Estuary English.

History:

·         Estuary English was brought into prominence by the work of David Rowewarne in the early 1980’s together with the prediction that it may well in time replace RP as the standard pronunciation form of English.

·         Estuary English is a variety that is growing out of its original regional roots, influencing more speakers and spreading into wider areas of usage in the UK.

·         It is often described as a mid-point between Cockney and RP.

·         The non-standard accent and dialect features are best understood as those have been influenced by Cockney and the south east.

·         The remainder of the dialect is ‘standard’ in the sense that is adheres roughly to the prestige of RP.

·         Rosewarne stated certain dialect features involving non-standard grammatical forms including the contracted word ‘ain’t’  as a verb and non  standard past tense forms like ‘come’ for ‘came’ in the usage like ‘I come back home yesterday.’

·         The usage of the double negative forms has been put forward as another dialectal feature derived from Cockney, although negative constructions involving the primary verbs ‘to be’ ‘to do’ and ‘to have’ usually in the past tense. In these instances, the adverb ‘never’ is used to construct forms like ‘I never did’ or ‘He never went’, rather than the standard use of ‘not’, for example ‘I did not.’  

Research:

• Joanna Przedlacka produced research on the accent forms of Estuary English in the late 1990's form the greater London area, covering an area of approx. 50 miles.
• She used male and female informants aged 14-16 from four areas representing the spread of London to the north west (Aylesbury), north east (Little Baddow), south east (Farningham) and south west (Walton-on-the-Hill).
• Her findings suggested the tendency towards some of the pronunciation features described above, although Przedlacka concluded that there was a definate homogeneity of accents across the area.
• Where Estuary English trends were appearing these seemed to be led predominantaly by the female speakers of the sample.
• The phonomemnon of Estuary English moving more widely across southern England and even beyond, has been the subject of research most notably by Paul Kerswill.
• Estuary English is a dominant pronounciation form in much of the spoken broadcast media, and from actors and musicians. This is one of the factors for the spread of Estuary English beyond its regional heartlands of the south east.
• Kerswill's research into the city of Milton Keynes found vowel fronting, perhaps indicacting the influence of Estuary English forms there as the population of the city has grown, with significant migration there from London and the south east.
• The emergence of Estuary English forms increasingly further afield from London signals something of the spread of the variety - and hints at its potential role inthe concept of dialect levelling, in which regional and local dialect differences begin to decrease.
  
  
  *Vowel fronting = moving the place in which the vowel sound is generated towards the front of the mouth.
  
  *Dialect levelling = is the means in which dialect differences decrease.