What is Cockney Rhyming Slang?

Languages

Where does English come from?

Like most strands of British culture, the national tongue has twisted this way and that across the centuries. The Romans didn’t establish the English language. For that we look to the Angles and Saxons of north-west Germany. From the fifth century they deposited Old English, which, while largely unrecognisable compared to the modern version, established the fundamental bits of the language: moon, woman, think – that kind of stuff. Not many Old English words survive but those that do are the most used in the modern language.

Subsequent centuries saw the tongue added to and adapted with Old Norse (thank you Vikings), Latin (good work missionary folk) and, in greatest measure, Old French (Normans take a bow). By the 12th century, this mixture of words had become Middle English.

Three hundred years later the language changed again, this time moved by the ‘Great Vowel Shift’. It began in the south east of England, where vowel sounds evolved and standardised, spread north and created the sounds of modern English. The shift may have been caused by a mass migration of people trying to flee the plague, modifying their accents as they went in order to be understood. It’s worth remembering that while much of this was going on, Scotland,Wales, Ireland and Cornwall stuck to their ancient Celtic languages.

The four Celtic tongues of Britain

Elderly Celtic languages were pushed to the margins. Four variants have survived to modern times, although the speakers of each are also fluent in English.

Welsh (Cymraeg)

Once spoken across the whole of southern Britain, today it claims about half a million speakers, two thirds of whom speakWelsh on a daily basis. The farther north or west you go inWales, the moreWelsh speakers you find. Dialects change with location, with a rough divide between north and south.Welsh is mandatory on the national curriculum in schools and bilingual road signs are seen everywhere; measures made after Welsh Language Act of 1993 that gave Welsh equality with English for the first time in 450 years.

Scottish Gaelic (Gadhlig)

Largely confined to the Highlands and Islands (particularly the Western Isles), where it’s spoken by around 60,000 people, Scottish Gaelic is the remnant voice of a language that was in Scotland until the 12th century. Despite the Scottish Parliament’s official recognition of the language in the Gaelic Language Act of 2005 and the use of bilingual road signs, Scottish Gaelic’s long decline is starting to look terminal.

Cornish (Kernewek)

The brave 3,000 or so West Country folk who still speak Cornish have artificially resurrected (воскресить) the language – it hasn’t been a working ‘native’ language since the 18th century. Only around 400 of these people are fluent. In 2002 the British Government formally recognised Cornish as a minority language.

Irish (Gaeilge)

The Republic of Ireland has clung more successfully to the Gaelic Irish language than Northern Ireland, although survival in the north has been ensured by its symbolism, by its connection to a unified Ireland. The Good Friday Agreement gave the language official status in Northern Ireland and initiated measures to promote it. Around ten per cent of the population now have some knowledge of Irish, specifically its strong Ulster dialect.

The great dialect divide

Given Britain’s modest scale, and the fluidity with which its people move around, regional accents and dialects remain impressively diverse. Perhaps the biggest variation comes in England’s north/south split. To the north the vowels are kept short; to the south, usually, they’re longer. However, variations in local accents can be noticeable within a distance of ten miles.

Ah dinnae unnerstaun ye: Scots dialect

Scots, or Lallans (meaning ‘Lowlands’), contains bits of Gaelic but derives largely from English. Lallans reflects the old language of the Scottish lowlands. Few people actually speak Lallans; today it’s more of a literary form. Confusingly, much of mainland Scotland speaks Scottish Standard English, in theory closer to English than Lallans. However, get up to Aberdeen, where proximity to the Norse ports across the water has given the local accent a dense Scandinavian burr, and you’ll do well to understand anything they’re saying at all.

Talking in class

Britain’s inky linguistic pool is clouded further by class. There is the so called Received Pronunciation (RP) (‘received’ meaning accepted or approved). RP began as a regional accent of the south Midlands, but was in the right place at the right time when its patrons moved south to London in the late medieval period and grew wealthy. By the 19th century, the accent had become the oral hallmark of Britain’s upper classes. RP is also sometimes referred to as Queen’s English; go back 20 years and it was also called BBC English (not any longer).

The changes on television reflect a wider shift in accents in the south-east of England, where the growth of Estuary English, in which the twang of Cockney meets the airs of RP, gives the burgeoning middle classes the feel of workaday credibility. Tony Blair, the common man, would occasionally slip into Estuary English (perhaps subconsciously) during his time as PM. Some analysts suggest that even the Queen has shifted toward the Estuary in recent years.

Immigrant languages

Communities migrating to the UK in recent decades have brought many more languages to the country. Surveys started in 1979 by the Inner London Education Authority discovered over 100 languages being spoken domestically by the families of the inner city's school children.

Word counts

As many as 4,300 words of modern English derive from Old English, 1,000 are from Old Norse and 10,000 are from Norman French.

Saying goodbye to good day

In 2007 Vale of Glamorgan Council barred its telephone operators from answering the blower with a chirpy bore da (good morning). Union officials decided that making the largely English speaking telephonists use Welsh was straining their vocal chords and thus contravening health and safety regs.

Patagonian patter

Around 1,500 people in the Chubut Province of Patagonia in southern Argentina speak Welsh; They are the descendants of 153 migrants who made the crossing west in 1865 to establish a Welsh state with the Argentine Government’s consent.

Dairy dialect

In 2006, language specialists identified regional differences in the way cows around the UK mooed, in particular noting the distinctive West Country drawl of Devon’s bovine beauties. Similar claims have been made about frogs and birds.

World English

300 to 400 million people around the world speak English as a first language (over a billion have basic English). The biggest chunk of first language English speakers, about 215 million, live in the USA. English is an official language in more than 50 countries.

It is estimated that over 95% of the British population are monolingual English speakers. There are various minority Celtic languages, and speakers of these are invariably bilingual English speakers. In Scotland 1.4% speak Scottish Gaelic as well as English; in Northern Ireland 6.6% of the population are bilingual in Irish Gaelic and English; in Wales, 21% also speak Welsh. In Scotland, Northern Ireland and some border areas of England, Scots is a distinct minority language although at times it overlaps with Scottish English. There are also large numbers of community languages, brought into the country and sustained by recent immigrant communities, which account for more than 5.5% of the population. The largest group (spoken by 2.7% of the total UK population) are South Asian languages such as Bengali, Punjabi, Hindi and Gujarati. Other community languages include Cantonese, Italian, Polish, Greek and Turkish. 45% of the total ethnic minority population lives in London, but community languages are spoken throughout the United Kingdom.

What is Cockney Rhyming Slang?

Cockney Rhyming slang is a coded language invented in the nineteenth century by Cockneys so they could speak in front of the police without being understood. It uses a phrase that rhymes with a word, instead of the word itself – thus ‘stairs’ becomes ‘apples and pears’, ‘phone’ becomes ‘dog and bone' and ‘word’ becomes ‘dicky bird’. It can become confusing when sometimes the rhyming part of the word is dropped: thus ‘daisies’ are ‘boots’ (from ‘daisy roots’).

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