Abstract
In the 19th century, Cockney, the traditional working-class accent of London, underwent a significant change in how it was perceived and described. At the beginning of the 19th century the public discourse on the Cockney accent was restricted to a few linguistic shibboleths such as the interchange of /w/ and /v/ (represented in spellings such as weal, winegar, or vell) and h-dropping, and mentioned by orthoepists and orthographically reproduced by some novelists. By the end of the 19th century, detailed Cockney descriptions and depictions had emerged, leading to the social and cultural construction – the enregisterment – of the Cockney dialect. This paper documents this process by systematically analysing various types of published meta-discourse for both the linguistic forms (shibboleths) mentioned and the social meanings associated with them, especially in the form of so-called ‘characterological figures of personhood’. It further analyses conflicting language ideologies that Cockney was subject to in the 19th century, and which influenced its enregisterment process.
Funding source: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
Award Identifier / Grant number: Forschungsstipendium 2021
Funding source: German Historical Institute London
Award Identifier / Grant number: post-doctoral scholarship 2020
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Research funding: This study was funded by the German Historical Institute London (post-doctoral scholarship 2020) and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Forschungsstipendium 2021).
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- Language shift in the Erlangen Huguenot community
- Between Nottin’ Ill Gite and Bleckfriars – the enregisterment of Cockney in the 19th century
- Analysing bilingualism and biscriptality in medieval Scandinavian epigraphic sources: a sociolinguistic approach
- Same people, different outcomes: the sociolinguistic profile of three language changes in the history of Spanish. A corpus-based approach
- Personal names in medieval libri vitæ as a sociolinguistic resource
- Book Reviews
- Simon Franklin: The Russian graphosphere
- Raf van Rooy: Language or Dialect? The History of a Conceptual Pair
- Wendy Ayres-Bennett and John Bellamy: The Cambridge Handbook of Language Standardization
- Elvira Glaser, Michael Prinz & Stefaniya Ptashnyk: Historisches Codeswitching mit Deutsch: Multilinguale Praktiken in der Sprachgeschichte
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- Language shift in the Erlangen Huguenot community
- Between Nottin’ Ill Gite and Bleckfriars – the enregisterment of Cockney in the 19th century
- Analysing bilingualism and biscriptality in medieval Scandinavian epigraphic sources: a sociolinguistic approach
- Same people, different outcomes: the sociolinguistic profile of three language changes in the history of Spanish. A corpus-based approach
- Personal names in medieval libri vitæ as a sociolinguistic resource
- Book Reviews
- Simon Franklin: The Russian graphosphere
- Raf van Rooy: Language or Dialect? The History of a Conceptual Pair
- Wendy Ayres-Bennett and John Bellamy: The Cambridge Handbook of Language Standardization
- Elvira Glaser, Michael Prinz & Stefaniya Ptashnyk: Historisches Codeswitching mit Deutsch: Multilinguale Praktiken in der Sprachgeschichte