Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-j824f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-15T16:49:45.177Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Phonetic variation and change in the Cockney Diaspora: The role of place, gender, and identity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 August 2020

Amanda Cole Open the ORCID record for Amanda Cole [Opens in a new window]  and
Bronwen G. Evans
Amanda Cole*
Affiliation:
University of Essex
Bronwen G. Evans
Affiliation:
University College London
*
Address for Correspondence: Amanda Cole Department of Languages and Linguistics University of EssexColchester, CO4 3SQ, UKamanda.cole@essex.ac.uk
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Recent research has suggested that two linguistic processes are displacing Cockney: the emergence of Multicultural London English (MLE) in inner London and dialect levelling (e.g. Kerswill & Williams 2005). This study investigates firstly whether Cockney phonetic features have ‘moved East’ to Essex (Fox 2015), and secondly the features’ indexicality in relation to place and identity. Fifty-four participants from Debden, an outpost of the Cockney Diaspora, completed a sociolinguistic interview. Vowel measurements were made from a wordlist and passage, and quantitative attitudinal and qualitative data were extracted from a questionnaire and interviews. Overall, changes in identity as a result of social change exceeded linguistic changes, and linguistic labels were not interpreted uniformly across the community. Whilst Cockney variants were largely maintained in young speakers, they were transposed onto an ‘Essex’ accent. Furthermore, some young women but no young men considered themselves Cockney, likely due to the matrifocal nature of Cockney. (Cockney, phonetic variation and change, dialect levelling, identity, indexicality, gender)

Type
Articles
Information
Language in Society , Volume 50 , Issue 5 , November 2021 , pp. 641 - 665
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Abercrombie, Patrick (1944). Greater London plan. London: University of London Press.Google Scholar
Bell, Allan (1984). Language style as audience design. Language in Society 13(2):145–204.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carter, Terry (2006). Post-war Loughton 1945–1970. Loughton: Loughton and District Historical Society.Google Scholar
Cheshire, Jenny; Fox, Susan; Kerswill, Paul; & Torgersen, Eivind (2008). Ethnicity, friendship network and social practices as the motor of dialect change: Linguistic innovation in London. Sociolinguistica 22:1–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cheshire, Jenny; Kerswill, Paul; Fox, Susan; & Torgersen, Eivind (2011). Contact, the feature pool and the speech community: The emergence of Multicultural London English. Journal of Sociolinguistics 15:151–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clapson, Mark (1999). Working-class women's experiences of moving to new housing estates in England since 1919. Twentieth Century British History 10(3):345–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cohen, Phil (2013). On the wrong side of the track? East London and the post Olympics. London: Lawrence & Wishart.Google Scholar
Copland, Fiona, & Creese, Angela (2015). Linguistic ethnography: Collecting, analysing and presenting data. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eckert, Penelope (2008). Variation and the indexical field. Journal of Sociolinguistics 12(4):453–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fabricius, Anne (2007). Vowel formants and angle measurements in diachronic sociophonetic studies: FOOT-fronting in RP. In Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS XVI), Saarbrücken, Germany, 6–10 August 2007, 1477–80. Online: http://www.icphs2007.de/conference/Papers/1087/1087.pdf.Google Scholar
Fox, Susan (2015). The new Cockney: New ethnicities and adolescent speech in the traditional East End of London. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Harrington, Jonathon; Kleber, Felicitas; & Reubold, Ulrich (2008). Compensation for coarticulation, /u/-fronting, and sound change in standard southern British: An acoustic and perceptual study. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 123(5):2825–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johnstone, Barbara; Andrus, Jennifer; & Danielson, Andrew (2006). Mobility, indexicality, and the enregisterment of ‘Pittsburghese’. Journal of English Linguistics 34(2):77–104.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kerswill, Paul, & Williams, Ann (2000). Creating a new town koine: Children and language change in Milton Keynes. Language in Society 29(1):65–115.10.1017/S0047404500001020CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kerswill, Paul, & Williams, Ann (2005). New towns and koineization: Linguistic and social correlates. Linguistics 43:1023–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kerswill, Paul; Cheshire, Jenny; Fox, Susan; & Torgersen, Eivind (2008). Linguistic innovators: The English of adolescents in London. Final report submitted to the Economic and Social Research Council, February 2008. Online: http://doc.ukdataservice.ac.uk/doc/6127/mrdoc/pdf/6127uguide.pdf.Google Scholar
Kerswill, Paul; Torgersen, Eivind; & Fox, Susan (2008). Reversing ‘drift’: Innovation and diffusion in the London diphthong system. Language Variation and Change 20:451–91.10.1017/S0954394508000148CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Labov, William (1966). The social stratification of English in New York City. Washington, DC: Centre for Applied Linguistics.Google Scholar
Labov, William (1994). Principles of linguistic change, vol. 1: Internal factors. Malden, MA: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Lawrence, Jon (2016). Inventing the ‘traditional working class’: A re-analysis of interview notes from Young and Willmott's Family and kinship in East London. The Historical Journal 59(2):567–93.10.1017/S0018246X15000515CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levon, Erez, & Holmes-Elliott, Sophie (2013). East end boys and west end girls: /s/-fronting in Southeast England. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 19(2):111–20.Google Scholar
Llamas, Carmen (2007). ‘A place between places’: Language and identities in a border town. Language in Society 36(4):579–604.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (2019). ELAN (Version 5.4). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.Google Scholar
McCloy, Daniel (2016). phonR: Tools for phoneticians and phonologists (R package version 1.0-7). Online: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/phonR/phonR.pdf.Google Scholar
Milroy, Lesley (1987). Language and social networks. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Montgomery, Chris, & Moore, Emma (2017) Language and a sense of place: Studies in language and region. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moore, Emma (2010) The interaction between social category and social practice: Explaining was/were variation. Language Variation & Change 22(3):347–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moore, Emma, & Montgomery, Chris (2017). Introduction. In Montgomery & Moore, 1–12. doi: 10.1017/9781316162477.002.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Office for National Statistics (2016). 2011 Census aggregate data. UK Data Service (Edition: June 2016). Online: https://www.ons.gov.uk/census/2011census/2011censusdata/2011censusdatacatalogue.Google Scholar
Orton, Harold (1962). A survey of English dialects: Introduction. Leeds: E. J. Arnold.Google Scholar
Powell, W. R. (1956). Loughton: Introduction. In A history of the County of Essex: Volume 4, Ongar Hundred, 110–14. Online: https://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/essex/vol4/pp110-114; accessed 11 August 2017.Google Scholar
R Core Team (2018). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. https://www.R-project.org/.Google Scholar
Rosenfelder, Ingrid; Fruehwald, Josef; Evanini, Keelan; Seyfarth, Scott; Gorman, Kyle; Prichard, Hilary; & Yuan, Jiahong (2014). FAVE (Forced Alignment and Vowel Extraction) (Program Suite v1.2.2 10.5281/zenodo.22281). Online: https://github.com/JoFrhwld/FAVE.Google Scholar
Shaw, Jason A.; Best, Catherine T.; Docherty, Gerard; Evans, Bronwen G.; Foulkes, Paul; Hay, Jennifer; & Mulak, Karen E. (2018). Resilience of English vowel perception across regional accent variation. Laboratory Phonology 9(1). doi: http://doi.org/10.5334/labphon.87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Silverstein, Michael (2003). Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life. Language & Communication 23(3–4):193–229.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sivertsen, Eva (1960). Cockney phonology. Oslo: Oslo University Press.Google Scholar
Torgersen, Eivind, & Kerswill, Paul (2004). Internal and external motivation in phonetic change: Dialect levelling outcomes for an English vowel shift. Journal of Sociolinguistics 8:23–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Trudgill, Peter (2008). The dialect of East Anglia: Phonology. In Kortmann, Bernd & Upton, Clive (eds.), Varieties of English, 178–93. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Vertovec, Steven (2007). Super-diversity and its implications. Ethnic and Racial Studies 30(6):1024–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Watt, Paul; Millington, Gareth; & Huq, Rupa (2014). East London mobilities: The ‘Cockney Diaspora’ and the remaking of the Essex ethnoscape. In Watt, Paul & Smets, Peer (eds.), Mobilities and neighbourhood belonging in cities and suburbs, 121–44. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Wells, John (1982). Accents of English 2: The British Isles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511611759CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wells, John (1994). The Cockneyfication of RP? In Melchers, Gunnel & Johannesson, Nils-Lennart (eds.), Nonstandard varieties of language, 198–205. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell.Google Scholar
Williams, Ann, & Kerswill, Paul (1999). Dialect levelling: Change and continuity in Milton Keynes, Reading and Hull. In Foulkes, Paul & Docherty, Gerard (eds.), Urban voices: Accent studies in the British Isles, 141–62. London: Arnold.Google Scholar
Young, Michael, & Willmott, Peter (1957). Family and kinship in East London. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.Google Scholar