In the late 1990s, Guy Ritchie did more to popularise British dialects around the world than Shakespeare, regularly putting Cockney, Scouse, and Irish up against foreign tongues like New York. Yet just two decades later, some of the more novel ways of speaking – like Cockney – are difficult to find off the silver screen.
Despite its size, London only has a handful of regional dialects, namely, Cockney, Received Pronunciation (or the King’s English), Estuary, and Multicultural London English. The first two of these are in danger. A 2024 study in the English World-Wide Journal discovered that, of 193 voices recorded in London, nobody spoke in either the Queen’s English or Cockney.
Is the language of Del Trotter, Michael Caine, and Danny Dyer almost gone?
A Small Footprint
Dialects have always passed in and out of existence, often, it’s because the usage of certain words is endemic to a small group of people, region, or hobby.
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In the latter case, the game of bingo has its own terminology. The Rhino.bet website lists phrases like Two Little Ducks and Four Corners among its bingo lingo for beginners. While not required to play online bingo, the operator says that colourful calls enhance the overall experience and allow audience participation around certain numbers.
On a regional scale, Newcastle’s Geordie has such a small footprint in the northeast that it might be considered endangered, while Cumbria had its own language – Cumbric – until the mid-11th century.
In 2021, researchers from Portsmouth and Cambridge universities predicted that almost all northern pronunciations would no longer exist within 45 years, as southern dialects spread northward. The paper cited the odd example of a word for snail – dod-man or hoddy-doddy – as evidence that time can erase words. These vanished in the last one hundred years.
Hollywood Stars
According to a 2010 article from the BBC, a Lancaster University study predicted Cockney’s days were numbered to about 30 years when Multicultural London English (“Jafaican”) would become dominant.
The University of Essex offered a riposte in 2023, noting that Cockney wasn’t disappearing, its speakers had just moved northeast in the 19th century to Essex, as poverty, overcrowding, and a lack of jobs bit into London.
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The disappearance of Received Pronunciation from London is perhaps the bigger surprise, as it’s the dialect of Hollywood stars like Ben Kingsley, Judy Dench, Colin Firth, and Daniel Craig. Those names give RP an air of exclusivity, offering some clues as to its demise.
Received Pronunciation was never common in the first place, peaking at 5% of the population in the war years and dropping to 2% more recently.
Only Fools and Horses
Overall, the demise of Cockney and RP points to one thing – the rejection of class-based dialects, as London becomes a more multicultural place. Historically, Cockney was the language of criminals, who used it to evade detection by ear-wigging coppers. Only Fools and Horses parodied the speech as nearly incoherent at times.
There’s still hope for Cockney, though. In the early 2010s, Glasgow University linguists found that locals watching Eastenders had started to adopt the accent, which might be the strangest linguistic chimera ever heard.
