#it's closer to estuary than it is to cockney

[libertatias]

remembering graham mctavish voiced charlie cutter and furious we didn't get scottish charlie

[shuinami]

Part 1: What Exactly is Hobie’s Accent and Who Has It?

Part 2: When, Where, Why (Black Londoner Culture since Windrush) | Part 3: How (Writing Tips)

As a black Londoner, a large reason Hobie is so special to me is because I really saw and heard myself in him, while also not seeing a stereotype or typical, lacking in nuance portrayal of a black Londoner.

A lot of people have given great advice about how to write the dialogue of a British person; however, though the U.K. is a small place, different areas, like anywhere, have very different cultures and accents. Even somewhere as geographically small as London has a few different native accents, as many of you have picked up on, Cockney is one but there is also Received Pronunciation (RP), Estuary English and the one Hobie uses for most of his intro: Multicultural London English (MLE). 

I’m an MLE user myself, as are most black Londoners, including Daniel Kaluuya (who voices Hobie and was asked to make the dialogue sound authentic). Aside from tilting my head in slight confusion at some of the slang floating around the fandom, one of the last times I rewatched the movie, I noticed Hobie actually only uses one relatively ubiquitous Cockney phrase… and apparently, it was used inauthentically? On the other hand, he uses quite a few MLE phrases and constructions but it seems few people represent that in their fan content. 

It made me want to give my two cents and some advice on how to write the dialogue of an MLE user since I haven’t seen anyone do something like this yet.

In addition, I wanted to give a little bit of context about life as a black Londoner, since Windrush brought the first mass migration of black people to England in 1948 until now, since it’s another thing that I haven’t seen anyone talk about how it differs from the typical depictions of British life. And also how that intersected with punk culture and what it says about Hobie. Everyone is entitled to their personal interpretations but, of course, as someone who Hobie’s a bit closer to home for than most, I felt a lot of people are missing a key part of who he is without understanding the youth culture of black Londoners.

To answer these questions, I think it would be good to put names to the four main London accents so you can understand exactly what Hobie’s purposefully mixed accent is made up of and the one thing it is not.

I also want to say before we get into it that some people have unique accents/accents that may not seem to match their status or ethnicity, etc. so it’s not that nobody speaks using other accents but if we hear it, it would be noticeable.

Starting off, we have Received Pronunciation which is that posh, fancy and stuffy accent you probably first associated a British accent with. This is the accent of the rich, associated with types who go to private schools like Eton, with the royals’ accents and political figures. Nothing to do with Hobie.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, there’s Cockney. Cockney is an interesting one; it’s a term referring to people that are from East London, and according to Google “traditionally one born within the hearing of the Bow Bells” which means in earshot of the bells of St Mary-le-Bow Church. 

The term is also used to cover the accent and slang; the Cockney accent is not necessarily exclusive to Cockney people but rather is one that, nowadays, floats around the working class. The culture, on the other hand, such as familiarity with rhyming slang and stuff like eating jellied eels is not so ubiquitous amongst the working class not from the area. An example of a Cockney with this accent would be Danny Dyer, who plays Mick Carter in EastEnders and some of the other characters also have a proper Cockney accent. Here’s an iconic clip from EastEnders that showcases the Cockney accent lol

However, there is a more general accent, which refers to the varying mixtures of RP and cockney that most Londoners have: Estuary English. The estuary in the term refers to the Thames Estuary in the South East of England, near but outside of London. The accent is not locked there, however, and extends to London, especially as people have tended to move further out from London with time due to housing prices and thus accents of outer and inner parts of London mix. It’s not associated with class the way the other two previous accents are.

There are no clear boundaries between Estuary English and Cockney, mainly due to upward mobility and movement around London. I’m not a linguist so it’s hard to describe but I would personally say that proper Cockney has some ways of pronouncing things that even Estuary English speakers on the Cockney end of the spectrum don’t typically do. 

Some examples I would consider Estuary English or more typical accents would be those of people like Amelia Dimoldenberg (chicken shop girl 😂) and Tom Holland; on the more Cockney end of this accent, you’d have people like Adele (who I’m pretty sure has Cockney family members).

Then there’s Multicultural London English, influenced mainly by the dialects of the ethnic immigrants that have come to the U.K., most notably Jamaican Patois but also, more recently, borrowing a lot from West African Pidgin languages, as well as some words and phrases here and there from other immigrant communities. Most black people speak MLE and many other ethnic Londoners do too, as due to the effects of colonization and structural racism, many are relegated to the working classes and live in community together. Examples of this accent would be John Boyega, Jasmine Jobson, Letitia Wright and, of course, Daniel Kaluuya.

Now that we’ve got the accents down, which does Hobie have?

While the term Cockney is thrown around a lot, there is a strong implication that Hobie was born and raised in Camden, especially given the casting of Daniel Kaluuya, who was born and raised in that area himself. 

Here’s a map of London, I split us up based on how I understand people typically refer to it, which is a mix of geography, government designation and postcodes. The rainbow in the middle is considered Central London, it’s a very commercial and touristy area, where all our classic landmarks are and it’s very expensive to live there. 

Part of the borough of Camden is in central London and, currently, it starts to get more residential near Camden Market, which is 3 miles away from St Mary-le-Bow-Church, aka. The Bow Bells. A true Cockney is said to be within 3 miles or earshot of the bells (for geographical reasons, the sound carries more East). I’m not sure about the balance of residential to commercial areas in the 70s, although apparently, the area near Camden Lock was industrial. London has changed and expanded over time so someone from an east-most part of Camden at a point probably would have been easily counted as Cockney but I have no clue about the timeline. It’s uncertain whether or not Hobie would fit the criteria but if he was born today, Hobie definitely wouldn’t be considered or consider himself a Cockney. 

So again, while there’s no clear distinction of what makes a Cockney accent, Hobie is probably not a Cockney (unless you hc as such).

Does that mean he uses Estuary English? I would say no. I think his accent is predominantly Cockney and he uses some of the slang, as most Londoners do, but being black and not from East London, he mostly uses MLE slang and sentence constructions.

I believe this was the creative intention, given the casting of Daniel Kaluuya, most known for his roles in movies tackling black issues, and the freedom he was given to make the dialogue authentic, meaning Hobie’s blackness is a core part of his character design for Spider-Verse. You can also hear Daniel exaggerating the accent for Hobie at points; as he’s said himself, it’s not just his regular accent, which might not be too obvious to those not so used to London accents. It's a more Cockney accent, particularly in the intro, that he’s putting on instead of speaking normally, despite not necessarily using much Cockney lingo. Bear in mind, that Daniel naturally has a stronger Cockney twang to his natural speaking voice than a lot of MLE speakers.

Returning to the point that the one Cockney phrase, “scooby doo” was used inauthentically; it’s worth noting that you’ll be hard-pressed to find an up-to-date and thorough reference or guide on how to write the use of Cockney slang authentically because Cockney is a somewhat dated culture. For example, jellied eels? Not a common thing anymore, Some people, probably older East Londoners, still do eat them but extremely few places sell them and most of us will have never even seen them in our lives. As mentioned above, upward mobility along with people moving around means that the accent, slang and general culture have been watered down over time. On top of that, a lot of East London has been gentrified, such as the Isle of Dogs (in Tower Hamlets), which has had Canary Wharf transformed - a mall, a business centre and a major transport link and Stratford (in Newham), which has similarly had a giant mall and major transport links added to it.

Some Cockney rhyming slang stuck and is known to all Londoners, such as “telling porkies/porky pies” and “copper”. “I ain’t got a scooby (doo)” is a more common one, although not even that is known to all. Typically, Cockneys only say the first half of the rhyming slang phrase (even if it no longer rhymes). I couldn’t tell you which Cockney rhyming slang phrases have been absorbed into more general London vocab other than those, because again, it’s not used as most lists you could probably find online have it written out in full but know that a lot of phrases have been absorbed. 

Cockney slang is an oral tradition of the working class and so until more recently, when literacy rates went up, probably wouldn’t have been written, on top of people tending to write in standard English instead of using slang when writing. Unless you’re talking to a boomer/gen-x/older millennial from East London, it’s not so likely that you could read off a list of cockney phrases to a Londoner and they would be familiar with them. Because Daniel Kaluuya and I’m guessing the other people involved in writing Hobie’s dialogue aren’t Cockneys, well, that’s how we ended up with what we got.

So, whilst a dated dialect probably would be perfect for Hobie, it’s hard to get right or for it to read as natural to a Londoner because it’s difficult to pinpoint people that still talk like that on a regular basis, even in East London and it’s ESPECIALLY not black people/MLE users that talk like that these days. Cockney Rhyming slang was code language, after all so it figures that it’s a bit elusive.

Funnily enough, Hobie’s use of MLE is probably a slight anachronism, a little ahead of his time. Because the mass migration of Caribbeans began in 1948, by the 70s, most young black people would be the first big wave of second gens or immigrants themselves; ‘Black British’ culture would’ve still been quite young and not had enough time to carve itself as its own thing. The MLE we (including Hobie in the movie) use today started to really be what it is today in the 90s. Point being, you’re not going to find documentation of black Londoners from the 70s or early 80s who talk like Hobie.

Basically… Hobie’s accent is not authentic to the time period so if you wanted to write a historically authentic accent/slang… then you probably wouldn’t really write one… buuut it’s less fun and less Hobie! So let’s learn about black British youth culture and racism in London since the 70s, then we can understand the context in which the language is used before we learn the lingo + how to use it 😎

[llevs-corner]

Paul Kerswill's Dialect Leveling Theory

What is Dialect Leveling?

Dialect levelling is a form of standardisation whereby local variations of speech lose their distinctive, regional features in favour of a more urban or mainstream dialect. This means that the speech forms of different parts of the country are becoming more similar over time and this results in a reduction of language diversity.  There are several factors involved  in dialect levelling:

Geographical mobility results in greater dialect contact between commuters.

Social mobility and consequent breakdown of tight knit working class communities.

Increased interaction with people of other speech varieties.

Children are less likely to adopt their parents’ pronunciation as they come under peer pressure to conform to the linguistic norm of the group. Adolescents take on a vital role in language change.

Economic change lead to loss of rural employment and construction of suburbs and new towns.

World Wars meant a change in roles within society especially WWII when women went out to work and soldiers mixed with a wide range of geographical and social backgrounds which may never have previously clashed.

Traditional Dialect Features:

 North/Midlands - ‘tha’ for ‘you’, ‘hissen’ for ‘himself’, ‘I is’ or ‘I are’ for ‘I am’, ‘reet’ for ‘right’

 Southwest - ‘her’ for ‘she’, ‘I be’ for ‘I am’, 'umman’ for ‘woman’

 

Modern Dialect Features:

Multiple negation ‘I don’t want none’

Use of ‘ain’t’ for negative auxiliaries

Use of ‘them’ as a demonstrative adjective ‘Look at them big spiders’

Use of glottal stops for /t/ at the end and in middle of words ‘bu/?/er’ ‘le/?/ me’

Replacement of /th/ sounds by /f/ or /v/ so ‘thin’ becomes ‘fin’ and ‘brother’ becomes ‘bruvver’

 

Order of Spread of Levelling

London and surrounding area

Southeast

Central England – Midlands, East Anglia

 Northern England

 Northeast England and Scotland

The outcome of levelling is a convergence of accents and dialects towards each other. In some cases, this leads to southern features being adopted in the whole country contributing to the spread of Estuary English as a nationwide dialect.

Kerswill investigated the changes in dialect in Milton Keynes, Reading and Hull by interviewing local residents of different ages and studying their pronunciation of certain speech sounds. He generally used children of the ages 4, 8 and 12 (equally divided by sex) and one caregiver, usually the mother.

  The recordings were from either specific tasks given to the children such as quizzes or spot the difference games or spontaneous speech obtained by interviews or playground recordings. The children’s caregivers were also interviewed.

  Milton Keynes and Reading are both viewed as towns where social and geographical mobility is high as there are plenty of newcomers from all social classes expanding the economy of the areas. However, as Reading is a more established town the population is more stable and local they do not rely on commuters as much. 

Hull is geographically more isolated and more economically depressed than the other two towns; cut off from the south by the River Humber and remote from other large metropolises, the town is less attractive to commuters. Social networks are closed as the city is largely working class while surrounding villages are middle class so working/middle class children attend different schools and teenagers living on the estate studied were often third generation locals.

 

 Milton Keynes:

Older residents used vowel sounds typical of the traditional, local accent, newcomers (e.g. parents) spoke with a variety of regional accents, while children spoke like their parents/carers for the first 4 years ( school age – one child sounded Scottish at 4 yrs but had changed to local accent by 5 ½ yrs. before changing to a new Milton Keynes accent) which had developed into Estuary English (watered down cockney with some vowels closer to received pronunciation) and were typical of south-eastern speech.

Reading:

Gradual change as children were influenced by their local born-parents and grandparents. Some change was apparent with older residents pronouncing the post- vowel /r/ sound in ‘start’ and ‘nurse’ and young speakers replacing /t/ with a glottal stop /?/.

Hull:

Young speakers retained the northern accent of their older relatives, notable in vowel sounds such as /u/ in ‘but’. They differed again in the use of glottalling and /th/ fronting in words like ‘think’ and ‘brother’.

North/South Levelling:

Kerswill identified a gradual move among adolescent, Southern speakers towards the more standardised, less localised variations of speech. However, in Hull, the closed social networks encourage the continuation of traditional pronunciations, for example, dropping the /h/ was widespread in both old and young residents of Hull but far less so in Reading and Milton Keynes.

He suggests an economic factor – the prosperity of southern towns makes social mobility and achievable goal for young people, however, the high levels of unemployment in northern towns such as Hull makes children unconvinced of the value of education as a passport to social mobility and therefore reject the pressure from authoritarian systems such as the educational one to modify their accents. Why the /th/ fronting and glottalling in Hull then, as this is common in Reading and Milton Keynes as well.

Kerswill says that these linguistic variations are associated with youth culture rather than social class as they are spread though the media and celebrity culture popular with adolescents. Hull teenagers can signify their allegiance to their region and class by maintaining the traditional northern accent as well as identifying themselves with their peer group  by adopting new phonemes popular with youth culture which may still be working class but not traditionally northern.

—

[amsaro]

Americans are also the only people I’ve ever heard say “he has an accent.” 

Like ... that is an incomplete sentence. It’s like describing someone by saying “he had hair.” What hair? Long? Short? Black? Brown? Curly? Straight? 

What accent?

Among international English speakers, that might be English, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, Canadian, American, Australian, Kiwi, South African?

Even just in England, nobody would say “an accent.” It would be Cockney (or Estuary), Brummie, West Country, Mancunian, Scouse, Geordie. And these are just the broadest strokes. Manchester and Liverpool are less than 40 miles apart and their accents are wildly different. Newcastle (Geordie) and Sunderland (Mackem) are even closer together, yet there are marked differences. People talk about a Welsh accent, but north and south Wales are worlds apart.

Given how London/southeast-centric England is, it wouldn’t surprise me if estuary speakers referred to anything else as “an accent” but they don’t. It’s a meaningless phrase. Because, as OP says, everyone has an accent.

And it’s not as if the US is accent free. I guess by “an accent” you’d include the generic southern accent, of which there are dozens of variations. What about New York? That’s about as centre-of-the-universe as you get, but even to a foreigner it’s a distinctive accent. Most people can pick up a Boston accent, but there are variations across New England. Many people can pick up a “Minnesota” accent, but to a non-native the entire upper-Midwest sounds the same. 

Everyone has an accent.

So I’ve recently become aware that some Americans (I hope not all) do not think they have an accent. Like, they just think how they speak is like “the normal” and everyone else has an accent... no. Americans, you have an American accent. When you speak I, as a non-American, immediately learn you are from America because you have an American accent. And perhaps, if it’s very strong and distinctive, I may even be able to tell what part of America you’re from, from your accent. In short, EVERY SINGLE PERSON has an accent!