Cockney

[4][5][6] Estuary English is an intermediate accent between Cockney and Received Pronunciation, also widely spoken in and around London, as well as in wider South Eastern England.

[10] Concurrently, the mythical land of luxury Cockaigne (attested from 1305) appeared under a variety of spellings, including Cockayne, Cocknay, and Cockney, and became humorously associated with the English capital London.

[11][13] The current meaning of Cockney comes from its use among rural Englishmen (attested in 1520) as a pejorative term for effeminate town-dwellers,[15][10] from an earlier general sense (encountered in "The Reeve's Tale" of Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales c. 1386) of a "cokenay" as "a child tenderly brought up" and, by extension, "an effeminate fellow" or "a milksop".

[16] This may have developed from the sources above or separately, alongside such terms as "cock" and "cocker" which both have the sense of "to make a nestle-cock ... or the darling of", "to indulge or pamper".

[4][20] In 1617, the travel writer Fynes Moryson stated in his Itinerary that "Londoners, and all within the sound of Bow Bells, are in reproach called Cockneys.

A 2012 study[30] showed that in the 19th century, and under typical conditions, the sound of the bells would carry as far as Clapton, Bow and Stratford in the east but only as far as Southwark to the south and Holborn in the west.

The church of St Mary-le-Bow was destroyed in 1666 by the Great Fire of London and rebuilt by Sir Christopher Wren.

Although the bells were destroyed again in 1941 in the Blitz, they had fallen silent on 13 June 1940 as part of the British anti-invasion preparations of World War II.

The kit featured the Bow Bells on the reverse as a symbol of the area, and the promotional video included the church of St Mary-le-Bow and parts of East London within earshot of the bells – such as Brick Lane, Upper Clapton and Stratford – as well as a scene in Romford, in suburban East London.

[42] The study, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, said that the accent, which has been around for more than 500 years, is being replaced in London by a new hybrid language.

[38] Writing in 1981, the dialectologist Peter Wright identified the building of the Becontree estate in Dagenham as influential in the spread of the Cockney dialect.

This vast estate was built by the Corporation of London to house poor East Enders in a previously rural area of Essex.

[49] This feature results in Cockney being often mentioned in textbooks about Semitic languages while explaining how to pronounce the glottal stop.

London /p, t, k/ are often aspirated in intervocalic and final environments, e.g., upper [ˈapʰə], utter [ˈatʰə], rocker [ˈɹɔkʰə], up [ˈaʔpʰ], out [ˈæːʔtʰ], rock [ˈɹɔʔkʰ], where RP is traditionally described as having the unaspirated variants.

[92] However, according to Ladefoged & Maddieson (1996), the vocalised dark l is sometimes an unoccluded lateral approximant, which differs from the RP [ɫ] only by the lack of the alveolar contact.

[93] Relatedly, there are many possible vowel neutralisations and absorptions in the context of a following dark L ([ɫ]) or its vocalised version; these include:[94] Cockney has been occasionally described as replacing /ɹ/ with /w/.

Peter Wright, a Survey of English Dialects fieldworker, concluded that this was not a universal feature of Cockneys but that it was more common to hear this in the London area than elsewhere in Britain.

[102] Since then, the Cockney accent has been more accepted as an alternative form of the English language rather than a lesser one, though the low status mark remains.

Studies have indicated that the heavy use of South East England accents on television and radio may have caused the spread of Cockney English since the 1960s.

[112] Research suggests the use of English speech characteristics is likely to be a result of the influence of London and South East England accents featuring heavily on television, such as the popular BBC One soap opera EastEnders.

[113] Certain features of Cockney – Th-fronting, L-vocalisation, T-glottalisation, and the fronting of the GOAT and GOOSE vowels – have spread across the south-east of England and, to a lesser extent, to other areas of Britain.

[114] However, Clive Upton has noted that these features have occurred independently in some other dialects, such as TH-fronting in Yorkshire and L-vocalisation in parts of Scotland.

Writing in April 2013, Wells argued that research by Joanna Przedlacka "demolished the claim that EE was a single entity sweeping the southeast.