked out the window.

Cockney

The term Cockney has traditionally been applied to the broadest form of the working class dialect of the innermost suburbs of East London (the “East End”). Today, however, references to the East End tend to cover the whole area east and north-east of the city of London, spreading into much of urbanized south Essex.

cockney Accent

• /eɪ/ is [æɪ]

• /əʊ/ is [ʌʉ]

​Vowels

​Consonants

• glottal stop, not only before a consonant but also accompanying /p/ between vowels as paper and representing /t/ between vowels as in butter and before a pause wet in.

• th-fronting initially, medially and finally for θ to f, and medially and finally for ð to v.

• l-vocalization finally after a vowel as in well (wɛʊ).

• h-dropping.

• -ing is /ɪn/ as in laying; or if part of thing– [ɪŋk].

• /aɪ/ is [ɑɪ]

• /aʊ/ may be [æə]

• /iː/ is [əi]

  etc.

Cockney recording

I came back to the bed, like, after breakfast. I was just like laying on it a bit and reading the . . . the paper. And I don’t know, I thought suddenly I feel wet in my pyjamas. And I looked inside, and put my hand in. I . . . it is wet. Well, how . . . how the dickens? I ain’t spilt any tea or anything down there. So I thought well, I know, I’ll go out in the ablution place, like, there . . . they’ve got some little radiators, all little individual places got a little radiator, put my pyjamas on there to dry, I just thought it was some water. Of course, when I got out there the dressing that was on me, that was soaked in a . . . yeah, like a . . . a watery blood. So, of course I went and saw the sister, and er . . . they put another dressing on it. They put another dressing on it . . . it wasn’t . . . wasn’t long before that was soaked and all, Fred. Wasn’t long before that was soaked. So of course I went and had another one done. So I said to the . . . the nurse, I said . . . guessed to what it was, it was like where they . . . they’d taken the tubes out, and I said to her, ‘Have they opened up?’ She said, ‘No, there’s nothing, like o . . . a . . . actually open, it’s seeping.’ It was seeping through, yeah. Well . . . I said, well, I said, ‘If you put s . . . some, like, little butterfly stitches over that first of all . . . out of . . . er . . . er . . . plaster, like, you know . . . hold that together first of all, then put a dressing and a big plaster on it,’ so she done that. But it still didn’t . . . yeah, it still seeps through. And of course I’m going to get worried, and when . . . when she done it, like, the third time . . . took it off, I’m laying there, I could see it, it was running away from me like tears.

Find in this snippet the accent features, as well grammar and vocabulary:

Open Ended

And now write down the features you observed:

Cockney dialect

• Ain't as in You ain’t getting rid of me and never as in I never done nothing as negators.

• Negative concord as in She can’t say nothing.

• was/were levelling as in We wasn’t allowed to wear hats or I weren’t gonna take the risk.

• Non-standard use of relativizer as in The car what she drives.

​Grammar

​Pragmatics

• Pragmatic marker innit as in Alright I’ll give you the four pound today, innit?

• Agreement marker you know what I mean / you get me as in Music calms me down you get me.

Rhyming slang

Using an expression which rhymes with a word and then using that expression instead of the word.

Multiple Choice

In Cockney rhyming slang Lucy Locket stands for:

• rocket

• pocket

• socket

• docket

Multicultural London English (MlE)

This dialect emerged in the early 1980s in parts of London with high immigration levels, blends the traditional East End Cockney dialect with various sounds and grammatical constructions influenced by numerous languages brought by immigrants, including Jamaican Creole, Punjabi, Bengal etc.

While MLE retains some Cockney features, it introduces unique elements such as specific pronunciations of vowels and aitches, novel pronoun usage (e.g., "man" meaning "I"), and the incorporation of slang like "mandem" and "gyaldem," reflecting a rich, multicultural linguistic evolution in London.

It is marked by the emergence of new quotative expressions be like and this is + speaker and extensive used of general extenders and stuff and or something.

*Article on MLE sounds

Multiple Choice

Which MLE word stands for muscular?

• peng

• hench

• shook

• ting

Draw

Now that Cockney has gone mainstream, which dialect took its place as the 'ugly stepsister'?

Essex English

Essex dialect, once a distinct East Anglian dialect, together with Suffolk and Norfolk, is the new punching bag among Enlgand's accents.

It was also influenced by factors like social change, urbanization, and the proximity to London and is deeply rooted in the Cockney dialect due to significant migration from East London to Essex throughout the 20th century.

East anglian dialects

Prosody

• Stressed syllables tend to be longer and more heavily stressed than in many other dialects.

• Unstressed syllables are correspondingly shorter, with reduction of most vowels to schwa.

• Non-utterance-final schwa tends to disappear.

  e.g. What, are you on holiday? [wɑ:ʔ jɑn hɑ:ldə]? ; Have you got any coats? [hæ:jə gɑʔ nə kʊʔs]?

​Accent

Sounds

• Upgliding diphthongs as in goat [guːt], know [nʌu].

• Smoothing of vowel + ə as in seeing [sɛ:n], trying [tra:n].

• Intervocalic and word-final glottalization of /p, t, k/.

• h-dropping; w-dropping before /ʊ/.

• v-w merger as in village [wɪlɪʤ].

• Dropping of word initial unstressed /ð/ as in Are y’comen’en? (‘Are you coming then?)

East anglian dialects

Grammar

• Negative concord, possessive-based reflexives, past use of done, demonstrative them.

• Third-person present-tense singular zero as in We got a nice butcher at Burwell. He make he make some good sausages.

• A-verbing as in I’m a-runn’n.

• Simple forms for progressive as in Kittle bile! (The kettle is boiling!)

• Explicit second person in imperatives as in Go you on! ; Do you sit down!

• Presentative be as in Here I be!

• Pronoun exchange, where pronoun forms he, she, we, they can occur as grammatical objects as in I know she.

• Third person singular that as in The dog hurt thaself.

• Now for just as in I’m now coming!

​Accent

Norwich recording

I’ve got something humorous happened to me, one thing I’ll never forget. We . . . well the . . . this is the . . . this is when I first met my husband . . . cos I generally . . . you know, my daughter always laugh about that. We went and had a drink, erm, one night. I don’t know if you know the Blue Room near the, erm . . . Well, we went in there one night to have a drink. There was, erm, two girl friends and me – this was before I’d married, see – and, well this was the night, see, when I met my husband. And, erm, you know, they was like buy . . . the fellows was buying us drinks and that, see, and, er, my friend and her sister, oh, she say, well, we don’t want to go with them, she said, let’s give them the slip. Right. Well, we ran up, er, Prince of Wales Road, and opposite the . . . well, that’s . . . that was the Regent then, that’s the ABC now. There’s a fruiterers, Empire Fruit Stores, I don’t know if it’s still there, is it? Well, there was this here fruits . . . er, fruitstore and that, and they had a passageway at the side of it, see. Well, my friends said to me, oh, they said, Flo, we’ll get in here and give them the slip. I went to go in first, thought that was a long passage and that wasn’t. They had 40 steps and I fell right to the bottom. Yeah. And there was me, see, and we . . . and we could hear . . . you know, they could hear these here fellows come run . . . running up behind, see, so my friends said, oh quick, Flo have fell down a lot of stairs. Well, the one what’s my husband, he said, let her lay there, he said.

Find in this snippet the accent and grammar features:

Open Ended

And now write down the features you observed:

Bristol English

The Bristol dialect, often referred to as "Bristolese," probably the most recognizable among the West Country dialects is characterized by several unique linguistic features that set it apart within the United Kingdom.

One of the most notable features is the "Bristol L," where the terminal "L" is intrusive probably as a result of hypercorrection. The name Bristol comes from original Bridgestow and is likely a result of this pronunciation feature.

Like most West Country dialects it is rhotic and often associated with pirate speech for hard R's.

Now usually
post-alveolar

Originally
retroflex

West country dialects

Accent

• rhoticity

• h-dropping, t-glottalization, l-vocalization

• lengthened short vowels

• unstressed vowels retain full quality

• word-final vowel + nasal sequences are not reduced to syllabic consonants, as [bʌtən] in button

• initial fricative voicing: /f, θ, s, ʃ/ are voiced to [v, ð, z, ʒ]

• happY-lengthening as [æpei] in happy

• [ɒɪ] for /aɪ/ as in hide [ɒɪd]

• [æy] for/aʊ/ as in how [aʊ]

• vowel-r metathesis as in chillurn (children)

​Accent

​Captain Blackbeard

Somerset sample

Poll

Does Blackbeard have a West Country accent?

• Yes

• No

west country dialects

Grammar

• Negative concord, a-verbing, possessive-based reflexives, pronoun exchange

• Gendered pronouns as in She's a nice scarf.

• Superfluous to in location questions as in Where's that to?

• Second person singular pronouns thee/thou

• Regularization of irregular verbs as in know-knowed; take-tooked

• Unemphatic periphrastic do as tense carrier as in William, my son, do live down there.

​Accent

Open Ended

Which grammar features do we encounter often in the South?