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Background of Cockney English

Background of Cockney English - раздел Литература, Slang Background Of Cockney English. Due To The Fact That London Is Both The Politi...

Background of Cockney English. Due to the fact that London is both the political capital and the largest city within England, Wells, 1982b doesnt find it surprising that its also the countrys linguistic center of gravity.

Cockney represents the basilectal end of the London accent and can be considered the broadest form of London local accent. Wells 1982b It traditionally refers only to specific regions and speakers within the city. While many Londoners may speak what is referred to as popular London Wells 1982b they do not necessarily speak Cockney.

The popular Londoner accent can be distinguished from Cockney in a number of ways, and can also be found outside of the capital, unlike the true Cockney accent. The term Cockney refers to both the accent as well as to those people who speak it? The etymology of Cockney has long been discussed and disputed. One explanation is that Cockney literally means cock s egg, a misshapen egg such as sometimes laid by young hens. It was originally used when referring to a weak townsman, opposed to the tougher countryman and by the 17th century the term, through banter, came to mean a Londoner Liberman, 1996 . Today s natives of London, especially in its East End use the term with respect and pride - Cockney Pride. Cockney is characterized by its own special vocabulary and usage, and traditionally by its own development of rhyming slang.

Rhyming slang, is still part of the true Cockney culture even if it is sometimes used for effect. More information on the way it works can be found under the Cockney English features section.

Geography of Cockney English London, the capital of England, is situated on the River Thames, approximately 50 miles north of the English Channel, in the south east section of the country. It is generally agreed, that to be a true Cockney, a person has to be born within hearing distance of the bells of St. Mary le Bow, Cheapside, in the City of London. This traditional working-class accent of the region is also associated with other suburbs in the eastern section of the city such as the East End, Stepney, Hackney, Shoreditch Poplar and Bow. Sociolinguistic issues of Cockney English The Cockney accent is generally considered one of the broadest of the British accents and is heavily stimatized.

It is considered to epitomize the working class accents of Londoners and in its more diluted form, of other areas. The area and its colorful characters and accents have often become the foundation for British soap operas and other television specials. Currently, the BBC is showing one of the most popular soaps set in this region, East Enders and the characters accents and lives within this television program provide wonderful opportunities for observers of language and culture.

Features of Cockney English Some of the more characteristic features of the Cockney accent include the following Monophthongization This affects the lexical set mouth vowel. MOUTH vowel Wells 1982b believes that it is widely agreed that the mouth vowel is a touchstone for distinguishing between true Cockney and popular London and other more standard accents.

Cockney usage would include monophthongization of the word mouth Example mouth mauf rather than mouth Glottal stop Wells 1982b describes the glottal stop as also particularly characteristic of Cockney and can be manifested in different ways such as t glottalling in final position. A 1970s study of schoolchildren living in the East End found p, t,k almost invariably glottalized in final position.

Examples cat up sock It can also manifest itself as a bare as the realization of word internal intervocalic t Examples Waterloo Waerloo City Ciy A drink of water A drin a wa er A little bit of bread with a bit of butter on it A li le bi of breab wiv a bi of bu er on i. As would be expected, an Estuary English speaker uses fewer glottal stops for t or d than a London speaker, but more than an RP speaker. However, there are some words where the omission of t has become very accepted.

Examples Gatwick Gawick Scotland Sco land statement Sta emen network Nework Dropped h at beginning of words Voiceless glottal fricative In the working-class common accents throughout England, h dropping at the beginning of certain words is heard often, but its certainly heard more in Cockney, and in accents closer to Cockney on the continuum between that and RP. The usage is strongly stigmatized by teachers and many other standard speakers. Examples house ouse hammer ammer TH fronting Another very well known characteristic of Cockney is th fronting which involves the replacement of the dental fricatives, and by labiodentals f and v respectively.

Examples thin fin brother bruvver three free bath barf Vowel lowering Examples dinner dinna marrow marra Prosody The voice quality of Cockney has been described as typically involving chest tone rather than head tone and being equated with rough and harsh sounds versus the velvety smoothness of the Kensington or Mayfair accents spoken by those in other more upscale areas of London.

Cockney Rhyming Slang Cockney English is also characterized by its own special vocabulary and usage in the form of cockney rhyming slang. The way it works is that you take a pair of associated words where the second word rhymes with the word you intend to say, then use the first word of the associated pair to indicate the word you originally intended to say. Some rhymes have been in use for years and are very well recognized, if not used, among speakers of other accents.

Examples apples and pears - stairs plates of meat - feet There are others, however, that become established with the changing culture. Example John Cleese - cheese John Major - pager Numerous examples and usage of rhyming slang can be found online. See Note 2 for information. Slang and the Dictionary Slang an attempt of common humanity to escape from bald literalism, and express itself illimitably the wholesome fermentation or eructation of those processes eternally active in language, by which froth and specks are thrown up, mostly to pass away, though occasionally to settle and permanently crystallise.

Walt Whitman, 1885 What is slang? Most of us think that we recognise slang when we hear it or see it, but exactly how slang is defined and which terms should or should not be listed under that heading continue to be the subject of debate in the bar-room as much as in the classroom or university seminar.

To arrive at a working definition of slang the first edition of the Bloomsbury Dictionary of Contemporary Slang approached the phenomenon from two slightly different angles. Firstly, slang is a style category within the language which occupies an extreme position on the spectrum of formality. Slang is at the end of the line it lies beyond mere informality or colloquialism, where language is considered too racy, raffish, novel or unsavoury for use in conversation with strangers So slang enforces intimacy.

It often performs an important social function which is to include into or exclude from the intimate circle, using forms of language through which speakers identify with or function within social sub-groups, ranging from surfers, schoolchildren and yuppies, to criminals, drinkers and fornicators. These remain the essential features of slang at the end of the 1990s, although its extreme informality may now seem less shocking than it used to, and its users now include ravers, rappers and net-heads along with the miscreants traditionally cited.

There are other characteristics which have been used to delimit slang, but these may often be the result of prejudice and misunderstanding and not percipience. Slang has been referred to again and again as illegitimate, low and disreputable and condemned by serious writers as a sign and a cause of mental atrophy Oliver Wendell Holmes, the advertisement of mental poverty James C. Fernal. Its in-built unorthodoxy has led to the assumption that slang in all its incarnations metaphors, euphemisms, taboo words, catchphrases, nicknames, abbreviations and the rest is somehow inherently substandard and unwholesome.

But linguists and lexicographers cannot or at least, should not stigmatise words in the way that society may stigmatise the users of those words and, looked at objectively, slang is no more reprehensible than poetry, with which it has much in common in its creative playing with the conventions and mechanisms of language, its manipulation of metonymy, synechdoche, irony, its wit and inventiveness.

In understanding this, and also that slang is a natural product of those processes eternally active in language, Walt Whitman was ahead of his time. More recently some writers Halliday being an influential example have claimed that the essence of slang is that it is language used in conscious opposition to authority. But slang does not have to be subversive it may simply encode a shared experience, celebrate a common outlook which may be based as much on relatively innocent enjoyment by, for instance, schoolchildren, drinkers, sports fans, Internet-users as on illicit activities.

Much slang, in fact, functions as an alternative vocabulary, replacing standard terms with more forceful, emotive or interesting versions just for the fun of it hooter or conk for nose, mutt or pooch for dog, ankle-biter or crumb-snatcher for child are instances.

Still hoping to find a defining characteristic, other experts have seized upon the rapid turnover of slang words and announced that this is the key element at work that slang is concerned with faddishness and that its here-today-gone-tomorrow components are ungraspable and by implication inconsequential. Although novelty and innovation are very important in slang, a close examination of the whole lexicon reveals that, as Whitman had noted, it is not necessarily transient at all. The word punk, for example, has survived in the linguistic underground since the seventeenth century and among the slang synonyms for money - dosh, ackers, spondulicks, rhino, pelf - which were popular in the City of London in the 1990s are many which are more than a hundred years old. A well-known word like cool in its slang sense is still in use and has been adopted by other languages, too, although it first appeared around eighty years ago. Curiously, despite the publics increasing fascination for slang, as evinced in newspaper and magazine articles and radio programmes, academic linguists in the UK have hitherto shunned it as a field of study.

This may be due to a lingering conservatism, or to the fact that it is the standard varieties of English that have to be taught, but whatever the reasons the situation is very different elsewhere.

In the US and Australia the study of slang is part of the curriculum in many institutions, in France, Spain, Holland, Scandinavia and Eastern Europe slang, and especially the slang of English, is the subject of more and more research projects and student theses in all these places slang is discussed in symposia and in learned journals, while in Russia, China and Japan local editions of British and American slang dictionaries can be found on school bookshelves and in university libraries.

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