On Cockneys and their English, Ahead of the 2012 Olympics

It should be easy for American visitors to London for the 2012 Olympics to get around, right? They speak English, after all. Not so fast, warns NPR's London-based correspondent, Philip Reeves.

The games themselves will be held in East London where, according to Reeves, "people speak in code." This is the land of Cockney rhyming slang, a curious linguistic contrivance developed in Victorian times by those who wanted to evade the police. Though East London is ethnically diverse nowadays, and many Cockney speakers have left (and some claims have been made that Cockney English is on its way out) the slang persists. For a compilation of examples, you can go to cockneyrhymingslang.co.uk. Some London bloggers are putting together special rhyming slang just for the games.

Now here's an interesting origin, while I've been focusing so much on birds in this blog (see my magpie post). Cockney sounds like "cock" and it is in fact related. Cockney as a noun very early on (14th, 15th centuries) meant an egg laid by a hen or "cock's egg" (I don't try to understand the problem here that cocks don't lay eggs). The "-ey" part at the end is related to the German word for egg, "Ei." A derivative meaning soon after was a child who remained too close to his mother, one who couldn't wean himself away, a mother's darling and, hence, an overly effeminate man or an effeminate townsman.

When Cockney started to be used as a term for one born within the city of London, a 17th century usage, this seemed to be because such a person was deemed inferior to other English people. 1617: "Londiners, and all within the sound of Bow-bell, are in reproch called Cocknies, and eaters of buttered tostes."

And just as so often groups get associated with their language patterns, Cockney came to refer just as much to the accent of these particular Londoners as to the population itself, though this transition didn't seem to occur until around 1900. In 1890, the English publisher Andrew White Tuer wrote of "Back-slang, or Costers' Cockney, in which the letters forming leading words are turned hindside before." Cockney speech was the supposedly inferior language that Henry Higgins tried to correct in Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion/My Fair Lady.

So there we have the Cockney, a strange bird of its own, to be handled carefully by American visitors who might assume they know what to expect. Separated by a common language, indeed. (I highly recommend, by the way, the blog "separated by a common language," which focuses on all kinds of discrepancies between British and American English usage).