Christopher Howse has narrated this article for you to listen to.
Cockney is dead, but so is the King’s English. Long live Standard Southern British English. The Cockney Barbara Windsor yelling ‘Ge’ aah-a my pub’ is as fossilised as Eliza Doolittle. And what a shock it is today to hear the late Queen, aged 21, declare: ‘My whole life whether it be long or short shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family.’ She seems to say devated, sairvice and end (for ‘and’).
Now a study from the University of Essex has put the accents of London and the south-east into the laboratory and shown that three are dominant: Estuary English (replacing Cockney), Standard Southern British English (replacing the monarch’s way of speaking, otherwise known as Received Pronunciation) and, coming up in a gap between, Multicultural London English.
‘Class is not an important linguistic predictor for young people in south-east England’
The authors, Dr Amanda Cole and Dr Patrycja Strycharczuk, sensibly enough note that accents don’t depend entirely on sounds.
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