MLE

Question 1

what is MLE?

Answer 1

a dialect of london english which has emerged since the early 1980s in parts of london where there has been a relatively high level of immigration. MLE is based on the traditional east london cockney dialect, but it has a number of different sounds and grammatical constructions.

Question 2

what are the multicultural influences on the new accent of the east end?

Answer 2

MLE is spoken by people from all ethnic backgrounds and its influences are also multicultural. its a mix of sounds from places of diverse as the caribbean, greece, asia and africa

Question 3

which sounds seems to have made a comeback in the london accent?

Answer 3

h-dropping is on its way out. ‘h’ is back

Question 4

what is the difference in the use of question tag between cockney and MLE?

Answer 4

cockney - don’t they
MLE - ennit

Question 5

what is the key point about monpthongs and diphthongs in the accents of london?

Answer 5

a lot of cockney vowels are diphthongs. the tongue has to go on a little journey whereas MLE vowels are much more likely to be monpthongs so the tongue is kept still

Question 6

has the cockney accent disappeared and been replaced by MLE?

Answer 6

there is many people that brought the london accent over to kent (an area with lots of cockney speakers). many people are saying words that have come from london which do catch on. there is th-fronting ‘with’ ‘month’ which is something that london would do. there is a lot of glottal stops to ‘but’ ‘it’ but again all of those things you hear in london. the kent accent is dying out.

Question 7

phonological features of MLE

Answer 7

• cockney english has a lot of diphthongs ie long alighted sounds.
• in MLE, they become monpthongs. so it’s a shortening of those vowel phonemes
• the GOOSE vowel /u:/ is pronounced differently. the vowel sound in words such as ‘food’ and ‘true’ are pronounced further forward in the mouth
• at the beginnings of words there is th-stopping. the words that begin with fricatives (‘th’ sounds) tend to be replaced by /d/ or /t/.
• different pragmatic markings, ‘you get me?’ used in a similar way to how ‘innit?’ used to be at the end of a sentence as an informal tag question