Estuary English - Features

Features

Estuary English is characterised by the following features:

• Non-rhoticity.
• Elision of r before other consonants for ex. cart is pronunced /kɑːt/
• Use of intrusive R: pronouncing an "r" sound when no r is present to prevent consecutive vowel sounds
• A broad A (ɑː) in words such as bath, grass, laugh, etc.
• T glottalization: realising non-initial, most commonly final, /t/ as a glottal stop instead of an alveolar stop, e.g. can't (pronounced /kɑnːʔ/).
• Yod-coalescence, i.e., the use of the affricates and instead of the clusters and in words like dune and Tuesday. Thus, these words sound like June and choose day, respectively.
• L-vocalization, i.e., the use of, or where RP uses in the final positions or in a final consonant cluster, for example whole (pronounced /hoʊ/).
• The wholly–holy split.
• Use of question tags.

Despite the similarity between the two dialects, the following characteristics of Cockney pronunciation are generally not considered to be present in Estuary English:

• H-dropping, i.e., Dropping in stressed words (e.g. for hat)
• Double negation. However, Estuary English may use never in cases where not would be standard. For example, "he did not" might become "he never did".
• Replacement of with is not found in Estuary, and is also very much in decline amongst Cockney speakers.

However, the boundary between Estuary English and Cockney is far from clear-cut, hence even these features of Cockney might occur occasionally in Estuary English.

In particular, it has been suggested that th-fronting is "currently making its way" into Estuary English, for example those from Isle of Thanet often refer to Thanet as "Plannit Fannit" (Planet Thanet).