In response to a group petition, Tower Hamlets council in east London has designated Cockney as a “group language”. This recognition paves the way in which for the borough to actively problem the linguistic discrimination that audio system of “non-standard” English dialects face.
Analysis in 2023 discovered that younger individuals within the south-east of England now not communicate the number of English we consider as “Cockney”. This has led some pundits to decry what they perceive to be the dying of this longstanding dialect.
Cockney has lengthy been held, within the public creativeness, as a felony code of rhyming slang that emerged amongst Londoners born within the sound of Bow bells. That is traditionally inaccurate.
Our new report identifies – and challenges – the discriminatory, anti-working-class ideologies that underlie myths about Cockney and different non-standard types of English Englishes.
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Cockney was initially posh
The earliest quotation of Cockney dates again to the 1390s. In his medieval poem, Piers Plowman, writes: “And I sigge, bi my soule, I haue no salt Bacon, Ne no Cokeneyes”. A “Cockeneye” was an imaginary “cock’s egg” – the speaker is saying he had nothing to eat, not even imaginary meals.
Early written makes use of of Cockney to explain individuals capitalised on an egg’s delicate and embryonic qualities. When Chaucer wrote “Cokenay” within the Canterbury Tales he meant, “a spoilt or pampered little one”.
Whilst late as 1904, “Cockney” was used to imply, “a feeble and pampered individual from a metropolis”. The phrase mirrored the notion that metropolis life was luxurious in contrast with toiling on England’s farms.
As a result of London is the prototypical English metropolis, “Cockney” got here for use as a label for Londoners. The well-known definition of the dialect as hinging on being born inside earshot of Bow bells is attributed to a 1571 sermon by J. Bridges, during which he wrote: “We’re thorough out all of the Realme referred to as cockneys which might be borne in London, or within the sounde of Bow bell.”
Bridges meant that individuals all through England referred to as Londoners “Cockneys”. Within the sixteenth century, the St Mary-le-Bow church was certainly an emblem for London, not a instrument for distinguishing this one a part of town from the remainder of it. All Londoners had been Cockneys.
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Recasting Cockney as a working-class English
Research of language change in massive cities usually present that linguistic improvements emerge in working-class communities after which unfold. It’s probably that, in previous centuries, east London working-class communities would have been drivers of improvements for the types of English spoken within the capital.
Within the 1700s and 1800s, the emergence of the middle-class life-style as a goal for upward mobility gave rise to a self-help trade for attaining larger social standing. Together with prescriptions for methods to gown and methods to eat a meal, adopting “correct speech” turned a goal for ascending to the center class.
Elocutionists offered books by choosing out modern options of London English and inveighing in opposition to utilizing them. They recast the label “Cockney” as a working-class English that individuals ought to keep away from in the event that they wished to sound correctly center class.
Within the nineteenth century, authors together with Charles Dickens adopted the elocutionists. They assigned Cockney linguistic options to working-class (and sometimes nefarious) characters. These characterisations strengthened the conceptualisation of Cockney as a working-class (and felony) language.
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Altering enregisterment
What modified over greater than 600 years, then, was the way in which Cockney was, as linguists put it, “enregistered”. Enregisterment is the method of linguistic options turning into linked in standard consciousness to a bunch or place.
By the 1700s, Cockney was enregistered as “London English”. The forefront of London English would have been the speech of working-class east London communities. By means of the 1800s, intellectuals profited from stigmatising working-class linguistic options. This narrowed the enregisterment of Cockney to “working-class London English”.
Our fashionable understanding of Cockney relies on this current re-enregisterment. It conceptualises Cockney as a particular set of linguistic options, related to destructive social traits and constrained to working-class east London.
That is mirrored in standard explanations for rhyming slang as a definitive characteristic of the dialect. Rhyming slang emerged in Cockney comparatively just lately, in all probability within the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Opposite to standard perception, rhyming slang by no means may have been a method to obscure felony exercise from police. In any case, code phrases solely work till one other individual learns them. (Take into account that at present, avenue cops know the vocabulary for the crimes they encounter.)
The concept Cockney rhyming slang encoded criminality is based on the ideology that working-class individuals interact in felony exercise. Inside this logic, it follows that if working-class persons are speaking about one thing, it have to be crime.
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At present, working-class east London communities proceed to be a driving drive behind linguistic improvements which might be spreading all through England. This type of innovation remains to be stigmatised. Audio system who use them are routinely penalised in gatekeeping settings akin to faculty and media and in hiring choices.
Some individuals we have now spoken as a part of our analysis determine, particularly, as Cockney. Others declare an affinity with the non-public resilience and community-mindedness which have lengthy been central to the Cockney identification.
Additional, we have now discovered that Cockney just isn’t a reductive, monolithic identification, however relatively a multifaceted one. We now have interviewed Londoners who determine as Bengali Cockney, Black Cockney, East Finish Cockney, Essex Cockney, Jewish Cockney and Sylheti Cockney, amongst others.
Linguists talk about “codeswitching” to consult with individuals shifting from non-standard to plain English for socioeconomic attainment. This apply illustrates how judging somebody’s speech as “non-standard” is at all times ideologically pushed.
Tower Hamlets’ recognition of Cockney as a “group language”, in contrast, acknowledges the linguistic validity of all types of English spoken within the borough. It celebrates the function that non-standard dialects play in shaping particular person and group identities and the methods during which identities akin to “Cockney” proceed to evolve. As considered one of our interviewees (all of whom are anonymised in our report) put it:
[Cockney] is a manifestation of working-class tradition. That’s the way it feels, a sort of constructive working-class tradition, which is beneath the cosh. To have vibrant working-class tradition is one thing that’s completely precious.
