Social Variation in the

English of England—
Cockney and RP
Variation in English in Britain
• There are many regional varieties
• There are two major social varieties
worth mentioning:
Cockney and
Received Pronunciation
(RP)
 Cockney

• This was originally the speech of the city

of London
• Started developing several hundred years
ago
• It is now considered a working class
dialect
• Film example for reference: Eliza in My
Fair Lady
 Pronunciation Features of
Cockney
• Glottal stop instead of /t/, e.g., butter
• Final /l/ as labial /w/, e.g., wall
• /th/ as /f/ or /v/, e.g., I fink (think),
muvver (mother)
• /ei/ moving toward shwa in the first
element, e.g., face, chains
• Dropping initial /h/, e.g., ’ello, ’ow are
you, ’arry? (Hello, how are you, Harry?)
 Grammatical and
Discourse Features of
Cockney
• Use of luv (for women), guvnor, mate
• Tag with innit?
• Confrontational tag, e.g., I said I was there,
didn’t I?
• Addition of –s in narration style, e.g., I gets
out of the car…
• Use of never for single time, e.g., I never
did it.
 Received Pronunciation (RP)
• Arose about 200 years ago as a prestige way
of speaking
• Speech of those who went to British public
schools (these are actually private,
expensive, elite schools)
• Boys from all over England got the same
accent
• Those boys became the country’s leaders,
hence their accent has upper class prestige
 RP Today
• Many educated speakers in England
speak a variety that approaches RP but is
overlaid with regional or other features
• It is estimated that perhaps only 2% of
people in Britain actually speak RP today.
• Queen Elizabeth II speaks RP
 Estuary English
• This variety may be replacing RP
• It is spoken in London, along the River
Thames, and spreading over much of
Southern England
• It has some features of Cockney, but not
so extreme, e.g., glottal stop, not between
vowels, but finally, e.g., quite
• Final /l/ as /w/, e.g., wall, at all