On the subject of change, the Dickensian reversal of ‘v’ and ‘w’ seems to have dropped out of Cockney speech altogether, e.g. vater (water) and wery (very). Occasionally an old-fashioned shopkeeper (are there any left?) can be heard to say welly good, sir, but not welly often!
As speed is all important, ‘h’ is seldom used. However, the suggestion (which is a sort of tasteless joke) that Cockneys trying to ‘talk proper’ put ‘h’ in the wrong places is not quite correct. I have listened very carefully, and only noticed an aspirated ‘h’ used for special emphasis, often with a glottal stop thrown in as well, e.g. oie was :henraged (I was enraged); bleedin’ ca:s :heverywhere (bleeding cats everywhere).
‘L’ in the middle or end of a word is usually lost and replaced by ‘oo’ or ‘w’. This is just about impossible to write convincingly. Consider: li:oo (little); bo:oo (bottle); vere’s a sayoo of too-oos darn Mioowaoo (there is a sale of tools down Millwall).
‘N’ and ‘m’ seem to be virtually interchangeable; a patient of mine had an emforced rest due to an emflamed leg. Another found aoo vose en:y bo:oos ah:side ve ‘ahse enbarrussin’. (all those empty bottles outside the house embarrassing). In Poplar people used to eat bre:m bu:er (bread and butter).
There are many other consonant changes, which vary from family to family and from street to street. ‘Sh’, ‘ch’, ‘zh’ (as in treasure) and ‘j’ replace almost anything, e.g. we’re garn :a shea-shoide (we’re going to the seaside). Ve doctor, ’e shpozhezh, vish fing wazh a washp shting azh wha: ‘azh shwelled up loike (the doctor he supposes, this thing was a wasp sting that has swelled up).
Wocha is the most common of all Cockney greetings, which has passed into Standard English. It is a very old form of “What are you (doing)?” The ‘ch’ in wocha replaces two or three words.
‘J’ can replace ‘d’. Jury Lane’s a jraugh:y ole plashe. (Drury Lane’s a draughty old place.)
‘J’ and ‘zh’ frequently join words together, e.g. Izee comin’, djou fink? (Is he coming, do you think?) ’Azhye mum? (How is your Mum?).
The softening of fricatives may have arisen from the fag-end already mentioned. In fact to speak the dialect, one only has to purse the lips, imagine a Woodbine stuck somewhere on the lower lip, and let the words roll out with the minimum of mouth movement, and you’ve got it!
If you think representing consonants in written Cockney speech is hard, that is only because you haven’t tried the vowels! There are five vowels in the alphabet, plus ‘y’ and ‘w’, and no possible combination of these seven sounds can convey the complexity of Cockney vowels, which are washed and soaped and rinsed and put through the wringer, then stretched and twisted beyond anything that any phonetician can imagine. Italian is the language of pure vowels (the singer’s delight). English has diphthongs and a few triphthongs. Cockney has quadraphthongs and quinquaphthongs, septaphthongs and octophthongs, and God knows how many more. They all differ from person to person, from time to time, from place to place, and from meaning to meaning. Vowels are the vehicle by which voice inflexion is carried, and singers spend years studying the tone, colour and meaning that can be placed on vowels. The Cockney does it from birth.
Many Cockney vowels are elongated and made unnecessarily complex, e.g. loiedy, lahoiedy (lady). Others are reduced to almost nothing, e.g. fawna (foreigner).
Diphthongs in Standard English can become a single pure vowel in Cockney, e.g. par (power), sar (sour).
In writing, to render ‘I’ as ‘oi’ gives the wrong impression, because Cockneys do not say ‘oi’, as in oil or joy. They say something like aoiee.
‘Ow’ becomes an approximation of ‘aehr’, e.g. aehr naehr braehn caehr (how now brown cow).
‘O’ (as in go) is ‘eao’ (or something like it), e.g. ‘e breaok ’is leig, feoo off of a waoo, ’e did (he broke his leg, fell off of the wall, he did); ’e niver aw: :oo ‘ave bin up vere, aoiee teoozh’im (he never ought to have been up there, I tells him).
I was struggling to express the Cockney accent in written form, until a professor of English Literature said to me, “You will not succeed, because it cannot be done. People have been trying since the fifteenth century, but it has never been successful.”
What a relief! I will struggle no more.
Grammar, Syntax and Idiom
In all countries at all times in history, the poorest of the poor have tended to live around the docks. Trapped by poverty, they have become isolated, and remained more or less static. This may be why Poplar of the 1950s existed in a sort of time warp, with habits, customs and family life being somewhat behind the times. With the closure of the docks, this changed.
Speech is a living entity, changing with the people. But Cockney language changes have lagged far behind those of middle-class English. Many Cockney speech forms – idioms, grammar and syntax – which today are considered flawed, are, in fact, very ancient speech forms that can be traced back to Tudor times.
Here are some typical examples:
Possessive (conjugated)
myern mine (my one)
yourn yours (your one)
hisn, hern his, hers
ourn ours
yourn yours
theirn theirs
The ‘-self’ form becomes:
Meself myself
Yerself yourself
his-self, herself himself, herself
usselves ourselves
yerselves yourselves
vemselves themselves
Verbs frequently take the third person singular for the whole conjugation:
I was I tells I says
you was you tells you says
he/she was he/she tells he/she says
we was we tells we says
you was you tells you says
vey was vey tells vey says
Some expressions in the past tense use the past participle on its own, without the auxiliary (have, did):
I bin I have been
you bin you have been
he/she bin he/she has been
we bin we have been
you bin you have been
they bin they have been
The form of the past participle may itself be changed:
I seed I saw
you seed you saw
he/she seed he/she saw
we seed we saw
you seed you saw
vey seed they saw
The demonstrative adjectives ‘these’ and ‘those’ are usually replaced by ‘them’, pronounced with a ‘v’, e.g. vem sosjis (these sausages), vem cabjis (those cabbages).
The relative pronouns ‘who’, ‘which’, and ‘that’ are replaced by ‘as’ and ‘what’, or sometimes both, e.g. a bloke wha: oie knows, or ve bloke as wha: oie knows (the bloke that I know).
‘So’ is often replaced by ‘that’, e.g. moei col’s va: bad, oei can: smeoo nuffink (my cold’s so bad, I can’t smell anything).
‘Here’ and ‘there’ are often used for emphasis, e.g. vish ‘ere ca:s a good mahsher (this cat’s a good mouser) va: vere kid’s a roei: ‘an’foo (that kid’s a right handful).
Auxiliary verbs are frequently duplicated, e.g. oei woon: ‘arf ’a towd ‘im orf, oei woon: (I wouldn’t half have told him off, I wouldn’t); ’e don: ‘arf maihk yer laugh, ’e do. (he doesn’t half make you laugh, he does).
No: ‘alf (not half) is an emphatic positive in Cockney dialect.
‘Off of’ nearly always replaces ‘from’: oei go: i: off of ’Arry. ‘E give i: :a me (I got it from Harry. He gave it to me).
Adverbs frequently become adjectives: ‘e done famous a: schoo-oo, vish term loeik (He did famously at school this term); ve job’s go:a be done proper, loeik (The job’s got to be done properly).
To end a sentence with ‘like’ is typical Cockney dialect.
‘The’ is frequently omitted altogether and replaced with a glottal stop, fetch : tea (fetch the tea), go : pichers (go to the pictures).
A double glottal stop, exec
uted with lightning speed, can sometimes be detected in such sentences.
The conjunction ‘that’ is usually replaced by ‘as how’, pronounced ‘azhow’ – oei knowed azhow i: was vem as wa: done i: (I knew that it was them who had done it).
The relative pronouns ‘who’ and ‘which’ are frequently rendered ‘as what’: ve ca: as wa: ‘as brough: in a mahsh (The cat which has brought in a mouse).
Plural pronouns are split into singulars, sometimes repeating the plural for emphasis: me an’ ’er, we goes : pichers (me and her, we went to the pictures); vem an’ uzh, we ‘azh a good foie: (them and us, we had a good fight).
Comparisons are subject to many enhancements, and can go clean over the top: ‘better’ and ‘best’ become betterer, bestest, or more betterer, most bestest, or even bestestest. Vat wozh ve beshteshtish fing wha: ‘e ever done. (That was the best thing he ever did.) Good is often kept the same, although I have heard gooderer and goodist.
‘worse’, ‘worst’ become worser, worsest, or worserer, worsesest. Bad also, may be kept the same but can be baderer, baddest.
Things can go even further on the lips of a Cockney wordsmith: ve mos’ worsestest fing wha: ‘e ever done was more be:erer van ’er wickidniss (The worst thing he ever did was better than her wickedness). And that’s about the most worsestest bit of grammar I have ever heard – but I love it!
‘A-’ prefixes the participles of many common verbs and this is a survival of the ‘y-’ prefix that was used in the Middle Ages:
“Wha: chew sh’poash :a be a-doin’ of, eh?” (What are you supposed to be doing?)
“Oei wus age:in me mum’s errins” (I was getting my mum’s errands [shopping])
“Weoo, your mum’s a-comin’ rahnd : corner nah an’ a-callin’ for yer” (well, your mum’s coming round the corner now, and calling for you).
These are all typical examples of Cockney speech, and are of great antiquity. If Henry VIII had used similar grammatical forms it would have been the King’s English, and pockets of the Docklands people retained this speech form in the 1950s.
Shakespeare wrote, not for the instruction of the intelligentsia, but for the entertainment of the London people. Double negatives occur in his plays and so, presumably, they were acceptable. Cockneys make generous use of such negatives: she ain: nahbody, va: cah, oei’m a-tellin’ ya; she ain: no: go: nuffink (triple negative!) on ‘er back wha:s no: cast-offs, oei teoozhya (she isn’t anybody, that cow; she hasn’t got anything on her back which isn’t a cast-off, I tell you). We are taught at school that a double negative makes an affirmative, but when, in Cockney, three, four or five negatives are used, the rule ceases to bind!
‘Never’ is nearly always used for ‘did not’:
“You broke ve cup.”
“No, oei niver. Straigh: up, oei niver.” (You broke the cup. No I didn’t. Honestly I didn’t.)
‘To’ is usually dropped after the prepositions ‘up’, ‘down’, and ‘round’ and replaced by a glottal stop: up : Aooga’ (up to Aldgate); dahn : Dilly (down to Piccadilly); rahn’ : Pop (round to the pawnbroker).
Cockneys generally seem to need to ‘have been and gone’ before they can do or say anything: she been an’ gawn an’ got sploeiced (she has got married) oei been an’ gawn an’ done it nah! (I’ve done it now!). A Cockney boy of my acquaintance had to ‘turn round’ before he could say or do anything:
An’ I (pronounced oie) turns rahn’ an’ I says “’ah abah: goin’ darn Steps?” An’ ’e turns rahn’ an’ says “you’re on”. So we offs, an’ we gi:s ’alf-way vere an’ ’e turns rahn an’ says, ’e says “’ah abah: some fishin’?” So I turns rahn’ an’ says “Fishin! Why didn: you say va: afore? We’re ’alf-way vere nah. We ain: go: no gear.” So ’e turns rahn’ an’ ’e says “oh come on, won: take long.” So we turns rahn an’ goes ’ome for : gear, loike.
Such circumlocution would make all but the coolest head dizzy, but to those accustomed from early childhood to being, linguistically, in a perpetual state of revolution it is all perfectly clear and logical.
The present tense is nearly always used to depict a fast-moving series of past events, and this gives particular strength and vitality to a story:
Oie’m tellin yer, last nigh: vey ’as a set-to. She clocks ’im one on : snout, an’ ’e grabs ’er an’ pushes ’er ’gainst : fender, an’ she ’its ’er ’ead, an’ vat’s ’ow she gi:s a black eye, see? Oei’m tellin’ yer.
A particularly charming idiom in narrated gossip is the continuous use of ‘I said’, ‘she/he said’ – but used in the present tense. (In all the following I is pronounced oie.):
I says to ’er, I says, “look ’ere” I says, “I’ve just abou: ‘ad it up to ’ere” I says “an’ you be:er watch it” I says “or else”. an’ she says, she says “wha:” she says, “you fre:enin’ me?” she says, an’ I says “I am va: you ge: narky wiv me”, I says, “an’ I’ll give yer a proper mahfoooo (mouthful). I’m tellin’ yer, nah jes watch i:, ’cos I’m tellin’ yer.”
This last phrase I’m tellin’ yer is intensely Cockney, and is always spoken with determination, and sometimes anger. It is also a guarantee of veracity: oei teoozhya vis ‘ere nag’s a winner, oei’m a-tellin’ yer (I tell you, this horse is a winner, I’m telling you.); oei teoozhya, ‘e’s va: mean ’e wouldn: give the pickins ah: ‘is shnah: (I tell you, he’s that mean, he wouldn’t give you the pickings out of his snout [nose]).
“Don’t talk to me about…” or “you can’t tell me nothing about…” are both used as an opening gambit to attract attention. They both imply unrivalled personal experience and specialist knowledge of a subject already under discussion:
Dandruff! You can’t tell me nuffink abah: dandruff, you can’t. Cor, we all go: i:. I goddi:, me mum’s goddi:, me dad’s goddi:, me free sisters an’ me nan’s goddi:. An’ know what? Bleedin’ dawg’s goddi:. Cor! Dandruff all over : bleedin’ place; on : table, on : dresser, on : mantlepiece, all over : floor. Everywhere. Me mum she shweeps up bucki:s of i: every day. Gor blimey, don: talk :a me ‘bah: dandruff, ma:e.
Subordinate clauses take on a life of their own; overheard in All Saints between two church workers, one of whom had been asked to join the roster of flower-arrangers:
“’oo asked yer to be a flarh-loeidy (flower-lady) ven?”
“Ve loeidy wiv ve long teef.”
“Oh yers. Ve loeidy wiv ve long teef an’ ve boss-oiyes (boss-eyes).”
“Nah, nah, no: ‘er. Ve loeidy wha: asked me :o be a flarh-loeidy’s teef are more longerer’n ‘erens.
The foregoing is just a taste of the rich vernacular that goes to make up the Cockney dialect. A comprehensive study would be a full-time job for any writer, but it would be rewarding.
Slang
Slang, rhyming slang and backslang were so much a part of Cockney speech in the 1950s that many children starting school at the age of five had to learn a whole new vocabulary.
Backslang has largely disappeared from the vernacular. It used to be the language of the Costers, and was used between themselves for trading and bargaining, e.g yennep (penny). The street coster lingered almost to the end of the twentieth century, but has just about disappeared now.
The slang I heard in the 1950s was rich, varied, colourful, obscene, racy, and widely used. It has been said that rhyming Cockney slang was originally developed to outwit authority and nosy parkers. If this was the case, it was entirely successful, because no one but the initiated could follow it. Whatever the origins of this closed language, the humour of it is too good to be missed.
The following is taken from Jack Jones’s Rhyming Cockney Slang, published by Abson Books in 1971:
Almond Rocks Socks Me almonds need darning
Biscuits and Cheese Knees She ain’t ‘arf got knobbly biscuits
Bristol Cities Titties A fine pair of Bristols
Butcher’s Hook Look Let’s ‘ave a butchers at it
China Plate Mate ’e ‘s me best China
Greengages Wages I’ll pay you when I get me greens
Khyber Pass Arse ’e can stick that up his Khyber!
Mince Pies Eyes She’s got lovely minces
Pen and Ink Stink It pens a bit
Rabbit and Pork Talk She can’t ‘arf rabbit
Uncle Bert Shirt Why ‘aven’t you washed me uncle?
Weasel and Stoat Coat I’ll put on me weasel
This evocative and often elusive language was widely used until the 1970s, but with the closure of the docks and the disintegration of family life, Cockney speech is changing, and this fascinating heritage of rhyming slang is falling into disuse. It was once a vital, living, idiomatic form of speech, but I predict that during the first quarter of the twenty-first century it will become a mere relic, found only in dictionaries to be studied and reproduced in soap operas for the amusement of the masses.
The following books can be recommended:
The Muvver Tongue, by Robert Balthrop and Jim Woolveridge, The Journeyman Press, 1980
The Cockney, by Julian Franklyn, Andre Deutsch, 1953
Dictionary of Rhyming Slang, by Julian Franklyn, Routledge, 1975
An unrivalled record of Cockney speech is to be found in Mayhew’s London and the other following books can be recommended:
Balthrop, Robert and Jim Woolveridge, The Muvver Tongue (The Journeyman Press, London, 1980).
Franklyn, Julian, The Cockney (Andre Deutsch, 1953).
Franklyn, Julian, Dictionary of Rhyming Slang (Andre Deutsch, 1961).
Harris, Charles, Three Ha’Pence to the Angel (Phoenix House, London, 1950).
Jones, Jack, Rhyming Cockney Slang (Abson Books, London, 1971).
Lewey, F., Cockney Campaign (Heffer, 1944).
Matthews, Professor William, Cockney Past and Present (Routledge, London, 1940).
O’London, Jack (Wilfred Whitten), London Stories (TC & EC Jack Ltd, Bristol, 1948).
Quennell, Peter, ed., Mayhew’s London (Hamlyn, London, 1969).
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