London dialekt.

Contents.
Introduction.
Part 1. London dialect in the development of the English language
Part 2. London dialect contribution in standardization of English
Part 3. Contemporary London dialect – Cockney.
Conclusion
Bibliography

London dialekt.

swich
suche
þey they
hij
they
they
Zouun gave
yafe
yaf
gaf
her their
hire
hire
theyre
There are, obviously, substantial differences between each type. Some modern type forms can be seen already in Type I, e.g. þey (= they), whilst others only appear in Type IV. Furthermore, only Type IV is immediately recognisable as an antecedent of the present-day language.
Now this situation is rather curious. Consider in particular the differences between Types II and IV. It would appear that they both represent forms of London English separated merely by a period of less than a century. But the differences are so large that chronology scarcely seems a sufficient explanation. The answer to this puzzle is manifold. A key element was certainly patterns of immigration in London. In the early 14th century immigration into London was primarily from the Home Counties and East Anglia. But during the century the immigration patterns changes, with the principal sources being the East Central Midlands, although immigration continued from Norfolk at a steady rate. As such immigrants moved to London, they would, of course, bring their dialect with them, including such non-London forms as they and theyre. Very roughly speaking, what we are presented with is an amalgam where potent elements are older London English alongside newer forms from the Central Midlands and East Anglia. The standard language which emerges is not properly London English at all ~ London English carries on and is still today easily distinguished from Standard English. But there is more to the development than that.
Einar Haugen suggested that standardisation must meet four criteria: selection, codification, elaboration and acceptance. Standard English was selected because the seat of government was in London, it was codified partly through printing, for printers required settled forms, and partly through education, as the new middle classes demanded an education in English, rather than French or Latin. Its elaboration was a result of its quick spread through all written discourse, and not merely the language of government. These three effects then led to its acceptance as the usage of educated people, at least in formal situations.
By the end of the 16th century, George Puttenham was able to advise:
ye shall therfore take the vsuall speach of the Court, and that of London and the shires lying about London within lx. myles, and not much above. I say not this but that in euery shyre of England there be gentlemen and others that speake but especially write as good Southerne as we of Middlesex or Surrey do, but not the common people of euery shire …
To cut a complicated story short, there appears to have been two systems at work in London at the time. The first, which is traditionally called System 1, was the system derived from Chancery Standard. The second, System 2, was been used by middle class speakers including immigrant speakers from East and Central Midlands. From our point of view today, the interesting aspect of this dual system is that during the 17th century System 2 gradually ousted the more conservative Chancery Standard of System 1.
This could only have occurred as the result of dialect contact. But more than that, there must have been a sociological context beyond the mere linguistic. The explanation which seems most plausible is that aspiring middle class speakers from the Midlands, as they arrived in London, found themselves, as they strove to improve their position, attempted without success to assimilate their speech to the aristocratic manners of the Court. If we try to replicate the resolution of this dialect conflict with the linguistic situation at the beginning of the 21st century, there happens to be a remarkable parallel. For, just as in the 17th century, today we find another group of social climbers whose dialect norms are invading the standard language. That, of course is the contemporary phenomenon known as Estuary English.
But the first point is that standard English is not constant. Change occurs. Furthermore that change is not purely linguistic. That is to say, although change can occur as the result of internal linguistic change, for example the rise of the auxiliary verb do, absent from the language until about the fifteenth century. It also occurs as the result of social factors. The rise of System 2 is clear evidence of that. Indeed, some contemporary writers deplored the change. Alexander Gil, who taught, amongst others, John Milton, talks about "the affectations of the Mopsies", most probably the 17th century equivalent of Estuary English speakers. Thus social prejudices affecting the language even then. Gil was complaining about men such as John Hart, one of the other great spelling reformers of the time. It would appear that whereas Gil used System 1, the old aristocratic system, Hart was a middle class System 2 speaker.
Be that as it may, even System 2 was not designed to last. That system had some features which are today archaic, not current in Standard English since the 18th century. The most obvious of these is seen in writers such as Pope, who rhymes speak and take. The loss of such rhymes was again the result of dialect mixture, and it seems probably the result of influence from East Anglian dialects. The vowel system there was quite distinct from either of the other two systems we have looked at, and had been so since Anglo-Saxon times. But the links between there and London had always remained strong, and it would appear that the mix of rural and urban was the force which allowed the development of a new System, System 3 in our terms to emerge.
It is tempting to assume that, once System 3 had taken over, the Standard language settled down. Yet there are continuing changes, not merely in the vowel system. Changes affecting every area of the language. To stick with the sound system for one more moment, the fact that my speech is peppered with glottal stops, a feature which astonishes my Californian colleagues and which some of you may regard as uncouth, has to be set against the claim which I would make that I speak Standard English. Time for another question: How can that be true?
The apparent strangeness of my claim leads us away from sound systems. For the issue which becomes more and more important in the 18th century is codification. No doubt most of you will know of Jonathan Swift’s Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue. Here is a short extract from that essay:
Besides the grammar-part, wherein we are allowed to be very defective, those persons will observe many gross improprieties, which however authorized, and grown familiar, ought to be discarded
Undoubtedly, there were others like Swift. The following is part of a resolution which was adopted by the Royal Society in 1664:
... there were persons of the Society whose genius was very proper and inclined to improve the English tongue, particularly for philosophic purposes, it was voted that there should be a committee for improving the English language.
For the most part the desire for the correction of English lay with two other groups, who overlapped considerably. These were teachers and journalists (or, rather, the eighteenth century equivalent thereof). The feature that joined them together was the realisation that there was considerable profit to be made, especially from the new middle classes, many of whom came from families who were either non-literate or scarcely literate. Much of this no doubt due to the Industrial Revolution, although long-term effects were also important, in particular the rise of printing and the continuing urbanisation of England.
We have already seen that Standard English is not a necessary aspect of English (since between, say, the Norman Conquest and the rise of printing there was scarcely even a faint approximation to a Standard). We have also seen that Standard English, like any other variety, is not only subject to internal linguistic change, but it is also subject to social change (as in the shifts from System 1 to System 2 and then System 3).
Indeed, in terms of social change, we need not have looked so far back. Consider, for example, the pronunciation of the gerundive in hunting, shooting and fishing. The pronunciation of that as in’ has almost died out. Similarly, the pronunciation of off as orf is equally outdated. The first of these may be the result of competition within the Standard, but the second seems to have been the result of contact with non-standard dialects, presumably from northern dialects. Another feature which raises little comment is the insertion of a glottal stop before a consonant such as /p/ at the end of a word, i.e., stop is pronounced as /stQ p/. Note that this is distinct from the feature which common to the local dialects of the two capitals of this country, i.e. Edinburgh and London, where glottal stops substitute for /t/ between vowels.
This feature, called preglottalisation, is particularly interesting, because it is common among Standard speakers, particularly younger Standard speakers, and reports suggest that it is not socially stigmatised. There are, apparently, signs that younger Standard speakers are even able to use glottal replacement at the end of words, that is to say, they are able to replace final /t/ by / / in words such as hot.
This development, which does remain stigmatized by older speakers, is one of the signs of "Estuary English". It may well be due to the influence of the local London dialect, but since glottal replacement is found also in East Anglia, the term "Estuary English" seems especially apt. Glottalisation and "Estuary English" also reminds us of another recent change, by which /l/ is diphthongised in words such as milk to give /mIok/. This change, perhaps less than a hundred years old, originated in local London English, but is now reported amongst some younger speakers of Standard: Whether these Estuary features matter is debatable: my point is that English is now the international language spoken or learnt by two billion people, and serious problems of clarity can arise from exactly these uses .
Other than to point out that one might ask whether he is being willfully ignorant or deliberately misleading. There is a more interesting issue. Let us accept that a major identifying feature of Estuary English is the vocalisation of /l/, the change by which /l/ becomes a vowel sound which forms a diphthong the preceding stressed vowel, as in milk. Then us now assume that that results in unclarity.
So far, so good. But at this point we should remember something else. One of the oddest features of standard English is that it is what is called non-rhotic. That is to say, in words such as fair there is no final /r/. Most standard varieties of English, for example, Scottish or American English are rhotic, having preserved final /r/. Ask any American here for their judgment about American dialects which are non-rhotic, for example New York City. Certainly, for Scottish speakers, the merger of the three words poor, pore and paw is an unambiguous loss of clarity. So standard English has no monopoly on clarity.
Still in the XXIst century there are some point to be highlighted about the role of London dialect in the development of Standard English, but what goes without saying is that even now London language is different compared to the literary standard, widely known as Cockney which is to be described further.
Part 3. Contemporary London dialect – Cockney.
A working-class Londoner, especially in the East End, and English as used by such a Londoner. Though often stigmatized as a gutter dialect, Cockney is a major element in the English of London, the core of a diverse variety spoken by some 7m people in the Greater London area.
In Langland's Piers Plowman (1362), cokeneyes means eggs, apparently small and misshapen, as if laid by a cock. In Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (c.1386), the Reeve uses cokenay in the sense of a mother's darling or milksop. By the early 16c, country people had extended the term to people brought up in cities and ignorant of real life: ‘This cokneys and tytyllynges [delicati pueri] may abide no sorrow when they come to age. In this great citees as London, York the children be so nycely and wantonly brought up that comonly they can little good’ ( Robert Whitinton, Vulgaria, 1520). By the early 17c, however, this expression of disdain for the city-bred young had narrowed to one place and one person: the ‘Bow-bell Cockney’ (1600) and ‘our Cockney of London’ (1611). In 1617, two definitions were written for the term in this sense: A Cockney or Cockny, applied only to one borne within the sound of Bow-bell, that is, within the City of London, which tearme came first out of this tale: That a Cittizens sonne riding with his father into the Country asked, when he heard a horse neigh, what the horse did his father answered, the horse doth neigh; riding farther he heard a cocke crow, and said doth the cocke neigh too? and therefore Cockney or Cocknie, by inuersion thus: incock, q. incoctus i. raw or vnripe in Country-mens affaires ( John Minsheu , Ductor in linguas: The guide into tongues).
Londiners, and all within the sound of Bowbell, are in reproch called Cocknies (Fynes Moryson, An Itinerary). A succession of stigmas has therefore been associated with the name from the start: odd egg, milksop, young city slicker, and street-wise Londoner. At the same time, the reference of Cockney moved from something new or young (an egg, a child) to a spoiled adolescent (city youth) to anyone of any age born in London within the sound of the bells of St Mary-le-Bow Church. With ‘our Cockney of London’, the other usages were forgotten and a stereotype developed of a breed with no interest in life beyond the capital: ‘That Synods Geography was as ridiculous as a Cockneys (to whom all is Barbary beyond Brainford; and Christendome endeth at Greenwitch)’ ( Richard Whitlock, Zootomia, or observations on the present manners of the English, 1654).
Comments on the usage of London Cockneys date from the 18c. After setting out the faults of the Irish, the Scots, and the Welsh, the London elocutionist John Walker noted in 1791: ‘There are dialects peculiar to Cornwall, Lancashire, Yorkshire, and every distant county in England; but as a consideration of these would lead to a detail too minute for the present occasion, I shall conclude these remarks with a few observations on the peculiarities of my countrymen, the Cockneys; who, as they are the models of pronunciation to the distant provinces, ought to be the more scrupulously correct’ (A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary of the English Language).
Walker lists four faults: (1) A habit among Londoners of ‘the lowest order’ of pronouncing words like fists, posts, wastes as two syllables, as if there were an e between the t and the s. (2) Not confined to the lowest order, ‘the pronunciation of v for w, and more frequently of w for v’ (‘vine and weal’ for wine and veal), which he called ‘a blemish of the first magnitude’. (3) Not pronouncing h after w, so that ‘we do not find the least distinction between while and wile, whet and wet, where and were, &c.’ (4) ‘Sinking the h at the beginning of words where it ought to be sounded, and of sounding it, either where it is not seen, or where it ought to be sunk. Thus we not infrequently hear, especially among children, heart pronounced art, and arm, harm.’ He also notes that words like humour are pronounced as if written ‘yewmour’. Even so, he concludes: ‘Thus I have endeavoured to correct some of the more glaring errors of my countrymen, who, with all their faults, are still upon the whole the best pronouncers of the English language.’
Cockney and London usage seem to have been synonymous for Walker. He makes no distinction between refined and unrefined usage in the capital apart from his reference to the lowest social order. In the 19c, however, the term was limited to those whose usage never served as a model for anyone. By the time of Shaw’s play Pygmalion (1913), Cockney was generally regarded as debased language (‘gutter Cockney’) and Shaw's flower-girl Eliza Doolittle received far more help from the phonetician Henry Higgins than Walker felt his fellows needed. The speech of all classes of Londoner has changed greatly since Walker's time. In the process, one of his ‘faults’ has by and large become a feature of the standard spoken English of England: the /w/ in such pairs as while/wile: see W and WH-SOUND. Of the others, one remains a stigma, one has only recently disappeared, and the third vanished long ago but remains controversial. The dropping of aitches is widespread beyond Cockneydom and is generally considered substandard. Pronunciations like ‘fistiz’ for fists continued into the 20c, but appear to have died out in the 1950s. The exchange of v and w has been the most controversial of Walker's SHIBBOLETHS, commentators who deny that it ever occurred sometimes blaming DICKENS for inventing it. He uses it copiously in The Pickwick Papers (1837), as part of the dialect of Samuel Weller, whose father calls him ‘ Samivel Veller’: ‘I had a reg'lar new fit o' clothes that mornin', gen'l'men of the jury,’ said Sam, ‘and that was a wery partickler and uncommon circumstance vith me in those days. … If they wos a pair o' patent double million magnifyin' gas microscopes of hextra power, p'raps I might be able to see through a flight o' stairs and a deal door; but bein' only eyes, you see, my wision's limited’ (ch. 34).
Walker, however, provides the proof that Sam's style of speech existed well before Dickens created him, but it appears to have been in decline when Dickens made it a literary stereotype, and had virtually disappeared by the 1870s, as noted by Shaw in an appendix to Captain Brassbound's Conversion (1900):
When I came to London in 1876, the Sam Weller dialect had passed away so completely that I should have given it up as a literary fiction if I had not discovered it surviving in a Middlesex village, and heard of it from an Essex one. Some time in the eighties the late Alexander Tuer called attention in the Pall Mall Gazette to several peculiarities of modern cockney, and to the obsolescence of the Dickens dialect that was still being copied from book to book by authors who never dreamt of using their ears, much less of training them to listen.