If you go back a hundred years in London, there are two clearly distinguishable accents.

The upper and educated classes spoke an accent widely known as Received Pronunciation, but also going by ‘The Queen’s English’ or ‘BBC English’. The working classes spoke in a London accent – Cockney.

There was not much in between these 2 accents, so if you watch early films set in London, the characters are normally speaking one or the other of these accents.

Fast forward a hundred years to the present day, and we can see a wider range of accents. You can still hear cockney, especially to the East and in parts of Essex, but RP is dying out – young people are not adopting this accent. Instead we have 3 new accents: Standard Southern British (SSB) which is spoken by the middle classes, Estuary which is a mixture of SSB and Cockney, and Multicultural London English, which is widely spoken in diverse urban areas of London.

The reasons for this diversification of accents in and around London are simple: in post-war Britain, the class system changed and gave rise to a large middle class population in the South East of England. London itself diversified with new communities from all over the world, especially South Asia, West Africa and Jamaica.

This diversifying society naturally will sound different from the more binary one that went before, and so over the last 50 years or so, the three new accents SSB, Estuary and MLE have become the most widely spoken in the South East. They have all gained wider reach too with MLE appearing in other large cities such as Manchester, Estuary has spread throughout the South East in a way cockney never did, and SSB is now the go-to accent in broadcasting and education.

In the video lesson below, I explore these accents using one simple sentence: “I hope the room’s quieter.”

Each of the accents sounds different with H dropping, T Glottalisation, smoothing, and many vowel position variations playing a role.

When you’ve finished the lesson, take the quiz below to test your skills!