Not just Cockney,bruv! (was: Revised Eastern Vowel Orthography)

"Raymond A. Brown" wrote:

> >Would these be the same infamous people Der Spiegel likes to call
> >"die Hooligans" (seen at soccer games)?
>
> Not necessarily - tho they certainly are bovver boys.  But the term
> includes any troublesome street gang, whether associated with soccer or not.
>
> >> But the shifts [T] -> [f] and [D] -> [v] have long since just been confind
> >> to Cockney; it is found generally in colloquial speech throughout the whole
> >> of the greater London area and beyond.  It is common in urban colloquial
> >> speech of south-east Wales (where I lived & worked for 22 years) and, I
> >> believe, urban colloquial speech in some other areas.
> >
> >Any chance of it spreading, you think?
>
> The evidence here would indeed suggest that it is spreading, especially
> among the urban young.  Whether it will make it across the Atlantic is a
> different matter  :)
Hmm, curious.  Is it more of a class dialect thing, or is it becoming
general among all young urbanites?

I somehow doubt that American dialects (or for that matter Canadian,
Australian, South African, etc.) would ever have enough contact with
the British for it to make a discernible impact on their speech patterns,
despite British television and radio programming overseas.

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Tom Wier <artabanos@...>
AIM: Deuterotom ICQ: 4315704
<http://www.angelfire.com/tx/eclectorium/>
"Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero."
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