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Traditional Cockney and popular London speech

2012; University of Barcelona; Issue: 9 Linguagem: Inglês

2013-2247

Brian Leonard Mott,

Multilingual Education and Policy

This paper gives a full description of the phonetics and phonology of Traditional Cockney and Popular London speech, treating these varieties as constituting a continuum rather than two separate dialects. Exemplification of the vowels, diphthongs and consonants is provided, both in isolate words and in connected speech, along with their range of variation. The frequencies of the vowels have been charted on the basis of the pronunciation of three elderly male speakers. Regarding the consonants, there are detailed observations on the features typically associated with the linguistic varieties examined: strong aspiration of unvoiced plosives, glottalization, H-dropping, L-vocalization and TH-fronting. A section on prosody provides coverage of lexical stress, rhythm and intonation. The paper takes into account up-todate research on these phenomena, but does not deal with the most recent vowel shifts, some of which form part of Multi-cultural London English.