Estuary English

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As Estuary English (English. Estuary , mouth ') is called an accent of the English language , which in the southeast of England (at the mouth of the Thames is spoken). Estuary English shares a number of phonetic features with the London Cockney , such as the use of glottal stops at the end of a word. The term Estuary English was originally coined in 1984 by the journalist David Rosewarne. Estuary English initially received some media attention, which among other things discussed Estuary English as the successor to the standard pronunciation Received Pronunciation (RP). Use of Estuary English has also been observed among middle and upper class speakers such as former Prime Minister Tony Blair and other celebrities. Linguistic research has also been involved with Estuary English since the 1990s . There are still no clear results as to whether Estuary English is actually a regional accent, a dialect or a variety of parallel developments in the pronunciation of British English.

History of the term

The Estuary English phenomenon was first described by the journalist David Rosewarne in the Times Literary Supplement 1984. Rosewarne proposed that an increasing spread of an accent between the London dialect Cockney and the English standard pronunciation Received Pronunciation (RP) can be observed. lies. Rosewarne says that speakers with this accent use fewer glottal stops for / t / and / d / than a Cockney speaker, but more than a RP speaker. As the term for this new accent, Rosewarne coined the term Estuary English , and he saw Estuary English as the potential RP of the future as it was gaining increasing popularity among younger speakers.

The phenomenon was picked up a few years later by Paul Coggle, a lecturer in German at the University of Canterbury. Coggle published a small entertainment book entitled Do You Speak Estuary? . However, neither Rosewarne's article nor Coggle's book was a serious academic examination of the phenomenon. In the years that followed, the discussion about Estuary English was mainly dominated by the media and less by linguistic research. At the end of the 1990s, however, an increasing number of publications appeared that dealt with the phenomenon, tried to describe it and attempted a scientific classification.

features

The linguist John C. Wells was among the first to attempt to describe Estuary English scientifically. According to Wells, Estuary English is an accent from the region in and around London, not a dialect like Cockney. (A dialect is not only characterized by a non-standard pronunciation, but also by non-standard vocabulary and grammar characteristics.) According to Wells, Estuary English has the following characteristics:

  • Use of the glottal stop ([ʔ]) instead of [t], especially at the end of the word: take i 'off instead of RP take it off
  • Use of the affricates [d͡ʒ] and [t͡ʃ] instead of the consonant clusters [dj] and [tj] (Yod coalescence ): Chooseday ([tʃu: zdeɪ]) for Tuesday (RP: [tju: zdeɪ])
  • Vocalization of the / l / at the end of a word: miwk-bottoo for milk bottle
  • Shifting the diphthongs in words like face , price and goat : [fʌɪs], [prɑɪs], [gʌʊʔ]
  • Changed pronunciation of <o> and <oa> in front of dark [l] (dark l) (so-called wholly - holy split ): wholly / ˈhɒʊli / is pronounced differently than holy / ˈhəʊli /

In addition to the characteristics compiled by Wells, other linguists have mentioned other potential characteristics of Estuary English. The linguist Ulrike Altendorf notes that speakers of Estuary English are increasingly observing Th fronting, i.e. the replacement of the Th sound [θ] by [f], as in Norf London for North London , as it is otherwise in Cockney is common.

David Rosewarne himself mentions other characteristics than Wells', for example: B. the i-sounds in me (RP: / i: /) and city (RP: / ɪ /), which are realized as diphthongs in Estuary English. So me is pronounced more like May , city more like citay . In addition, speakers of Estuary English leave out the sound [j] in words like news ([nu: z], so-called j-dropping ); the pronunciation [nju: z] is only found in conservative RP speakers.

Estuary English in the media

David Rosewarne's publications have garnered some attention in the English media, so in the years that followed there was speculation about RP's future, including whether it would slowly be replaced by Estuary English. Concern was also expressed as to whether the appearance of Estuary English as a new variant of English is a sign of the increasing decline in standards and whether Estuary English should be taught in schools. British celebrities have been identified as speakers for Estuary English, including Greg Dyke, then Director General of the BBC 1999, MP Ken Livingstone , George Leonard Carey , Archbishop of Canterbury , Princess Diana and former Prime Minister Tony Blair .

Estuary English in Linguistic Research

The status of Estuary English is still under discussion in linguistics. Most linguists, like Wells, assume that Estuary English is an accent, but there are also a few theses that it is a dialect ; That is, Estuary English includes not only a special pronunciation, but also grammatical phenomena.

The question of whether Estuary English is only spoken by certain social classes and, if so, by which, is answered differently in the literature: In the fifth edition of Gimson's Pronunciation of English, Estuary English is found as a kind of "regional middle class RP" . In contrast, in the Introduction to Phonetics by Davenport and Hannahs, Estuary English is a lower-middle-class and working-class accent.

While for popular, non-scientific authors like Rosewarne it is already clear that this is a new regional variant of English in the south-east of England, this is not yet so clear from a scientific point of view. Some linguists reject the term Estuary English entirely because they see no evidence that it is even a new variant of English. This rejection of the concept of Estuary English is supported in part by field studies: the linguistic features of Estuary English mentioned by Rosewarne and others have been investigated in field studies in various cities and regions in South East England. The use of different characteristics was proven in all studies, but not so consistently that one could speak of a uniform accent of the south-east of England.

The question still remains of how far Estuary English has spread beyond the region around London in other cities: Here, too, field studies from the 1990s and 2000s do not provide a clear picture: It looks more like individual features like Th fronting and the use of the glottal stop are also spreading outside the south east of England. Because of this, some authors come to the conclusion that there is no such thing as Estuary English: rather, it is a popular, non-scientific abbreviation for various independent developments in the English language that are spreading in England. Individual linguists summarize this in a nutshell that Estuary English will be the RP of tomorrow.

Examples

Example of a speaker from Berkshire with an Estuary accent (British entertainer Ricky Gervais )
Example of a speaker from Essex with an Estuary accent (British entertainer Russell Brand )

See also

literature

  • Ulrike Altendorf: Estuary English: is English going Cockney? In: Moderna Språk 93 (1) (1999), pp. 1–11.
  • Ulrike Altendorf: Estuary English: Leveling at the Interface of RP and South-Eastern British English . Gunter Narr Verlag, Tübingen 2003, ISBN 3-8233-6022-1 .
  • Ulrike Altendorf: Estuary English . In: Alexander Bergs , Laurel J. Brinton (Eds.): The History of English , Volume 5: Varieties of English . Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / Boston, 2017, ISBN 978-3-11-052279-2 , pp. 169–186.
  • Paul Coggle: Do you speak Estuary? The new Standard English - How to spot it and speak it . Bloomsbury, London 1993, ISBN 0-7475-1656-1 .
  • Joanna Przedlacka: Estuary English and RP: Some Recent Findings . In: Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 36 (2001), pp. 35-50.
  • Joanna Przedlacka: Estuary English? A sociophonetic study of teenage speech in the Home Counties . Peter Lang, Bern 2002, ISBN 3-631-39340-7 .
  • David Rosewarne: Estuary English . In: Times Educational Supplement , October 19, 1984.
  • David Rosewarne: Estuary English: tomorrow's RP? In: English Today 37, Vol. 10, No. 1 (January 1994), pp. 3-8.
  • John C. Wells: Transcribing Estuary English: a discussion document. In: Speech Hearing and Language: UCL Work in Progress 8 (1994), pp. 259-267.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ David Rosewarne: Estuary English . In: Times Educational Supplement , October 19, 1984.
  2. ↑ Paul Coggle: Do you speak Estuary? The new Standard English - How to spot it and speak it . Bloomsbury, London 1993, ISBN 0-7475-1656-1 .
  3. ↑ Ulrike Altendorf: Estuary English . In: Alexander Bergs , Laurel J. Brinton (Eds.): The History of English , Volume 5: Varieties of English . Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / Boston, 2017, ISBN 978-3-11-052279-2 , p. 170.
  4. ↑ Ulrike Altendorf: Estuary English . In: Alexander Bergs, Laurel J. Brinton (Eds.): The History of English , Volume 5: Varieties of English . Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / Boston, 2017, ISBN 978-3-11-052279-2 , pp. 170–172.
  5. ↑ Ulrike Altendorf: Estuary English . In: Alexander Bergs, Laurel J. Brinton (Eds.): The History of English , Volume 5: Varieties of English . Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / Boston, 2017, ISBN 978-3-11-052279-2 , p. 172.
  6. ^ John Wells: Transcribing Estuary English - a discussion document . In: Speech Hearing and Language: UCL Work in Progress 8 (1994), pp. 259-260.
  7. ↑ Ulrike Altendorf: Estuary English: is English going Cockney? . In: Moderna Språk 93 (1) (1999), pp. 1–11.
  8. ↑ David Rosewarne: Estuary English . In: Times Educational Supplement , Oct 19, 1984, p. 29.
  9. ↑ David Rosewarne: Estuary English: tomorrow's RP? In: English Today 37, Vol. 10, No. 1 (January 1994), pp. 3-8.
  10. ^ Neil Ascherson: Britain's crumbling ruling class is losing the accent of authority . In: Independent on Sunday , August 7, 1994.
  11. ^ Tony Bex: Estuary English . In: The Guardian (Education section). London, 6th September 1994.
  12. ↑ Melvyn Bragg in The Observer , June 27, 1999, quoted in: John Wells: Estuary English . University College London, last accessed June 1, 2019.
  13. ↑ David Rosewarne: Estuary English: tomorrow's RP? In: English Today 37, Volume 10, No. 1 (January 1994), p. 3.
  14. ^ David Crystal: Estuary English . In: The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1995.
  15. ^ Alfred Charles Gimson, Alan Cruttenden: Gimson's Pronunciation of English , 5th Edition. Routledge, London 1994, p. 86.
  16. ^ Mike Davenport, SJ Hannahs: Introducing Phonetics and Phonology . Arnold, London 1998, p. 34.
  17. ^ Peter Roach: English Phonetics and Phonology . Cambridge 2009. ISBN 978-0-521-71740-3 , p. 4.
  18. ↑ Ulrike Altendorf: Estuary English . In: Alexander Bergs, Laurel J. Brinton (Eds.): The History of English , Volume 5: Varieties of English . Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / Boston, 2017, ISBN 978-3-11-052279-2 , pp. 173–175.
  19. ↑ Ulrike Altendorf: Estuary English . In: Alexander Bergs, Laurel J. Brinton (Eds.): The History of English , Volume 5: Varieties of English . Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / Boston, 2017, ISBN 978-3-11-052279-2 , p. 177.
  20. ↑ Joanna Przedlacka: Estuary English? A sociophonetic study of teenage speech in the Home Counties . Peter Lang, Bern 2002, ISBN 3-631-39340-7 .
  21. ↑ Ulrike Altendorf: "Caught between Aristotle and Miss Marple ... - A proposal for a perceptual prototype approach to 'Estuary English'" . In: Complutense Journal of English Studies (24) (volume 2016), pp. 131–154
  22. ^ David Crystal: Language and Time, Part 4: RP and its Successors . In: BBC Website (bbc.co.uk), last accessed June 1, 2019.