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  Peter Roach

Estuary English again

1/6/2015

1 Comment

 

After I objected to Alan Cruttenden’s term “London Regional General British (LRGB)” being given the same status as the term ‘Estuary English’ in the lead paragraph of the Estuary English article, the Wikipedia editor concerned agreed to move the mention of LRGB to a new section devoted to the EE name itself. Unfortunately, as Jack Windsor Lewis has recently pointed out, the new mention stated that Alan uses the terms LRGB and Estuary English interchangeably, which is clearly not the case – he refers to EE in quoting various things that have been written on the subject, but uses LRGB in what he himself has to say. I have corrected this, and hope that it now works better.

Something that bothers me about this article as a whole is that it more or less accepts EE as a genuine accent of English, ignoring the considerable body of opinion that thinks it is just a convenient catch-all label that can’t be given a precise definition. Although I know a lot of scholarly work has gone into the study of EE, I am still one of the sceptics, and have said in print “…there is no such accent, and the term should be used with care.” In the Wikipedia EE article, there is in fact a short piece (much of which was put in by me) at the end of the over-long and under-organized section called Features, which refers to some published opinions opposed to the notion of EE. However, I feel there ought to be a separate section where the arguments against treating EE as a bona fide accent are set out. I would also like the first sentence of the article to be changed from “Estuary English is an accent of English …” to “Estuary English is claimed to be …”. However, I am worried that if I make these alterations, I could be accused of pushing forward my own agenda, something which is very much disapproved of in WP. So for the present I hold back.

1 Comment
Sidney Wood link
3/6/2015 10:22:31 am

For the past 60 years I've always told anyone who asked, that my "dialect" is Estuary English, according to what we were told at school around 1950 in a lesson on English dialects. Our English master was referring to the towns along the Kent and Essex shores of the Thames Estuary. I've no knowledge of where he found the expression. Whatever name you give to this accent, I'm convinced it emerged, as far as Kent is concerned, during the 19th century as a long sequence of sound changes that occurred in the estuary towns and then spread southwards across the county. The accent was complete by 1900, although some of the sound changes had still not penetrated beyond Ashford in the SE. At the same time similar sound changes were spreading throughout the home counties (described by George Orwell for the Thames Valley of the 1890s, upstream from London), so the expression "Estuary English" would have been a misnomer even before the end of the 19th century (except for the estuary area itself). Wells (1982) describes four regional subdivisions of SBE: London (in its own chapter 4.2), and the home counties, East Anglia and the west (chapter 4.3). But only East Anglia and the west were dealt with in detail. The home counties is where you will find Estuary English, call it what you will. (See Trudgill 2002, Sociolinguistic Variation and Change, chapt 16).

I've no quarrel with Rosewarne claiming to have coined "Estuary English" himself. For all I know, our English master might have coined it too, assuming he hadn't read it in some lost article or heard it in a lecture.

Rosewarne's 1984 article was unfortunately fraught with contradictions and ambiguities, multiplied by all who have subsequently taken sides for or against each individual claim, further increased by preoccupations like how often we say "cheers" or indulge in th-fronting, so the resulting confusion among linguists is understandable. The advantage is there's always someone you can quote in your favour, whatever you believe. I'm with Trudgill.

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    A blog that discusses problems in Wikipedia's coverage of Phonetics

    Peter Roach

    Emeritus Professor of Phonetics,
    ​University of Reading, UK

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