Pronunciation. · The glottal stop in certain positions, especially replacing [t] at the end of a word or before a consonant (Gatwick airport)

· The glottal stop in certain positions, especially replacing [t] at the end of a word or before a consonant (Ga t wick airpor t). On the other hand, only those speakers closest to the Cockney end of the continuum would use the glottal stop before a vowel (as in water), which is still perceived to be a Cockney feature.

· The replacement of final [l] by a short [u] vowel, so that hill is pronounced [hiu].

· Although this feature is common, other features traditionally associated with Cockney speech are much less so, such as the; replacement of th [ѳ] and [ð] by [f] and [v] respectively.

Grammar

· The ‘confrontational’ question tag, as in I said I was going, didn't I. Other Cockney tags (such as innit) are also sometimes found in jocular estuary speech (or writing), which may indicate a move towards their eventual standardization.

· Certain negative forms, such as never referring to a single occasion (I never did, No I never). Less likely is the use of the double negative, which is still widely perceived as uneducated.

· The omission of the -ly adverbial ending, as in You're turning it too slow, They talked very quiet for a while.

· Certain prepositional uses, such as I got off of the bench, I looked out the window.

· Generalization of the third person singular form (I gets out of the car)., especially in narrative style; also the generalized past tense use of was, as in We was walking down the road.

Some of these developments are now increasingly to be heard in the public domain, such as on the more popular channels of the BBC, and some have even begun to penetrate the British establishment. Glottalization, for example, will be heard on both sides of the House of Commons, and has been observed in the younger members of the royal family. The publicizing of the trend, however, has provoked a strong purist reaction, and led to a further round of the debate about the safeguarding of standards. What seems to be happening, however, is the gradual replacement of one kind of standard by another- a process which was characterized by several newspaper commentators in 1993 as the linguistic cornerstone of a future classless British society.

Case study 3: Scouse

Scouse — the accent of the city of Liverpool — is instantly recognisable and there are several features we immediately associate with speakers from Merseyside. For instance, the characteristic <ts> sound speaker from Liverpool uses for the letter <t> in the following words: celebrated, security, daughter, thought, start, twilight, street, sorted out, hat and upset. Also typical of many speakers on Merseyside is the apparent deletion of a word-final <t> at the end of a statement (e.g. it’s so sad really that he missed all that, we’d go for meals and go the pictures and things like that, they don’t mean that and don’t worry about it ). In fact the <t> sound is not generally omitted, rather it is replaced by a very weak (and therefore often inaudible) <h> sound.