Estuary English - A Controversial Issue? (0)

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Estuary English

The geographical dimension: Is ‘Estuary’ English estuary?
Estuary English is a dialect of English widely spoken in South East England , especially along the River Thames and its estuary. Phonetician John C. Wells defines Estuary English as "Standard English spoken with the accent of the southeast of England".[1] The name comes from the area around the Thames, particularly London, Kent, north Surrey and south Essex.
The variety first came to public prominence in an article by DavidRosewarne in the Times Educational Supplement in October 1984.[2] Rosewarne argued that it may eventually replace RP ( Received Pronunciation ) in the south-east. Studies have indicated that Estuary English is not a single coherent form of English; rather , the reality behind the construct consists of some (but not all) phonetic features of working - class London speech spreading at various rates socially into middle -class speech and geographically into other accents of south-eastern England.[3][4]
Rosewarne (1984) states that “the heartland of this variety lies by the banks of the
Thames and its estuary”. However, in the name itself the Thames is not mentioned.
This seems to have irritated some of the academics , who willingly displayed their
reluctance to the term . In his posting to the Linguist List, for instance , Battarbee (1996) talks of "… regional arrogance of the SouthEast within the UK: it takes for granted that 'Estuary' means the Thames Estuary. There are many estuaries in Great Britain, and several of the emerging regional mega -accents are estuarially based ".
Other linguists have criticised the term because it suggests that the variety is restricted to the area of the Thames estuary. Trudgill (2001) severely criticises both the concept of EE and its name, among others because “it suggests that it is a variety of English confined to the banks of the Thames Estuary, which it is not”. Also Maidment (1994) expresses his negative attitude to the term: “… Estuary English, if it exists at all, is not only spoken on or near the Thames estuary. There is no real evidence that it even originated there. … the accent of younger speakers in Milton Keynes which is a new city quite a long way from the Thames Estuary has many of the features claimed for EE”. Further , Crystal (1995) calls ‘Estuary English’ “ something of a misnomer, for the influence of London speech has for sometime been evident well beyond the Thames estuary, notably in the Oxford -Cambridge-London triangle (p.50) and in the area to the south and east of London as far as the coast.”
Moore (p.c.), UK coordinator of the European Network of Innovative
10 Schools , best describes the drawbacks of the term ‘EE’:
The name is neither helpful nor accurate. Because of a superficial resemblance of some features to the speech sounds of the south-east of England, it has been named for the Thames estuary. But there is no evidence that it really originates there - and is probably far more geographically diverse in its origins. The description is also stupid , since it omits the name of the river - as if the Thames were the only river with an estuary. It is yet more stupid because the distribution of the accent has no real connection at all with the river estuary (whereas this might have been the case in past ages for the speech of communities whose lives , trade and occupations were determined by a river).
To conclude, linguists argue that (1) London influence on English is not only
apparent on the Thames estuary (Rosewarne himself wrote: “it seems to be the most
influential accent in the south-east of England”, not only in the Thames estuary), and
(2) ‘Estuary English’ is not a felicitous or adequate name. Nonetheless, it is now so
solidly entrenched in the English language , particularly in the academic circles, that
it would be unwise to struggle against it.
2. Historical background-a myth destroyed

Estuary English - a result of certain long-lasting processes

People who have had a chance to read newspaper articles concerning Estuary English, might have had the impression that it is a relatively new Cockney influenced language variety making its way into various regions of the country at a rapid pace .
In this respect , the opinions held by the coiner of the term and other linguists are congruent but different from the journalists’ ones . Rosewarne (1984) explains that the variety that he chose to call ‘Estuary English’ is not new: “It appears to be a continuation of the long process by which London pronunciation has made itself felt . This started in the later Middle Ages when the speech of the capital started to influence the Court and from there changed the Received Pronunciation of the day.” Although with a pinch of criticism, Trudgill (2001) supports this claim : “This is an inaccurate term which, however, has become widely accepted. It is inaccurate because it suggests that we are talking about a new variety, which we are not.” It is also affirmed by Wells, who admits that influences from London are now easier to observe:

It is not a variety that has spontaneously emerged recently

Estuary English is a new name. But it is not a new phenomenon . It is the continuation of a trend that has been going on for five hundred years or more - the tendency for
features of popular London speech to spread out geographically (to other parts of the
country) and socially (to higher social classes). The erosion of the English class system and the greater social mobility in Britain today means that this trend is more clearly noticeable than was once the case. (Wells 1997)
- ‘the sudden emergence of a new type of English’ results from irresponsible disregard for the facts.
3. Commonly cited salient features of Estuary English
· l-vocalization, milk miwk
· glottalling, using a glottal stop
· happY -tensing; happy, coffee, valley
· yod coalescence; Tuesday, tune , attitude, duke , reduce
· diphthong shift, FACE , PRICE and GOAT vowels (wotshor
nime?) (Wells 1997)
perhaps to a phonemic split (wholly holy) (Wells 1994)
The features that Wells excludes from EE’s phonetic make-up that are typical of
Cockney are:
· h-dropping, so that Cockney hand on heart becomes ('and on 'eart).
· th-fronting, using labiodental fricatives instead of dental fricatives
This turns I think into /a fink / and mother into / move / (Wells 1997)
However, Coggle (1993) claims that TH fronting in word-medial and word-final
positions is becoming widespread at the Cockney end of the EE spectrum.
4. Difficulties in defining phonological boundaries between Received
Pronunciation, Estuary English and Cockney
Rosewarne (1984 onwards) places Estuary English speakers on an accent continuum between RP and Cockney, and according to him they can display various shades of EE either towards the Cockney or the RP end of this continuum.
Maidment (1994) represents this definition by means of Diagram 1 and points to the fact that such a depiction of Estuary English would indicate that there are rigid boundaries between Cockney and EE, and EE and RP.
[Cockney][EE][RP]
[I F] [I F]
[I F]
The difficulties in deciding whether a certain passage of speech can be recognised as Estuary English lies in the “fuzziness of the boundaries between EE and Cockney, and EE and RP” (Maidment 1994), which is the consequence of an overlap between the formal style of Cockney and informal style of EE, and the formal style of EE and the informal style of RP.
Several studies have been designed to determine whether such boundary markers exist and whether they can function separately or collectively only. One of such attempts was made by Haenni (1999: 14 – 38), who examined selected accent features of EE to see if they can fix a rigid boundary between Cockney, EE and RP. His survey reveals that clear-cut markers of Estuary English do not exist (1999: 38).

Cockney speakers’ accommodation in the new territories? Fox 1999/2000: Basildon Project

Basildon is a predominantly white, working class town developed in the
1950’s in response to the need of East End Londoners forced to leave the city and find new houses in the post-war period . The location of the town, approximately 25 miles east of London, would imply that the dialect spoken there is Estuary English as Rosewarne (1984) believed that the variety was based by the banks of the Thames, but also used in the south-east of England.
Research methodology:
Fox recorded thirty adolescents, aged 12–19, from working class backgrounds. 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 contributory factors in the gradual process of the establishment of Estuary English.
Altendorf 1997: London Project (1)
Altendorf’s study was conducted in London. The adolescent informants, born and brought up in Greater London, were aged 9 and 14, and at the time of the study were attending a moderately expensive , private day school located in a middle-class area, close to a working class area. The students came from lower-middle to middlemiddle class backgrounds. The experiment involved: 1 junior schoolboy, 6 senior schoolgirls, and 6 senior schoolboys (but 4 teenagers were discussed in the available paper). Adults between 45 and 55 years of age were also recorded.
Conclusions:
Altendorf (1999a) concludes that /t/-glottaling and /l/-vocalisation are characteristic
of EE, but they ‘are not exclusive enough to define Estuary English as a distinct variety’.
Przedlacka 1997/1998: the Home Counties Project
The sociophonetic study of teenage speech in the Home Counties conducted by Przedlacka, contained the diachronic and the synchronic dimensions. The data from (1) ‘Estuary English’ speakers and the informants included in The Survey of English Dialects (the SED) recorded in the 1950s (Orton 1967 & 1970, in Przedlacka 2001 & 2002a), and (2) speakers of ‘Estuary English’, Cockney and Received Pronunciation were compared. Gender and class differences were taken into account. The fieldwork was done in four localities: Aylesbury, Bucks, Little Baddow, Essex, Farningham, Kent, and Walton -on-the- Hill , Surrey (the supposed territory of Estuary English) each locality represented by four speakers, eight males and eight females altogether. The speakers were recruited in two different types of schools: eight students from selective (grammar) schools and eight students from non-selective (comprehensive)
schools.
Conclusions:
Przedlacka (2001) concludes that in the territory where EE is said to be the dominant way of speaking there is “a number of distinct accents” with some influences from London speech, not a single and definable variety. She observes tendencies rather than absolutes as far as differences in the distribution of phonetic variables in male and female speech are concerned.

Schmid 1998: Canterbury Project

The study in Canterbury involved 48 informants: 13 men, 13 women and 22 teenagers: aged 14-15 and 17-18. The data were collected directly; recordings of spontaneous speech were made and transcribed phonetically. Eventually Schmid analysed 22 informants displaying many EE features as she set out to prove that Estuary English influenced the speech of her informants.
Schmid concludes that: (1) “… speakers from different social backgrounds share to a greater or lesser extent Estuary English as their common accent”, (2) “EE unites all the young people, regardless of which social background they come from” and (3) males are more willing to adopt stigmatised features of EE than women.

Altendorf 1998/99: London Project (2)

Altendorf’s second research in South London suburbs was only an introduction to a greater project devoted to Estuary English (Altendorf 2003). There were six informants altogether: 2 Estuary English speakers, 2 Cockney speakers from East End and 2 RP speakers from a school in Central London, all of them women born and brought up in Central or Greater London. Social classes were represented by different schools: Comprehensive School, Public School I, Public School II – working class, middle class and upper middle class.
Conclusions:
/L/-vocalisation and /t/-glottaling are widespread in the speech of all social classes on the continuum between Cockney and RP. Nevertheless, the use of a glottal stop by EE and RP speakers is restricted to less formal styles and is blocked in intervocalic and prelateral positions. TH fronting is a feature of Cockney, extremely rarely present in EE and RP.
All the above studies debunk the myth of the emergence of a single and definable accent. The speech samples analysed prove that there are some tendencies towards specific language changes in the south-east of England, but the pace of these changes is different in the particular localities. In addition , the speech patterns of men and women differ, with males tending to use stigmatised features more readily than females and women being more innovative. Differences between the two social classes analysed are also noticeable.

The influence of Estuary English: Will it replace RP?
“What I have chosen to term Estuary English may now and for the foreseeable future,
be the strongest native influence upon RP.” (Rosewarne 1984)
The very optimistic claim by Rosewarne that Estuary English will exert strong
influence on Received Pronunciation has been stuck to by the media and a gossip about the death of Queen’s English in the foreseeable future has been spreading to the detriment of EE speakers: “Reports of its death are silly journalistic exaggerations.” (Wells 1998-1999).
Tatham allows for the possibility of EE becoming the accent of the majority
of English people from various socio- economic groups, while the linguistic minorities from the lowest groups may “use certain features of ‘Estuary English’ in combination with elements of whatever their regional speech might be” (1999/2002).
He assumes that Estuary English may take over some of the functions RP has served for years, for example disguising one’s origins. He actually thinks that EE may have already become a model for general imitation “for large and influential sections of the young”.
Trudgill (2001) approaches the question with an apparent reserve and justifies his point of view in practical terms; the present sociolinguistic conditions are not favourable for EE to spread in the whole of the UK. First of all, London is not the only large urban centre; therefore it has not exclusive rights to influence the speech in all the regions of the country. Next, such centres as Belfast , Dublin, Cardiff , Glasgow, Newcastle , Nottingham, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester , Birmingham and Bristol have been reported to focus the accents around them. And last but not least , “There is no parallel here to the nationwide network of residential Public Schools which gave rise to RP.”
The last argument has been challenged by Parsons (1998: 63-64): “there seems to be no need for this, if EE grows on the substrate of RP. If at one time in the future EE should invade the last strongholds of RP, the old boarding public schools (possibly because there will be no more teachers who speak anything else , or because pupils will refuse to be ‘branded on the tongue’ by speaking anything else), then EE will be the New RP.”
Parsons (1998: 61) also takes a position on the influence of the current levelling of accents in the south-east on the possible substitution of RP by EE:
If… levelling of accents is taking place in the whole of south-east England, the home territory of RP, or if such a levelling is perceived , because people cannot tell the
difference (bearing in mind that ‘accent is in the listener’), then EE will indeed be in a very strong position to oust RP, which is what has been predicted by ROSEWARNE
Coggle (2000) does not support the claim that EE will oust RP either; however, he supposes that “… EE would probably influence the speech of powerholders in the Greater London area, and indeed that some EE speakers would become power -holders.”
According to Agha, Estuary English and Received Pronunciation may
approximate each other:
This is certainly possible, though in more than sense. At present, ‘Mainstream’ RP and Estuary English are centered in very different institutional loci. The demographic
profiles of their speakers are also different, despite some overlap. But RP itself is a
register that has changed internally in numerous ways… These changes are… of different kinds... These include changes in phonetic patterns, exemplary speakers,
register names , characterological discourses, as well as changes in the demographic
profile of those who recognise the register as a standard to be emulated, versus those
able to speak some form of it (whether exemplary or not). RP and estuary English may well come to approximate one another in one or more of these respects as well; but whether or not they do, their mode of co-existence at any given point in their history is linked to their modes of dissemination and the logic of socially anchored role alignment between speakers and hearers of utterances, linked to each other through them. (Agha 2003)
Conclusion:
‘Estuary English’ is an artificial term that covers a number of levelled out varieties of English spoken in the south-east of England. It constitutes a continuum of accents between Received Pronunciation and Cockney, accompanied by standard grammar and possibly several characteristic lexical features.
Since Rosewarne invented this label linguists have been discussing various aspects of the concept, though there have not been many of those who published their views .
Those who did, were primarily interested in discovering whether it was a uniform accent in its own right and defining the boundaries between EE and the neighbouring accents – RP and Cockney. They failed to do so because as it turned out those boundaries were too fuzzy – the supposedly typical EE features appeared in the other two accents as well. Nevertheless, they established the contexts in which the features could appear without being overtly stigmatised and agreed that there were certain tendencies in the patterns of their distribution according to social class, gender and locality. They simply debunked the myth that a new accent emerged. Other areas of interest to linguists were the possible causes of the rise and alleged spread of the variety, its possible influence on other accents, as well as its future prospects. Again , it has not been proven that Estuary English is spreading geographically, although single features of London speech may be. The process of EE creation is not new and the motivations for its emergence may only be speculated about although the most plausible ones seem to be dialect levelling and koineisation in the south-east region . These phenomena are a consequence of long-term accommodation of speakers from various backgrounds. The role of the media in its spread is overestimated, but one thing is certain about them. They have created animage of a monster that endangers the ‘ pure ’ English language.
References:
Ryfa , J. (2003) Estuary English – A controversial issue? MA thesis. Retrieved 7 October 2011 from http://www.eriding.net/amoore/lang/joanna-ryfa-estuary.pdf
Rosewarne, D. (1984) Estuary English: David Rosewarne describes a newly observed variety of English pronunciation ‘Estuary English’ Times Educational Supplement, 19 Retrieved 10 October 2011from http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/estuary/rosew.ht m
Wells, J. (1997) Questions and Answers about Estuary English. Retrieved 7 October 2011 from
http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/estuary/ee-faqs-jcw.ht m
Altendorf, U. (1999) Estuary English: Is English going Cockney? Retrieved 10 October 2011 from http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/estuary/altendf.pdf

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