Лондондық акценттер мен диалектілер: Кокни, Эстуари Англиясы және Лондон тілінің эволюциясы

Accent and dialect of English spoken in London

Cockney is a dialect of the English language, mainly spoken in London and its environs, particularly by Londoners with working class and lower middle class roots. The term Cockney is also used as a demonym for a person from the East End, or, traditionally, born within earshot of Bow Bells. Estuary English is an intermediate accent between Cockney and Received Pronunciation, also widely spoken in and around London, as well as in wider South Eastern England. In multicultural areas of London, the Cockney dialect is, to an extent, being replaced by Multicultural London English—a new form of speech with significant Cockney influence.

The earliest recorded use of the term is 1362 in passus VI of William Langland's Piers Plowman, where it is used to mean "a small, misshapen egg", from Middle English coken + ey ("a cock's egg"). Concurrently, the mythical land of luxury Cockaigne (attested from 1305) appeared under a variety of spellings, including Cockayne, Cocknay, and Cockney, and became humorously associated with the English capital London. The current meaning of Cockney comes from its use among rural Englishmen (attested in 1520) as a pejorative term for effeminate town dwellers, This may have developed from the sources above or separately, alongside such terms as "cock" and "cocker" which both have the sense of "to make a nestle cock  or the darling of", "to indulge or pamper". By 1600, this meaning of cockney was being particularly associated with the Bow Bells area. In 1617, the travel writer Fynes Moryson stated in his Itinerary that "Londoners, and all within the sound of Bow Bells, are in reproach called Cockneys." The same year, John Minsheu included the term in this newly restricted sense in his dictionary Ductor in Linguas.

Cockney sparrow: Refers to the archetype of a cheerful, talkative Cockney. Cockney diaspora: The term Cockney diaspora refers to the migration of Cockney speakers to places outside London, especially new towns. It also refers to the descendants of those people, in areas where there was enough migration for identification with London to persist in subsequent generations. Mockney: Refers to a fake Cockney accent, though the term is sometimes also used as a self deprecatory moniker by second, third, and subsequent generations of the Cockney diaspora.

Initially, when London consisted of little more than the walled City, the term applied to all Londoners, and this lingered into the 19th century.

The traditional core districts of the East End include Middlesex towns of Bethnal Green, Whitechapel, Spitalfields, Stepney, Wapping, Limehouse, Poplar, Haggerston, Aldgate, Shoreditch, the Isle of Dogs, Hackney, Hoxton, Bow and Mile End[(Stratford)]. The informal definition of the East End gradually expanded to include towns in south west Essex such as Forest Gate, East Ham, Leyton, Plaistow, Stratford, Walthamstow and West Ham as these formed part of London's growing conurbation.

The church of St Mary le Bow is one of the oldest, largest, and historically most important churches in the City of London. The definition based on being born within earshot of the bells, cast at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, reflects the early definition of the term as relating to all of London. The audible range of the Bells is dependent on geography and wind conditions. The east is mostly low lying, a factor which combines with the strength and regularity of the prevailing wind, blowing from west south west for nearly three quarters of the year, to carry the sound further to the east, and more often. A 2012 study showed that in the 19th century, and under typical conditions, the sound of the bells would carry as far as Clapton, Bow and Stratford in the east but only as far as Southwark to the south and Holborn in the west. An earlier study suggested the sound would have carried even further. The 2012 study showed that in the modern era, noise pollution means that the bells can only be heard as far as Shoreditch. According to legend, Dick Whittington heard the bells 4.5 miles away at Highgate Hill, in what is now north London. The studies mean that it is credible that Whittington might have heard them on one of the infrequent days that the wind blows from the south. The church of St Mary le Bow was destroyed in 1666 by the Great Fire of London and rebuilt by Sir Christopher Wren. Although the bells were destroyed again in 1941 in the Blitz, they had fallen silent on 13 June 1940 as part of the British anti invasion preparations of World War II. Before they were replaced in 1961, there was a period when, by the "within earshot" definition, no "Bow Bell" Cockneys could be born. The use of such a literal definition produces other problems since the area around the church is no longer residential, and the noise pollution means few are born within earshot.

Cockney speakers have distinctive accents and dialects and occasionally use rhyming slang. The Survey of English Dialects took a recording from a long time resident of Hackney in the 1950s, and the BBC made another recording in 1999 which showed how the accent had changed. One of the characteristic pronunciations of Cockney is th fronting. The early development of Cockney vocabulary is obscure, but appears to have been heavily influenced by Essex and related eastern dialects, while borrowings from Yiddish, including kosher (originally Hebrew, via Yiddish, meaning legitimate) and shtum ( originally German, via Yiddish, meaning mute), as well as Romani, for example wonga (meaning money, from the Romani "wanga" meaning coal), and cushty (Kushty) (from the Romani kushtipen, meaning good) reflect the influence of those groups on the development of the speech. John Camden Hotten, in his Slang Dictionary of 1859, refers to "their use of a peculiar slang language" when describing the costermongers of London's East End.

A dialectological study of Leytonstone in 1964 found that the area's dialect was very similar to that recorded in Bethnal Green by Eva Sivertsen, but there were still some features that distinguished Leytonstone speech from Cockney. Linguistic research conducted in the early 2010s suggests that today, some aspects of the Cockney accent are declining in usage within multicultural areas, where some traditional features of Cockney have been displaced by Multicultural London English, a multiethnolect particularly common amongst young people from diverse backgrounds. Nevertheless, the glottal stop, double negatives, and the vocalisation of the dark L (and other features of Cockney speech) are among the Cockney influences on Multicultural London English, and some rhyming slang terms are still in common usage. An influential July 2010 report by Paul Kerswill, professor of sociolinguistics at Lancaster University, Multicultural London English: the emergence, acquisition, and diffusion of a new variety, predicted that the Cockney accent would disappear from London's streets within 30 years.