Estuary English?!?

J.C.Wells, University College London

Handout for a talk first given at the BAAP Colloquium, Cambridge, 1992, and later revised

1. Estuary English (EE) was defined by Rosewarne (1984) as: a variety of modified regional speech, [...] a mixture of non-regional and local south-eastern English pronunciation and intonation. It received great media attention in 1993. Coggles book (1993) is subtitled the new Standard English. The Tory Minister of Education condemned it as a bastardized version of Cockney dialect.

2. EE differs from Cockney in that it lacks
/h/ dropping (in content words) hQnd n hAt (Qnd n A?)
TH fronting TINk (fINk), fAD (fAv)
MOUTH vowel monophthong mQUT (maf), dQUn (dan)
T glottalling within a word before a vowel bt (b?), wOt (wOU?)

3. EE agrees with Cockney, but differs from RP, in having (perhaps variably)
tense vowel in HAPPY hQpi, kfi, veris
T glottalling finally (etc.) teIk I? ȁf, DQ? Iz, p?ni
vocalization of preconsonantal/final /l/ mIok bto, dZento/dZen?li
yod coalescence in stressed syllables tSuzdeI, rIdZus, stSudn?
(?) diphthong shift in FACE, PRICE, GOAT fIs, prAIs, gU?
(?) striking allophony (phoneme split?) in sold sU(l)d, rUl

4. Disregard Rosewarne's claims re
glottalling of /d/ (!)
phonetic quality of /r/
yod dropping after /s/ and /l/ sut, Qbslut
accenting of prepositions, use of rise-fall, use of question-tags
usage: cheers 'thank you; goodbye'; there you go 'here you are' etc.
international ratings (RP 84%, GenAm 71%, Australian 59%, EE 57%...)

5. Issues:


References


Posted on the web 1998 Nov 09. SIL version 1999 01 18. John Wells

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