Between Nottin’ Ill Gite and Bleckfriars – the enregisterment of Cockney in the 19th century

Abstract In the 19th century, Cockney, the traditional working-class accent of London, underwent a significant change in how it was perceived and described. At the beginning of the 19th century the public discourse on the Cockney accent was restricted to a few linguistic shibboleths such as the interchange of /w/ and /v/ (represented in spellings such as weal, winegar, or vell) and h-dropping, and mentioned by orthoepists and orthographically reproduced by some novelists. By the end of the 19th century, detailed Cockney descriptions and depictions had emerged, leading to the social and cultural construction – the enregisterment – of the Cockney dialect. This paper documents this process by systematically analysing various types of published meta-discourse for both the linguistic forms (shibboleths) mentioned and the social meanings associated with them, especially in the form of so-called ‘characterological figures of personhood’. It further analyses conflicting language ideologies that Cockney was subject to in the 19th century, and which influenced its enregisterment process.