Cockney

Cockney is an old rhyming slang dialect that originated from the East end of London. Although no one speaks fluent Cockney any more, residents in this area of London still use a lot of words. But many Cockney words have slipped into the English language and are used in everyday speech all over England. This talk looks at how the Cockney dialect works and then goes on to look at the words, which are in the English language today.

Even though the Cockney dialect is now dated, it has certainly left it's mark on the English language as it's spoken today. This talk aims to show those who attend how this dialect works and why it started followed by examples of Cockney used in everyday English and often appears in everyday speech, magazines, comics, newspapers, in films and TV programmes.

Working-class London is usually considered Cockney, although picky people insist that true Cockneys are born within the sound of Bow Bells, in London's East End, and all others are just Londoners! To American ears (and to many English ears) the differences are too subtle to matter much. J. C. Wells, in Accents of English 2, has an excellent chapter on London speech. Worth a read for his analysis of how historical Cockney has been recorded in popular literature. Among the things he mentions (as I understand him) is that the substitution of /w/ for /v/ (as in Dickens's Pickwick Papers) was probably on its way out by the late 1800s (possibly much earlier); that Dickens never recorded T glottaling, L Vocalization, or Diphthong Shift in his eye-dialect, and that even Shaw's attempts at eye-dialect require you to remember that the playwright's underlying assumptions are based in Irish English, which accounts for some otherwise most peculiar renderings. Bear in mind, when reading anything in Cockney eye-dialect, that words ending in -er are meant to be pronounced with a schwa at the end. The R is only to be pronounced if linking to a vowel. So you will sometimes come across renderings such as "termorrer" for "tomorrow," where the first and last "o" are meant to be schwas. The common hesitation indicator in American, "uh," is usually spelled "er" in British English, and "um" becomes "erm." Same pronunciation (more or less), different orthography. Also, in common British English eye-dialect, "ar" is usually what Americans render as "ah" - so you need to translate that for yourself, too. "Arsk" for "ask" is a common example, and you might well arsk why, since the broad A is used in RP, too. My guess is that it's to indicate an even backer vowel than commonly heard in RP, where the broad A is often a tad more central than the cardinal vowel. (On the other hand, I've come across this use of "ar" to indicate RP broad As in plays with a northern setting.) For painless pop cultural study of Cockney from about mid-century, I heartily recommend you rent a copy of Passport to Pimlico, starring Stanley Holloway, in addition to the Shaw films others have mentioned. You might like to avail yourself of historical music hall recordings, too, which give you a window on a much earlier time. There are several collections available on CD. Read the liner notes so that you know where the performers you are listening to come from, and do bear in mind that singing (and public performance generally) can impose changes on native conversational speech. (Would you know the Beatles were from Liverpool by the way they sang? With the exception of the last word in the opening line of "Do You Want to Know a Secret?" I doubt it. Rod Stewart doesn't sing with much of a Scottish accent, either.) Aiming for complete historical accuracy is a losing battle. But if you uncover relieable evidence of pronunciation trends of the era in your further researches, I say go ahead and use them unless they are likely to interfere too much with audience comprehension. Oh, and post them here, will you? I'd love to learn more myself.