ON THE OPPOSITE SIDES OF THE CONTINUUM:

STANDARD BRITISH ENGLISH AND COCKNEY.

A HISTORICAL OUTLINE OF THE PARALLEL DEVELOPMENTS

OF THE TWO VARIETIES

MATTEO SANTIPOLO

Standard (British) English and Cockney are the varieties of

English placed on the opposite ends of the linguistic continuum in the
London area. The present article aims at drawing an outline of their
almost parallel histories and developments. The variety in-between,
that is Estuary English, is intentionally not dealt with here, referring
the reader interested in the subject to Santipolo 2000 and 2001.

1. Standard (British) English vs. RP

Standard English (SE) is that dialect of English, the grammar,
syntax, morphology, slang and vocabulary of which are most widely
accepted and understood. Here “widely” means both socially and geo-
graphically, that is, the dialect that, least of all, raises critical judge-
ments about itself and is generally considered overtly prestigious. It is
perhaps worth remembering that “the chief difference between stan-
dard and non-standard varieties are not in their ‘superior' or ‘inferior'
linguistic structures, but in the different level of social acceptability
accorded to them and in the fact that non-standard varieties are not
extensively codified or officially prescribed.” (Milroy & Milroy,
1993: 6). In the present work, we shall refer to Standard British Eng-

403
lish, leaving out other possible standards (Standard American English,
Standard Australian English, Standard Irish English, etc.).
If SE is a dialect, Received Pronunciation (RP), where received
is to be meant in its 19th century sense of “accepted in the best soci-
ety”, is the accent most generally associated with it (other names by
which this accent is commonly known include Oxbridge English,
BBC English, and Queen’s English). It is, however, possible to speak
perfectly SE with an accent other than RP. This is the case, for in-
stance, limiting our attention to the British Isles with many learned
Irishmen and Scotsmen. There may be slight differences concerning
grammar, slang, vocabulary, etc., but the ones that, even without
switching to a different dialect, stick out most, regard pronunciation.
On the other hand, dialects other than SE are never spoken with
an RP accent, and it would definitely sound strange and quite unnatu-
ral to overhear a conversation between, say, two Welshmen, calling
each other bach! or del!, uttered in an Oxbridge accent.

1.2 Historical Outline

The dialect which we now call Standard English is the result of
a long process of changes, influenced by social, political, cultural and
economic factors that started in the Middle English period. No direct
connection can, indeed, be established with West Saxon, the written
standard of Old English.

404
 When, in the 15th century, the Court moved from Winchester to
London the history of what was to become SE and that of the new
capital grew indissolubly intertwined.
A regionally standardised literary language based on the dialects
of the Central Midlands (Northamptonshire, Huntingdonshire and
Bedfordshire) had already appeared in the late 14th century and had al-
ready started to influence the London area, as is proved by the works
of Langland and Chaucer.
Recent studies have shown, however, that the geographical area
that more than any other contributed to the formation of modern SE is
that of the so-called “East Midlands Triangle”, namely that included
between Cambridge, Oxford and London (Crystal, 1995: 50).

405
 Map 1: The East Midlands Triangle

The two events that gave a decisive contribution towards a

somehow unified written standard occurred in the 15th century.
The already remembered emergence of London as the political
and commercial centre of the country favoured the rise in importance
of the Chancery: manuscripts were being copied according to a homo-
geneous standard, which, little by little, began to make its influence be
felt among private citizens as well. And it is no coincidence that Wil-
liam Caxton in 1476 decided to set up his wooden press in London
(and precisely not very far from Westminster Abbey and the Court)
so as to have a constant speech model to look up to (Crystal, 1995:
54). In this way, London English soon became the standard language
of the printers and was carried into the remotest parts of the country
(Matthews, 19722: 203-4). This was also the time when the speech of
London's West End (or, more in general, of the upper classes living

406
there) started to be increasingly identified with SE; whereas that of the
East End (the poorer part of town) was identified with Cockney (see
Map 2 below).
It must be pointed out that London, as much then as now, was a
magnet attracting provincials from all over the British Isles and, there-
fore, the type of English that resulted from such a melting pot could
only be a hybrid.
The attempts to unify English speech that we have seen so far,
all seem to have been the outcome of an almost unconscious process
and, in any case, limited to the written language. The first ones who
consciously tried to achieve such a result by fostering a standard of
pronunciation were the orthoepists of the 16th and 17th centuries, as is
confirmed by the comments on the acceptability of kinds of English
that began to appear during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1558-
1603). The following one is by J. Hart in the Preface to his Methode
to Read English (1570):

“[…] the Court, and London speaches, where the generall flower of all Eng-
lish countrie speaches, are chosen and vsed.”
(Matthews, 19722: 201)

In The Arte of English Poesie (1589), attributed to George Put-

tenham we read that the best type of English is

407
 “the vsuall speach of the Court, and that of London and the shires lying about
London within ix Myles, and not much aboue.” (Book 3
Chapter 4)

The role of London and of its speech seem to have become al-
ways more and more relevant throughout the 17th and 18th centuries,
so much so that Scottish-born King James I (1603-1625) will be able
to say that “soon London will be all England.” It must indeed be re-
membered that, with its approximately 250,000 inhabitants at the end
of the 16th century, London represented about a tenth of the whole
population of England and Wales (Matthews, 19722: 203).
But, as we shall in dealing with Cockney (cf. 2.2 and, in par-
ticular, see Thomas Sheridan's statement from A Course of Lectures
on Elocution, 1762), a distinction, at least as soon as the second half
of the 18th century, started to be made between the language of the
London lower classes and that of the Court and the Universities, no
matter how scanty the number of members of the latter may have
been.
If London drew to itself people from all over the country and
these, mainly for the reasons we previously saw in dealing with Cock-
ney, were somehow compelled to abandon their native accent or even
dialect to adopt that of the capital, the resulting variety, quite obvi-
ously, could not sound completely natural, but rather a sort of self-
imposed and therefore artificial type of speech.
It was only when the habit of sending children of the upper
classes to the so-called Public Schools was established, towards the

408
middle of 18th century, that the new standard of speech began to be as-
sociated with the educated classes and became fluid as all natural lan-
guages are expected to be.
The Seven Public Schools (the first to be founded was Westmin-
ster in 1339. The others are Charterhouse, Eton, Harrow, Rugby,
Shrewsbury and Winchester), soon became the symbol of a whole
class of people and of values. Among the distinguishing features of
this class, language was one of the most important. If a written stan-
dard had, by now, a long and settled history, and grammar and vo-
cabulary were quite codified, it was pronunciation that, still at the end
of the 19th century, was far from being rigidly established.
One of the first remarks on some kind of standardised pronun-
ciation is by A. J. Ellis1:

“In the present day we may […] recognise a received pronunciation all over
the country […] It may be especially considered as the educated pronunciation of
the metropolis, of the court, the pulpit and the bar.”
(On Early English Pronunciation, vol. 1, 1869: 23)

This was also the first time the phrase received pronunciation
made its appearance in a text.
The first scholar to recognise the change that had occurred from
geolect to sociolect of SE, was Henry Sweet who in his The Sounds of
English wrote (1908):

1
All the following quotations are from Crystal, 1995

409
 “Standard English […] is now a class dialect more than a local dialect: it is
the language of the educated all over Great Britain […] The best speakers of Stan-
dard English are those whose pronunciation, and language generally, least betray
their locality […].”

In 1917 Daniel Jones published his famous English Pronounc-

ing Dictionary which was to mark a turning point as far as accent is
concerned. And in the Preface to the 1st edition he defined his model
for English as that:

“most usually heard in everyday speech in the families of Southern English

persons whose menfolk have been educated at the great public boarding-schools
[…]”

and called it Public School Pronunciation (PSP). Only one year

later, however, he will specify:

“I do not consider it possible at the present time to regard any special type as
‘Standard' or as intrinsically better than any other types. Nevertheless, the type de-
scribed in this book is a useful one. It is based on my own (Southern) speech, and is,
as far as I can ascertain, that generally used by those who have been educated at
‘preparatory' boarding schools and the ‘Public Schools’ […] The term ‘Received
Pronunciation’ […] is often used to designate this type of pronunciation […].”
(19609: 12)

Jones's moderate opinion does not seem to have been shared by

another linguist of the time, Henry Cecil Wyld, who, in 1914 wrote:

410
 “It is proposed to use the term Received Standard for that form which all
would probably agree in considering the best, that form which has the widest cur-
rency and is heard with practically no variation among speakers of the better class
all over the country.”
(A Short History of English, 19273: 149)

Such judgements of an intrinsically better variety of English

were even carried further in a later work by the same author, the title
of which is itself extremely explanatory to understand the principles
underlying it: “The Best English: a Claim for the Superiority of Re-
ceived Standard English” (1934) appeared in the Proceedings of the
Society for Pure English, No. 4. After explaining that what is gener-
ally referred to as Standard English is indeed standard only as far as
“accidence and syntax” are concerned, but instead full of
“provincialisms” that “[…] none but the uncandid would hesitate to
call vulgarism, in pronunciation”, and after proposing to call this type
of English Modified Standard, he goes on to explain what should be
meant by Received Standard (R. S.) and why it should be considered
superior:

“R. S. […] is the type spoken by members of the great Public Schools, and by
those classes in society which normally frequent these. I suggest that this is the best
kind of English, not only because it is spoken by those often very properly called
‘the best people', but because it has two great advantages that make it intrinsically
superior to every other type of English speech – the extent to which it is current
throughout the country, and the marked distinctiveness and clarity in its sounds.”

411
 It is clear that the motivations for such a viewpoint do not hold
at all: it is a contradiction to say that R. S. is spoken by the upper
classes (who, obviously enough, represent only a strict minority of the
whole population) and then state that it is “current throughout the
country”. And again, the illustration of the distribution of various
vowel sounds in different varieties of English that follows and is
meant to support the second intrinsic motivation, does not add to the
idea of the supposedly superiority of R. S.
But no matter how linguistically ungrounded these opinions may
appear today, at that time, they still found supporters even from offi-
cial institutions.
During the heyday of the British Empire (1890-1940), the pos-
session of RP was used as a criterion for the selection of young men as
potential officers to be sent abroad and represent the British nation.
Announcers and presenters on the BBC were required to use ex-
clusively RP, and in 1926 John C. W. Reith established The Advisory
Committee on Spoken English (Poet Laureate Robert Bridges chaired
it and D. Jones, G. B. Shaw, and later H. C. Wyld were, among others,
all members of it.) The recommended accent was PSP, as RP was still
referred to at that time, and one of the tasks of the Committee was to
establish some degree of uniformity in the announcers' speech, espe-
cially as far as where there may have been more than one choice. Af-
ter World War II, the Committee became the BBC Pronunciation Unit
and its object was to provide guidelines to newsreaders on the pronun-
ciation of place and personal names. When the Independent Television

412
started broadcasting in the 1950s, a new, more relaxed style of speak-
ing on TV became popular. But it was only in the 1960s that the BBC
began to use some announcers and commentators from regional sta-
tions therefore having mild local accents. Radio 3 and the BBC World
Service have, however, remained more conservative until the end of
the 1980s, when it was finally announced that the latter would start a
new policy of using announcers with a more representative range of
accents (McArthur, 1992: 109-111).
Also the Church of England has always been a stronghold of RP
to such an extent that, at the beginning of the 20th century, even elo-
cution classes were offered in some Anglican theological colleges.
Nowadays, probably no more than 3%- 5% of the population of
England has a totally regionless accent (and, as in the past, these are
usually people who have attended the Public Schools or want to sound
as if they had), and only 12-15% of the population are native speakers
of SE (Trudgill, 1990: 2).
Anyway, those who are still thought to speak an “inferior” so-
ciolect or a geolect, are now, on the whole, closer to SE and RP than
their predecessors, and this thanks to the ever-increasing number of
them, they are being exposed to, mainly through better education, the
media and mobility.
These elements are also of the utmost importance in the slow
process, presently working, of raising the consciousness that the ac-
ceptance of a given accent or variety as the norm, depends on social,
and not linguistic, factors. No elegance, or better expressiveness can

413
ever be intrinsic characteristics of any given dialect, their commonly-
accepted value being the consequence of the power and social and
economic influence of the people who speak it.

2. Cockney

“Perhaps Cockneys are a prejudiced race,

but certainly this inexhaustible richness seems
to belong to London more than any other great city.”
(Virginia Woolf, Review of E. V. Lucas's “London Revisited”,
1916)

Map 2: London. The heartland of Cockney

By Cockney is currently meant the variety of English originally

used in the East End of London. This does not correspond exactly to

414
any single neighbourhood or jurisdictional division, including roughly
the following areas: Aldgate, Bethnal Green, Bow, Limehouse, Mile
End, Old Ford, Poplar, Ratcliff, Shoreditch, Spitalfield, Stepney,
Wapping and Whitechapel (see Map 2). As a whole they belong to the
three districts of the City, Hackney and Tower Hamlets. However, ac-
cording to the most traditional definition, a true Cockney is anyone
born within the sound of the bells of St. Mary-le-Bow Church, Cheap-
side (London EC2)

2.1 Historical Outline

Etymologically the word Cockney means “cock's egg”, coming
from cokene, the old genitive of cock (OE cocc, kok), plus ey (OE æg;
ME ey. Cf. German Ei, “egg”). This was a mediaeval term referring to
a small, misshapen egg, supposedly laid by a cock and we first find it
in William Langland's Piers Plowman (1362):

“And I sigge, bi my soule,

I have no salt Bacon, we no
Cockneyes, bi Crist, Colopus
To maken”
(A. VII, l. 272)

It soon came to be applied to a “pampered child” or “mother's

boy”, most probably through the Middle English cocker “pamper”. It

415
made its first appearance with this meaning in Geoffrey Chaucer's
Canterbury Tales (1386):

“And when this jape is told another day,

I sal been holde a daf, cokenay!”
(The Reeve's Tale, line 4208)

Here it stands for “a waekling, a softie” or a “pampered child”.

By the early 16th century, countrymen began to apply it to peo-
ple born and brought up in cities and therefore thought to be weaker,
as we read in Robert Whitinton's Vulgaria (1520):

“This cokneys and tytylynges may abide no sorrow when they come to age.
In this great citees as London, York the children be so nycely and wantonly brought
up that comonly they can little good.”

As an expression of disparagement and disdain, anyway, already

by the 17th century, it was referred only to Londoners:

“A Cockney or Cockny, applied only to one borne within the sound of Bow-
bell, that is, within the City of London, which tearme came first out of this tale: That
a Citizens sonne riding with his father into the country asked, when he heard a horse
neigh, what the horse did the father answered the horse doth neigh; riding farther he
heard a cocke crow, and said doth the cocke neigh too? and therefore Cockney or
cocknie, by inuersion (sic!) thus: incock, q. incoctus i. raw or vnripe in Country-men
affaires.”
(John Minsheu, Ductor in linguas: The guide into tongues, 1617)

416
 Little by little, then, during the 17th century, the meaning of the
word shifted from Londoners in general, only to those born within the
sound of Bow bells. The reproachful phrase “our Cockney of London”
(1611) thus came to indicate any person with no interest in life beyond
the English capital.
The following century saw the term undergo a further shift, be-
ing related not only to people but also to the variety of language they
spoke. This occurred through a process that we might call meaning
extension. In Thomas Sheridan's A Course of Lectures on Elocution
(1762), we find the word applied for the first time to the dialect:

“[…] in the very metropolis [London] two different modes of pronunciation

prevail, by which the inhabitants of one part of the town, are distinguished from
those of the other. One is current in the City, and is called the cockney; the other at
the court end, and is called the polite pronunciation. As amongst these various dia-
lects, one must have the preference, and become fashionable, it will of course fall to
that which prevails at court, the source of fashions of all kinds. All other dialects, are
sure marks, either of a provincial, rustic, pedantic, or mechanic education; and there-
fore have some degree of disgrace annexed to them.”
(Lecture II:. Pronunciation)

Further on, he lists some of the main pronouncing features, or

mistakes, of the lower variety, not detaining himself from statements
such as: “How easy it would be to change the cockney pronunciation,
by making use of a proper method!”. The invocation for a change of
this kind seems to reveal that, not only the people called Cockney, but

417
also their by now homonymous dialect was being looked down upon
in a disparaging and disdainful manner.
About the end of the 18th century another important work con-
firms the impression of the rise and catching on of this negative atti-
tude towards Cockney. In his famous A Critical Pronouncing Diction-
ary (1791) John Walker devotes the final part of the section on Ireland
to his “[…] countrymen, the Cockney; who, as they are the model of
pronunciation to the distant provinces, ought to be the more scrupu-
lously correct.”. He singles out four main faults of the Londoners (1st
Pronouncing s indistinctly after st; 2nd Pronouncing w for v, and in-
versely; 3rd Not sounding h after w; 4th Not sounding h where it ought
to be sounded, and inversely) also providing guidelines to eradicate
them and thus concluding:

“[…] I have endeavoured to correct some of the more glaring errors of my

countrymen; who, with all their faults, are still upon the whole the best pronouncers
of the English language. For though the pronunciation of London is certainly erro-
neous in many words, yet, upon being compared with that of any other place, it is
undoubtedly the best; that is , not the best by courtesy, and because it happens to be
the pronunciation of the capital, but best by a better title; that of being more gener-
ally received: or, in other words, though people of London are erroneous in the pro-
nunciation of many words, the inhabitants of every other place are erroneous in
many more.”

In the Middle English period, if we exclude the literary lan-

guage, there had been no idea of a variety superior to all others. It
seems that the growth in prestige of London English and its following

418
“being more generally received” were the outcome of the growth in
importance of London itself. As the centre of governmental, legal, but,
above all, business affairs, it was the place everyone, and merchants in
particular, from all over the country had, one way or another, to turn
to, thus being forced, willy nilly, to discard, or, at least, soften their
native dialect, to adapt it to that of the capital. Of course, it was not
the English spoken at Court that merchants had to switch to, which,
obviously enough, was quite out of their ear's reach. Rather, it was the
language spoken by local merchants and common people of the streets
and many markets.
But it is right because of the importance as a model that Walker
attaches and recognises to London, that he seems to take it at heart to
point out that:

“The grand difference between the metropolis and the provinces is, that peo-
ple of education in London are free from all the vices of the vulgar; but the best
educated people in the provinces, if constantly resident there, are sure to be strongly
tinctured with the dialect of the country in which they live. Hence it is that the vul-
gar pronunciation of London, though not half so erroneous as that of Scotland, Ire-
land or any of the provinces, is, to a person of correct taste, a thousand times more
offensive and disgusting.”

In the 18th century, the Cockney dialect made its first important
appearance in literature. It did so mainly through characters in Charles
Dickens's successful novels, Sam Weller in The Pickwick Papers
(1837) probably being the most illustrious. One of the features por-

419
trayed by Dickens through his character is the supposedly Cockney
habit of exchanging of v and w:

“‘Vell, that's wery true, Sammy,' replied Mr Weller, mollified at once; ‘but
wot are you a doin' on here? Your gov'nor can't do no good here, Sammy. They
won't pass the werdick, they won't pass it, Sammy.' […] ‘Wot a perwerse old file it
is!' exclaimed Sam, ‘alvays a goin' on about werdicks and alleybis, and that. […].”
(Chapter 43)

Although many commentators have considered this characteris-

tic to be only an invention by Dickens, which does not seem to be the
case, if we think of Walker's list of Londoners' faults, it spread so
much as to become the commonplace most usually associated with the
dialect, at least in its literary transposition. It became so popular
among writers that it kept being exploited long after it had ceased to
be actually used as is confirmed in what George Bernard Shaw writes
in an appendix to his Captain Brassbound's Conversion (1900):

“When I came to London in 1876 the Sam Weller dialect had passed away so
completely that I should have given it up as a literary fiction if I had not discovered
it surviving in a Middlesex village, and heard of it from an Essex one. […] in the
eighties […] the obsolescence of the Dickens dialect that was still being copied from
book to book by authors who never dreamt of using their ears, much less of training
them to listen.”

As we shall explain more in detail later on, Shaw did not limit
himself to point out the obsolescence of the Dickens dialect, but, in

420
Pygmalion, he will put himself in line with the negative judgements
on Cockney expressed by so many of his predecessors. In 1909 these
attitudes even received an official recognition thanks to the report of
The Conference on the Teaching of English in London Elementary
School issued by the London County Council, where is stated that

“[…] the Cockney mode of speech, with its unpleasant twang, is a modern
corruption without legitimate credentials, and is unworthy of being the speech of
any person in the capital city of the Empire.”

On the other hand, however, there started rising at the same time
cries in defence of Cockney, which, besides, seem to have a more sci-
entific foundation, as, for example the following one:

“The London dialect is really, especially on the South side of the Thames, a
perfectly legitimate and responsible child of the old kentish tongue […] the dialect
of London North of the Thames has been shown to be one of the many varieties of
the Midland or Mercian dialect, flavoured by the East Anglian variety of the same
speech […].”
(McBride, 1910: 8, 9)

No matter what the experts or the high-brows thought about it,

Cockney was spreading beyond the traditional boundaries of the East
End, not only into other parts of London, but even into neighbouring
counties, as is confirmed by E. Gepp's complaint about “the ugly ver-
nacular sound” of unliterary Londoners in his An Essex Dialect Dic-
tionary (1923):

421
 “Modern Cockney language has now crept in among us, and is creeping more
and more, and we regret and resent it. […] The deadening influence of London is
seen for many miles out […] the poison is in the air, and the blighting Cockney's
Sahfend (Southend), Borking (Barking) and Elestead (Halestead) and the like show
what we may come to. Heaven preserve us!”
(p. 150-51)

Already in 1938 William Matthews was able to write (19722:

76):

“The Cockney dialect at the present time is extremely varied, for many rea-
sons. The London area is too large and the population too mixed for any uniform
system of pronunciation to exist, and such social as education have produced many
modifications of even the characteristic sounds.”

Nowadays degrees of Cockneyhood are perceptible all around

the South-East of England, their relevance and diffusion varying ac-
cording to such factors as social class, occupation, education, locality,
etc., which I shall analyse further on.
We may conclude by summing up what we have seen so far
about the change of meaning of the word Cockney through almost
seven-hundred years, in the following way:

· Stage I (14th century): misshapen, malformed egg;

· Stage II (late 14th and 15th century): pampered, spoilt
child;

422
 · Stage III (16th century): any city dweller of any city (as
opposed to countrymen);
· Stage IV (17th century): a Londoner (in particular, born
within the sound of Bow Bells);
· Stage V (18th century): Londoners and their dialect.

Whereas Stages 1-4 are mostly specifications, and therefore re-

strictions of the meaning of the word, partly or completely rubbing out
the previous one; Stage from 4 to 5 is, on the contrary an extension, as
it not only keeps the previous meaning, but it attaches a new possible
interpretation to the word in a semantically related area. Besides, it is
worth pointing out that Stage from 4 to 5 also represents a change, or
rather, an addition in the field of applicability of the term, namely
from ethnography and sociology to linguistics. Given that both appli-
cations remain valid, we may better state that Cockney enters the do-
main of Sociolinguistics.

2.2 Rhyming Slang, Backslang and Slang

One of the most renowned and undoubtedly striking peculiari-
ties of Cockney has always been its Rhyming Slang. Rhyming Slang is
a kind of slang in which a word is replaced by another word or phrase
that rhymes with it. It generally consists of a binary expression that
rhymes with a single everyday word (McArthur, 1992: 868-69).
Therefore, the slang phrase co-exists with the standard word and it is
up to the speaker to decide which to use, the choice generally being

423
influenced by the context. As in the Old Germanic poetic tradition, the
rhyming phrase is fixed and formulaic, variation being only chrono-
logical. The target word is more often than not a monosyllable, though
sometimes it may be a disyllable. Polysyllables are definitely rarer.
(Murdoch, 1983: 23-25). Sometimes the rhyme does not take place if
the words making up the phrase are pronounced in RP, but only if a
Cockney accent is used (see examples Nos. 11, 15 below). On other
occasions, the rhyme is impure, or there may just be an assonance
even in a London accent (see examples Nos. 8, 32 below). There are
also cases in which the rhyme is pure both in a Cockney accent and in
RP, but they may differ compared to each other (e. g. No. 29 below).
Quite often the rhyming element is omitted, thus making the compre-
hension of the expression to the layman practically inaccessible (see
examples Nos. 12, 16, 31, 37, 40, 42, 43 below). It has been argued
that the drop of the rhyming element is a conscious practice to make
the slang even more secret. It is more probable, given the humour with
which Cockney Rhyming Slang is tinged all over, that it is just a form
of abbreviation like so many others in every language or dialect. (for
a detailed analysis of the rules governing this process see Murdoch,
1983). The dropping of the rhyming element, however, is not possible
when both words are stressed and refer to a personal name (see exam-
ple 52 below).
What follows is just a short list of examples. Some of these ex-
pressions have become so popular, that they are sometimes used even
in Standard English, though colloquially.

424
 1. Adam and Eve: believe. E g. “Would you Adam 'n' Eve
it?”
2. Apples and Pears: stairs.
3. Bees and Honey: money. E.g. “I've run out of bees and
honey.”
4. Berkshire Hunt: cunt.
5. Bird Lime: time.
6. Bottle and Glass: arse.
7. Brahms and Liszt: pissed (drunk).
8. Brass Tacks: facts.
9. Brick and Mortar: water.
10. Bristol Cities: titties (breasts).
11. Bull and Cow: row (fight). E.g. “Last night we had a
bull and cow.”
12. Butcher's Hook: look. E.g. “Let's take a butcher's at that
paper.”
13. Cain and Abel: table. E g. “I was sitting at the Cain and
Abel.”
14. Cat and Mouse: house.
15. Charing Cross: horse.
16. China Plate: mate. E.g. “Me and me China.”
17. Cobbler's Awls: balls, testicles.
18. Dog and Bone: phone.
19. Donald Duck: luck.

425
 20. Duke of Cork: talk. E.g. “They've got ways to make you
duke of Cork”
21. Elephant's Trunk: drunk. E.g. “to cop an elephant.” (to
get drunk)
22. Fisherman's Daughter: water.
23. Frog and Toad: road.
24. Gates of Rome: home. E.g. “Do you know the way to
his gates of Rome?”
25. God Forbids: kids.
26. Grasshopper: copper (policeman).
27. Half Inch: pinch (to steal).
28. Ham and Eggs: legs. E.g. “She was standing on her
ham and eggs.”
29. Hampstead Heath: teeth.
30. Holy Friar: liar. E.g. “You're just a holy friar!”
31. Jack Malone: alone. E.g. “All on his Jack.”
32. Jack O'Brien: Train.
33. Jam Jar: car. E.g. “I have my own jam jar.”
34. Jim Skinner: dinner.
35. Jimmy Riddle: piddle (urinate).
36. Lady Godiva: fiver (a five pound note).
37. Loaf of Bread: head. E g. “Use your loaf!”
38. Molly Malone: phone.
39. North and South: mouth.
40. Oxford Scholar: dollar. E.g. “Lend me an Oxford.”

426
 41. Peas and Pot: hot.
42. Pig's Ear: beer. E.g. “Give me a Walter Scott [see No.
49] of pig's!”
43. Rabbit and Pork: talk. E.g. “She rabbits all the bird
lime [see No. 4]”
44. Rory O'More: a. whore; b. floor; c. door. E.g. (c.) “Shut
that Rory O'More!”
45. Rosy Lea: tea.
46. Rub-a-Dub: pub.
47. Saucepan Lid: quid. “It costs a saucepan lid.”
48. Tea Leaf: thief. E.g. “You bloody tea leaf!”
49. Tit for Tat: hat.
50. Trouble and Strife: wife.
51. Uncle Willy: silly.
52. Walter Scott: pot.
53. You and Me: tea.

Sometimes there may be two or more ways to indicate the very

same thing or concept (see examples Nos. 9 and 22; 20 and 43; 45 and
53 above); or there may be one expression indicating more ideas, ac-
cording to the context (see example No. 44 above). A fair amount of
phrases are merely names of people, either real, invented on purpose
or legendary (see examples No. 1, 7, 13, 19, 31, 32, 34, 35, 36, 38, 44,
51, 52 above) or names of places (see examples No. 10, 15, 24, 29),
regardless of their having or not connections with what they refer to.

427
Then there are also quite a few rhymes which, at a deeper analysis,
mean more than they seem to do at a quick glance, the irony being un-
derlying (see examples No. 11, 25, 30, 50 above). On other occasions,
things are even more complicated, because the rhyming slang to refers
to another already slang word (see examples Nos. 7, 26, 27, 36, 47
above). Given the undeniable lubricious and flippant tone of rhyming
slang, allusions to taboo words are unavoidable (see examples Nos.
4, 6, 10, 17, 35 above).
Although many scholars have investigated and much has been
written about the origin of Cockney Rhyming Slang, it still remains
quite uncertain where it really lies.
As remembered by Julian Franklyn (1975: 10), John Camden
Hotten writes in his The Slang Dictionary (1859):

“This cant, which has nothing to do with that spoken by the costemongers, is
known in Seven Dials and elsewhere as ‘the rhyming slang’, or the substitution of
words and sentences which rhyme with other words intended to be kept secret.[...]
Unlike all other systems of cant, the rhyming slang is not founded upon allegory.
[…] I learn that the rhyming slang was introduced about twelve or fifteen years ago
[…].”

What seems to deserve credit about this statement is the time

when rhyming slang would have started to catch on, that is the early
Victorian Age. Some think it was born as a kind of secret language,
mainly used by thieves and little criminals (crooks, pickpockets,
pimps, small smugglers, etc.) in order not to allow the policemen or

428
coppers, to understand them. A support to this hypothesis is repre-
sented by The Vulgar Tongue: a glossary of slang, cant, and flash
words and phrases, used in London from 1839 to 1859 […] by one
Ducange Anglicus who, in the Preface to the first edition, thus moti-
vates:

“This little volume has been printed with the view of assisting Literary Men,
the Officers of the Law and Philanthropists, in their intercourse with Classes of
English Society who use a different phraseology, only understood by their own fra-
ternity.”

Julian Franklyn himself only partly agrees with this opinion,

proposing instead that rhyming slang must have been the product of
some kind of verbal competition between Irishmen and Cockney
working side by side in the London docks. The Londoners would have
created it “as a means of mystifying ‘the Micks¹’”. These, on their
own part, would have taken up the gauntlet and introduced such ex-
pressions as Rory O'More. This explanation would account for the
presence of so many Irish references and proper or legendary names in
Cockney Rhyming Slang. At a time when employment in the London
dockland mainly depended on casual works, navvies would easily
slide into the Victorian underworld, thus enlarging the army of down-
trodden beggars and thieves crowding the alleys of the capital and
taking their slang with them.
Rhyming slang was also used by costermongers, hawkers, huck-
sters, tallyman and the like, especially at the old Covent Garden

429
vegetable and fruit market, at the Smithfields meat market, at the Bil-
lingsgate fish market and at all the other markets scattered in the East
End (Petticoat Lane - now between Middlesex Street and Wentworth
Street -, Bethnal Green Road, etc.).
Restricted to traders was probably another typically, though not
exclusively Cockney feature, that is Backslang. This consists of
speaking or writing words backwards, and unlike Rhyming Slang,
there is little doubt it was originally devised to disguise words for
trade purposes and for confounding the police. By using it, they could,
for instance, sell the same item at different prices at once, according to
whether they were dealing with a habitual customer or a stranger, the
latter being at a loss before such an utterance as “It's owt [two] bob”
turned to the initiate. Here are some examples: yob (sometimes modi-
fied to yobbo) for “boy”(Murdoch, 1983: 37 n. 14, points out that this
word “comes in the main language to be a slang term for ‘hooligan’,
‘rough' (male).” It is likely that in the transition from Cockney to
Standard English the term undergoes a process of meaning restriction
and specification. (After all, analogous phenomena have always been
characteristic of English. This is, for instance, confirmed by the dis-
tinction of meanings of such words as pork (from Latin porcus
through Old French) and pig (from OE *picga). Other similar pairs
are: ox/beef; sheep/mutton; calf/veal; deer/venison; or again: be-
gin/commence; child/infant; freedom/liberty; hide/conceal;
wish/desire; etc.); elrig for “girl”; ecilop (sometimes modified to slop)
for “police”; egabac for “cabbage”; edgenaro for “orange”; rape for

430
“pear”; shif for “fish”; eno for “one”; owt for “two”; erth for “three”;
etc.
Cockney slang has always been strongly affected by other lan-
guages brought into the country by immigrants. We have already
hinted at the Irish influence, but there are also more exotic sources of
inspiration. So, for example, there are words from Romany, the lan-
guage of the gypsies (chavvy: “a child”; mush: mate; etc.) or from
Yiddish, the Germanic language used by Jews of Eastern and Central
Europe (clobber: “clothes”; gezumph: “to swindle”; gelt: “money” (cf.
German das Geld); goy: “non-Jew”; schemozzle: “a disturbance”;
schlemiel: “a simpleton”; spiel: “to talk”; etc.). Sometimes the influ-
ence has come from temporary London emigrants: quite a few people
during the British Empire, often spent years abroad, especially in Asia
and Africa, thus acquiring scraps of the local tongues that they
brought back to the East End when they came back (from Arabic:
ackers: “money”; bint: “a girl”; from Hindi: dekko: “a look”; doolally:
“mad” (from the name of a town in India, Deolali, where a British
Army mental hospital was situated); etc.)
Other characteristics of Cockney slang are: abbreviations, from
time to time with the addition of -o (e.g. aggravation = aggro);
euphemisms (e.g. God blind me = Cor blimey); run-together phrases
(e.g. What cheer! = Wotcher!)
We may conclude by pointing out that Cockney Rhyming Slang
and Backslang seem both to be the continuation and adaptation of the
Old Germanic poetic tradition and love for playing with words.

431
2.3 Cockney in literature
In 2.2 we saw that the first time the word cockney made its ap-
pearance in literature was in the 14th century in the works of William
Langland and Geoffrey Chaucer. But although it was only in the 17th
century that Cockney, no matter how despised, was officially recog-
nised the status of dialect, we can assume that, London being the cen-
tre of culture in England already in the Elizabethan and Jacobean time,
even such dramatists as John Heywood (1497-1580) and Thomas
Middleton (1580-1627) must have had required here and there of the
actors interpreting their plays to put on some kind of London accent.
This in spite of the fact that nothing, or very little of the sort seems to
emerge from the texts that have reached us.
William Shakespeare himself seems to have walked on the same
steps as his predecessors, although such characters as Mistress
Quickly in Henry IV seem to reveal more Cockney features than ever
found before, mostly rendered through spellings unusual even for that
time. Also the Fool in King Lear betrays such features, though it was
up to the actor interpreting him to exaggerate or soften them, probably
according to taste and target. And in Act II Scene IV line 117 we even
find another example of the word cockney used in the sense of “city-
dweller”:

“Cry to it, nuncle, as the cockney did to the eels when put'em i' th' paste
alive.”

432
 Ben Jonson (1572/3-1637) often made London life the subject of
his satirical humour, and it is therefore no surprise that some of his
characters present linguistic features that, although not consistent, may
be ascribed to Cockney. As his contemporaries and followers, he did it
mainly through misspellings, intended to represent pronunciations and
expressions characteristic of vulgar London speech.
Another important contribution to our understanding of the fea-
tures of early Cockney is represented by Francis Beaumont's The
Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607-8), a comedy, once attributed also
to John Fletcher, set in London.
But if the plays of the 16th and 17th centuries are only sprinkled
with rare and inconsistent examples of Cockneyisms, their actual re-
alisations, as we have seen, being left to performers, it is to the private
writings of Londoners and their idiom, grammar and “auricular or-
thography”, that we have to turn, in order to find more details of the
early stages of the dialect. One of the most important texts of this kind
is Henry Machyn's Diary, kept in the years 1550-63. As accurately
remembered by Matthews, 19722: 12-24, Machyn was a merchant-
tailor, maker and furnisher of funeral cloths and trappings, and in his
diary, among other things, he describes the great dinners of the mer-
chant companies, the masques produced by the city companies and the
inns of courts, and the events taking place in his parish:

“The xix day of Aprell was a wager shott in Fynsbere feld of the parryche of
the Trenete the lytyll of vj men agaynst vj and one parte had xv for iij and lost the
game: and after shott and lost a-nodur game […]” (p. 132)

433
 Useful evidence of the London pronunciation of the time is also
provided by Machyn's spellings of place-names, in particular of streets
and buildings of the City: Smytfeld, Vestmyster, Mynsyon lane, Kan-
wykstrett (Candlewick Street), Lumbarstrett (Lombard Street),
Wostrett (Wood Street), etc.
Another important source of information regarding London
speech in the 16th and 17th centuries can be found in the London parish
books kept in the Guildhall Library. Mainly dealing with the upkeep
of churches, the administration of their properties, the relief of the
poor and the like, these documents were written by anonymous scriv-
eners on behalf of churchwardens, generally traders of the parish, ap-
pointed to prepare the year's accounts. Given their rarely learned
background and origin, they occasionally slid into idioms and pho-
netic spellings that best of all reveal at least some of the aspects of the
London speech of the time when they were written. Once again Mat-
thews (19722: 19-22) makes a list of these misspellings, which in-
clude: a) use of short e in words which were commonly pronounced
with short i: consperacy, chelderyn, kendred, wretten, ef (if), etc. b)
short a for short o: caffen (coffin), falowing, maps (mops), bande
(bond), etc. c) e for a in such words as: stren (Strand), Jenuarie, texes,
etc. d) ow (most probably indicating /ao/) instead of o: sowld, owlde,
towle (toll), towld (told), etc. e) long a and ai replaced by i or y: chy-
nes (chains), ordined, Rile (rail), strynge (strange), etc. f) normal ou or
ow is represented by u: shutt (shout), shruds (shrouds), Suthe (South),

434
utter (outer), etc. g) interchanged w and v. h) drop of initial h and its
insertion elsewhere. i) occasional replacement of th by f or v: frust
(thrust), Feverstone (Featherstone), etc.
In the 18th century the first signs of Cockneyisms leak out of
letters contained in great novels. One such example is represented by
Henry Fielding's The Life of Jonathan Wild the Great (1743), in which
the protagonist is himself a Cockney. But even more replete with
Cockneyisms are letters in Tobias George Smollet's The Adventures of
Roderick Random (1748).
The actor, dramatist and farce writer Samuel Foote (1720-77)
made constant use in his works of dialect characters, parodying Irish-
men, Scotchmen and City merchants. The latter are the object of his
burlesque in particular in Taste (1752) and The Mayor of Garrat
(1764). Jerry Sneak, the City penmaker protagonist of this last, is the
first Cockney character to show confusion of w and v, later to become
one of the strongest stereotypes attached to Cockneys in literature.
Written about the same years is The Abecedarian by school-
master John Yeomans, in which he makes this rebuke:

“A is rank'd the first letter in the order of every alphabet; but the citizens of
London have injuriously converted its eligible pronunciation to that of e.”

But in order to find more than just impromptu comments on

Cockney features we have to turn to the orthoepical works of James
Elphinston (1721-1809) and in particular to his Principles of English
Grammar Digested (1765), Propriety Ascertained in her Picture

435
(1787) and Inglish [sic!] Orthography (1790). Translating Martial
from Latin he has recourse to Cockney to illustrate its traits.
The first scholar to openly defend Cockney was Samuel Pegge,
who in his Anecdotes of the English Language (1803), tries hard to
prove that the so-called London vulgarisms had indeed been used by
such writers as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Dryden, Swift
and many others.
An important work is also Pierce Egan's Real Life in London
published in monthly parts starting from November 1821. A sort of
guidebook to London scenes and London characters, this study does
not tell us much new about Cockney pronunciation and grammar, but
it provides us with valuable and real examples of slang, clichés and
epithets, besides giving us interesting images of life in London in the
early 19th century.
Appeared in 1837-38 is Cockney's Adventures by Renton Nich-
olson, in which the happier and more pleasant aspects of Cockney life
are portrayed, including its slang and pronunciations.
We have already seen that Dickens definitely established with
his novels a tradition of Cockney characters, but his contemporary
William Thackeray as well, though not so fond of vulgar dialogue,
contributed to the illustration of the London speech, especially in his
burlesque The Yellowplush Papers (1840).
But probably the most important collection of Cockneyisms in
the 19th century is represented by Henry Mayhew's London Labour
and the London Poor (1861). This work is basically a sociological

436
study of the life conditions of the London costermongers, hucksters,
beggars and criminals carried out by having the protagonists them-
selves speak and describe their own lives in their own speech. The re-
sult is an unaimed at store of information on Cockney slang, pronun-
ciation, idiom and grammar, rendered through conventions present
also in other works of the time. The following example is taken from
Matthews (19722: 54):

“I vos at von time a coster, riglarly brought up to the business, the time vas
good then; but, lor, ye used to lush at such a rate! About ten years ago, I ses to me-
self, I say Bill, I'm blowed if this here game 'ill do any longer. I had a good moke
and a tidyish box ov a cart; so vot does I do, but goes and sees von o' my old pals
that gits into the coal-line somehow. He and I goes to the Bell and Siven Mackerels
in the Mile End Road, and then he tells me all he knowed, and takes me along vith
himself, and from that time I sticks to the coals.”
(Vol. II, p. 97)

Punch or The London Charivari, the famous weekly magazine

of radical political ideas, was founded in 1841 and closed down in
1992, and for these one-hundred and fifty-one years, thanks to its hu-
morous cartoons and writings about people of all social classes and
localities, it has always been a rich source of real language. If the first
Cockney references were in the same line of tradition as Dickens, later
on Punch began to publish a series of Cockney rhyming letters, writ-
ten by one 'Arry (his real name was F. Anstey) to his pal Charlie, in
which such conventions as w for v were abandoned and Americanisms
made their appearance.

437
 The first writer to make wide use of this new kind of Cockney
dialect launched by Punch was A. W. Tuer in The Kawkneigh Awl-
minek of 1883 (Wright, 1981: 17).
Another one who adopted the new manner was Edwin W. Pugh
in A Street in Suburbia (1895), a biasless picture of ordinary life in
Marsh Street. In his realist tales of London's East End life collected in
Tales of Mean Streets (1894), and in his novel A Child of the Jago
(1896), in which the violent boyhood of Dick Perrott in an East End
slum off Shoreditch High Street is described, Arthur Morrison gives a
bleak and vivid picture of this London area not very unlike Dickens's,
thus contributing to make the already negative idea of Cockneys even
more negative.
Towards the end of the 19th century Cockney started to become
a staple of music hall songs, being particularly associated with “the
pearly kings and queens”, that is costermongers and their wives who
wore (and still wear) garments covered with pearls buttons (Algeo in
Machan & Scott, 1992: 172).
It was George Bernard Shaw who best epitomised the Cockney
character in his play Pygmlion (1912). If Professor Higgins was in-
spired by Henry Sweet, the famous phonetician to whom he had been
introduced in 1880, Eliza Doolittle, the poor Cockney flower girl,
soon became the symbol of a whole category of people from the lower
strata of society. Her language could but reflect her humble origin,
thus reinforcing the overall negative attitude to it. And in the Preface
to the play, Shaw wrote:

438
 “The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their chil-
dren to speak it. […] it is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without
making some other Englishman despise him.”

It is as if with Shaw we had reached the bottom of a process of

pejorative attitudes towards Cockney, that had started some five cen-
turies earlier.
Published in 1908, A Room with a View, by E. M. Forster, al-
though set in Italy, is another example of the prejudices the English
upper classes had about Cockneys.
In more recent times, Cockney has appeared in such a play as
Steven Berkoff's East (1977), the subtitle of which “Elegy for the East
End and Its Energetic Waste”, seems to be indicative of a desire to
give a new, no matter how cruel and raw, picture of the homeland of
Cockney, its people and language.
In the early 80s a TV series called East Enders contributed to
give even more popularity to the Cockneys.

Matteo Santipolo
Università di Bari
Dipartimento di Pratiche Linguistiche e Analisi di Testi
[email protected]

439
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