Do you need to be from London to be a cockney?

The pearly king of Woolwich and his mouse turned heads at the Modern Cockney Festival

The Modern Cockney Festival concluded recently with the dialect being officially recognised as a community language by an east London council. Among other things, the month-long event featured a pearly burka, jellied eels and a debate about who really likes pie and mash. In 2023, what does it mean to be a cockney - and are some of the most authentic ones not even from London?

The word itself, the first recorded usage of which dates back as far as 1362, used to be said only to apply to those born within earshot of the bells of Mary-le-Bow Church in Cheapside in the City of London. A lack of maternity wards in the area, not to mention noise pollution, rendered this definition obsolete long ago.

In 2011, then-University of Lancaster academic Paul Kerswill claimed that cockney accents "would disappear in 30 years". He said that while older people still spoke with the recognisable accent, this was no longer true of the younger generation.

Now that 12 of those years have elapsed, Joe Leslie, who lives in Brentwood in Essex but whose family inhabited Bow in east London as far back as anyone can remember, says his ilk is soon to be brown bread (dead, for those unfamiliar with cockney rhyming slang). He believes both the accent and the identity are destined to be banished to the history books.

"People may have this romantic view of the Del Boy character," he says. "But the new generation just don't keep the traditions alive. I've tried to, but people are more interested in looking at old photos than reinvigorating them.

"And of course, the area has changed so much."

The "pearly burka" was created by Modern Cockney Festival founders Saif Osmani and Andy Green

Andy Green and Saif Osmani, who were behind the Modern Cockney Festival, are embracing this change. They believe the cockney identity is still thriving but has evolved.

Today, Mr Green says, rather than being born near any particular church, the main qualification for cockneydom is being a "non-posh" person with London heritage.

"The working class don't have cultural institutions to fly their flag, and the festival was to explore what it means to be cockney and to celebrate that. The association is historically a negative one," he says.

"Cockneydom spans far and wide. People [at the festival] identify as Bangladeshi cockneys or Kent cockneys. They all have some roots and culture in common, even if their community has had more influences."

Saif Osmani and Andy Green believe the culture is under threat because of physical and social changes in London's East End

But even though Mr Osmani and Mr Green have now achieved official recognition for the dialect as a community language, courtesy of Tower Hamlets Council, are cockney speakers indeed a dying breed, as Prof Kerswill predicted in 2011?

As he foresaw, Multicultural London English (MLE) has become more widespread. While there are some similarities with cockney, MLE is also influenced by languages from across the world.

What perhaps no-one could have seen coming, though, was that the traditional cockney accent might establish a stronghold outside London.

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Sociolinguist Amanda Cole from the University of Essex, who studies accent change and attitudes to language, is from a family that hails from Hackney and Newham in east London. In the slum clearance programme after World War Two, her grandparents were relocated to Essex, along with thousands of other people living in dilapidated two-up, two-down Victorian houses who moved out of the capital.

"I had this idea in my head that cockney is not dead, it's just moved to Essex," she says. "My feeling was that there was a real enclave of cockney; just anecdotally, I felt there was a lot of cockney spoken by young people."

Over the past six years, she has been putting her hypothesis to the test, interviewing people from the Debden Estate near Epping Forest where she grew up.

A slum clearance operation in Poplar, east London, in 1951. The workers are standing on the ruins of Trinity Church

Dr Cole discovered that the accents of the people she studied in this part of Essex had scarcely changed, with little meaningful distinction between the generations - although she did find that younger people were more likely than their grandparents to pronounce the "h" in "home" and to say "yous" instead of "you".

Before the cockney influx, she points out, an Essex accent was typically more rural-sounding - similar to the way people speak in Suffolk and Norfolk. She says that although this accent can still be heard in less urban areas and in the north of the county, it is losing ground.

The way people across the generations speak today in Debden and elsewhere in Essex, Dr Cole concluded, meant her theory was indeed correct: the cockney accent is alive and thriving there.

Although as she points out, language is always in flux, regardless of how people identify or where they live. "Cockney would have changed if the speakers stayed in London, and it's changed on Essex soil; it's all just part of language change."

The cockney settlement of Debden Broadway, pictured in 2017

As to the question of whether these younger Essex dwellers can be defined as cockneys, Dr Cole says that is not how they perceive themselves.

"As soon as they started moving to Essex, they began to consider their accent an Essex one. It happened very quickly. As soon as the community relocated, there started to be this reinterpretation of Essex. Though some people do still consider themselves to some extent to have a cockney accent, this has rapidly been changing to identifying with an Essex one."

And so in 2023, the classic features of the cockney accent, such as losing the "t" in the middle of a word, or saying "think" as "fink", and "milk" as "miwk", are now seen as quintessential Essex characteristics.

The Modern Cockney Festival is said to be the first event of its kind

The discussion about whether cockney speakers are a dying breed, or have merely hopped across the border to Essex, is always likely to be a source of disagreement.

But in any case, for Mr Green and Mr Osmani, modern cockneydom isn't really about the dropping of the letter "h" or the use of rhyming slang, and is perhaps not even necessarily to do with being from London. For them, the cockney speakers of Essex have a crucial qualifying characteristic - their cultural and socioeconomical alignment with the "common Londoner".

And the idea that cockney status should be conferred only on those born within the sound of the bells of Mary-le-Bow Church? As far as the BBC can Barnaby Rudge, that notion is good and proper brown bread.

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