The Cockney accent

Last Tuesday, a student asked me what English accent I found the most difficult to understand. I said it was the Irish accent, but I spoke too fast! What I think is one of the most difficult English accents for a foreigner is actually the Cockney accent.

Cockney is the accent or dialect traditionally spoken by the working class of London. Cockneys pronounce words quite differently to standard English and, in addition, they use argot based on ingenious rhymes. This argot makes it nearly impossible for a foreigner to understand what is said, but it also makes the cockney accent interesting and unique. Here are some examples of how it works:

• "I'm going up the apples": "I'm going upstairs". It comes from the phrase apples and pears, which rhymes with stairs. They you remove the second part of the phrase, and you get "apples" = "stairs".
• "What's the lemon?": "What's the time?" It comes from lemon and lime, which rhymes with time.
• "Can I use your dog to call the missus?": "Can I use your phone to call my girlfriend?" It comes from dog and bone, which rhymes with phone.
• "My phone is brown bread": "My phone is dead". In this case, you can't skip the second word, so you have to say "brown bread".

To prevent the police (and any outsiders in general) from understanding what they were talking about, the working-class Londoners came up with a coded language based on rhymes like in the examples above. As you can see, it's extremely difficult to understand if you don't know the code or don't have the hang of it!

Are you curious about the Cockney accent? Check out this video from Let Them Talk TV, in which Gideon explains how Cockney accent works with examples and a touch of humour. Anna from English like a native made a video about this accent as well. For further information about the Cockney accent, you can read articles about it on the Encyclopædia Britannica webpage, the Oxford English Dictionary, or Wikipedia.