Cockney English is a well-known variety of English that is spoken in London. One of the distinctive features of Cockney is the thought-thaw split. The word thought is pronounced with a diphthong which consists of a mid back rounded tense vowel and a high back rounded lax vowel. However, the word thaw is pronounced with a diphthong which consists of a mid back rounded lax vowel and a schwa. The first diphthong occurs word-medially and the second occurs word-finally.
Words such as thought, taught, force, north, board, pause, clause and sword are pronounced with the combination of the mid back rounded tense vowel and high back rounded law vowel. In contrast, words such as north, door, force, four, saw, bored, paws and claws have the mid back rounded law vowel and schwa. Though words such as bored and paws do not have a word-final vowel, grammatical endings do not affect the pronunciation. The result is that paw/paws and bore/bored have the same vowel.
In most varieties of English, word pairs such as board/bored, sword/soared, clause/claws and pause/paws sound the same. However, that is not the case in Cockney English. The word pairs are pronounced distinctly. In the first word of each pair, the first component of the diphthong is pronounced with a higher vowel than in the second word of the pair.
Many features serve to distinguish Cockney English from other varieties of English. One of the distinctive features is undoubtedly the thought-thaw split. It allows Cockney to distinguish words which are pronounced identically in most other varieties of English.
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