Cockney English is a variety of English that is spoken in London. One of the most characteristic features of the dialect is the pronunciation of words such as grey and rain. The diphthong is quite different from that of many other dialects. However, it is not the same diphthong used in words such as hi and time.
The diphthong in grey has a front or central vowel in the first component of the diphthong. In the word hi, the first component of the diphthong is a back vowel. It is more retracted.
The following words have distinct pronunciations in Cockney:
bake/bike
day/die
late/light
main/mine
pay/pie
say/sigh
stale/style
tray/try
vain/vine
wait/white
The diphthongs of Cockney English are different from those of many other varieties of English such as Received Pronunciation. In the movie My Fair Lady, Eliza Doolittle practises the sentence The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain. The sentence has many words with the characteristic diphthong of Cockney English.
No comments:
Post a Comment