LINGUIST List 5.527

Sun 08 May 1994

Disc: Accents, Estuary English

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Message 1: Re: 5.497 Accents

Date: Tue, 03 May 1994 11:58:49 Re: 5.497 Accents
From: <00dgchurmaleo.bsuvc.bsu.edu>
Subject: Re: 5.497 Accents

Speaking of Australian sandwiches, I recently noticed a different odd (to me) pronunciation of this word in the song "The Land Down Under" (I think that's the title) by the Austr. group Men at Work: it has a VOICED affri- cate at the end. Is this fairly general, or is it just because it's supposed to rhyme with (!) "language" (as in "I said `Do you speak-a my language?'/He just smiled and gave me a Vegamite (sp.?) sandwich.")? It didn't sound forced at all.

Don Churma

Message 2: accents (Estuary English)

Date: Fri, 06 May 94 17:01:22 +0accents (Estuary English)
From: <jgpukc.ac.uk>
Subject: accents (Estuary English)

I am mailing this for my colleague Paul Coggle, who appears to be the only person who has published to any length on the matter.

Estuary English

Further to the recent mention of Estuary English, readers of Linguist may like to know that my book `Do you speak Estuary?' was published in November 1993 by Bloomsbury ISBN 0-7475-1656-1. It did receive a certain amount of media attention at the time, probably because it refers to a number of prominent media personalities who are EE speakers.

EE exists between RP and Cockney and is, I claim, serving as a bridge between the various classes in SE England. So, for instance, upper class speakers can move `down market' from RP towards Cockney (by adopting some, but not all the features of Cockney) and Cockney speakers can move `up market ' towards RP, discarding certain Cockney features and retaining ers. I hope to establish whether or not individual features are adopted or discarded in any particular order (it seems that they *are*).

An interesting aspect is that EE seems to be pushing out the traditional accents (of Kent, Surrey, Sussex, Hampshire, Essex etc). Most young people in the SE now speak a version of EE - presumably because it is an urban and not a rural accent and lends `street cred'.

When the University of Kent was established in 1965 the predominant accent amongst our students was RP (tending towards conservative RP). Regional accents were also on their way in, but people tended to modify these towards RP. Now, 29 years later, the tendency is definitely towards EE. Of course other accents are represented, but these tend to get modified towards EE rather than towards RP. Even many of our foreign students are picking up EE features (and sounding all the more English for it!). I suspect that EE will push out RP in the long run or at least will modify very substantially.

For more details see my book (which as far as I know is the only book so far on this topic)!

I welcome any comments, discussion, further observations etc.

Paul Coggle (University of Kent at Canterbury) pc1ukc.ac.uk

Message 3: Estuary English (fwd)

Date: Fri, 6 May 1994 21:58:40 +Estuary English (fwd)
From: Paul Kerswill <llskerslreading.ac.uk>
Subject: Estuary English (fwd)

First, the main source is David Rosewarne 1994 'Estuary English: tomorrow's RP?', in English Today 37, Vol. 10 No. 1, pp. 3-9. My view is that Rosewarne misguided in very many respects. For a start, it's is not a new variety, it's just a standardised form of speech with Southeastern phonology. People have spoken like that for years and years. EE retains some regional low-level phonetic features. What MAY be new is the fact that the non-standard urban dialects are being levelled in the whole SE region, so that it is increasingly hard to tell even where nonstandard speakers come from. Rosewarne completely misleadingly tries to associate EE with certain discourse features, such as stressing prepositions and using tags. This is nonsense, and seems to be based on his dependence on local radio for his data. What we can say is that, although attitudes to it are still not positive, it is becoming more and more used in high-status occupations, including broadcasting. It lacks the snobbery associated with some forms of RP.

Second, I and a colleague, Ann Williams, have just finished a funded (ESRC) research project on something related, in a rather complex way, to Estuary English. This is the speech of children and adults in the New Town of Milton Keynes, founded from scratch in 1969 60 miles north of London and now with a population of 170,000. We used quantitative methods to study phonological features. To cut a long story short, we have found that it is very difficult to say that there is a distinctive variety growing up. This is because we have a levelled variety there with no strongly regional features (i.e. no strongly Cockney vowels, no rhoticity, but plenty of glottal replacement and l-vocalisation). Using a Principal Components analysis, we found that our oldest subject group, the 12 year olds, form a relatively homogeneous group linguistically, different from both the 8 and the 4 year olds. What they have converged on is precisely this hard-to-place accent, that is less distinctive than say that of similar children in our home town of Reading or indeed London itself.

This is where the relationship with EE comes in: people who speak this are often highly mobile, socially and geographically; they can converge on it from 'above' (RP) or 'below' (local dialect). Milton Keynes forms a microcosm of this mobility; dialect contact is intense there, as a morning spent in the shopping centre and the market will testify. The result is a range of varieties used by the children - the natives of the new town - that contains fewer geographically marked forms than elsewhere. This means that working class speakers there sound much less 'broad' than people elsewhere, and consequently sound like EE speakers, with non-standard grammatical features.

If people would like me to send them copies of our papers on MK, I will be willing to oblige.

Incidentally, do you know anything about Scholtemeier's Polders project? If so, I'd love to get the references. I met him several years ago but have heard nothing since.

Please could you forward this message to accent-interested parties? Thanks.

Paul Kerswill Dept. of Linguistic Science University of Reading Reading RG6 2AA, England