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low birth rank who’d made a mint during the
Industrial revolution were seeking ways to separate
themselves from their social origins. These people
began cultivating a prestigious non-rhotic
pronunciation in order to demonstrate their new
upper-class status. This lofty manner of speaking was
promoted through new dictionaries and taught by
elocution teachers and gradually became standardised
as Received Pronounciation. Meanwhile the folk in
the north of England, Scotland and Ireland largely
maintained their rhotic accents. Most American
accents have stayed rhotic too with a few exceptions
like New York and Boston which became non-rhotic
– these were the cities that even after the
Revolutionary War remained under the strongest
influence by the British elite.
Estuary English
Estuary English, a dialect spoken by both working
and middle class people along the Thames and its
estuary was first identified by David Roswarne in
The Times Educational Supplement
in 1984.
Rosewarne argued that it would eventually replace
both Received Pronounciation and Cockney in the
south-east. Estuary English is non-rhotic inserts an
r
when no
r
is present to prevent two consecutive
vowel sounds, Dune sounds like June and Tuesday
sounds like Choose day. There’s an alveolar stop
which takes the
t
off the end of can’t. Aitches aren’t
dropped as consistently as they are in Cockney but
he never did
might creep in instead of
he did not.
The good news for English language purists is that
Estauary English isn’t having all it’s own way as
other forms of dialect, such as British Asian (‘innit!),
so called
Jafaican
(d’ya get me?) and even the effects
of television programmes (every sentence becomes a
question in the style of Australia’s Neighbours) are
having even more effect on Received Pronunciation .
Um, that’s the bad news too.
The Old Dialects
When I first started answering the telephone here at
City & Village Tours 25 years ago there was much
more variety in the way people sounded. There was
still very much a Kentish accent, a distinct Sussex
and Hertfordshire sound and as for Hampshire, well
you’ve not really lost your accent have you? The
Kentish dialect of old was very colourful – I vote
we bring back
better-most
for the best
, jawsy
for a
chatterbox and
yarping
for a whinging child. Kentish
was first spoken in Kent, Surrey, southern Hampshire
and the Isle of Wight by the Jutes. Dickens, living at
Higham near Rochester, captured a flavour of the
Kentish dialect with characters like Sam Weller in
The Pickwick Papers:
“
Business first, pleasure arterwards, as King Richard
the Third said ven he stabbed t’other king in the
Tower, afore he smothered the babbies”
Authors have also long dipped into the Sussex dialect
for good words: Kiplings Puck of Pooks Hill (toad
stool and fairy respectively) and JK Rowling’s
Dumbledore (bee) are good examples. Old terms for
birds that predate Victorian ornithology are also good
dialect words, yaffle for green woodpecker comes
from the old Sussex dialect and made it onto the
television screen in my childhood with Professor
Yaffle on the old clock in the Bagpuss shop window.
Sussex being a seafaring country had lots of dialect
names for its fishermen: chop-backs in Hastings,
jugs in Brighton, mudlarks in Rye, pork-bolters in
Worthing and the winnicks or willicks of Eastbourne
where whitearse pie (Great Northern Wheatear) was a
great delicacy. Sussex also had more than 30 words
for mud including clodgy, gubber, pug, slurry, slub,
smeary and stodge – three of which have clearly
made into our modern vocabularly. From the old
Sussex dialect we might also find ourselves feeling