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    Price, Wide, Try Has A Backer Starting-Point, Thus And, The Diphthong in

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    Ariadna Escobedo
    The document discusses Estuary English, a variety of English associated with London and the Thames estuary region. Estuary English was coined in 1984 to describe a mixture of non-regional and local southeast English pronunciation found in between Received Pronunciation and London speech. While it gained popularity, claims about its reach and characteristics were exaggerated. Research shows that youth accents near London retain distinct local features rather than comprising a single Estuary English variety, and the definition remains an area of debate.

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    Price, Wide, Try Has A Backer Starting-Point, Thus And, The Diphthong in

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    Ariadna Escobedo
    23 views3 pages
    The document discusses Estuary English, a variety of English associated with London and the Thames estuary region. Estuary English was coined in 1984 to describe a mixture of non-regional and local southeast English pronunciation found in between Received Pronunciation and London speech. While it gained popularity, claims about its reach and characteristics were exaggerated. Research shows that youth accents near London retain distinct local features rather than comprising a single Estuary English variety, and the definition remains an area of debate.

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    The document discusses Estuary English, a variety of English associated with London and the Thames estuary region. Estuary English was coined in 1984 to describe a mixture of non-regional and local southeast English pronunciation found in between Received Pronunciation and London speech. While it gained popularity, claims about its reach and characteristics were exaggerated. Research shows that youth accents near London retain distinct local features rather than comprising a single Estuary English variety, and the definition remains an area of debate.

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    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
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    23 views3 pages

    Price, Wide, Try Has A Backer Starting-Point, Thus And, The Diphthong in

    Uploaded by

    Ariadna Escobedo
    The document discusses Estuary English, a variety of English associated with London and the Thames estuary region. Estuary English was coined in 1984 to describe a mixture of non-regional and local southeast English pronunciation found in between Received Pronunciation and London speech. While it gained popularity, claims about its reach and characteristics were exaggerated. Research shows that youth accents near London retain distinct local features rather than comprising a single Estuary English variety, and the definition remains an area of debate.

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    of 3

    By the term ‘Estuary English’ people refer to a variety of English associated with London

    and the surrounding Thames estuary in southeast England.

    The term ‘Estuary English’ was invented by David Rosewarne in 1984, in an article in
    which he described it as “a mixture of non-regional and local south-eastern English
    pronunciation and intonation. If one imagines a continuum with RP and London speech at
    either end, ‘Estuary English’ speakers are to be found grouped in the middle ground. […]
    The heartland of this variety lies by the banks of the Thames and its estuary.”

    A few years later, the idea was picked up by the popular press, since when there has been
    considerable public discussion of Estuary English. New and exaggerated claims were
    made about it. The author Paul Coggle (1993) asserted that it could be heard in places as
    far away from London as north Norfolk, Dorset, the Kent coast, Northamptonshire and
    Oxfordshire.

    Here are some ways in which EE pronunciation differs from RP.


    • [t] in various syllable-final environments is replaced by the glottal stop, [ ], thus
    [ ] get off, [ ] stop it.
    • [tj] is replaced by and [dj] by , as in tune, reduce.
    • [l] before a consonant or word-finally is replaced by a kind of vowel-sound, [o],
    thus milk [ ]
    • The wide diphthongs sound different. Thus [ ], the diphthong in words such as
    price, wide, try has a backer starting-point, thus [ ]; and [ ], the diphthong in
    words such as mouth, loud, down, has a fronter starting-point, thus [ ].
    • The narrower diphthongs in words such as face, day and goat, no tend to have an
    opener starting-point, thus [ ] and [ ].
    • The weak ending -ing tends to be pronounced with an alveolar nasal rather than a
    velar nasal, thus runnin’ (= running). (This is characteristic of working-class
    English in most parts of the English-speaking world.)
    • The [t] tends to be omitted in the words twenty and plenty, and also in want and
    went when followed by a vowel sound. (Unlike Americans, EE speakers do not
    omit the [t] in words such as winter or painted.)

    It has been claimed that Estuary English is “the new standard English”. Coggle’s thinks it
    has a “street cred” that RP lacks. I suggested redefining it as “standard English spoken
    with a non-RP, London-influenced accent” (Wells 1994), Nevertheless, the popular
    reaction to Estuary English has on the whole been unfavourable. It has often come to be
    seen as the sum of all the pronunciation trends that purists dislike. A minister of
    Education stigmatized EE as “bastardized sub-Cockney”. The word “Estuary” also
    apparently became confused with “Essex”, acquiring the negative connotations associated
    with the outer-London eastern suburbs in that county. A recent website (written by a non-
    linguist) attributes to EE all the most extreme characteristics of Cockney pronunciation.

    Cockney characteristics which would not be expected in EE include


    • h-dropping, thus ’and, ’eart, ’edge for hand, heart, hedge.
    • a monophthong rather than a diphthong in words like mouth, loud, down, thus
    [ ] etc.
    • th-fronting, namely thus use of [f] and [v] rather than [ ] and [ ] respectively.
    • many non-standard festures of grammar and usage, e.g. them fings (those things),
    I ain’t seen no one (I haven’t seen anyone), the boys done good (the boys did
    well).

    According to this analysis, the footballer David Beckham would be regarded as a speaker
    of Cockney rather than of Estuary English.

    Some of the confusion over the definition of EE arises from the fact that Rosewarne did
    not allow for stylistic variation within the same accent. Furthermore, he refers to matters
    of vocabulary and usage as well as to pronunciation, e.g. saying cheers rather than thank
    you. But this is not incompatible with Standard English/RP.

    It is certainly true that certain phonetic features of Cockney (th-fronting, l-vocalization)


    are spreading fast into other areas of England. However, the claim that a single accent,
    EE, is “sweeping the southeast” has been shown to be untrue. The Polish phonetician
    Joanna Przedlacka investigated the speech of young people in four places about 50 km
    away from London in different directions. She found that rather than having the same
    accent in these different places (the EE claim), they all retained distinct local
    characteristics. For example, she found that the percentage of glottal stops by teenagers
    varied as follows:

    RP speakers (at Eton school) 8


    Cockneys (in Bethnal Green, London) 85

    Aylesbury, Bucks., NW of London 43


    Farningham, Kent, SE of London 38
    Walton on the Hill, Surrey, SW of London 21
    Little Baddow, Essex, NE of London 8

    It is true that most of the speakers in the areas surrounding London have glottalling
    scores intermediate between RP and Cockney. But they are far from being speakers of
    one uniform variety that we could call Estuary English.

    References

    Coggle, Paul, 1993. Do you speak Estuary? London: Bloomsbury.


    Przedlacka, Joanna, 2002. Estuary English? Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
    Rosewarne, David, 1984. ‘Estuary English’. Times Educational Supplement, 19.
    Wells, John, 1994. ‘Transcribing Estuary English’. Speech, Hearing and Language 8:
    261-267.

    See the website www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/estuary.

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