What is London English?
Introduction
There is no single ‘London English’. We are talking about hundreds of speech communities – over time and in different ethnic and social class contexts – each with their own changing dialect. For a thousand years, London has been the birthplace of the standard way of speaking English – the most powerful language in the world – but also of some of the most recognised non-standard ways of speaking.
We often use labels for accents and dialects. Eliza Doolittle speaks Cockney, Stormzy speaks Multicultural London English, the King speaks the Queen’s English! But these labels create artificial boundaries around groups of people and different language features. They can obscure the real workings of language.
Rather than looking at these abstract language ‘labels’, this project deconstructs them and looks at the tiny bits of language that either form part of them or fall between them. It is this wider set of language features that combine uniquely in the speech of each Londoner.
So when we talk about a community’s ‘variety of English’, we are actually referring to many different levels of form and meaning. We use the term ‘dialect’ to refer to all of these dimensions of language, and ‘accent’ to refer more specifically to the pronunciation of words. The main components of a dialect are words, pronunciations, grammar, and conversational or discourse patterns.
Words
The words of London are like a diary of the people who have lived in the city. Over the centuries the words that make up London English today have grown and evolved out of social contact, migration, social innovation, and identity signalling.
As with accents, it is important not to think of words in terms of a strict ‘slang’ vs. ‘proper’ division.
Slang
The term ‘slang’ tends to be overused. It only denotes a very specific kind of in-group vocabulary that is intentionally designed to exclude outsiders.
Many such ‘antilanguages’ have developed in subcommunities of London over the centuries.
The words we use every day
Much vocabulary specific to London is simply part of the style of speaking in more casual settings, and can be described as colloquial (that is, language used in ordinary or familiar conversation, that is not formal or literary) or dialect words.
Inevitably, if words are narrowly associated with a city or region, we think of them as colloquial. Words like geezer, fam, guv, and innit evoke both London and a very colloquial way of speaking.
A familiar pattern of change
Words follow the same pattern of change as language overall, with words that have colloquial, non-standard status cycling into regular, standard usage over time. Many formerly colloquial or slang words now seem very formal to us, as the innovative, transgressive or playful context of their first uses are long forgotten.
For example, many mainstream phrases in English come from the early 20th century jazz slang (cool, uptight, jam, gig) and from American frontier slang (pan out, strike gold, pass the buck).
Some words you might think of as modern have even older origins — friend and unfriend as verbs date back to 1400 and the 1650s respectively. Clearly the actions are not new! Similarly, dude (1880s), puke (1500s), fanboys and fangirls (early 1900s), legit (1890s), and fly (as in ‘cool’, 1800s).
Sounds
In sociolinguistics, an accent is a way of pronouncing a language that is distinctive to a country, area, social group, or individual. Accents are systems of pronunciation, rather than isolated forms like words. Throughout history, changes in these systems of pronunciation have changed how London English sounds.
The Great Vowel Shift
A historical example, that shows how an accent is a linked set of pronunciations, was the Great Vowel Shift. This was a wholesale shift in how words were pronounced in London and the South-East that took place over 300 years, finishing around 1700.
Thousands of words that had long vowels in Middle English e.g. face, boot, life, developed new, double vowel pronunciations (e.g. life was pronounced ‘leef’ in Middle English but now has a double vowel and is pronounced ‘laif’). Scholars have suggested that these changes had social origins, including people with diverse accents migrating into London and possible hyper-correction towards French pronunciation targets.
Changing how London English sounds
In accents, changes like this often affect the whole balance of pronunciations and follow deep and regular rules, rather than randomly affecting individual words. This can cause big changes in how a language sounds overall.
Later accents of London, such as Cockney, and more recent examples such as Multicultural London English, Black British English, and British Asian English have all been accompanied by systematic shifts within pronunciation systems, through the influence once again, as with the Great Vowel Shift, of migration and contact.
Grammar
London has played a leading role in setting the grammar ‘norms’ for both standard varieties of the English language and vernacular urban varieties throughout its history.
Establishing a ‘standard’ grammar
For a long time there was no ‘standard’ English grammar. Shakespeare’s language, for example, included a lot of variation in the use of past tense forms (holpe/help’d, shak’d/shooke, clung/cling’d). It was only later that English speakers imposed the artificial constraint that the language should have only one, ‘standard’ form.
These norms for Standard English were established in the 18th century by London scholars such as Jonathan Swift and Bishop Robert Lowth, who, along with others, selected certain forms of language over others as ‘correct’, often based on mimicry of Latin or other subjective tastes, or adoption of the most prestigious speakers’ habits.
A wide influence
London has been influential in vernacular grammar too. Many features of traditional London grammar, like them kids, what we done, or he weren’t, have become established in all the major urban areas of Britain over the past century or longer, and the cycle continues with new varieties of London English, particularly Multicultural London English and its older source variety Black British English.
Grammar is always changing too
There is a common belief that Standard English grammar is somehow unchanging, but in fact it continually undergoes change too. For example, older listeners flinch when they hear young people’s use of literally to mean really, yet their own use of really underwent a similar shift from a literal to an intensifying meaning (with similar flinching by their elders at the time!).
In another generation’s time it will have become standard to use literally, and perhaps also legit/legitimately, to intensify meaning in the same way we use really and seriously today.
Some new colloquial London grammar may not come from internal structural change, but from high contact among groups with diverse backgrounds who bring in elements from their languages. As with accents, new grammatical usage may arise out of contact among social groups, but can also stem from existing flux within the language itself.
Hybridity
It is common to think of accents and dialects with named labels, like ‘Multicultural London English’, ‘Cockney’, or ‘South London’. But in fact, in any city, each individual finds themselves located at a unique cross-section of many influences.
For example, some decades ago a middle class subset of Londoners developed Estuary English – bankers in the City of London, journalists on Fleet Street, even politicians hoping to appeal to the masses. They started to blend elements of Cockney and RP, leading to the ‘mainstreaming’ of what used to be more vernacular features.
Looking past the labels
One goal of the present project is to deconstruct some of these fixed dialect labels and look ‘under the hood’ to see the social workings of speech patterns in real time. What we find is layers of sound changes, sometimes shared by speakers of purportedly very different dialects.
This layering of accents is often crucial for someone’s finer level of identity signalling. Individuals typically don’t simply want to signal that they are ‘working class’, or ‘Asian’. They are more likely to be aiming to embody something quite specific – say, the persona of a young, Asian, Gen Z, East London woman with upwardly mobile aspirations – and combining speech features to achieve this.