4. Dialectal and territorial vocabulary variations

Standard English is defined by the Random House Dictionary as the English language written and spoken by literate people in both formal and informal usage and that is universally current while incorporating regional differences (Random House Dictionary of the English language. College Edition. N.Y., 1968).

Vocabulary of standard English is contrasted to dialect words or dialectisms belonging to various local dialects, which are varieties of the English language peculiar to some districts and having no normalized literary form. Regional varieties possessing a literary form are called variants. There are two variants in Great Britain: Scottish English and Irish English. And there are five main groups of dialects: Nothern, Midland, Eastern, Western, Southern. Each of them contains several (up to 10) dialects.

One of the best known Southern dialects is Cockney or “London language”, the regional dialect of London. It has deep historical roots. In the 16^th century, Cockney was simply the language of all Londoners who were not part of the Court, and was spoken by all sorts of people, craftsmen, clerks, shopkeepers and tradesmen. The transformation of Cockney into the working-class speech of East London occured in the 18^th century. The City of London was quickly changing into the richest square mile in the world, and the old City dwellers – street traders and artisans were driven out. They took their distinctive accents to the docklands of the East End, where they were joined by thousands of farmworkers driven out by the industrial revolution to London from neighbouring countries of Essex, Suffolk, Kent and Middlesex. These country immigrants added their speech traditions to the “London language”. During the Education Acts of the late 19^th century, the emphasis on “correct English” and the three Rs (considered as forming the base of childrens’ education. The expression comes from the sound at the beginning of words “reading”, “writing” and “(a)rithmetic”) isolated the speech of the London working class. Cockney attracted the attention of many writers such as Charles Dickens (the street-talk of Mr. Pickwick’s devoted servant in “Pickwick Papers”), Jack London (“The People of the Abyss”), George B. Shaw (from a Covent Garden flower seller Eliza Doolittle in “Pygmalion”), etc.

The typical pronunciation features of Cockney are as follows:

1. “th” is replaced by “f” or “v”, e.g. “barf” for “bath”, “bruvver” for “brother” etc;

2. saying [ai] instead of [ei], e.g. [taik] instead of [teik], [`paiin] instead of [`peiin], etc;

3. finding the [n] missing from “ing” endings like “eatin”, “drinkin”, “shootin”, “fishin”;

4. the characteristic long [u:], for “ew”, e.g. [stu:] for “stew”, [nu:d] for “nude”, [nu:z] for “news”;

5. the characteristic rhyming slang, in which some words are substituted by other words rhyming with them, e.g. a bull and a cow for row, pot and pan for man, twist and twirl for girl, weeping willow for pillow.