Transcribing Estuary English: a discussion document

Many of our native-speaker undergraduates use a variety of English that I suppose we have to call Estuary English, following Rosewarne 1984, 1994, Coggle 1993, and many recent reports on press and television. So do many of the patients our BSc students will have to deal with.That is, they use the popular speech of the southeast of England (based on that of London, and thus supposedly centred on the Thames estuary). This means that their accent is located somewhere in the continuum between RP and broad Cockney (= the broadest London working-class variety).