How to speak London

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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.

The authors, Dr Amanda Cole and Dr Patrycja Strycharczuk, sensibly enough note that accents don’t depend entirely on sounds. They are held together by social forces. But in The Search for Linguistically Coherent Accents they pinned down the accents of 193 linguistic guinea pigs, partly by
making them read out little lists of words (‘toad, held, though, falling’ or ‘hot, together, gone, thick’).

The three accent clusters emerged through analysis of the diphthongs – as might be expected, if you think of the Cockney way of pronouncing mouth as maaf (though this also incorporates f for th, also a trait of Multicultural London English as used by good old Stormzy: ‘It’s a kind of rapper fing, innit’). Drs Cole and Strycharczuk haven’t discovered these new accents; but they have given them a phonetic standing.

So why has Received Pronunciation (RP) taken to its deathbed? The Essex study quotes opinions that it is regarded as having a ‘rather dated – even negative – flavour in contemporary British English’ and has an ideological link with ‘the past and the upper class’, which are disapproved of.