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. Coggle’s 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

3. EE agrees with Cockney, but differs from RP, in having (perhaps variably) 4. Disregard Rosewarne's claims re 5. Issues:

References


Unicode version posted on the web 1998 Dec 17. John Wells

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