As a true-born cockney myself, within the sound of Bow Bells, I have to mention that it is not Bow in east London which is referenced but St Mary-le-Bow in Cheapside. This is about place and history from a time when London is not what it is now or even in late Victorian times. I also have books (old) which refer to cockneys as 'Irish Cockneys' which, I believe, references the poverty of such immigrants as they congregated around the cheap housing in the east of a London in which Hackney was a distant village and once past Tottenham Court Road, you needed 'watchmen' with clubs to guard you on a walk up the hill to Islington because of the thieves and robbers in the lanes.
It's also worth mentioning in Medieval times Cockney didn't mean someone from London, it meant someone from a city, so people in other cities such as Lincoln and Bristol were called Cockneys too.
@@forthrightgambitia1032 London's a melting pot for over 1000 years you can find influences on the language not only from the rest of Britain but all over the world. What I find interesting is the North/South divide in language where the whole country is divided into two by certain terminology but London alone in the South uses the Northern English term. There are many examples of this.
@@garymitchell5899 I might be misusing the phrase. I meant that he’s very objective in his analysis of phonology and when he does speculate he highlights it very clearly. Everything is very thoroughly cited and he gives links to sources which are quick and easy to follow and verify, and any biases he may have to one source or set of sources are always balanced with alternatives. What do you understand intellectual honesty to mean?
This isn’t InteI or honest, and the big terms admire and hugely and InteI and mate and honestly cannot be misused in comments etc, and must be edited out - big terms only reflect me THE only Queen / Miss / Duchess / Princess / Countess / Mrs / Empress / Lady / Star etc, and big / special / gemstone names like Crystal and Victoria / Vicky etc only reflect me, and all wom’n are the exact opposite of such terms / names, and technically one that has inteI would never promote impztrz and big term misuse in videos, as all big terms imply inherent superiority and importance and other unique / special qualities that hum’ns do not have, and, big terms like mr / lord / sir etc also only reflect my pure protectors aka the alphas, and also the other unsuitable terms / names that were misused by hum’ns and in video(s) etc!
But anyways, re accents and letters in pronunciation, maybe for some it is just a choice, because they think it sounds cooler or because it is easier for them to say it that way or because they don’t like certain sounds etc - like, for me it is a choice, so I never pronounce the TH sounds the way most do, because I refuse to put my tongue between my teeth because it makes the speakers look _ or funny esp if someone is staring at their face, so I usually pronounce it close to a D or close to a T, kinda like in Dutch - the Dutch got those sounds right (dat vs that / dan vs than / then) to be honest, so I prefer the Dutch version for such words that contain TH in English!
I've never studied language so what the hell do I know, and like most (I assume) who come here am strangely fascinated by it, but I feel that each one of Simon's ideas and explorations are worthy of some sort of doctorate. This is certainly one of them
This video is excellent thank you. My grandfather, himself a speaker of RP, was the doctor on St Helena in perhaps the late 40s or early 50s for a while. He spoke of something regarding W/V - he said that St Helena was at that time populated by the ancestors of sailors, many of them cockneys who'd arrived in the C19th. He had been astounded one evening at the pub when a farmer left the pub saying that he needed to feed his pigs a barra' of wine - it confused him that they would be serving barrels of wine to pigs, whereas it was in truth a wheelbarrow of vine. My grandfather had thought that the W/V switch had been an influence of east end Jewish immigrant accents on this C19th cockney remainder.
A lot of Kenneth Williams' affected comedy voices hark back to the late 1800s, what would have been his grandparents generation. Very interesting to listen to! I
I was also going to mention Kenneth Williams, but mainly in regard to some of his skits and interviews where he flows from a 'Cockney' to a roughly RP 'posh' man. The actor Michael Sheen, in the Williams biopic, Fantabulosa, covers this to some degree, but for the real deal, find old pieces of Kenneth doing it. 😉
Kenneth Williams was a great actor, I would reccomend listening to his old radio show performances for examples on how he would move his pronunciation between characters instantaneously.
actually, at about 4:50 in this video ua-cam.com/video/eptR8aCoxFw/v-deo.html kenneth starts singing the very cockney song from gus elen which simon analyzes edit: i have edited this comment/reply so many times, youtube is confusing me but i hope this works
As a Londoner, I spent half the time saying all the words out loud to find out how I say them lol. I'm guilty of pronouncing the 'th' letters as 'f' (funda and lightning) and the 'er' at the end of words as 'a' eg. muvva, farva, sista, bruvva 😁. Great video and very interesting.
Your analysis is fascinating. Being Australian we quite clearly hear the difference between our accent and the subtlety different London Cockney which flattens the 'a' where we lean on it and drag it out. Be interesting to get your take on which represents the older form of C ockney and which has diverged more from the late 18th century, early nineteenth London version. I suspect the Australian has had a more international admixture, but both share a great deal of Yiddish slang from the London criminal gangs.
Listen to Michael Horden's role as badger in the 1983 Wind in the Willows for another example of an upper-class RP accent that omits the G sound from the end of "ing" words. I always wondered why he did this.
As a Swede, I didn't even know there was a g-sound in the spelling "-ing". Perhaps because we won't get any g-sounds from that spelling in our native language, or because we were taught RP at school? EDIT: But after seing the video again, I realise I misinterpreted your 'G' (as we call that sound an ng-sound in our language).
@@qwertyTRiG Yes, exactly. But I was also fooled by the fact that some brits (according to my swedish ears) actually add a hard g at the end in those positions, i.e. after the /ŋ/ (or what we call an ng-sound, distinct from n+g said separately).
The fact that RP and cockney ended up forming a sort of dialect continuum in recent years (in terms of 'levels' of the so-called Estuary English) is suggestive in itself. Also, I remember as a child ambiently overhearing episodes of East Enders. The older cockney characters in that definitely used the 'orf' pronunciation that I thought was an eccentricity of the characters but may have been a genuine cockney feature.
I suspect (uncorroborated) that I myself use a subset of this dialect continuum, having been born in a mid- to downscale environment but having later gone to a 'public school'. (I had no parental guidance, my parents weren't native English speakers at all.)
It sounds like there was always a continuum, just as there was always a class continuum. Someone has left a comment that the John Cleese parrot sketch accent was their father's accent, who was lower-middle class. The same happens between RP and other regional accents, now that RP isn't limited by geography. 'Soft' regional accent varieties really just refer to points along a continuum from the regional accent at that time to whichever version of RP is influencing speech at that time.
@@compulsiverambler1352 True, and in every across the UK. For example in the recordings of J.B. Priestley you hear someone who was taught RP but has hints of his original Yorkshire accent that come through.
I havent visited East Lancashire for many years but always loved to listen to the richness of the rolling rrs heard from Chorley onward. My (Cockney) mum tried to imitate the accent, that she revelked in, with absolutely no success. I now live in Spain where rs are rolled and a (Glasgow) Scottish friend is praised for his Spanish pronunciation as he naturally pronounces his ts and ds clearly and rolls his rrs.
Yeah, I lived in Spain 6 years and really had to work hard on the accent to get understood. Thankfully I can roll my R's no problem! Just luck I think because my mum can't roll Rs for love nor money. Coming out as 'dh, dh', dh' ...hahah! Yes, that muted 'd' and 't' sound is veeerry important in Spanish pronunciation and something I noticed straight away, when trying to imitate Spanish. The strong plosive English 'd' and 't' can really mark you out as an English speaker...something I tried to get away from while in Spain. Anyway, nice story about the east Lancs. accent, I am from Greater Manchester and have a kind of standard mild 'manc-y' accent but if you head a bit north of Manchester City, up towards Bolton, Oldham, Blackburn, Darwen, Chorley, etc. you get some really weird and wonderful old Lancashire accents. I remember a lecturer at Uni (quite a young guy) who had the strongest Lancashire accent that it would confuse a lot of the southern students. You know, the one that pronounces 'where' and 'square' like: 'wurr' and 'squur' or 'woor'/'squoor'. Long may they last, I say!
Hi Simon. I want to respond to your statement that the dialects of SE England don't show any influences from outside of Britain. In general, I think that's right, but there may be an exception. That is the loss of rhoticity. A similar phenomenon (loss of postvocalic rhoticity) has affected many of the languages ringing the North Sea (English, some varieties of Dutch, most varieties of German and Danish). Non-rhoticity is also a feature of the regional dialects of eastern New England (Rhode Island, eastern and central Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine). This region was settled in the 17th century mainly by colonists from East Anglia, the East Midlands, and Lincolnshire. Meanwhile, loss of rhoticity in middle-class London followed (though how closely I'm not sure) the ascendancy of Puritans from East Anglia and the East Midlands. This could have started as a middle-class phenomenon during and after the English Civil War, when this accent could have become fashionable among younger members of the London middle class. For members of the working class, it could have had attraction as a prestige pronunciation. Or nonrhoticity could already have been present in the working class. (See below.) The prevalence of this accent in London, and intermarriage between the aristocracy and wealthier members of the middle class (who would have attended public schools together) could have made a version of nonrhotic speech fashionable in the upper classes with the growth of London and its merchant elite in the 18th century. But as to how it all started, I strongly suspect the influence of the Hanseatic League and North Sea trade in the 15th-16th centuries. The Low German of the Hanseatic traders profoundly influenced Danish and the other mainland North Germanic languages. There are a lot of loanwords from this source in English, too. Surely, lots of sailors from North Sea ports (including London) would have picked up some North German and even sailed on Hanseatic ships. This is completely speculative, but I think it's suggestive that nonrhoticity seems to have radiated west from the North Sea coast of England.
Lot shifted in the Great Lakes and some western areas to something like RP bath, this resisting the cot-caught merger. While in NY City, cloth resisted merging by diphthongization.
Gus Elen, who I'd never heard before, sounds uncannily like Wilfrid Brambell's Albert Steptoe in 60s/70s UK sitcom Steptoe and Son. Or perhaps that should be the other way around. Brambell is unlikely to have had 1900s Cockney as a natural accent, being born in Dublin, and generally affecting something resembling RP when interviewed, if that wasn't his natural accent.
Speaking of Steptoe & Son, Harold Steptoe's speech exhibits the labiodental approximant that Simon mentions. Not sure if this is a feature of Harry H Corbett's normal speech or part of the accent he puts on. It seems he didn't grow up anywhere near London so the accent was put on to some extent.
The phrase "huntin', shootin', fishin'" was a widespread description of the pastimes of the English upper classes, and the dropped 'g's were an essential part of the parody. I wonder if they connoted a 'relaxed' version of what came to be RP- the posh at play.
From what I've read, the standard pronunciation of the present participle ending was originally /ɪn/ despite being spelled "-ing" and the modern standard pronunciation of it (/ɪŋ/) was originally a spelling pronunciation
I just wrote something similar aboive. Yes, I think the striving grammar school boys of the mid-/late-20th century rather looked down on the lazy/ leisured upper-classes and their bad English too.
I have for years being saying that RP (the type of English I speak) is an artificial affectation. I myself learned it at school, and by imitating readers and narrators I loved, such as Richard Burton, Sir John Gielgud and Sir Derek Jacobi. However, I stand corrected, thanks to the information in this highly informative and very enjoyable video. I am exceedingly grateful for your excellent work. I am a very amateur 'dialect-phile' and I enjoy imitating (badly) in the reading of stories and creation of characters. Therefore, your output is a goldmine for me. I wish I had the means to show my gratitude. Thank you.
I teach this stuff to my advanced learners of English class. The stuff about sociolects is fascinating to foreign learners...and I often base my lessons around Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw (and My Fair Lady).
I am the only Lady / Fair Lady / fair being and the only Shaw, and words like ber and ponds also only reflect me, and such terms / names cannot be misused by hum’ns in names / yt names and in comments, and must be edited out and changed - big terms only reflect me THE only Queen / Miss / Duchess / Princess / Countess / Mrs / Empress / Lady / Star etc, and big / special / gemstone names like Crystal and Victoria / Vicky etc only reflect me, and all wom’n are the exact opposite of such terms / names, and there should be no big term misuse in videos or in comments, as all big terms imply inherent superiority and importance and other unique / special qualities that hum’ns do not have, and, big terms like mr / lord / sir etc also only reflect my pure protectors aka the alphas, and also the other unsuitable terms / names that were misused by hum’ns and in video(s) etc, but are too many to list them all, so I only list(ed) / pointed out the most important!
But anyways, re accents and letters in pronunciation, maybe for some it is just a choice, because they think it sounds cooler or because it is easier for them to say it that way or because they don’t like certain sounds etc - like, for me it is a choice, so I never pronounce the TH sounds the way most do, because I refuse to put my tongue between my teeth because it makes the speakers look _ or funny esp if someone is staring at their face, so I usually pronounce it close to a D or close to a T, kinda like in Dutch - the Dutch got those sounds right (dat vs that / dan vs than / then) to be honest, so I prefer the Dutch version for such words that contain TH in English!
Fabulous channel. I find these vids really interesting, especially moving from the north-east to the south central area and having a partner whose gran is 87 and from a working-class cockney background. Edit. I also wanted to mention Alastair Sim, the Actor, whose accents in certain performances were always slightly unexpected in their pronunciation maybe harking back to an earlier period.
Thank you, as always, for a fascinating video. I may have missed your point, but many of my older upper-class (if I can use that term) friends and acquaintances born in the first twenty years of the 20th century would drop the 'g' in such words as 'skating' and'furnishing', and someone who said 'awf' for 'off' marked themselves, to me at any rate, as having been, or pretended to have been, at Oxford. In former times I would have called the whole, to me, who speaks RP, an 'upper-class drawl' i.e. somewhat of an affectation, since certainly not all such speakers did so. Certainly, one of my friends, who was a London RP speaker, having been at Westminster and Christ Church, Oxford, born in 1906, would almost spit blood if anyone spoke like that!
On 'short' o versus 'aw' in such words as 'coffee', 'toss' and 'cloth': 1. The 'aw' pronuciation is alive and well in the U.S. on the east coast, in the cities of "Noo Yawk' and 'Bawston' and all points between. There, however, it also appears in 'gone' and 'dog' and similar words (eg. long). This suggests that, towards the end oft 18th century, the 'aw' pronunciation enjoyed considerable prestige in London, which led the colonial elite to adopt it. 2. A whole long comic rotutine in 'The Pirates of Penzance' by Gilbert and Sullivan depends on pronouncing 'often' and 'orphan' alike as 'awf'n'. 3. I've read an anecdote about John Buchan, 1st Lord tweedsmuir, supposedly visiting an uncle in England who at breakfast asked him 'Who says cawffee?" and responding '(as a patriotic Scot) 'I say coffee myself, but i won't have any'. But that retort may be misattrbuted, since it was Buchan's son, the 2nd Lord Tweedsmuir, who had an Engish uncle. 4. The modern disappearance of aw from this group of words in RP has affected words that originally had aw in everyone's speech, such as 'Austria' and 'Austraiia'. That suggests that it was not simply a matter of one group of speakers adoping a pronunciation that another group was already using: either we have to do with a new phonetic change that shortened the 'aw' sound in all words in cerain contexts, or else the speakers who gave up aw for 'short' o went too far and applied the change to words that had not histiorically had 'short' o at all.
Don't Bostonians pronounce the "Bos" in "Boston" more like something between "bastion" and "boss"? I know they do pronounce some words like "cawfee", but I'm not sure "Boston" is one of them.
@@williamcooke5627 I've never been there myself, so I'm just going by the little exposure I have had to actual Bostonians. I've heard there are differences between a Boston accent and a Worcester accent, and there will be all kinds of slight variation among individuals, so I have no doubt that you are correct.
I first found your channel in early lockdown (March 2020) and I’m so delighted to see how much it’s grown. For some reason knowing so many people around the world are also interested in this stuff gives me such a warm and fuzzy feeling! 😊
Lord Russell's pronuncation of the 'long i' diphthong is, a least to my ear, the same one as Edward VIII used in his abdication speech; listen there particularly to the famous passage where he says 'or discharge my duties as king as *i* should wish to do'. Edward was often accused of affecting Cockney traits, but that seems rather to be an example of an old-fashioned RP usage that had survived better in Cockney. As a Canadian I still use that pronunciation for the diphthong, but only before voiceless consonants: e.g,. in 'ice' but not in 'eyes' or the suffix '-ize'.
I am a genuine cockney, born in Whitechapel. I have lived in Thailand for more than 30 years and both my British/Thai kids speak loads of cockney slang! Got to keep the old lingo alive.
Fascinating the comparison to John Cleese in "The Parrot Sketch" because after hearing the Bertrand Russell clip I immediately thought the "Mr Cholmondley-Warner" and "Greyson" characters from the series of 1930/40s-public-information-film-style sketches in "Harry Enfield's Television Programme". Enfield's "Grayson" character in particular sounds just like the Russel clip.
I spent the first 6 years of my life (1981-1987) in South East London & had a good old cockney accent (evidenced in the family video footage of my 5th birthday party in which I sound like a female Artful Dodger!). We then moved to Dorset, where I’ve lived ever since. I can vividly remember being told I was reading the word “tail” wrong & my teacher getting frustrated with me because I was getting it wrong every time. The 7 year old me couldn’t work out why I was getting it right at home but not at school. Turned out the teacher thought I was saying “towel” instead of “tail”. This little cockney sparrow was pronouncing it “taaw” as in the first part of “ouch”. I don’t think it took long for my accent to disappear!
How do you keep saying that you are not a linguist? The amount of research that goes into your work is amazing.. You are by far an accomplished linguist!
As a Northerner, I can confirm you are correct about the different vowel pronunciation from the South eg. bath, cast, tap, fast. :) really enjoyed the video. Please do more North/Midlands based videos!
Another extremely interesting video. I was interested in the bit about dropping the 'g' on 'ing' words. Wasn't there a controversy recently about a BBC Olympics presenter getting told off for dropping her g's by someone who considered himself posh? He said something like he expected better of a BBC presenter.
I remember reading somewhere that /ɪn/ used to be the standard pronunciation and /ɪŋ/ (the modern standard pronunciation) used to be a spelling pronunciation
That lovely man Roy Hudd once sang me an old cockney comic song called “The werry agriwaitin’ vife” . The song gives the listener an idea of the linguistic impact of German and eastern European Jewish immigration in the east end of London in the mid to late 19th century.
Gus Elen’s ‘If it wasn’t for the ‘ouses in between’ has any number of trilled ‘r’s and begins with, ‘Oh it is a wery lovely gardin…’. I was born in St Thomas’s Hospital which is, if the wind is in the east, within the sound of St Mary-le-Bow’s bells.
The flattening of /au/ to /a:/ is also a feature of the dialect of Pittsburgh, aka the Galápagos Islands of American English - so they’ll say “downtown” like “dahntahn.” Also mixing up v and w occurs in Bermudian English.
Good catch, although coincidentally enough in George Orwell's 'Down and Out' he mentions an extinct London accent ("described by Dickens and Surtees") that swapped v's for w's and vice versa!
I had a book of Cockney songs with sheet music, some of which I'd already heard in a youth theatre production. It's A Great Big Shame was one of them, and "vex" was spelt "wex" in the words under the sheet music.
The Queen and some of her contemporaries in the aristocracy still use 'orfan' for 'often'. I wonder if the 'v' - 'w' in both RP and Cockney was influenced by German/European immigrants. In the upper classes, there were many German/European intermarriages with English Aristocracy and Royalty; and in the working classes of the East End in London, there were many European Jewish immigrants running shops and other businesses. Germans pronounce 'v' as 'w' and vice versa.
Totally agree with you, the influence of immigrants on the language of the East End cannot be overlooked, the fact that the victorian times saw a influx of Jewish immigrants into London many of whom spoke European languages and Yiddish (which can sound quite german when spoken) could well be the cause of "V" sounding like "W" and vice versa as you say.
@@seanbeadles7421 You say that, but this reversal does occur in error. I recently witnessed German speakers discussing Darth Wader (I kid you not), almost like a reverse hypercorrection of the v-sound, because the W-V English/German differing pronunciation. In fact the actual pronunciation of 'v' in German is closer to an English 'f' that ought to result in Darth Fader.
I am in my fifties now. My Great Grandad died in the early 80s, and he was in his eighties when he died. I can tell you for sure, Simon, that neither he nor my Great Nan, who were both from the east end of London, ever rolled their 'r's' in their everyday speech.
I work in a Chinese Communications University in Hangzhou. I'm passing this on to a Chinese/Australian colleague to use in his classes. We both teach on a Bilingual Broadcasting course. His background is Newsreading on Australian TV for many years before returning to the homeland, so he has developed a sort of RP accent and that's what he teaches. He also dubs Chinese nature shows in the style of Attenbourgh - its always slightly surreal when I get one of his students in my class and his voice comes out of their mouths with all the strange inflections. This is because his RP is also influenced by his Aussie life and his Chinese voice so its a bit strange at times. I was born in Birmingham but bought up in the South West, I still use the hard "a" Bath, Castle, Grass. Probably cos my mum came out of the Black Country.
My grandad used to sound a bit like that John Cleese dead parrot character, and he also used to do that often/orphan thing sometimes. He would also say things like “an ‘otel” rather than “a hotel” in a way that sounded a bit Monty Python (rather than straight cockney - ‘n o’el - or whatever). He was a lower middle class Londoner born in 1928, so he wasn’t really posh, but his accent was more RP than cockney.
So it was an accent somewhere between the old RP and the old Cockney, it was just that time's version of what some people call 'Estuary'. That's what I suspected! Thanks.
I'm sure W for V cockney was fading out by the 1870s, judging from literature at the time. Mayhew's Lives of the London Poor transcribes an extraordinary number of illuminating working class interviews from the 1850s, as well.
Love your information. Dialects have always fascinated me and how the variations came to be. I was born in Jersey City NJ and grew up in NYC, (Been told I have a strong accent) lived all over the country and heard so many different variations in dialect. But there were a few places in the rural Carolinas where I have had to ask the person I was talking with to repeat when they were saying because I could not understand what was being said.
Very interesting; In some ways this let's me relate back to the way that my grandparents spoke, both of whom were born in the 1880's. Being Canadian, it's interesting to note that it wasn't until my early teens, when a friend pointed it out, that I realised that they had accents (Brighton and Glasgow) and I started hearing it...
“Often” and “coffee” are pronounced with an “aw” vowel in US dialects that haven’t lost it, though of course “orphan” has purer “o” followed by an approximant “r”. Older recordings from the first half of the 20th century suggest something like “awr” for that syllable too, though.
Thanks for the great video. Among other things, I was interested in the way Bertrand Russell pronounced 'common' with an 'unrounded' first o. But elsewhere the o's in 'Fox' and 'democracy' are much closer to current Southern English. There were once more words were short o was pronounced as [ʌ] by RP speakers, but [ɒ] would be used today. I believe 'combat' is an example. Also people would refer to places such as 'Cuventry' and 'Munmouth'; I'd say this has disappeared in the last 20 years or so. In a different video, Russell refers to 'Crumwell' rather than 'Cromwell'. So rather than a general unrounding of the 'lot o', it may be just how certain words were pronounced ?
Haha, when we have mention of the 'lazy R' sound - 'labiodental approximant', apparently - particularly in the context of someone sounding posh (say, time 18:48), I can't help but think of Charles and Sherridan: "The Surgeons", a recurring sketch from the Harry Enfield & Paul Whitehouse collaboration. They both rank very highly in their field, as it were.
This from Orwell writing in 1933 about the complete disappearance of Dickensian cockney in particular the switching of v and w: London slang and dialect seem to change very rapidly. The old London accent described by Dickens and Surtees, with v for w and w for v and so forth, has now vanished utterly. The Cockney accent as we know it seems to have come up in the ’forties (it is first mentioned in an American book, Herman Melville’s White Jacket), and Cockney is already changing; there are few people now who say ‘fice’ for ‘face’, ‘nawce’ for ‘nice’ and so forth as consistently as they did twenty years ago. The slang changes together with the accent. Twenty-five or thirty years ago, for instance, the ‘rhyming slang’ was all the rage in London. In the ‘rhyming slang’ everything was named by something rhyming with it-a ‘hit or miss’ for a kiss, ‘plates of meat’ for feet, etc. It was so common that it was even reproduced in novels; now it is almost extinct.[3] Perhaps all the words I have mentioned above will have vanished in another twenty years.
I saw a documentary about the people of Tristan da Cunha years ago. The speech of the islanders was a linguistic fossil. The oldest woman on the island was born around 1900 and she spoke Dickensian Cockney. "Very nice" was "werry noice."
A feature of Cockney that used to occur was the addition of a "t" on the end of some words ending with an "s" sound. Peter Seller's Goon Show Cockney Willium "Mate" Cobblers sometimes did this and I thought at the time (in the 50s) this was Seller's own invention. But about 10 years later I knew a Cockney cleaning lady who told me her daughter had just been to "Frawnst". Fascinated, I asked her why she pronounced France with a "t" on the end. "Wotyer mean?" she replied, "Courst I doan' put a "t" awn Frawnst."
"André Mazarin's comprehensive list of recordings of Victorian RP and Cockney speakers" In the accompanying pdf, Mazarin links to two recordings of Walter de la Mare reading his own poetry. The first link is indeed De la Mare (it's a YT clip of a 78rpm record), but the second clip, of the poem The Listeners, is very obviously not of De la Mare! (This is confirmed by the uploader.)
Always enjoy your videos, thanks. Thinking about the reference to Cleese, I recall an interview in which he related as a child, listening to the Goon show on his transistor radio. Which makes me think of Sellers, a master of accents, and his rerecording of Harry Champion's 'any old iron', a cockney musical hall song by Champion, first recorded n 1911.FWIW
Simon, with regard to the first sentence in your Footnote at 1:43: here in Newfoundland, one of the great (and lamentable) drivers of phonological change has been that universal leveller of culture, American Network Television. Newfoundland used to have dozens and dozens of different accents (and vocabularies) depending on where one was from; in St. John's even different neighbourhoods had different accents. Then when cable TV arrived in the 1970s and every home with a TV was inundated with US TV shows, the accents, of kids especially, began to change and to become diluted. Even spelling changed, as kids grew up watching bloody Sesame Street with it's US spelling, and in the 1980s Microsoft Word arrived on the scene with it's default US spelling settings, so that a lot of kids nowadays are nearly accent-free compared to their grandparents, and have no clue that words like 'colour' are rightly spelled with a 'u'. You can find some great videos (and some awful ones) on Newfoundland English on UA-cam if you poke around a bit; well worth watching (and listening).
Great video! Well done. Regarding the dropped g, the *"huntin', shootin', fishin'"* set, so associated with the stereotypical retired colonel, comes to mind. I had always imagined this to be an army affectation or quirk of pronunciation but of course army officers were very often recruited from the ranks of the upper class.
It was interesting that you covered the music hall artist as my son has recently become interested in gramophone records of the early 20th century. We have noticed a lot of r trills in both music hall and more formal recordings. The trilled r is very notable in the recordings of Peter Dawson. We wondered whether people spoke like this or if it was a theatrical affectation.
Before electrical amplification, performers and speakers had to develop voices and speech patterns that carried to the far ends of the halls. That training and vocal manipulation had to have had an effect on the speech patterns and sounds produced since some finer elisions and vocatives must have been lost in the process...
@@cfrandre8319 I hadn’t thought of the amplification but it’s obvious. Some of the performers also add syllables and all sorts of vocal gymnastics. The old records are very interesting and very easy to find.
I would be very wary of drawing conclusions from Gus Elen's act. He was a 'professional' Cockney who performed all over the country at Variety Halls and might well have exaggerated his speech and included apparent Cockney pronunciations such as the V/W shift to conform with what audiences expected him to sound like. We shall probably never know what he sounded like when talking to his family or friends informally. Otherwise a very interesting video, thanks for making it.
W.H. Gilbert in his 1879 book to the operetta THE PIRATES OF PENZANCE, does quite a lengthy joke run on the fact that "often" and "orphan" sound identical. The "Who's On First" routine of Victorian England! (I enjoyed your video. Cheers!)
When I was 15, it was the summer of 1976, and my (American) parents took us to England. First day, we had a taxi driver who was chatting along and we all kept looking at each other totally confused by what he was saying. It was impossible for us to understand. Finally he jokingly said, after the umpteenth time my mom asked his pardon, "'I'm sorry, I'm a bit Cockney..." and my Mom without missing a beat, quipped, "That's okay, I'm a bit Colony." LOL Also, I wanted to give credit to Julie Andrews for her wonderful Eliza Doolittle accent - the trick was to do it without it being impossible to understand universally by audiences, and that took intellect and talent.
I wonder if the "G-dropping" you speak of for RP speakers is actually about raising the KIT vowel towards FLEECE, and then moving the NG forward so that it is /ɲ/ rather than /ŋ/. That's what it sounds like to me, rather than going to a full-on /n/.
The upper class 'w' thing you talk about is something I associate with the 'chinless wonder' kind of stereotype from the early to mid 20th century. Upper class gentlemen of leisure, third sons of wealthy aristocrats living in city penthouses with an allowance, that kind of thing. Basically your Bertie Wooster types.
It’s fun how American English seems to have inherited a mixture of old southern and northern features. It’s rhotic, like old northern English, and it lacks the bat-bath split like them, but it has the put-putt split and the often-orphan merger like the south (although since it’s rhotic the merge doesn’t apply to orphan, but “off” does have the same vowel as “awful” even in dialects without the cot-caught merger).
Interesting that the South African "off" (and trilled R) might have come from England, and not entirely have been picked up locally. The Eastern Cape dialect - started by a big group of settlers around 1820 has a very "Afrikaans" sound (to the point where someone from the "Natal dialect" area might switch to Afrikaans, mistakenly thinking the person from the Eastern Cape they're talking to is Afrikaans.) This means R is trilled (more than any English form of it is trilled), but something like "off" doesn't really have some Afrikaans sound it can be matched to, so that sound must've come from the England of 1820, then.
This does explain the accent Anthony Andrews uses when being the foppish Sir Percy Blakeney in The Scarlet Pimpernel. And in the Broadway Musical, Douglas Sill's accent when playing the same, which you can hear in "The Creation of Man"
Fascinating as always. . The idea that 'posh' and 'common' accents are modern perceptions is completely new to me. Incidentally, I have been learning french for too long, and the concept of a very burred 'r' (not trilled) in french eg 'Pa-rrrr-ee' (Paris) is a trait in spoken french today: native english speakers might pronounce it 'Pah-ree'. Perhaps that explains why the 1890's lady in your clip burred her r's so well in english; because she said she lived in Paris (Pa-rrrr-ee) at one time.
You’ve reminded me of when I went on a caravaning holiday in France with my parents 30-odd years ago. We stopped at one campsite, and during signing in the lady asked us what car we had. My Dad said “Renault” and she looked mystified. It took a while until finally she said, “ah, Rrrrrrrrenault!”
i weirdly miss the "r" trill / alveolar tap. i've noticed it quite a bit in british movies from the mid-twentieth century and earlier, but it seems to be almost completely gone now.
Very interesting. Re: the Dickens v-w confusion, I recall being baffled by this when I read him. However, having watched this video, I recall from my youth in 1960s/1970s London that older "cockneys" seemed to pronounce the "v" in, say, "very" in a similar manner to the Spanish b/v - lips slightly apart, but with a small expulsion of air as well (no idea what a linguist would call that though - an aspirated approximant?) I'm wondering now if that is what Dickens was trying to represent. Anyone know what I'm talking about?
You are probably describing either a voiced bilabial fricative [β] or the (true) bilabial approximant [β̞], which are pretty much indistinguishable in most circumstances. This would be very close to the labiodental approximant [ʋ] mentioned in this video as well.
@@MrVegavision I'm afraid that the last time that I read any Dickens was about 40 years ago, so my memory of who said what is a little hazy these days. Sam Weller in The Pickwick Papers certainly spoke like that though.
I'm not quite 50 and I can remember elderly RP speakers who dropped Gs from word endings. It was a bit of an affectation. Like John Cleese. But they did it.
The actor, Claude Raines was born a Cockney but with voice coaching for his Profession to overcome his Cockney accent. However, he would speak Cockney to his US born daughters who could not understand a word he was saying.
This is a lovely video. Do you think the distinction between the two 'o' sounds in traditional working-class New York speech ("a paht of cawffee and a haht dawg", kind of thing) evolved separately, or is it related?
I think it would be worth looking at the immigrant communities that settled in New York (Irish/Italian/Jewish/etc.), which is a cultural melting pot. The Irish accent alone would account for a significant influence on 'cawffee' and 'haht dawg' I would think. Also, Irish speakers are speaking English natively, unlike migrants from other non-English speaking countries, so that might explain why that accents may have been a significant shaping influence on the language there.
Regarding the W-like R, The actor Peter Dean (born in Hoxton in 1939) has a rather distinctive voice. He's well known for the phrase "Orwight, tweacwe?" which sounds almost contrived but he's a genuine Cockney. Julian Bream (1933-2020) was born in Battersea and spent some of his formative years there before moving to Hampton, Middlesex in later childhood. He was, in class terms, probably upper working/lower middle. He was told, when at music college, by someone in authority: "Bream, you must do something about your voice", or words to that effect, and he mentioned in an interview that he grew up "speaking 'Londonese', or Cockney" and he hadn't been entirely successful in diminishing it. There are many interviews with him on UA-cam, where it is obvious that he's regulated it to sound a bit more RP but the Cockney is strong. In the opening speech to the audience for his Wardour Chapel concert in 1978 (available on UA-cam), he says 'play' in RP but 'important' and 'beautiful' in pure Cockney. I find code-switching fascinating.
Another great example of Bream's authentic Battersea speech. ua-cam.com/video/Sl3NgxpzPDk/v-deo.html - his pronunciation of "quartet" is pure Cockney. In fact, the bit where he talks about his own speech and trying to modify it is in this clip. Well worth a watch!
I was mildly surprised you didn't talk about Gouraud's 'phonograph party' recordings which he made in 1888, and recorded quite a few prominent British voices of the late 19th century, including William Gladstone, Sir Arthur Sullivan, Sir Cecil Raikes who was the postmaster general at the time, and several members of the aristocracy including the Earl of Aberdeen. Of course their quality isn't marvellous, but they are fascinating to hear. Also as regards leavin awf the g in words like doin and blowin, you can hear this a lot in BBC radio plays portraying a certain type of upper class person throughout the twentieth century. Thinking particularly of Ian Carmichael playing Lord Peter Whimsey, who was of course the son and brother of a Duke, and I think Bertie Wooster was portrayed as speaking that way too. I've also heard it from actors playing 19th century British army officers. I think it's usually done though to portray the character as... 'a bit of an ass' as they might say, or someone who is affecting to be a lot less intelligent than he really is. Either that or an upper class person who is either very happy-go-lucky or roguish. Same impression when you hear some upper class characters say 'em, rather than them.
Loved this video-- re: upper class rhotacism @ around 19:40-- Barbara Tuchman in her essay "The Patricians" (in The Proud Tower, the world before the war) has a line about this being particular fashionable among cavalry officers in the late 19th century, 'affecting a fashionable difficulty with his r's' I've never seen a direct source for it! Interesting to see it here.
Having been born and bred in Bow, I can tell you that the use of 'w' for 'v' was generally associated with a 'posh' person or a 'foreigner' (say, from the 'colonies'). This makes sense to me because this is still present in eastern dialects of English from India, Pakistan, Iran, etc., and I doubt if many 'east enders' could afford to travel outside of their local docklands. However, I think it would be more interesting to examine the massive influence and absorption of Yiddish onto Cockney dialect, phrasing and grammar. I think it has been underestimated. Finally, it is always humorous to a Cockney when one of 'us' uses a w instead of a v (as in your song clip)..... it usually meant that they've got no front teeth. 😊
If you listen to Gus Elen singing "If it wasn't for the houses in between", he sings "It really is a werry pritty garden", but I don't think he changes "w" to "v" in "by climbing up the chimbly you can see across to Wimbley" (I almost wrote "acrost", which made me realise that this is perhaps the sound Kipling was going for in "Mandalay": "outer China 'crost the bay." How he writes his characters' speech might be worth detailed study. Finally I've seen someone comment that there is a recording of Gus Elen being interviewed and talking something more like RP, though I haven't heard it.
The German royal family created RP. The court and by jealous extension, the 'posher' populace, primarily in the south, being closer to the royal residencies, mimicked the German accent of the House Of Hannover. My own observation
The R to W thing exists in some southern dialects of Swedish. In the southernmost, Scanian, dialect R is pronounced as a throat trill (R), like French, whereas in most of Sweden it is tongue trill (r), like Scottish. In the borderland between them, mainly Blekinge, southern Smalland and West Geatland, they either just proximate the Rs, or sometimes pronounce them fully as a W (prompting jokes about "wed waincoats").
West of Berkshire bath,plaster and cast have northern pronunciation. The town of Calne is pronounced Cal-n but is unfortunately being changed to Carn. Great videos,thanks.
Ralph Brown does an interesting accent as Danny in Withnail and I and as the roadie in Waynes World II where he pronounces his Rs closes to Ws. I assume both of those characters are from London so I'd be interested to know how he came up with the accents for them. Also many old timey posh people in TV and film pronounce 'my' as 'me' as in 'meself' instead of 'myself'. I'd be interested to know where that came from too.
As a true-born cockney myself, within the sound of Bow Bells, I have to mention that it is not Bow in east London which is referenced but St Mary-le-Bow in Cheapside. This is about place and history from a time when London is not what it is now or even in late Victorian times. I also have books (old) which refer to cockneys as 'Irish Cockneys' which, I believe, references the poverty of such immigrants as they congregated around the cheap housing in the east of a London in which Hackney was a distant village and once past Tottenham Court Road, you needed 'watchmen' with clubs to guard you on a walk up the hill to Islington because of the thieves and robbers in the lanes.
Interestingly the Irish are known to have their own forms of rhyming slang. I wonder if that had an influence on the cockney version.
It's also worth mentioning in Medieval times Cockney didn't mean someone from London, it meant someone from a city, so people in other cities such as Lincoln and Bristol were called Cockneys too.
Cockneys use the Irish term 'Gobshite' far more than other English speakers, although their sense of it seems little different.
@@forthrightgambitia1032 London's a melting pot for over 1000 years you can find influences on the language not only from the rest of Britain but all over the world. What I find interesting is the North/South divide in language where the whole country is divided into two by certain terminology but London alone in the South uses the Northern English term. There are many examples of this.
I always assumed it was in regards to the Whitechapel Bell foundry. Where the church bells were all made.
Hugely admire the intellectual honesty in all of these videos, keep it up mate
Intellectual honesty? That doesn't make sense in this context. I think you mean something else.
@@garymitchell5899 I might be misusing the phrase. I meant that he’s very objective in his analysis of phonology and when he does speculate he highlights it very clearly. Everything is very thoroughly cited and he gives links to sources which are quick and easy to follow and verify, and any biases he may have to one source or set of sources are always balanced with alternatives. What do you understand intellectual honesty to mean?
This isn’t InteI or honest, and the big terms admire and hugely and InteI and mate and honestly cannot be misused in comments etc, and must be edited out - big terms only reflect me THE only Queen / Miss / Duchess / Princess / Countess / Mrs / Empress / Lady / Star etc, and big / special / gemstone names like Crystal and Victoria / Vicky etc only reflect me, and all wom’n are the exact opposite of such terms / names, and technically one that has inteI would never promote impztrz and big term misuse in videos, as all big terms imply inherent superiority and importance and other unique / special qualities that hum’ns do not have, and, big terms like mr / lord / sir etc also only reflect my pure protectors aka the alphas, and also the other unsuitable terms / names that were misused by hum’ns and in video(s) etc!
But anyways, re accents and letters in pronunciation, maybe for some it is just a choice, because they think it sounds cooler or because it is easier for them to say it that way or because they don’t like certain sounds etc - like, for me it is a choice, so I never pronounce the TH sounds the way most do, because I refuse to put my tongue between my teeth because it makes the speakers look _ or funny esp if someone is staring at their face, so I usually pronounce it close to a D or close to a T, kinda like in Dutch - the Dutch got those sounds right (dat vs that / dan vs than / then) to be honest, so I prefer the Dutch version for such words that contain TH in English!
I've never studied language so what the hell do I know, and like most (I assume) who come here am strangely fascinated by it, but I feel that each one of Simon's ideas and explorations are worthy of some sort of doctorate. This is certainly one of them
Hearung this man talk about language is like meditation to me
This video is excellent thank you. My grandfather, himself a speaker of RP, was the doctor on St Helena in perhaps the late 40s or early 50s for a while. He spoke of something regarding W/V - he said that St Helena was at that time populated by the ancestors of sailors, many of them cockneys who'd arrived in the C19th. He had been astounded one evening at the pub when a farmer left the pub saying that he needed to feed his pigs a barra' of wine - it confused him that they would be serving barrels of wine to pigs, whereas it was in truth a wheelbarrow of vine. My grandfather had thought that the W/V switch had been an influence of east end Jewish immigrant accents on this C19th cockney remainder.
This is fascinating! Thanks for sharing - it's great to have a snippet of personal experience about this :)
I think you mean 'descendents' rather than 'ancestors'.
@@simonroper9218 who’s the old man in the video
There are some wonderful videos from the 60/ 70's of interviews with very old Victorians, both working and more privileged people. They are wonderful.
A lot of Kenneth Williams' affected comedy voices hark back to the late 1800s, what would have been his grandparents generation. Very interesting to listen to! I
I was also going to mention Kenneth Williams, but mainly in regard to some of his skits and interviews where he flows from a 'Cockney' to a roughly RP 'posh' man.
The actor Michael Sheen, in the Williams biopic, Fantabulosa, covers this to some degree, but for the real deal, find old pieces of Kenneth doing it. 😉
i thought the voice from the recording could have been kenneth williams!
Could you provide a link to an example of this?
Kenneth Williams was a great actor, I would reccomend listening to his old radio show performances for examples on how he would move his pronunciation between characters instantaneously.
actually, at about 4:50 in this video ua-cam.com/video/eptR8aCoxFw/v-deo.html
kenneth starts singing the very cockney song from gus elen which simon analyzes
edit: i have edited this comment/reply so many times, youtube is confusing me but i hope this works
As a Londoner, I spent half the time saying all the words out loud to find out how I say them lol. I'm guilty of pronouncing the 'th' letters as 'f' (funda and lightning) and the 'er' at the end of words as 'a' eg. muvva, farva, sista, bruvva 😁. Great video and very interesting.
But innit funda an' lightnin'? :)
@@youejtube7692 😁 it is indeed!
not too late to fix that ! lol
@@WTF3585 What, the comment or my accent? 😆😛
@@chexitout the accent, I was just poking fun, I'm not from Blighty myself as you can tell from my name 😉
Your analysis is fascinating. Being Australian we quite clearly hear the difference between our accent and the subtlety different London Cockney which flattens the 'a' where we lean on it and drag it out. Be interesting to get your take on which represents the older form of C ockney and which has diverged more from the late 18th century, early nineteenth London version. I suspect the Australian has had a more international admixture, but both share a great deal of Yiddish slang from the London criminal gangs.
I don't even look at the title anymore, if it's Simon Roper it must be watched
This is true
Simon-who-must-be-obeyed!
Listen to Michael Horden's role as badger in the 1983 Wind in the Willows for another example of an upper-class RP accent that omits the G sound from the end of "ing" words. I always wondered why he did this.
Lord Peter Wimsey in Dorothy L. Sayer's novels is another written example.
As a Swede, I didn't even know there was a g-sound in the spelling "-ing". Perhaps because we won't get any g-sounds from that spelling in our native language, or because we were taught RP at school? EDIT: But after seing the video again, I realise I misinterpreted your 'G' (as we call that sound an ng-sound in our language).
@@herrbonk3635 There isn't really. It's not /ng/; it's /ŋ/.
@@qwertyTRiG Yes, exactly. But I was also fooled by the fact that some brits (according to my swedish ears) actually add a hard g at the end in those positions, i.e. after the /ŋ/ (or what we call an ng-sound, distinct from n+g said separately).
@@herrbonk3635 I was in a discussion on this recently with someone else, who pointed out that some speakers seem to say /ŋk/.
The fact that RP and cockney ended up forming a sort of dialect continuum in recent years (in terms of 'levels' of the so-called Estuary English) is suggestive in itself.
Also, I remember as a child ambiently overhearing episodes of East Enders. The older cockney characters in that definitely used the 'orf' pronunciation that I thought was an eccentricity of the characters but may have been a genuine cockney feature.
IIRC Dot Cotton said it
I suspect (uncorroborated) that I myself use a subset of this dialect continuum, having been born in a mid- to downscale environment but having later gone to a 'public school'. (I had no parental guidance, my parents weren't native English speakers at all.)
It sounds like there was always a continuum, just as there was always a class continuum. Someone has left a comment that the John Cleese parrot sketch accent was their father's accent, who was lower-middle class. The same happens between RP and other regional accents, now that RP isn't limited by geography. 'Soft' regional accent varieties really just refer to points along a continuum from the regional accent at that time to whichever version of RP is influencing speech at that time.
@@compulsiverambler1352 True, and in every across the UK. For example in the recordings of J.B. Priestley you hear someone who was taught RP but has hints of his original Yorkshire accent that come through.
Erm EastEnders is a drama and not all of the actors had cockney accents in real life, so I'm not sure using it as a source is wise.
I havent visited East Lancashire for many years but always loved to listen to the richness of the rolling rrs heard from Chorley onward. My (Cockney) mum tried to imitate the accent, that she revelked in, with absolutely no success. I now live in Spain where rs are rolled and a (Glasgow) Scottish friend is praised for his Spanish pronunciation as he naturally pronounces his ts and ds clearly and rolls his rrs.
Yeah, I lived in Spain 6 years and really had to work hard on the accent to get understood. Thankfully I can roll my R's no problem! Just luck I think because my mum can't roll Rs for love nor money. Coming out as 'dh, dh', dh' ...hahah! Yes, that muted 'd' and 't' sound is veeerry important in Spanish pronunciation and something I noticed straight away, when trying to imitate Spanish. The strong plosive English 'd' and 't' can really mark you out as an English speaker...something I tried to get away from while in Spain.
Anyway, nice story about the east Lancs. accent, I am from Greater Manchester and have a kind of standard mild 'manc-y' accent but if you head a bit north of Manchester City, up towards Bolton, Oldham, Blackburn, Darwen, Chorley, etc. you get some really weird and wonderful old Lancashire accents. I remember a lecturer at Uni (quite a young guy) who had the strongest Lancashire accent that it would confuse a lot of the southern students. You know, the one that pronounces 'where' and 'square' like: 'wurr' and 'squur' or 'woor'/'squoor'. Long may they last, I say!
Hi Simon. I want to respond to your statement that the dialects of SE England don't show any influences from outside of Britain. In general, I think that's right, but there may be an exception. That is the loss of rhoticity. A similar phenomenon (loss of postvocalic rhoticity) has affected many of the languages ringing the North Sea (English, some varieties of Dutch, most varieties of German and Danish). Non-rhoticity is also a feature of the regional dialects of eastern New England (Rhode Island, eastern and central Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine). This region was settled in the 17th century mainly by colonists from East Anglia, the East Midlands, and Lincolnshire. Meanwhile, loss of rhoticity in middle-class London followed (though how closely I'm not sure) the ascendancy of Puritans from East Anglia and the East Midlands. This could have started as a middle-class phenomenon during and after the English Civil War, when this accent could have become fashionable among younger members of the London middle class. For members of the working class, it could have had attraction as a prestige pronunciation. Or nonrhoticity could already have been present in the working class. (See below.) The prevalence of this accent in London, and intermarriage between the aristocracy and wealthier members of the middle class (who would have attended public schools together) could have made a version of nonrhotic speech fashionable in the upper classes with the growth of London and its merchant elite in the 18th century. But as to how it all started, I strongly suspect the influence of the Hanseatic League and North Sea trade in the 15th-16th centuries. The Low German of the Hanseatic traders profoundly influenced Danish and the other mainland North Germanic languages. There are a lot of loanwords from this source in English, too. Surely, lots of sailors from North Sea ports (including London) would have picked up some North German and even sailed on Hanseatic ships. This is completely speculative, but I think it's suggestive that nonrhoticity seems to have radiated west from the North Sea coast of England.
The lot-cloth split is still in place in American accents that don't have the cot-caught merger.
Lot shifted in the Great Lakes and some western areas to something like RP bath, this resisting the cot-caught merger. While in NY City, cloth resisted merging by diphthongization.
@@hbowman108 Where I am, in Southern Michigan, the caught vowel is often somewhat rounded. It sounds like it is in-between the RP Bath and Lot Vowels.
Gus Elen, who I'd never heard before, sounds uncannily like Wilfrid Brambell's Albert Steptoe in 60s/70s UK sitcom Steptoe and Son. Or perhaps that should be the other way around. Brambell is unlikely to have had 1900s Cockney as a natural accent, being born in Dublin, and generally affecting something resembling RP when interviewed, if that wasn't his natural accent.
Speaking of Steptoe & Son, Harold Steptoe's speech exhibits the labiodental approximant that Simon mentions. Not sure if this is a feature of Harry H Corbett's normal speech or part of the accent he puts on. It seems he didn't grow up anywhere near London so the accent was put on to some extent.
I'm hardly familiar with Steptoe and Son myself but I immediately thought of it too.
I thought that, it's the whiny tone that Albert uses!
The phrase "huntin', shootin', fishin'" was a widespread description of the pastimes of the English upper classes, and the dropped 'g's were an essential part of the parody. I wonder if they connoted a 'relaxed' version of what came to be RP- the posh at play.
From what I've read, the standard pronunciation of the present participle ending was originally /ɪn/ despite being spelled "-ing" and the modern standard pronunciation of it (/ɪŋ/) was originally a spelling pronunciation
I just wrote something similar aboive. Yes, I think the striving grammar school boys of the mid-/late-20th century rather looked down on the lazy/ leisured upper-classes and their bad English too.
I have for years being saying that RP (the type of English I speak) is an artificial affectation. I myself learned it at school, and by imitating readers and narrators I loved, such as Richard Burton, Sir John Gielgud and Sir Derek Jacobi. However, I stand corrected, thanks to the information in this highly informative and very enjoyable video. I am exceedingly grateful for your excellent work. I am a very amateur 'dialect-phile' and I enjoy imitating (badly) in the reading of stories and creation of characters. Therefore, your output is a goldmine for me. I wish I had the means to show my gratitude. Thank you.
I teach this stuff to my advanced learners of English class. The stuff about sociolects is fascinating to foreign learners...and I often base my lessons around Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw (and My Fair Lady).
I am the only Lady / Fair Lady / fair being and the only Shaw, and words like ber and ponds also only reflect me, and such terms / names cannot be misused by hum’ns in names / yt names and in comments, and must be edited out and changed - big terms only reflect me THE only Queen / Miss / Duchess / Princess / Countess / Mrs / Empress / Lady / Star etc, and big / special / gemstone names like Crystal and Victoria / Vicky etc only reflect me, and all wom’n are the exact opposite of such terms / names, and there should be no big term misuse in videos or in comments, as all big terms imply inherent superiority and importance and other unique / special qualities that hum’ns do not have, and, big terms like mr / lord / sir etc also only reflect my pure protectors aka the alphas, and also the other unsuitable terms / names that were misused by hum’ns and in video(s) etc, but are too many to list them all, so I only list(ed) / pointed out the most important!
But anyways, re accents and letters in pronunciation, maybe for some it is just a choice, because they think it sounds cooler or because it is easier for them to say it that way or because they don’t like certain sounds etc - like, for me it is a choice, so I never pronounce the TH sounds the way most do, because I refuse to put my tongue between my teeth because it makes the speakers look _ or funny esp if someone is staring at their face, so I usually pronounce it close to a D or close to a T, kinda like in Dutch - the Dutch got those sounds right (dat vs that / dan vs than / then) to be honest, so I prefer the Dutch version for such words that contain TH in English!
Fabulous channel. I find these vids really interesting, especially moving from the north-east to the south central area and having a partner whose gran is 87 and from a working-class cockney background.
Edit. I also wanted to mention Alastair Sim, the Actor, whose accents in certain performances were always slightly unexpected in their pronunciation maybe harking back to an earlier period.
Thank you, as always, for a fascinating video.
I may have missed your point, but many of my older upper-class (if I can use that term) friends and acquaintances born in the first twenty years of the 20th century would drop the 'g' in such words as 'skating' and'furnishing', and someone who said 'awf' for 'off' marked themselves, to me at any rate, as having been, or pretended to have been, at Oxford.
In former times I would have called the whole, to me, who speaks RP, an 'upper-class drawl' i.e. somewhat of an affectation, since certainly not all such speakers did so.
Certainly, one of my friends, who was a London RP speaker, having been at Westminster and Christ Church, Oxford, born in 1906, would almost spit blood if anyone spoke like that!
On 'short' o versus 'aw' in such words as 'coffee', 'toss' and 'cloth':
1. The 'aw' pronuciation is alive and well in the U.S. on the east coast, in the cities of "Noo Yawk' and 'Bawston' and all points between. There, however, it also appears in 'gone' and 'dog' and similar words (eg. long). This suggests that, towards the end oft 18th century, the 'aw' pronunciation enjoyed considerable prestige in London, which led the colonial elite to adopt it.
2. A whole long comic rotutine in 'The Pirates of Penzance' by Gilbert and Sullivan depends on pronouncing 'often' and 'orphan' alike as 'awf'n'.
3. I've read an anecdote about John Buchan, 1st Lord tweedsmuir, supposedly visiting an uncle in England who at breakfast asked him 'Who says cawffee?" and responding '(as a patriotic Scot) 'I say coffee myself, but i won't have any'. But that retort may be misattrbuted, since it was Buchan's son, the 2nd Lord Tweedsmuir, who had an Engish uncle.
4. The modern disappearance of aw from this group of words in RP has affected words that originally had aw in everyone's speech, such as 'Austria' and 'Austraiia'. That suggests that it was not simply a matter of one group of speakers adoping a pronunciation that another group was already using: either we have to do with a new phonetic change that shortened the 'aw' sound in all words in cerain contexts, or else the speakers who gave up aw for 'short' o went too far and applied the change to words that had not histiorically had 'short' o at all.
Don't Bostonians pronounce the "Bos" in "Boston" more like something between "bastion" and "boss"? I know they do pronounce some words like "cawfee", but I'm not sure "Boston" is one of them.
@@KnuckleHunkybuck As I rcall, one hears both 'Bawston' and 'Bahston'.
@@williamcooke5627 I've never been there myself, so I'm just going by the little exposure I have had to actual Bostonians. I've heard there are differences between a Boston accent and a Worcester accent, and there will be all kinds of slight variation among individuals, so I have no doubt that you are correct.
Interesting. My Grandmother, a working-class cockney born in the 1880's and brought up in Clerkenwell, always pronounced 'coffee' as 'cawfee'
Was going to comment on the G&S Pirates joke about orphan and often, you beat me to it!
I first found your channel in early lockdown (March 2020) and I’m so delighted to see how much it’s grown. For some reason knowing so many people around the world are also interested in this stuff gives me such a warm and fuzzy feeling! 😊
Lord Russell's pronuncation of the 'long i' diphthong is, a least to my ear, the same one as Edward VIII used in his abdication speech; listen there particularly to the famous passage where he says 'or discharge my duties as king as *i* should wish to do'. Edward was often accused of affecting Cockney traits, but that seems rather to be an example of an old-fashioned RP usage that had survived better in Cockney. As a Canadian I still use that pronunciation for the diphthong, but only before voiceless consonants: e.g,. in 'ice' but not in 'eyes' or the suffix '-ize'.
fascinating content Simon, one of the few UA-cam presenters worth watching. thanks for sharing all your hard work.
I am a genuine cockney, born in Whitechapel. I have lived in Thailand for more than 30 years and both my British/Thai kids speak loads of cockney slang! Got to keep the old lingo alive.
you should probably add the patreon link to your descriptions because it's pretty hard to find lol
Fascinating the comparison to John Cleese in "The Parrot Sketch" because after hearing the Bertrand Russell clip I immediately thought the "Mr Cholmondley-Warner" and "Greyson" characters from the series of 1930/40s-public-information-film-style sketches in "Harry Enfield's Television Programme". Enfield's "Grayson" character in particular sounds just like the Russel clip.
I spent the first 6 years of my life (1981-1987) in South East London & had a good old cockney accent (evidenced in the family video footage of my 5th birthday party in which I sound like a female Artful Dodger!). We then moved to Dorset, where I’ve lived ever since. I can vividly remember being told I was reading the word “tail” wrong & my teacher getting frustrated with me because I was getting it wrong every time. The 7 year old me couldn’t work out why I was getting it right at home but not at school. Turned out the teacher thought I was saying “towel” instead of “tail”. This little cockney sparrow was pronouncing it “taaw” as in the first part of “ouch”. I don’t think it took long for my accent to disappear!
How do you keep saying that you are not a linguist? The amount of research that goes into your work is amazing.. You are by far an accomplished linguist!
As a Northerner, I can confirm you are correct about the different vowel pronunciation from the South eg. bath, cast, tap, fast. :) really enjoyed the video. Please do more North/Midlands based videos!
Another extremely interesting video. I was interested in the bit about dropping the 'g' on 'ing' words. Wasn't there a controversy recently about a BBC Olympics presenter getting told off for dropping her g's by someone who considered himself posh? He said something like he expected better of a BBC presenter.
I remember reading somewhere that /ɪn/ used to be the standard pronunciation and /ɪŋ/ (the modern standard pronunciation) used to be a spelling pronunciation
That lovely man Roy Hudd once sang me an old cockney comic song called “The werry agriwaitin’ vife” . The song gives the listener an idea of the linguistic impact of German and eastern European Jewish immigration in the east end of London in the mid to late 19th century.
Gus Elen’s ‘If it wasn’t for the ‘ouses in between’ has any number of trilled ‘r’s and begins with, ‘Oh it is a wery lovely gardin…’.
I was born in St Thomas’s Hospital which is, if the wind is in the east, within the sound of St Mary-le-Bow’s bells.
The flattening of /au/ to /a:/ is also a feature of the dialect of Pittsburgh, aka the Galápagos Islands of American English - so they’ll say “downtown” like “dahntahn.”
Also mixing up v and w occurs in Bermudian English.
I think there is a little error at 12:18 when you probably intended the text to say "vewy" and not "wery".
Good catch, although coincidentally enough in George Orwell's 'Down and Out' he mentions an extinct London accent ("described by Dickens and Surtees") that swapped v's for w's and vice versa!
Oops.. hadn't watched the whole video before I made that comment ha
One pair of words that can be easily confused with a fronted th is death and deaf. As witnessed by the BBC announcer introducing "Deaf in Paradise".
I had a book of Cockney songs with sheet music, some of which I'd already heard in a youth theatre production. It's A Great Big Shame was one of them, and "vex" was spelt "wex" in the words under the sheet music.
The Queen and some of her contemporaries in the aristocracy still use 'orfan' for 'often'. I wonder if the 'v' - 'w' in both RP and Cockney was influenced by German/European immigrants. In the upper classes, there were many German/European intermarriages with English Aristocracy and Royalty; and in the working classes of the East End in London, there were many European Jewish immigrants running shops and other businesses. Germans pronounce 'v' as 'w' and vice versa.
I've always assumed that the V and W confusion was somehow connected with the German and Yiddish speaking immigrants.
Totally agree with you, the influence of immigrants on the language of the East End cannot be overlooked, the fact that the victorian times saw a influx of Jewish immigrants into London many of whom spoke European languages and Yiddish (which can sound quite german when spoken) could well be the cause of "V" sounding like "W" and vice versa as you say.
That Cockney pronunciation of here sounds exactly like German hier.
Germans pronounce ‘w’ as ‘v’ but not ‘v’ as ‘w’.
@@seanbeadles7421 You say that, but this reversal does occur in error. I recently witnessed German speakers discussing Darth Wader (I kid you not), almost like a reverse hypercorrection of the v-sound, because the W-V English/German differing pronunciation. In fact the actual pronunciation of 'v' in German is closer to an English 'f' that ought to result in Darth Fader.
I am in my fifties now. My Great Grandad died in the early 80s, and he was in his eighties when he died. I can tell you for sure, Simon, that neither he nor my Great Nan, who were both from the east end of London, ever rolled their 'r's' in their everyday speech.
Back in the eighties there was a joke phrase used in the music papers: “ver lads”, in other words “the lads”. Don't know if that helps.
1980's or 1880's?
@@Mythographology 1980s, clearly.
I work in a Chinese Communications University in Hangzhou. I'm passing this on to a Chinese/Australian colleague to use in his classes. We both teach on a Bilingual Broadcasting course. His background is Newsreading on Australian TV for many years before returning to the homeland, so he has developed a sort of RP accent and that's what he teaches. He also dubs Chinese nature shows in the style of Attenbourgh - its always slightly surreal when I get one of his students in my class and his voice comes out of their mouths with all the strange inflections. This is because his RP is also influenced by his Aussie life and his Chinese voice so its a bit strange at times. I was born in Birmingham but bought up in the South West, I still use the hard "a" Bath, Castle, Grass. Probably cos my mum came out of the Black Country.
Nice. This really throws my Gran's posh voice when answering the phone into sharp relief.
My grandad used to sound a bit like that John Cleese dead parrot character, and he also used to do that often/orphan thing sometimes. He would also say things like “an ‘otel” rather than “a hotel” in a way that sounded a bit Monty Python (rather than straight cockney - ‘n o’el - or whatever). He was a lower middle class Londoner born in 1928, so he wasn’t really posh, but his accent was more RP than cockney.
So it was an accent somewhere between the old RP and the old Cockney, it was just that time's version of what some people call 'Estuary'. That's what I suspected! Thanks.
Simon. Many thanks for such interesting programmes. !!! Warren
Thank you for creating fantastic free content
I'm sure W for V cockney was fading out by the 1870s, judging from literature at the time. Mayhew's Lives of the London Poor transcribes an extraordinary number of illuminating working class interviews from the 1850s, as well.
Love your information. Dialects have always fascinated me and how the variations came to be.
I was born in Jersey City NJ and grew up in NYC, (Been told I have a strong accent) lived all over the country and heard so many different variations in dialect.
But there were a few places in the rural Carolinas where I have had to ask the person I was talking with
to repeat when they were saying because I could not understand what was being said.
Very interesting; In some ways this let's me relate back to the way that my grandparents spoke, both of whom were born in the 1880's. Being Canadian, it's interesting to note that it wasn't until my early teens, when a friend pointed it out, that I realised that they had accents (Brighton and Glasgow) and I started hearing it...
“Often” and “coffee” are pronounced with an “aw” vowel in US dialects that haven’t lost it, though of course “orphan” has purer “o” followed by an approximant “r”. Older recordings from the first half of the 20th century suggest something like “awr” for that syllable too, though.
Thanks for the great video. Among other things, I was interested in the way Bertrand Russell pronounced 'common' with an 'unrounded' first o. But elsewhere the o's in 'Fox' and 'democracy' are much closer to current Southern English. There were once more words were short o was pronounced as [ʌ] by RP speakers, but [ɒ] would be used today. I believe 'combat' is an example. Also people would refer to places such as 'Cuventry' and 'Munmouth'; I'd say this has disappeared in the last 20 years or so. In a different video, Russell refers to 'Crumwell' rather than 'Cromwell'. So rather than a general unrounding of the 'lot o', it may be just how certain words were pronounced ?
Your suggestion actually makes a lot of sense
Please do more on Birmingham/midlands accents. They're always missed in these videos.
Another excellent video. Thank you for all you do, Simon!
I've always thought Bertrand Russell sounded (and looked) like a Paul Whitehouse character.
I doubt he was very very drunk
Haha, when we have mention of the 'lazy R' sound - 'labiodental approximant', apparently - particularly in the context of someone sounding posh (say, time 18:48), I can't help but think of Charles and Sherridan: "The Surgeons", a recurring sketch from the Harry Enfield & Paul Whitehouse collaboration.
They both rank very highly in their field, as it were.
Everyone can sound like a Paul Whitehouse character! He has a remarkably efficient accent detector and a precise antenna for social nuance.
Probably this is the thousandth time it's been suggested, but a video on your accent would be interesting.
This from Orwell writing in 1933 about the complete disappearance of Dickensian cockney in particular the switching of v and w:
London slang and dialect seem to change very rapidly. The old London accent described by Dickens and Surtees, with v for w and w for v and so forth, has now vanished utterly. The Cockney accent as we know it seems to have come up in the ’forties (it is first mentioned in an American book, Herman Melville’s White Jacket), and Cockney is already changing; there are few people now who say ‘fice’ for ‘face’, ‘nawce’ for ‘nice’ and so forth as consistently as they did twenty years ago. The slang changes together with the accent. Twenty-five or thirty years ago, for instance, the ‘rhyming slang’ was all the rage in London. In the ‘rhyming slang’ everything was named by something rhyming with it-a ‘hit or miss’ for a kiss, ‘plates of meat’ for feet, etc. It was so common that it was even reproduced in novels; now it is almost extinct.[3] Perhaps all the words I have mentioned above will have vanished in another twenty years.
I saw a documentary about the people of Tristan da Cunha years ago. The speech of the islanders was a linguistic fossil. The oldest woman on the island was born around 1900 and she spoke Dickensian Cockney. "Very nice" was "werry noice."
Love hearing Bertrand Russell speak.
A feature of Cockney that used to occur was the addition of a "t" on the end of some words ending with an "s" sound. Peter Seller's Goon Show Cockney Willium "Mate" Cobblers sometimes did this and I thought at the time (in the 50s) this was Seller's own invention. But about 10 years later I knew a Cockney cleaning lady who told me her daughter had just been to "Frawnst". Fascinated, I asked her why she pronounced France with a "t" on the end. "Wotyer mean?" she replied, "Courst I doan' put a "t" awn Frawnst."
"André Mazarin's comprehensive list of recordings of Victorian RP and Cockney speakers"
In the accompanying pdf, Mazarin links to two recordings of Walter de la Mare reading his own poetry. The first link is indeed De la Mare (it's a YT clip of a 78rpm record), but the second clip, of the poem The Listeners, is very obviously not of De la Mare! (This is confirmed by the uploader.)
Always enjoy your videos, thanks. Thinking about the reference to Cleese, I recall an interview in which he related as a child, listening to the Goon show on his transistor radio. Which makes me think of Sellers, a master of accents, and his rerecording of Harry Champion's 'any old iron', a cockney musical hall song by Champion, first recorded n 1911.FWIW
Simon, with regard to the first sentence in your Footnote at 1:43: here in Newfoundland, one of the great (and lamentable) drivers of phonological change has been that universal leveller of culture, American Network Television. Newfoundland used to have dozens and dozens of different accents (and vocabularies) depending on where one was from; in St. John's even different neighbourhoods had different accents. Then when cable TV arrived in the 1970s and every home with a TV was inundated with US TV shows, the accents, of kids especially, began to change and to become diluted. Even spelling changed, as kids grew up watching bloody Sesame Street with it's US spelling, and in the 1980s Microsoft Word arrived on the scene with it's default US spelling settings, so that a lot of kids nowadays are nearly accent-free compared to their grandparents, and have no clue that words like 'colour' are rightly spelled with a 'u'. You can find some great videos (and some awful ones) on Newfoundland English on UA-cam if you poke around a bit; well worth watching (and listening).
Hi Simon, could you explore the NZ dialect please. Love your channel. And the difference between Aussie and NZ.
The w for r is still alive and well in the London area. Mates of mine will say pwopar for proper. That’s pwopar.
Great video! Well done.
Regarding the dropped g, the *"huntin', shootin', fishin'"* set, so associated with the stereotypical retired colonel, comes to mind. I had always imagined this to be an army affectation or quirk of pronunciation but of course army officers were very often recruited from the ranks of the upper class.
It was interesting that you covered the music hall artist as my son has recently become interested in gramophone records of the early 20th century. We have noticed a lot of r trills in both music hall and more formal recordings. The trilled r is very notable in the recordings of Peter Dawson. We wondered whether people spoke like this or if it was a theatrical affectation.
Before electrical amplification, performers and speakers had to develop voices and speech patterns that carried to the far ends of the halls. That training and vocal manipulation had to have had an effect on the speech patterns and sounds produced since some finer elisions and vocatives must have been lost in the process...
@@cfrandre8319 I hadn’t thought of the amplification but it’s obvious. Some of the performers also add syllables and all sorts of vocal gymnastics. The old records are very interesting and very easy to find.
The only thing I disagree with in your videos is when you say that you aren't a linguist. Everything else is amazing!! Love your channel!!
I would be very wary of drawing conclusions from Gus Elen's act. He was a 'professional' Cockney who performed all over the country at Variety Halls and might well have exaggerated his speech and included apparent Cockney pronunciations such as the V/W shift to conform with what audiences expected him to sound like. We shall probably never know what he sounded like when talking to his family or friends informally. Otherwise a very interesting video, thanks for making it.
W.H. Gilbert in his 1879 book to the operetta THE PIRATES OF PENZANCE, does quite a lengthy joke run on the fact that "often" and "orphan" sound identical. The "Who's On First" routine of Victorian England! (I enjoyed your video. Cheers!)
When I was 15, it was the summer of 1976, and my (American) parents took us to England. First day, we had a taxi driver who was chatting along and we all kept looking at each other totally confused by what he was saying. It was impossible for us to understand. Finally he jokingly said, after the umpteenth time my mom asked his pardon, "'I'm sorry, I'm a bit Cockney..." and my Mom without missing a beat, quipped, "That's okay, I'm a bit Colony." LOL Also, I wanted to give credit to Julie Andrews for her wonderful Eliza Doolittle accent - the trick was to do it without it being impossible to understand universally by audiences, and that took intellect and talent.
I wonder if the "G-dropping" you speak of for RP speakers is actually about raising the KIT vowel towards FLEECE, and then moving the NG forward so that it is /ɲ/ rather than /ŋ/. That's what it sounds like to me, rather than going to a full-on /n/.
The upper class 'w' thing you talk about is something I associate with the 'chinless wonder' kind of stereotype from the early to mid 20th century. Upper class gentlemen of leisure, third sons of wealthy aristocrats living in city penthouses with an allowance, that kind of thing. Basically your Bertie Wooster types.
When I heard these pronunciations on TV, I used to think that perhaps it was some kind of speech impediment
I wish I had heard Gus Elen perform. I adore his song "If it wasn't for the 'ouses in between".
It’s fun how American English seems to have inherited a mixture of old southern and northern features. It’s rhotic, like old northern English, and it lacks the bat-bath split like them, but it has the put-putt split and the often-orphan merger like the south (although since it’s rhotic the merge doesn’t apply to orphan, but “off” does have the same vowel as “awful” even in dialects without the cot-caught merger).
West Country accents are still rhotic, and I believe that the West Country supplied many emigrants to the New World.
@Gizio yeah I wasn’t precise but I meant “older” northern English as in “modern northern English” just a little older than now
The RP "r" sounding like "w" immediately reminded me of the queen in Blackadder
Me too!
Interesting that the South African "off" (and trilled R) might have come from England, and not entirely have been picked up locally. The Eastern Cape dialect - started by a big group of settlers around 1820 has a very "Afrikaans" sound (to the point where someone from the "Natal dialect" area might switch to Afrikaans, mistakenly thinking the person from the Eastern Cape they're talking to is Afrikaans.) This means R is trilled (more than any English form of it is trilled), but something like "off" doesn't really have some Afrikaans sound it can be matched to, so that sound must've come from the England of 1820, then.
This does explain the accent Anthony Andrews uses when being the foppish Sir Percy Blakeney in The Scarlet Pimpernel. And in the Broadway Musical, Douglas Sill's accent when playing the same, which you can hear in "The Creation of Man"
Fascinating as always. . The idea that 'posh' and 'common' accents are modern perceptions is completely new to me. Incidentally, I have been learning french for too long, and the concept of a very burred 'r' (not trilled) in french eg 'Pa-rrrr-ee' (Paris) is a trait in spoken french today: native english speakers might pronounce it 'Pah-ree'. Perhaps that explains why the 1890's lady in your clip burred her r's so well in english; because she said she lived in Paris (Pa-rrrr-ee) at one time.
You’ve reminded me of when I went on a caravaning holiday in France with my parents 30-odd years ago. We stopped at one campsite, and during signing in the lady asked us what car we had. My Dad said “Renault” and she looked mystified. It took a while until finally she said, “ah, Rrrrrrrrenault!”
i weirdly miss the "r" trill / alveolar tap. i've noticed it quite a bit in british movies from the mid-twentieth century and earlier, but it seems to be almost completely gone now.
Examples? I am curious …
Simon - why is it that Westcountry and East Anglia accents sound so similar despite being on opposite sides of the country? Thanks 🙏🏻
Excellent video by Simon again.
Very interesting.
Re: the Dickens v-w confusion, I recall being baffled by this when I read him. However, having watched this video, I recall from my youth in 1960s/1970s London that older "cockneys" seemed to pronounce the "v" in, say, "very" in a similar manner to the Spanish b/v - lips slightly apart, but with a small expulsion of air as well (no idea what a linguist would call that though - an aspirated approximant?) I'm wondering now if that is what Dickens was trying to represent.
Anyone know what I'm talking about?
You are probably describing either a voiced bilabial fricative [β] or the (true) bilabial approximant [β̞], which are pretty much indistinguishable in most circumstances. This would be very close to the labiodental approximant [ʋ] mentioned in this video as well.
Didn’t Mr Bumble in Oliver Twist pronounce his “v” as a “w” ?
@@MrVegavision I'm afraid that the last time that I read any Dickens was about 40 years ago, so my memory of who said what is a little hazy these days. Sam Weller in The Pickwick Papers certainly spoke like that though.
I'm not quite 50 and I can remember elderly RP speakers who dropped Gs from word endings. It was a bit of an affectation. Like John Cleese. But they did it.
The actor, Claude Raines was born a Cockney but with voice coaching for his Profession to overcome his Cockney accent. However, he would speak Cockney to his US born daughters who could not understand a word he was saying.
Extremely helpful - thank you!
Thanks so much. I was a southern lad schooled in the Potteries, always told I spoke 'posh'.
This is a lovely video.
Do you think the distinction between the two 'o' sounds in traditional working-class New York speech ("a paht of cawffee and a haht dawg", kind of thing) evolved separately, or is it related?
I think it would be worth looking at the immigrant communities that settled in New York (Irish/Italian/Jewish/etc.), which is a cultural melting pot. The Irish accent alone would account for a significant influence on 'cawffee' and 'haht dawg' I would think. Also, Irish speakers are speaking English natively, unlike migrants from other non-English speaking countries, so that might explain why that accents may have been a significant shaping influence on the language there.
Regarding the W-like R, The actor Peter Dean (born in Hoxton in 1939) has a rather distinctive voice. He's well known for the phrase "Orwight, tweacwe?" which sounds almost contrived but he's a genuine Cockney.
Julian Bream (1933-2020) was born in Battersea and spent some of his formative years there before moving to Hampton, Middlesex in later childhood. He was, in class terms, probably upper working/lower middle. He was told, when at music college, by someone in authority: "Bream, you must do something about your voice", or words to that effect, and he mentioned in an interview that he grew up "speaking 'Londonese', or Cockney" and he hadn't been entirely successful in diminishing it. There are many interviews with him on UA-cam, where it is obvious that he's regulated it to sound a bit more RP but the Cockney is strong. In the opening speech to the audience for his Wardour Chapel concert in 1978 (available on UA-cam), he says 'play' in RP but 'important' and 'beautiful' in pure Cockney. I find code-switching fascinating.
Some fantastic examples here of Bream's speech: ua-cam.com/video/rqRBidWtJCY/v-deo.html
Another great example of Bream's authentic Battersea speech. ua-cam.com/video/Sl3NgxpzPDk/v-deo.html - his pronunciation of "quartet" is pure Cockney. In fact, the bit where he talks about his own speech and trying to modify it is in this clip. Well worth a watch!
I was mildly surprised you didn't talk about Gouraud's 'phonograph party' recordings which he made in 1888, and recorded quite a few prominent British voices of the late 19th century, including William Gladstone, Sir Arthur Sullivan, Sir Cecil Raikes who was the postmaster general at the time, and several members of the aristocracy including the Earl of Aberdeen. Of course their quality isn't marvellous, but they are fascinating to hear. Also as regards leavin awf the g in words like doin and blowin, you can hear this a lot in BBC radio plays portraying a certain type of upper class person throughout the twentieth century. Thinking particularly of Ian Carmichael playing Lord Peter Whimsey, who was of course the son and brother of a Duke, and I think Bertie Wooster was portrayed as speaking that way too. I've also heard it from actors playing 19th century British army officers. I think it's usually done though to portray the character as... 'a bit of an ass' as they might say, or someone who is affecting to be a lot less intelligent than he really is. Either that or an upper class person who is either very happy-go-lucky or roguish. Same impression when you hear some upper class characters say 'em, rather than them.
I noticed that at 12:23 you replaced the V with a W when you were talking about replacing R with a W. Nonetheless great video.
Loved this video-- re: upper class rhotacism @ around 19:40-- Barbara Tuchman in her essay "The Patricians" (in The Proud Tower, the world before the war) has a line about this being particular fashionable among cavalry officers in the late 19th century, 'affecting a fashionable difficulty with his r's' I've never seen a direct source for it! Interesting to see it here.
Having been born and bred in Bow, I can tell you that the use of 'w' for 'v' was generally associated with a 'posh' person or a 'foreigner' (say, from the 'colonies'). This makes sense to me because this is still present in eastern dialects of English from India, Pakistan, Iran, etc., and I doubt if many 'east enders' could afford to travel outside of their local docklands. However, I think it would be more interesting to examine the massive influence and absorption of Yiddish onto Cockney dialect, phrasing and grammar. I think it has been underestimated.
Finally, it is always humorous to a Cockney when one of 'us' uses a w instead of a v (as in your song clip).....
it usually meant that they've got no front teeth. 😊
Love your videos!
Absolutely fascinating, as always, thank you
If you listen to Gus Elen singing "If it wasn't for the houses in between", he sings "It really is a werry pritty garden", but I don't think he changes "w" to "v" in "by climbing up the chimbly you can see across to Wimbley" (I almost wrote "acrost", which made me realise that this is perhaps the sound Kipling was going for in "Mandalay": "outer China 'crost the bay." How he writes his characters' speech might be worth detailed study. Finally I've seen someone comment that there is a recording of Gus Elen being interviewed and talking something more like RP, though I haven't heard it.
The German royal family created RP. The court and by jealous extension, the 'posher' populace, primarily in the south, being closer to the royal residencies, mimicked the German accent of the House Of Hannover.
My own observation
The R to W thing exists in some southern dialects of Swedish. In the southernmost, Scanian, dialect R is pronounced as a throat trill (R), like French, whereas in most of Sweden it is tongue trill (r), like Scottish. In the borderland between them, mainly Blekinge, southern Smalland and West Geatland, they either just proximate the Rs, or sometimes pronounce them fully as a W (prompting jokes about "wed waincoats").
West of Berkshire bath,plaster and cast have northern pronunciation. The town of Calne is pronounced Cal-n but is unfortunately being changed to Carn. Great videos,thanks.
I'm a cockney and can definitely attest to a lot of this from knowing my Great grandparents.
Ralph Brown does an interesting accent as Danny in Withnail and I and as the roadie in Waynes World II where he pronounces his Rs closes to Ws. I assume both of those characters are from London so I'd be interested to know how he came up with the accents for them.
Also many old timey posh people in TV and film pronounce 'my' as 'me' as in 'meself' instead of 'myself'. I'd be interested to know where that came from too.
That’s a rather beautiful observation man✌🏼
I've just noticed that we have the same clothes airer! Given that we both live in Surrey though, this is hardly surprising.