Language and identity in the Cockney Diaspora: A sociophonetic and variationist study Amanda Cole A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Language and Linguistics University of Essex 2021 i List of Publications This is a PhD by papers consisting of the following four original manuscripts in order of their appearance in this thesis: 1. Cole, Amanda & Strycharczuk, Patrycja (2019). The PRICE-MOUTH crossover in the “Cockney diaspora”. In Sasha Calhoun, Paola Escudero, Marija Tabain & Paul Warren (eds.) Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS2019) Dynamics of Vowels in Varieties of English Workshop. Melbourne, Australia. August 2019 (pp. 602-606). 2. Cole, Amanda (forthcoming). Co-variation, style and social meaning: the implicational relationship between (H) and (ING) in Debden, Essex. To appear in Language Variation and Change. 3. Cole, Amanda & Evans, Bronwen (2020). Phonetic variation and change in the Cockney Diaspora: the role of place, gender and identity. Language in Society. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404520000640 4. Cole, Amanda (forthcoming). Disambiguating language attitudes held towards socio-demographic groups and geographic areas in South East England. To appear in Journal of Linguistic Geography. These papers will be referred to in the body of the thesis by their chapter number (Chapter 6, Chapter 7, Chapter 8 and Chapter 9 respectively). Section, figure and table numbering resets at the start of each chapter. Differences in formatting and referencing styles between each paper result from the different conventions of each target publication. When citing work in these four chapters, please refer to the final published version of each paper when they become available. ii Chapter 6 presents a paper completed in collaboration with Dr Patrycja Strycharczuk. In this paper, I was responsible for research design, data collection, data pre-processing, forced-alignment and extraction of formant values, literature review, background research, and a write-up of introduction, discussion and conclusion sections. Pat conducted the data analysis and visualisation, the production of figures and the write-up of analysis and results. Chapter 8 is a paper written in collaboration with Dr Bronwen Evans. This work is an extension and continuation of my MSc dissertation which was supervised by Bronwen. The analysis, results and conclusions of the paper are entirely re-conceived from my MSc dissertation. In this paper, I was responsible for the collection, pre-processing, management and analysis of data as well as the literature review, background research and write-up of the paper. Bronwen contributed towards the experimental design and gave supervision and guidance throughout the project (i.e., on data collection, analysis). As well as giving writing advice during my MSc, she also gave detailed feedback on drafts of the paper itself. iii Table of Contents List of Publications ............................................................................................................. i Table of Contents .............................................................................................................. iii List of Figures .................................................................................................................. viii List of Tables ..................................................................................................................... xi Abstract ............................................................................................................................. xii Acknowledgements ......................................................................................................... xiv Chapter 1. Introduction ...................................................................................................... 1 1.1. Outline of thesis ................................................................................................................. 1 1.2. Research questions ............................................................................................................ 2 Chapter 2. Linguistic variation and social meaning ........................................................ 8 2.1. Social meaning .................................................................................................................... 8 2.2. Enregisterment ................................................................................................................. 10 2.3. Place.................................................................................................................................. 13 Chapter 3. The Cockney Diaspora .................................................................................. 17 3.1. Defining Cockney ............................................................................................................. 17 3.2. Relocation and slum-clearances .................................................................................... 24 3.3 Demographic changes in East London ........................................................................... 29 3.4. East Londoners in Essex ................................................................................................. 32 3.4.1 Essex Girl and Essex Man ......................................................................................... 32 3.4.2 Chavs ............................................................................................................................ 40 Chapter 4. Research site: The Debden Estate .............................................................. 43 4.1. Relocation from East London to Debden ...................................................................... 43 4.2. My family’s relocation to Essex ...................................................................................... 50 4.3. Modern-day Debden (and Loughton) ............................................................................ 51 4.4. Social mobility in Debden ................................................................................................ 54 4.5. Evaluations and perceptions of Debden (and Loughton) ........................................... 60 Chapter 5. Language variation and change in South East England ............................ 67 iv 5.1. Cockney ............................................................................................................................. 67 5.2. South East England .......................................................................................................... 68 5.3. East London ...................................................................................................................... 74 5.4. Essex .................................................................................................................................. 76 Chapter 6. The PRICE-MOUTH crossover in the “Cockney diaspora” ............................ 83 Abstract ..................................................................................................................................... 84 1. Introduction .......................................................................................................................... 84 2. Materials and method ......................................................................................................... 88 2.1. Speakers ........................................................................................................................ 88 2.2. Materials ........................................................................................................................ 90 2.3. Procedure ...................................................................................................................... 91 2.4 Analysis ........................................................................................................................... 92 3. Results .................................................................................................................................. 94 4. Discussion ............................................................................................................................ 96 5. Conclusions .......................................................................................................................... 98 6. References ............................................................................................................................ 98 Chapter 7. Co-variation, style and social meaning: the implicational relationship between (H) and (ING) in Debden, Essex ..................................................................... 102 Abstract ................................................................................................................................... 103 Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 104 Style clusters ...................................................................................................................... 104 Between-speaker co-variation in linguistic features .................................................... 108 Community of Interest ....................................................................................................... 110 (ING) and (H) ....................................................................................................................... 112