Estuary English - A Controversial Issue?
Equal numbers of females and males were chosen to avoid gender bias. All
participants were born or settled in Basildon before the age of three. To obtain the
material with different speech styles, the recording consisted of two stages: `Quick
and Anonymous' Survey (elicitation tasks a passage of prose and a word reading
list) and sociolinguistic interviews of 2 to 3 informants with the fieldworker. Finally,
six speakers' data were analysed auditorily in two phases.
The outcomes suggest that the variety used in Basildon displays the
characteristics of Cockney, rather than Estuary English: "there appears to be a case for
claiming that the vernacular is simply 'Cockney moved East'" (Fox 2000).
Therefore, it is tempting to disagree that ex-Londoners accommodated in
terms of language to speakers of traditional dialects by adopting what some people
now call `Estuary English', but this situation may have been one of the many
annaabi.ee 
