The story of english

The version of English covered in my video is version called Cockney English. This is most commonly used in South-East England, and a slightly different version became what is now called Australian English.This version of English began as the speech of the lower and middle classes predominate in the Eastern part of Elizabethan England, but was also common elsewhere. This British accent is very pronounced and noticeable. A key trait of Cockney English is the of the th and h sounds in speech. For example, instead of mother or throw someone speaking Cockney might pronounce them as muvver and frow. Lacking the h sound even occurs in words with only the verbal sound, but not the actual letter. Chains would be pronounced chynes. Cockney started out as very widespread in England until the early dictionaries were published featuring pronunciation guides. This caused many English people to shift their language to a more "proper" usage. This caused Cockney to be considered lower class for quite some time. In the last 20 years or so people in England have begun to embrace bits of Cockney in everyday use, and high class English is often considered pompous. However, much of this is not true Cockney. The Eastern England people who speak Cockney have developed something of their own language. The slang is actually incredibly difficult to understand. Backwards pronounced numbers like ruof conveys the same meaning that four does. They have also been known to use words from other languages like Hindi, Yiddish, and even some Roman influences.

Australians speak a very similar style of English, and there is a very good reason for that. In the 17 and 1800s Cockney was still most common in the lower class system, and England decided to round up all the petty criminals in England, Ireland, and Wales and send them to the colonies in Australia.  These petty criminals spoke a majority of Cockney. These people soon began borrowing terms from the aborigines who already lived in Australia; this is where words like kangaroo, dingo, and bilabong(water hole) came from. The common language here soon became a form of English pidgin. The phrase walk about is actually an early form of pidgin. People then began to form their own slang like G'd'ay as a greeting, ducks and geese for police, and dunny for bathroom. For a long time many Aussies felt inferior due to their heavy accents and differing slang terms; many even attempted to correct their English to the more high class British style. However, this inferiority soon lightened considerably and after this movie came out the harsher more heavily accented Australian language reached the main stream through movies like Crocodile Dundee and Steve Irwin's famous Crocodile Hunter series. This is the style of language most commonly associated with Aussies today.

I found this video to be rather interesting. I had seen before English accents that were very difficult to understand and I had never attributed that to their being different version of the same accent. Also I found it very interesting where the accents and language in Australia came from. The slang on both languages was pretty entertaining because it really shows how a foreign person will not understand your slang even if you are technically speaking the same language.