Everyone’s heard of ‘Cockney’.

[ssba] If there is one English accent that everyone has heard of, far more so than either RP or Estuary, it is Cockney. Pronunciation teachers will confirm this – students who have never heard of other regional accents will always recognise Cockney (at least by name).

Characteristics of a cockney accent.

There are a great many phonetic differences between Cockney and RP, some of the most noticeable are:

1. ‘th’

Cockney would replace voiceless ‘th’ /θ/ in words like ‘think’, ‘theatre’, ‘author’, with /f/, so they would be pronounced /fɪŋk/, /fɪəʔə/, /ɔ:fə/:

/fɪŋk/, /fɪəʔə/, /ɔ:fə/

Similarly, voiced ‘th’ in ‘the’, ‘this’, and ‘Northern’, would be pronounced /v/, so /və/, /vɪs/ and /nɔ:vən/:

/və/, /vɪs/, /nɔ:vən/

2. Glottal Stops /ʔ/

Cockney speakers will use glottal stops to replace /t/ before consonants and weak vowels:

water /wɔ:ʔə/, cottage /kɒʔɪdʒ/

It is also common for a glottal stop to replace a /k/ before a consonant:

blackboard /bleʔbɔ:d/

3. /æ/ replaced with /e/

Any word producing the front open /æ/ vowel would be pronounced with mid-open /e/ instead:

blackboard, bat, that

4. ‘h’ dropping

In cockney, you don’t pronounce /h/ at all. So ‘horrible’ is /ɒrɪbəw/, ‘hospital’ is /ɒspɪʔəw/, ‘who’ is /uː/ and ‘help’ is /ewp/.

horrible /ɒrɪbəw/, hospital /ɒspɪʔəw/, who /uː/, help /ewp/

Who speaks Cockney?

Traditionally a cockney speaker was born within the sound of the ‘Bow Bells’ (St Mary Le Bow Church), the accent is associated with East London – particularly the boroughs of Hackney and Tower Hamlets. This is not really the case any more, with large parts of modern East London inhabited by Asian communities who speak ‘Multicultural London English‘, many of the cockney speaking communities have reportedly moved further East into Essex.