Paul Kerswill

Cockney transformed: who are the Eastenders now?

London’s Cockney dialect is one of very few working-class urban varieties in Britain to have its own well-established label. Its features were portrayed by Dickens in some of his London characters, and it was the object of disapproval in Shaw’s Pygmalion. Centuries of immigration to London have had relatively few direct effects on the changes in Cockney. However, this is no longer the case. Since around 1980, radical changes to the vowel system, particularly the diphthongs, and new discourse features including a this is + speaker quotative, attest to linguistic innovation induced by high levels of language contact in the East End mediated by second-language learning. This has resulted in a repertoire of speech forms used by young working-class people which we have labelled Multicultural London English. In this paper, using a corpus analysis of interviews with some 140 young Londoners, I focus on the way they discursively construct their own way of speaking. It is clear that they are ambivalent about ‘Cockney’, usually defining it as ‘the other’, belonging to people who are possibly older, white, using rhyming slang, and living in another borough. They position their speech as separate from both Cockney and Received Pronunciation (or ‘posh’), and many simply call it ‘slang’. Many see it as non-racial, but others, particularly those living in an outer-city borough, see it as essentially ‘black’. My conclusions are that expressions of linguistic identity are still relatively unfocused, reflecting the highly fluid inner-city London society.