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John Wells's phonetic blog

来源：泰然健康网时间：2025年05月08日 19:02

Wednesday 25 March 2008

Changing London speech

Daniel Moog wrote to say that according to an article he had read

an occurrence currently happening in London is the development of a “multi-ethnic dialect” seeming independent of social origin and including patterns “from Cockney, Jamaican creole, Bengali and other languages”. ...Is it rather fact than fiction or is it more like a hype such as about Estuary English? What is your opinion?

My reply was that this research is highly respectable, being the work of well-known sociolinguists. To quote this report,

The teenagers also used words like blud (blood, meaning mate), creps (trainers), yard (house), and endz (area or estate). Prof Kerswill believes this new form of speech, which they refer to as Multicultural London English (MLE), arose as more recent immigrants learned English with few English-speaking role models. “I think there has been a change in the last 30 years. The first generation of Afro-Caribbean children in London would have spoken Cockney, but they would have kept their own Caribbean patois and switched between the two. Now their descendants - and young people of other ethnicities - are inventing a new form of English.”

The phonetic part is reported more technically in an article written by Jenny Cheshire, Sue Fox, Paul Kerswill & Eivind Torgersen, from which the following chart is taken.

What particularly interests me is the change in vowel qualities among young inner-city speakers.

You can see in this formant plot the striking anticlockwise movement of TRAP, STRUT, FOOT and GOOSE (/æ, ʌ, ʊ, uː/). This makes cat, for example, into [kat], so pretty similar to older Cockney cut, and leaves cut as [kɑt], with a very similar quality to that of cart [kɑːt]. Meanwhile FOOT and GOOSE lose their rounding and are no longer back but central or even front: /ʊ/ becomes more schwa-like and /uː/ turns into a sort of [ɨː] that can sound alarmingly similar to RP /iː/.

As the authors say, this confirms what they had already observed in other southeastern localities. (See also this blog for 4 October 2007.)

In London, however, they find that the changes in STRUT and GOOSE are led by young non-Anglos (of African, West Indian etc. heritage) and Anglos (white English) with non-Anglo friends rather than by Anglos who socialize mainly with other Anglos. It makes the new London STRUT similar to Jamaican STRUT but makes GOOSE very different from Jamaican GOOSE, which is firmly back and rounded.

The authors go on to describe the “reversal” of the London diphthong shift, leading to the restoration of RP-like qualities for FACE, GOAT, PRICE and MOUTH. Furthermore, they report, the young speakers drop h very much less than the older people; and they have an innovation called K-backing, involving [q] or something similar before non-high back vowels, as in cousin, car, cot, caught.

There is a Powerpoint presentation about it here.

Jenny Cheshire