The new Cockney by Susan Fox is the first book-length treatment of the London version of new urban varieties that seem to be emerging all over the globe as a result of an interplay of immigration, changing demographics of traditional urban neighbourhoods and language contact (cf. e.g. Kotsinas Reference Kotsinas1988 on Stockholm; Wiese Reference Wiese2012 on Berlin; Røyneland Reference Røyneland2016 on Oslo). As such, it is a highly anticipated and welcome addition to the field by an author who has been intimately involved in research in this location for decades.
The title is well chosen: in employing the label ‘Cockney’, it highlights the connection to the traditional, while the subtitle clarifies what is ‘new’, namely new (in this context: non-white) ethnicities and new linguistic patterns as encountered in the speech of adolescents in the part of London that used to be home to Cockneys and their (in)famous dialect. While a title along the lines of The emergence of Multicultural London English might seem more relevant and possibly even more correct (since the author herself pretty much concludes that ‘Cockney’ is no longer spoken in its traditional London home), The new Cockney is more in line with what is actually discussed in the book and how it is presented.
In chapter 1, ‘The social and historical context’ of the wider research site – London's East End – is presented, providing a concise, very useful step-by-step discussion of in- and outmigration at different periods of time. The demographic changes wrought not only by migration but also by large-scale socio-economic changes and restructuring in the neighbourhood (complete demise of the shipping industry/docks, resulting unemployment, poverty, forced resettlements, subsequent redevelopment as an upscale non-local neighbourhood) have resulted in a transformation of the area that might be unprecedented and largely unparalleled elsewhere: from a largely white, working-class neighbourhood, London's East End – within only a handful of generations – changed from a very homogenous to a very heterogeneous area (docklands: posh, upscale apartments and shopping with mostly non-locals moving in; other areas: deprived, mostly Asian and mixed-race, largely working class) and, additionally, to a mostly (in some parts almost exclusively) non-white, young, poor, non-English-speaking area.
Chapter 2, ‘Methodological issues’, outlines the theoretical prerequisites in terms of approaches and fieldwork. A relatively extensive general discussion of (core, but basic) concepts such as social networks, the speech community or communities of practice precedes a shorter part concerning the concrete methodology employed in the study (p. 53). Although Fox covers all essentials, personally, I would have liked to know much more about the hows and whys of location and participant selection as well as a more detailed time frame. It is never mentioned when the recordings were made, but given the background/timeline (PhD thesis; see Fox in Reference Fox2007), it is likely that – at the date of publication of the book – the recordings are at least ten years old. This, unfortunately, leads to questions of comparability with more recent studies, since any reader interested in (current) change in progress cannot know – at least not without conducting their own investigation on the timing of the PhD – whether five, ten or fifteen years have passed.
The description of the fieldwork stage in chapter 2 is very detailed and helpful for anyone who thinks about undertaking a similar project. Many caveats and issues that the author/fieldworker encountered are addressed, and she describes how she ensured that her ‘outsider’ status along practically all dimensions (ethnicity, age, sex, education) didn't prove detrimental for the project. The sections make clear that it takes determination and energy, not to mention the ability to deal with rejection and failure, and the will to try again, to end up with any useful data at all. Despite its relative imbalance (only white women, very few speakers in the ‘mixed’ group, problematic age distribution), the resulting dataset allows some general remarks about tendencies concerning age, gender and ethnic background.
Chapters 3 and 4 follow a parallel structure, each focusing on one diphthong identified as part of the Southern diphthong shift: chapter 3 is concerned with ‘The price variable’, while chapter 4 discusses ‘The face variable’. As the study is purely articulatory, the acoustic descriptions of the vowel system(s) of speakers are all adapted from Labov (Reference Labov1994) and mentioned rather than discussed. Fox's overview of previous research on these variables is almost exclusively limited to traditional sources (mostly Wells) and focused entirely on London, while no or only cursory mention is made of the same variables in other regions or more traditional materials such as Ellis (Reference Ellis1889) or the SED output for the Southeast (SED is mentioned e.g. on p. 80 but referenced unclearly; Hackney was an SED locality that might have been relevant).
The choice of variables (price and face) is not discussed, and no mention is made until the conclusion (p. 230) that other phonological variables could also have been of interest (and these, as well as many others, are briefly discussed in chapter 7). There is no direct link between the previous chapters and chapter 3, which jumps right into a brief description of the historical background of the price diphthong. The longest subsections in both diphthong chapters, 3.3 (pp. 82–109) and 4.3 (pp. 116–38), are devoted to ‘The quantitative analysis’. Here, we learn how the different variants of the variable in question are distributed in the dataset as a whole, according to phonological environment (preceding and following sound), ethnic background, gender, combinations of these three, as well as tendencies according to age. Moreover, we learn how the variants are distributed within the friendship groups that the author established. Fox shows that the use of certain variants indeed corresponds more or less well with these groups and by extension certain ethnic and/or social (mostly gender) boundaries.
Chapter 5, ‘Allomorphic variation in the English article system’, focuses on a possible change in progress involving the variants of the (in)definite articles (a/an and [ðə]/[ðiː]). Relatively low token numbers (94 tokens of a(n), 312 of the before vowels; pp. 158, 163) prohibit a more in-depth discussion so that the ‘quantitative’ analysis is restricted to tables containing percentage distributions according to the by-now familiar gender-ethnic groups. Fox mentions that Goldvarb runs were conducted (as is common in the variationist paradigm) but never goes into detail as to their results.
While it is clear that the invariant forms (e.g. a/[ðə] apple) are mostly used by the Bangladeshi and mixed-heritage speakers, Fox also addresses the fact that this is a variant that even native speakers acquire relatively late, pointing to a more general explanation for possibly imminent language change. This could be further supported by the fact that the present author is very familiar with [ðə] + vowel in spoken semi-formal American English (e.g. audio books, TV news). The section on linking and intrusive /r/ (5.5) is largely impressionistic and very brief, no doubt owing to the low frequency of the phenomena.
In chapter 6, we are presented with ‘The qualitative analysis’, which is mostly an explanation of why the youth club can be considered a community of practice (some aspects, particularly that of a joint negotiated enterprise, are doubtful if members’ ‘goal’ is simply to hang out together) and that the friendship groups that Fox has worked with in the preceding chapters are indeed justified structures. Section 6.6, ‘Chinese whispers and the role of brokering’, might be the most interesting, as it employs the concept of ‘linguistic brokers’ to attempt to identify which members of the youth club might be spreading certain variants.
The final chapter echoes the book's title ‘The ‘new’ Cockney’, and the use of the quotation marks could be read as ‘scare quotes’ here, as the author acknowledges that ‘[r]ecent sociolinguistic research suggests that “Multicultural London English” (Cheshire, Kerswill, Fox & Torgersen Reference Cheshire, Kerswill, Fox and Torgersen2011) more accurately describes the variety of English’ spoken in the former Cockney homelands (p. 213). The chapter then provides a very comprehensive summary of the phonological (vowels and consonants) as well as ‘Beyond phonology’ (7.4) features that past and current research has identified as undergoing change in the community and wider area. It is here that we get the best impression of the state-of-the-art of research undertaken recently, and it would have been nice to see this much earlier in the book. In fact, this chapter could easily be chapter 2, setting the linguistic scene after the same has been done for the historical context.
The brief ‘Conclusion’ presents a two-page summary of the core findings and a 1.5-page look into future directions of research. The bibliography contains about 200 references, very few from post-2007/PhD-submission. Indeed, these seem to be restricted to the output of the colleagues involved in the larger-scale research project (mostly Cheshire, Fox, Kerswill, Torgersen). It is a shame that such useful work has not been updated to the extent that it can be used as a reference work for many years to come. As it stands, it is an interesting study indicating some trends a new generation of researchers will have to follow up on in much more depth and detail.
Let me summarise some of the problems I had while reading the book. Overall, I mainly see issues with the presentation (e.g. usefulness of graphs and tables), terminology and particularly the methodologies employed in chapters 3 and 4 (chapter 3 is used for illustration here). First and foremost, the author uses terminology from the variationist framework (e.g. section 3.3.1 ‘Linguistic constraints’, variant, variable) and even states that she is working within ‘the British variationist paradigm’ (p. 140) in chapter 5 (although it remains unclear what is meant by this uncommon term; in fact, this is the only instance found when searching the web – British authors working in the variationist paradigm? research conducted on British varieties within the variationist paradigm?). But nowhere does she conduct a variationist analysis of the factors that influence the realisation of the price diphthong. The only quantitative evidence provided are distributions of the six identified variants of the dependent variable according to the independent factors (terms Fox never uses). The only statistical tests performed are chi-square tests over 3x4/5 tables, telling us nothing about where exactly the significant differences are located.
Fox's use of the term ‘constraint ranking’ seems synonymous with ‘most frequent’, which is not what it means – in fact, taking table 3.3 as an example, it is clear that Fox looks at each preceding environment and then compares the three ethnic/gender groups with each other, rather than looking at the dependent variable (‘new’ realisations/variants [æ, aɪ, ɐɪ] vs ‘old’/Cockney realisations [
, ɑɪ, ɑː]) and how each linguistic and social factor impacts its realisation. Fox's discussion does not highlight the parallels in constraint ranking, but rather the (less pronounced) ones in terms of (relative) frequency. It is noteworthy in this context that for [ɐɪ], which Fox thinks may become the ‘levelled variant’ (p. 93), the constraint ranking for preceding context is identical across all gender-ethnic groups: [ɐɪ] is ranked as number 1 after voiceless stops and ranked last after voiced stops, which presents the mirror image of the rankings for the traditional (Cockney) variants. For the ‘Bangladeshi’ variant [aɪ], there are no such parallels, with only a few shared rankings between the gender-ethnic groups, which might indicate that it is indeed the most marked of the three new variants and that – if any is taking place – levelling is progressing away from it. Similar parallels can be drawn for the following environment. Some of this is addressed by Fox, but as previously mentioned, the discussion is not focused clearly on the rankings.
Concerning the analysis, several variants should have been excluded from the in-depth analysis because of empty cells and generally very low token numbers, as should a number of preceding/following sounds which are known to cause coarticulation effects: vowels before and after glides and liquids as well as before nasals tend to be affected by coarticulation and/or undershoot (e.g. Labov Reference Labov1994: 197; Labov, Ash & Boberg Reference Labov, Ash and Boberg2006: 174). Fox also makes no mention of excluding unstressed items, which is common practice in sociophonetics (e.g. Harrington Reference Harrington, Hardcastle, Laver and Gibbon2010: 91; Summers Reference Summers1987: 854). This is evident in the distribution of price according to preceding sound, where (at a later point) it becomes clear that most of these tokens are most likely instances of the discourse marker and quotative (be) like, which is generally unstressed and might furthermore exhibit a lexical effect that should be looked at in isolation (i.e. tokens of like should be excluded here).
This is not a study set in a Language Variation and Change/variationist paradigm (although Fox at times writes as if it is); the focus is very much a qualitative, descriptive, state-of-the-art ‘taking stock’ of a clearly defined subset of the London population (members of one youth club in the East End) and a handful of features of their linguistic repertoire. These represent a subset of phonological features currently undergoing change in British/English English (diphthongs in lexical sets price and face) as well as one phonological–morphosyntactic feature (allomorphy in (in)definite articles). Methodological issues as well as the discussion of theoretical concepts and (alternative) approaches to fieldwork and the analysis form another large part. Because of these in particular, but also through many repetitions within and across chapters, the book often (still) reads like a qualification thesis rather than a monograph (e.g. discussion of social networks, communities of practice and key propagators’ work).
For the phonological features, the distribution of variants according to the friendship groups is included under the quantitative header, which I find problematical, since the establishment of the friendship groups is clearly not a quantitative, but qualitative measure. It seems more intuitive to have two main co-ordinated subsections in each chapter, one for the quantitative/distributional analysis with its sub-subsections on ethnicity, age, gender and phonological environments, and one for the friendship groups and their use of the identified variants (e.g. 3.3 ‘The quantitative analysis’, 3.4 ‘The friendship groups’, 3.5 ‘Summary’).
Despite these critical comments, the book is more than timely and offers a wealth of information and contextualisation in the rapidly evolving field of new urban (ethnic) varieties. Over the past decades, multiculturalism has become the rule rather than the exception in large cities worldwide, with London possibly in the vanguard of such change and the emancipation of such varieties due to its long-standing colonial ties. Thus, Fox's volume is a very welcome addition to this ever-expanding field and offers a multitude of further research avenues to explore.
