There’s a British accent that I’ve heard from time to time and I was wondering if it had a name (like “Cockney” or “Oxford”). Pratchett uses it regularly (for Gaspode) and Jack Wilde who played the Artful Dodger from the movie version of Oliver! and the TV show H.R.Pufinstuff had it as well.
It’s not Cockney since "H"s aren’t dropped or added.
Some “rules” I’ve figured out to help identify it.
1)“Th” at the beginning of a word is often pronounced “F” (ie “Fings” instead of “Things”)
2)“Th” at the end of a word is pronounced “V” (ie “wiv” instead of “with”)
Short “a” is often prounounced “oh”. I haven’t figured out the exact rules yet. (ie: “wot” instead of “what”)
“Me” is used in place of “my”
A typical sentence in this accent would be “Fings ain’t wot they used to be wiv me girlfriend.”
Sounds like it’s a stereotyped working class / lower middle class London accent to me, or maybe the much-maligned “estuary English” of Essex-born people around the Thames Estuary.
Someone speaking the way you described would most probably come from the East End of London, and not have benefitted from the finest education the city has to offer. We would say “an East End accent” - there is no snappy equivalent such as ‘Cockney’.
In recent years some academic or other identified what he termed “estuary English”, referring to region in and around the Thames estuary. This shares some of the ‘East End’ sounds. However, it is more heavily influenced by the speech patterns of neighbouring county Essex, and has its own peculiarities such as the transposition of ‘w’ for ‘l’, e.g. ‘milk’ becomes ‘miwk’.
In Fawlty Towers, Terry the chef speaks with an East End accent inflected with traces of Cockney.
In reality, many Londoners speak with a mongrel ‘accent’ which contains elements of Cockney, ‘East End’ and ‘Estuary’. This is part and parcel of the fact that nowhere is English so slaughtered as it is in England, where the natives neither know how to use it correctly nor care to learn.
media invention, media fad Sir Doris. Oh - and welcome to the boards.
As regards the OP: like most Londoners I can quite easily differentiate between more than a few different London accents. I myself have something of a North London accent - characterised by such words as “wolls” instead of “walls” and “saaaaaaandwiches”. Gaspode’s accent always strikes me as Essex/East London (as mentioned). However the Artful Dodger is different again, coming from a different period in time - I’m not sure how I’d classify that one.
Watch out for those Sarf Lon’eners though. ::shudder::
Is it not just possible that the accents used by Jack Wilde and characters in books may not actually be an accurate representation of any real accent at all?
Cockney and East End accents are the same thing (look up ‘Cockney’ in a dictionary). These accents will have developed over the years though, just like any accent. The East End is not stuck in a time warp.
Estuary English is greatly influenced by the East End. A large proportion of the residents of southern Essex originated from the East End, dropping their H’s all along the Fenchurch St to Southend line as they went.
Hi Ticker. Interesting. I did wonder whether to count these two as the same or not! I guess I felt that if I did, someone rather pedantic would point out that while a Cockney accent is necessarily an East End one, the reverse is not necessarily true. One can be in the East End of London without being within earshot of Bow Bells, no?
But then one might say they still sound the same, whether technically Cockney or not. Well, I can’t claim to be an expert but it just doesn’t sound that way to me. Then again I’ve only lived in The Smoke for 14 years. I hail from the North West, nr Manchester, so perhaps I lack a good ear for the accents of my more southerly friends! I’m happy to sit corrected.
Note for foreigners: the technical definition of a ‘Cockney’ is said to be ‘one born within earshot of the sound of Bow Bells’, Bow being one area of East London.
I’ve only been in London once (last year, week and a half, best vacation of my life) and I can tell the difference between the sterotypical Cockney accent “Ho Hit’s a jolliee 'olidaie wif yew Mary Poppins!” and the accenct I described (which I’ll refer to as East End) “Oh, it’s a jolly holeeeday wiv yew, Marwy (just a hint of the “w” in Mary…not nearly so Fuddesque) Poppins”
(Note that I’m not making fun of the accent. I like it and the way it sounds, which is why I wanted to find out more about it.)
I was just about to ask that. Where does the word come from though?
Confusingly, whilst Bow is in the East End good and proper, Bow Church, home of the bells, is slap bang in the middle of the City on Cheapside. (another note for foreigners: The City refers only to the 1 square mile of the medieval city, located on the eastern side of central London. The East End extends from the eastern edge of The City). I would guess that the sound of the bells would have carried quite far before modern high-rise buildings and traffic noise. The East End was always more densely populated and squalid than to the West, hence the bias in the term Cockney.