Dr Amanda Cole gives first Linguistics Guest Speaker Seminar of the year

22 October 2025

Dr Cole's work explores whether the migration of cockneys from East London to Essex has had impacts on the accents they use, and whether first generation Essex residents whose families relocated from East London use features of the Cockney accent. We heard from Dr Cole about her sociolinguistic research in this area. 

Drawing on her own family history of relocation from the East End to Essex, Dr Cole explored the characteristics that differentiate Cockney and Essex English, and showed that the variations in accounts of Cockney's phonetic features are so great that in some cases, Essex English could be considered as Cockney. Dr Cole argued that there is enough similarity to consider the accent in Debden, Essex, to be Cockney. 

Discussing concepts of indexicality (the ideological relationship between linguistic features and a social identity they signal) and enregisterment (the process by which a linguistic style becomes named and socially recognised). Cockney is an enregistered variety, and that linguists themselves study varieties like this while impacted by social notions of what Cockney is and who speaks it. 

Notions of who qualified as a Cockney were once rooted in place (being born within the sound of the bells of Mary-le-Bow Church), but the movement of Cockneys to Essex challenge this.

Dr Cole's participants sometimes reported they consider themselves as having a Cockney accent and an Essex accent simultaneously, challenging our notions of what an accent is, as situations for identity labels change over time. 

We thank Dr Cole for her fascinating talk, so well suited to the location of our university!