Estuary English

Estuary English is an English dialect or accent associated with South East England, especially the area along the River Thames and its estuary, centring around London. Phonetician John C. Wells proposed a definition of Estuary English as "Standard English spoken with the accent of the south-east of England", although he criticised the notion that the spread of language from London to the south-east was anything new. The name comes from the area around the Thames, particularly its Estuary. Estuary English can be heard from some people in London, north Surrey, north Kent, south Hertfordshire and Essex. Estuary English shares many features with Cockney, and there is some debate among linguists as to where Cockney speech ends and Estuary English begins.

The variety first came to public prominence in an article by David Rosewarne in the Times Educational Supplement in October 1984. Rosewarne argued that it may eventually replace Received Pronunciation in the south-east. Studies have indicated that Estuary English is not a single coherent form of English; rather, it 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.

The scholar Alan Cruttenden uses the term London Regional General British in preference to the popular term 'Estuary English'.

The names listed above may be abbreviated:

Some authors use different names for EE closer to Cockney (Popular London) and EE closer to Received Pronunciation (London Regional Standard or South-Eastern Regional Standard).

Note that some other authors use the name Popular London to refer to Cockney itself.

The boundary between Estuary English and Cockney is far from clear-cut. Several writers have argued that Estuary English is not a discrete accent distinct from the accents of the London area. The sociolinguist Peter Trudgill has written that the name is inappropriate because "it suggests that we are talking about a new variety, which we are not; and because it suggests that it is a variety of English confined to the banks of the Thames estuary, which it is not. The label actually refers to the lower middle-class accents, as opposed to working-class accents, of the Home Counties Modern Dialect area". Peter Roach comments that "In reality there is no such accent and the term should be used with care. The idea originates from the sociolinguistic observation that some people in public life who would previously have been expected to speak with an RP accent now find it acceptable to speak with some characteristics of the London area ... such as glottal stops, which would in earlier times have caused comment or disapproval".Foulkes & Docherty (1999) state "All of its [EE's] features can be located on a sociolinguistic and geographical continuum between RP and Cockney, and are spreading not because Estuary English is a coherent and identifiable influence, but because the features represent neither the standard nor the extreme non-standard poles of the continuum".

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