London Dialects Overview

There are four major accents/dialects of London, which Jim covers in this London dialect overview.

Received Pronunciation or Standard British
Estuary English
Cockney
Multicultural London English

Here's a transcript of the video:

I want to talk about various dialects of London.

So first of all I'm gonna talk about the sort of Classic RP sound. So RP is also known as Received Pronunciation or a lot of folks will call it Standard British or Standard English. I find Standard English a little confusing because English is spoken in so many different countries, even though that one's England, so it makes sense, and yet can be confusing.

So RP. This is much more the classic sort of sound that you would hear in older plays, for example, that happened at another time.

What I would say is that there is a Contemporary RP as well. So there is an RP sound that's much more like someone today would use. So Hugh Grant, for example, might be someone that you would see in a film and go "Oh is that... I think it's RP, Standard Brit, so that sort of thing where it's not quite as extreme as that Classic RP, but it's something a little bit more sounding like the intonation doesn't spread as far, for example. Right? So something along that line or even a little bit more relaxed.

Then we start to get into what falls into Estuary, which is named after the estuaries around London there, off the Thames River. So the Estuary accent tends to be a little bit more like this, and it's sort of a sliding scale that's a little bit more up here for top, and a little bit more Cockney down at the bottom. Right?

So you get some, all the way down there for the Cockney, and then you start to elevate that and then it starts to turn into Estuary.

And Estuary tends to have sort of a bending intonation, just a little bit that. You'll get some of the Cockney sort of glottal stops that will happen on occasion, but you also get some T's, and you also will get some tapped R's, which are what many Americans do: "Better." "Betty Botter bought some butter." "Betty Botter bought some butter." Right? That sort of a mix tends to be a little bit more that Estuary, in the middle.

So you can take this Estuary there and you can start to make it a little bit more like Cockney. You'll hear more of that sort of sliding in that direction. Like Ricky Gervais tends to be a little bit more in that direction.

And then up there in the upper end it starts to sound on the verge of what I would say is Contemporary RP. But it doesn't go all the way to that more Classic sounding RP.

And then there's another one that's commonly called MLE or Multicultural London English, that gets, that's also commonly called Jafaican.

Another funky one for Estuary is it's sometimes called Mockney it sounds a little bit like Cockney, but it's shifted. Theoretically this came from maybe like some hipsters trying to sound a little cooler even though they were headed off to like a posh university, that they wanted to sound a little bit more like they've got some street cred. Or younger folks hanging out. Well this was back in the 80s and before so, you know, it's not quite as hip as it used to be.

And MLE, Multicultural London English, is something that's a little bit more, like, assigned now to the more hip-hop generation of these days, which I am way too old to be a part of, right? So MLE is something that's a much more contemporary sounding one.

Ali G, that character of Sacha Baron Cohen that's him taking on MLE, as an example of that accent.

So there you go!

A little bit of an overview of various accents of London.

To check out some of these, check out AccentHelp.com.