Cockney, yes Cockney what is it? it's from
London that's correct most likely you know that
already but what is it exactly? Is it an accent?
or a dialect? Habla usted Cockney? Let's define our terms. If it's an accent
then wherever you are if you have the accent then
you're a cockney whether you hail from Hackney or
Dagenham or Watford because yes people speak like that in Watford too,
it doesn't matter you're all cockneys. It's just the way
people speak or the second and contradictory definition is that
it's a geographical thing the cockneys are a tribe,
a London tribe and in order to be a member of that tribe
you just need to have been born within a small
area of the East End of London. The problem with that is that my good
friend Algernon Fotherington-Smythe
went to Eton and Oxford voice goes to the royal family and
winner of the poshest person in Britain competition he's a cockney
even though his accent is super posh. Why is he cockney? Because he was born in
Bishopsgate falls into that geographical area,
doesn't matter. If you're born in the right location that would still
make you a cockney. Now there's something not right
here the two definitions are mutually incompatible
You can't have your cake and eat it too. so let's delve in:
First let's talk about accents, think of accents in the UK as being on a
spectrum. On the one side you have the RP -
received pronunciation. That's the accent of the dictionaries.
That refined middle class accent. When you look up a word in the
dictionary they will put the word in a phonetic
script next to the definition to help you
pronounce it correctly according to RP so this script tells you how to say it
in RP. If you're learning English, British English, your textbook
pronunciation will be in RP. However most people in the UK
have some kind of a regional accent in fact it's estimated that only three
percent of the people in the UK speak with an
RP accent so, on the other side of the spectrum.
we have a strong regional accent sometimes called a dialect okay that's
the red end of the spectrum. If you're from
Liverpool that would be a a Scouse accent,
from Manchester it's called the Mancunian accent
if you're from Birmingham or should i say Birmingham
you have a Brummie accent and from london
you have a cockney accent that's the strongest of
London accents right at the edge of the spectrum in the red zone that's
what we're going to be talking about today. However
many people who grew up in London are to be
found elsewhere on the spectrum they are recognizably
from London but they veer a little or a lot closer to RP
the blue side of the spectrum what about myself well i was born in London,
grew up in London and people can recognize
that my accent is a London accent but i'm not
i'm not a problem i feel somewhere closer to RP perhaps
depends on your opinion. Today on LetThemTalk we're going to look
in depth at the fascinating story of cockney how it came about
where it's spoken and very importantly how many people speak it. We know how
many Londoners there are, we know how many Glaswegians there are we know how
many Parisians there are but there seems to
be a big disagreement about the number of cockneys due to the reasons i just
mentioned. Listen to the comments from the first
video i made about cockney so for example
"cockney doesn't exist anymore, cockney is a dying accent they've all
moved away" "Nobody even speaks English in London
let alone cockney" come on you spent a day
in your life you know that was utter nonsense but on the other hand
you get people saying that everyone in southern England is a Cockney from
Milton Keynes to Brighton on the south coast regional accents are
dying out and the London accent the Cockney accent
often referred to as Estuary English is taking over the world -
okay not world but a large chunk of Southern England.
so anyway that's about 20 million people from zero people
to 20 million people they can't both be right
so i'm going to look at the data and and the facts and we're going to get you some
numbers also in this video we look at which famous people speak cockney and
where they come from and more but what we are not going to
look at is how it sounds, the linguistics of
Cockney, Why because we've already done that in the first video i did on cockney
so you should definitely watch that video before
watching this one so check it out somewhere up here somewhere so if you're
in London or planning to visit london or just have
an interest in the language of this great city then
stay tuned but hold on hold on because before we start we have to address the
elephant in the room now the video made on the Cockney accent,
the first one, was generally well received and it's still getting
a lot of views the time of recording recording this video
it accrued 1.5 million views almost and judged by most
of the comments very well received. The video was
supposed to be a light hearted look at the cockney accent i
repeat light-hearted, light-hearted but the
amount of abusive comments it received was
astonishing i didn't drown puppies or revoke Brexit no i've never experienced anything like
that in my life the haters were working
overtime just to give you a a flavor of that listen to this:
"you're not a Londoner you're Turkish" "What's your first language is it Punjab?"
"You're not English you're french Pakistani" yes
someone said that whatever "People only speak Arab in London they
don't speak English anymore." Yeah you can talk the
language is called Arabic, by the way you moron
"you don't look like a Londoner" interesting "you're not a Londoner you're
an american impersonating a cockney" what the f*** some other strange ones "they should have
asked an Englishman to do this video" so the
video was okay but the presenter didn't look
English enough what does a real Englishman look like yes dear viewer
we're talking about racism vile, evil racism showing its
ugly head and also some comments were just a bit strange
for example uh "i'm glad i watched this video about cockney
now i can understand Trainspotting" that's set in Edinburgh. i do hope
haters will stay away from the comments section this time for the rest of you
the 99% you lovely beautiful wonderful open-minded people stay tuned listen to our podcast zeitgeist banana
you can find it on youtube, itunes spotify
and all good podcast platforms. Let's begin with a little
history and geography lesson. Here's a map of London
right in the centre you will see an area called the City of London
if you don't know London don't confuse London and the City of london it's not
the same. The City of London is the original
London settlement it was an important Roman city the city
is synonymous with London's financial capital
but it's the oldest part of the capital and St Mary-Le-Bow, very important in our
story is right here just to put this into
perspective Big Ben is here and it's not in the city
of London that's right it's in the city of
Westminster also you can't see Big Ben from the street because it's actually
the name of the bell inside the tower not the tower itself
but that's a story for another day. Here is the West End which is the shopping
and entertainment Centre of London it's called the West End because it's
west of the City and here is the east end once a poor
working class and immigrant neighborhood though not so much anymore and it's
called the East End because it's east of the City of London
but you guessed that already didn't you the whole map is called Greater London.
By the way the word Cockney means the egg of the cockerel of course
cockrells don't lay eggs it's the hens but it was used as a
derogatory term for any city dweller that didn't know
the ways of the countryside but it soon got
associated with Londoners. Here we are at St Mary-Le-Bow
right in the heart of the City of London.
Cockneys have been associated with Stt Mary-Le-Bow
and particularly its bells since at least the 11th
century. 12 bells ringing out so loud that they could once be heard
throughout the town and beyond into the outskirts.
Now according to folklore in order to be a Cockney you need to have been born
within the sound of Bow bells This definition goes back a long time
john minshew one of the first ever dictionary writers in his 1617
work doctor in Linguas wrote a cockneyor, cockney applied
only to one born within the sound of Bow bell that is in the City of London.
so let's get this straight if you're born within the ear shot of these
bells then you are a Cockney, if not then you aren't and this by the way
is the geographical definition not the linguistic one
it says nothing about your accent. There is a much quoted story about the first
Lord Mayor of London, Dick Whittington 1354-1423
here he is it's something of a London legend in fact
maybe the first London legend. The story goes that he came to london
along with his cat to make his fortune from his home in the north of England
sometime in the 1370s after working in menial jobs in kitchens
in the City of London he got fed up and decided to go back
home but as he was fleeing he heard the sound of beau bells
beckoning him back "turn again Whittington Lord Mayor of
London seemed to stay and he turned back
with his cat and became the mayor. so where was he when he heard the bells,
the Bow bells? He was on Highgate hill that's quite far
away from here. Let's return to our map of london and
here is Highgate Hill and the closest underground is Archway
station. which is not in the centre at all it's
on the border of zone 2 and zone 3. it's 4.7 miles or 7.5
kilometers away. So here we are the whittington stone
the spot where Whittington was called back to london
and yes that's his cat and that's not all
if you're visiting London then do come up and have a look it's not far from
Camden town. There's also the Whittington hospital
and the Whittington pub. Don't drink too much in the Whittington pub or you'll end up
in the Whittington hospital. Yes it seems everything
around here is named after Whittington back in whittington's time this was just
a road in the countryside far away from London
and from here you could see the City but the bad news is that now you can see
well not very much everything is obscured by
skyscrapers. Anyway let's go back to our map and make some calculations
the bells can be heard from highgate hill which is 7.4 kilometers away
if we assume that they can be heard the same distance in each direction
then we get this area now according to my calculations there
are 4.5 million people living in this area so
that's the number of Cockneys. There are 4.5 million.
simple huh? No hold on, hold on, wait a minute.
i know what you're thinking i can hear you screaming that was back in the 13th
century but now what with the noise from the
cars and the traffic and the buildings
covering the whole city the noise won't travel that far will it?
Fortunately we can explore this a little further
with sound maps. A sound map shows us how specific sounds carry over a
geographical area we have sound maps covering the Bow
bells here is one from 1851 not quite as far
as Highgate Hill Victorian London was still a pretty
noisy place but as you can see the sound carried very
far especially eastwood all the way to
Leyton that's 9.5 kilometers but
now look at the sound map for 2012 the sound of Bow Bells can be barely
heard in Shoreditch and that's three kilometers away.
Ok let's make another calculation if the population covered by the sound map
of 2012 gets us the number
of cockneys we get fifty thousand but wait just a
minute Didn't we say you have to be born within
the sound of Bow bells? So we need to know how many people were
born within this area. Are there any maternity hospitals
within the sound map. Well actually not really.
There was the City of London maternity hospital
but that was bombed during the war so you would have to have been born before
the war to have been born there. There's some Bartholomew's
or Barts that's in the area but the maternity
department closed in the late 1980s. Another point is that the bells did not
ring between 1945 because they were destroyed
in an air raid and they weren't restored until
1961. So if we say that five babies were born
St Barts a day until the 1980s that's 30 years
so we get a ground total of 10 000 Cockneys
okay something clearly wrong here this is ridiculous there are more than ten
thousand cockneys this old definition can't really apply in 2020.
So let's look at it another way Traditionally
Cockneys lived in the working class population centres
east of the City of London so the place which is most closely associated with
the Cockney accent is the East End of London
the traditional core districts of the East End
are Bethnal Green, Whitechapel, Spitfields, Stepney, Whapping,
Limehouse, Poplar and some would and Hackney to that list. Here it is on the
map the East End began to develop in the
middle ages when London expanded beyond its city boundaries
and immense docklands emerged in the East End.
It became the hub of the British Empire where goods and people moved to and fro
to destinations all over the world. By the 17th century a
lot of the industry had moved to the East End
some manufacturing that was unwelcome within the boundaries of London proper
were moved east these included the gunpowder and the
lead-making industries. So the East End became a significant
area of production but at the same time it was a
desperately poor and overcrowded neighborhood you find in
many cities such as London, Paris and New York the
poorer parts are in the east and that's because the
prevailing winds blow from west to east so all the crap
coming from the chimneys would blow east so the rich
chose to live in the west for the cleaner
air and so the rent was cheaper in the east.
What about immigration that plays an important part in our story.
Now there's been a significant influx of immigrants to the east end
for hundreds of years. They first arrived by boat from around the world and worked
in the docks and the factories and as craftsmen in workshops
that had sprung up in the area. Let's have a look at some of
the immigrant groups who made their home in the East End The
Huguenots The Huguenots were french Protestants
who were persecuted in France because of their religion
in 1681 Charles ii of England gave them refuge and between 1670
and 1710 up to 50 000 Huguenots settled in England many of them in the
East End in the area known as Spitalfields
where the rent was cheap. In 1700 there were nine Huguenot
churches in London and walking around Spitalfields
in the East End today you still see many reminders
of the Huguenots such as in the street names
here we are on Fournier Street, Nantes Street
Corbet Street. The Irish The Irish started emigrating to London
in large numbers in the 18th century in Spitfields they worked in the weaving
industry and Irish labourers played an important
part in the building of London's docks and settled in the areas near to
their construction such as Shadwell and Whapping Ashkenazi
Jews in the middle ages there was a sizable
Jewish community in the city of London there is not much to remind us of that
period now except the street name old jury which is where the Jewish
ghetto was in medieval times the Jews were expelled from England in
1290 and they weren't allowed back until 1656. The first Jews to
arrive back in London were Sephardi Jews of Spanish
and Portuguese origin. In the second half of the 19th century
many ashkenazi jews fleeing poverty and persecution
in eastern Europe moved to Britain the majority came to London and most of
them moved to the East End at the beginning
of the 20th century there were 144,000 Jews living in London and 83%
were in the East End. Incidentally perhaps you've tried
Britain's national dish fish and chips? What you might not know
is that it is of Jewish origin. The tradition of
frying fish in batter was brought to London by Sephardi Jews in the
17th century somewhere later down the line the chips
got added to the dish. A Jewish immigrant Joseph Malin opened
Britain's first recorded combined fish and ship shop in Bethnal green in
London's East End in 1860. Mushy peas - that's definitely a
northern thing. No Londoner would invent that. If you go
to the east end today you'll find a couple of excellent
bagel shops on Brick Lane these are two of the only places where
you can find genuine bagels in London but it's one of the few remaining things
still around from the era of the Jewish East End. Chinatown Did you know that London's first Chinatown was around Limehouse and
Shadwell in the East End A couple of hundred Chinese traders had
first come over from Shanghai in the 1840s. The fictional character
Fu Manchu was a Limehouse resident and Sherlock
Holmes, when he needed an opium fix he went to
one of the opium dens in Limehouse. So the impression in film and
in fiction and in the media was that the Limehouse
Chinatown was somewhere less than salubrious but the writings about the
neighborhood and the about the drugs and the gambling and the
prostitution was that just fiction. It was complete
fiction in reality the chinese who numbered around 4 000
at the time of the first world war were a hard-working law-abiding community.
During the second world war the area was bombed and
Chinatown relocated to Soho where it is today. All that remains today
are a few street names like Ming Street, Peking
Street and Canton Street. Bangladeshi The latest
wave of immigrants came from Bangladesh from the Sylvet
region in the second half of the 20th century
brick lane and the streets around it are called Bangla Town
and you can see why. Did you know that 90% of Indian restaurants in the UK
are actually Bangladeshi restaurants? This is Brick Lane Mosque it was built
as a church by the Huguenots then it became a synagogue and now it's
a mosque serving the neighborhood's muslim
community The composition of the east end is
changing it's no longer a place for the poor immigrant
why? because it's so bloody expensive. The area is going through a process
of gentrification. You're more likely to find a city bank in one of those elegant
apartments than a family of poor immigrants.
Wandering around the East End the other day along with the espresso bars
I found a ukulele shop and a fauxmagerie selling vegan cheese, Yes the neighbourhood is certainly changing.
But where does this cockney accent come from why does it sound as it does?
why is it different to standard British English?
Surely the large number of immigrants moving to the area over the course of
hundreds of years must have shaped it in some way. Let's
have a closer look at some possible influences in cockney we drop
our h's 'at [hat], 'ouse [house] , 'ard [hard] 'orrible "there's been an 'orrible murder."
The French also don't pronounce the H Could this be a Huguenot influence? what about the influence of Yiddish on
Cockney? So many Ashkenazi Jews who spoke Yiddish moved to London in the late 19th
and early 20th century. Yiddish, by the way, is a Germanic
language but what influence did they have
on the accent? Just to give you one example
the oi sound which is quite prevalent in Yiddish.
Oy vey is the classic Yiddish phrase and this sound could have been transmitted
into Cockney directly from Yiddish the I sound as in night is often
pronounced [oi] in cockney NOIGHT. NICE becomes NOICE
RICE becomes RICE. TRIED becomes TROYED.
Incidentally the accent of New York is similarly influenced by Yiddish because
they had an enormous amount of Yiddish speakers moving to New York at the same time the end of the 19th and
the early 20th century and i'm told they say CAWFEE
and not COFFEE and that's maybe a sound from Yiddish so perhaps there
are some parallels with new the New York accent and the Cockney accent
but i'd better not comment too much about the New York accent as it's
something i don't know very much about but if you
do have any insight on that then please
let us know in the comments. It's perhaps too early to discuss the influence of
Indian languages on Cockney but just to give one possible example:
INNIT. In London we like to say INNIT instead of ISN'T IT "beautiful day
innit' However what's happened recently is that
this INNIT is starting to be used as a
substitute for all question tags for example "you're
Bob innit" huh? instead of "your're Bob aren't you?" "She'll be here tomorrow innit" instead of "she'll be here tomorrow won't
she" The theory is that this comes from
Punjabi, Bengali or Sylveti where they have a similar grammatical
construction. Almost certainly there is a good deal of
Irish in the mix and who knows even a touch of Chinese too.
So of course cockney is not dying out but rather it's
changing the commonly spoken today is not the same as the cockney spoken
100 years ago which is the same for British English as a whole
watch a film from the 1930s and it's changed quite a bit. listen to
this clip it's from The Lady Vanishes in 1938
No food what sort of place is this? expect us to share blasted dog box with
a servant girl on an empty stomach is that hospitality
is that organization? No food what sort of a place is this
they expect us to share a blasted dog box with a servant girl on
an empty stomach. Does that sound like English
from 2020. These days it's more complex to spot the
influences of other languages in London English
because there are over 200 languages spoken in
London. It's difficult to say what comes from
what but changing it is. Certainly there have been linguistic
influences on the Cockney accent from immigrant
groups and this influence hasn't stopped. Linguists
now talk about MLE Multicultural London English
with words from Jamaica the Indian subcontinent
and elsewhere. Some say that this is replacing cockney
well no it's just part of a change that's been going on for
hundreds of years. Accents are not static.
The accent has spread out as immigrants and the working classes
have moved from the East End. OK so not all the Cockneys live in the East End
anymore so where do they live? There are two
things to bear in mind. One cockney is more of a
cultural term rather than a linguistic term. The
Cockneys home maybe in the East End but in truth
you'll hear it all over London and beyond and it's been
like that for a long time. Don't believe me let's have a look at a
map of famous people with Cockney accents with a connection
or not a connection to the East End let's start with John Keats referred to
at the time as a Cockney poet although this was used
pejoratively Cockney accent? almost certainly of
course we don't have any recordings of him
though no doubt it was a very different accent to the one we know today.
Cockney Eastender? Yes he was born in Moorgate just a stone's throw from
Bow bells. Interestingly if you read his poems of a Cockney accent
they sound quite different this is ode to a nightingale
my art aches a drowsy numbness pains my sense
as of hemlock i had drunk Eliza Doolittle. The Cockney poster child
from the film My Fair Lady based on the play Pygmalion
by George Bernard Shaw Cockney accent? Yes, in the play anyway.
Cockney Eastender? No she was from Lisson Grove which is in the West End and how do you come to be so far east you were born in Lisson Grove
oh for what almost am i leaving Lisson Grove
it wasn't fit for a pig to live in and i had to pay four and six a week Alfred Hitchcock Cockney accent "the new cinemas growing up at that time was a
haven was a palace away from the sordid little homes that people lived in"
No certainly not, Cockney Eastender? yes he was from Leystonstone. Michael
Caine Cockney accent? Yes, Cockney Eaastender?
yes he grew up in Bermondsey David Beckham Cockney accent?
yes though it's become less pronounced over the years,
Cockney Eastender yes it's from Leytonstone same area as Alfred Hitchcock but a very different accent.
Jason Statham. Cockney accent? Yes Cockney Eastender? No from Shirebrook in
Derbyshire i can't quite get my head around that
one Amy Winehouse Cockney accent? Yes cockney Eastender?
No she's from Southgate Adele Cockney accent? Yes. Cockney Eastender?
No from Tottenham, not quite the East End Russel Brand
he's got the cockney accent but he's out of the zone he's from Grayes in Essex.
An honourable mention to Claude Rains you'll know him if you've seen
Casablanca he's the one who says "round up the usual
suspects" he had a strong Cockney accent growing
up but he lost entirely by the time he moved to
Hollywood, so as i said the Cockney accent
or London accent has spread way beyond the boundaries of the East End.
why is this? During the second world war the East End was heavily bombed and many
of its residents rebuilt their lives in homes
in other parts of London and notably Essex
East of London in places such as Harlow Basildon, Southend, Another fact to
consider is that the Cockney accent no longer has
a stigma to it in the past if you wanted to get work
in the civil service or in a profession the first thing you had to do was lose
your Cockney accent. You never heard a cockney accent on the
BBC except for a little local colour but
that's not the case anymore Cockneys are rightly proud of
their accent and the Cockney accent is spreading and
you'll hear the accent as far north as Barnet
and as far south as Brighton and west to Slough
so Cockney may refer to geographical location
but the accent has certainly spread much much further afield.
Cockneys are very much associated with the East End of
London but as the accent spread people call it different things
you'll often hear it referred to just as the London accent or as estuary English
when it's spoken in the outskirts or beyond the london boundary
but linguistically it's more or less the same thing
also when you're in london you'll notice there is not just one way of speaking.
As i said before London speaks somewhere along this spectrum with RP
on one side and the Cockney on the other between that you'll find people with
varying degrees of London accents received pronunciation with the
occasional glottal stop instead of a T dropping an H at the beginning of some
words. Peppering sentences with Cockney rhyming slang if you want
to know more about company rhyming slang check out the other video
and finishing the odd sentence with INNIT, So the boundaries are not clear
and I guess we'll never arrive at a precise
number of Cockney speakers but it doesn't matter accents change the
Cockney that John Keats spoke is no doubt very different to the way we
speak today the London accent or Cockney accent is
changing not dying changing ads it always has done you
might call it multicultural London English
but it's just part of an evolution of the language which gets
shaped and reshaped due to changing demographics and immigration as it has
done for a thousand years, London remains a wonderful place
to visit for the beauty of the city it's
welcoming people it's cuisine it's parks it's a buzzing cosmopolitan and
outward looking place but it's also a linguistic
treat with all its vibrant English accents
it's another reason to visit and if that's not enough over 250 languages are
spoken in London making it the most
linguistically diverse city in the world but that's a story for another day.
