London as “innovator”

An important aspect in the linguistic development and folk-linguistic perception of the Southeast is the presence of the capital London within this area. London has a long tradition as a source of linguistic innovation for accents of the surrounding area as well as for RP itself. In recent years, a number of London working-class variants have not only been spreading to areas outside London but also to higher social classes, including the RP-speaking upper and upper middle classes. Wells describes this trend in a series of articles, in one of which he states that “some of the changes … can reasonably be attributed to influence from Cockney – often overtly despised, but covertly imitated” (Wells 1994: 205). This development is currently exciting a high degree of public attention.

Another phenomenon connected with the Southeast of England which is attracting much public attention is the occurrence of variants associated with London English in urban accents as distant from Southeast England as Hull (in east Yorkshire) and Glasgow (in central Scotland). These variants are, in particular, T-glottalling, TH-fronting and labio-dental . The British media have had a tendency to attribute, in a very simplistic way, the presence of these features in the speech of younger speakers of these accents to the direct influence of metropolitan London English. This, some media observers believe, is linked closely to the popularity throughout the United Kingdom of the London-based television soap opera EastEnders, which has for nearly two decades been one of Britain’s most popular television programmes. A product of this alleged connection is the label Jockney – a blend of Jock (a nickname for a Scotsman) and Cockney – which has been used by some journalists to describe a new form of Glaswegian dialect borrowing from the television series EastEnders. However, in view of (a) the substantial body of evidence which points to the crucial role of face-to-face interaction in the transmission of changes in pronunciation, and (b) the continuing absence of any compelling evidence of the adoption of innovative forms as a direct consequence of television viewing, it is problematic to attribute the occurrence of these variants in accents outside Southeast England to the dissemination of London English in public broadcasting. Furthermore, it does not seem very likely that attitudes toward London English among speakers in cities like Hull and Glasgow are generally favorable. In any case, many of the so-called London variants have long existed in the accents of areas surrounding cities such as Glasgow and Norwich, and appear more likely to have originated from accents of the immediate vicinity than to have spread from London on the antiquity of T-glottalling in geographically dispersed regions of the British Isles).