Cockney Accent

Some of you may have heard of this famous accent before. Especially because of the well-known film My Fair Lady, starring Audrey Hepburn. When we talk about a Cockney accent we talk about an accent which is associated to the South East of England, concretely to a particular part of London, to East London.  As it originated there, it shares many characteristics with other dialects in the region such as Estuary English and RP. Its more important features are:

•           Non –rhoticity
•           Glottal stopping, better becomes /be?ə/
•           L-vocalisation:  The phoneme l in final-word position usually becomes a vowel sound. Milk becomes /miok/
•           Th-Fronting, that is, the pronunciation of <th> as /f/ or /v/. Thing becomes “fing”.
•           H- dropping, that is, the non-pronunciation of the sound /h/. Horrible becomes /ɒrɪbəw/.
•           Vowel raising. 3. /æ/ replaced with /e/
•         Any word producing the front open /æ/ vowel would be pronounced with mid-open /e/ instead: ran becomes /ren/

Exercises

1. Cockney rhyming slang, the secret language of London. Go to this webpage and find what Cockney rhyming slang is. http://www.cockneyrhymingslang.co.uk/cockney_rhyming_slang/
2. Do some research and look for at least 5 Cockney rhyming slang phrases.
3. Watch the following video and try to identify at least three features described above.