COCKNEY ENGLISH

As we were talking about linguistic diversity in class, this will be of some interest for you!

Cockney English is a special language style which is used in specific regions and is only spoken from some people in London. “Cockney” refers both to the accent as well as to those people who speak it.

The term comes from a Middle English word (coken-ay) from the 14^th century which means a weak townsman in comparison to the tough countryman. Through some joking language it came to describe a “Londoner”. In the 17^th century, Cockney was the language of all Londoners, in the 18^th century Cockney became associated with the working class and in the 20^th century it meant that a Cockney speaking person is from a lower background. Nowadays Cockney is the most widely spoken dialect in Britain. There are a few different features of the Cockney accent, for example the Monophthongization or the Glottal stops where the last letter is not pronounced. There is also one case where the ´h´ is dropped out at the beginning of certain words like house= ´ouse. The last is the TH fronting: the dental fricatives are replaced, for example thin is pronounced as fin. In the Cockney Rhyming Slang, a word is replaced with a phrase, usually containing a word which rhymes with the original word, for example “dog and bone” for “telephone”.

This is a great video that shows you how to do a cockney accent.

It is worth watching it!