London Area


To access the London Accent Audio Study Syllabus please click here
Information and Tips for Learners of the London accent:
The London the accent is constantly changing and migrating as speakers of a mixture of accents fuse and integrate with one another. There are actually many local accents within London depending on ethnicity, neighbourhood, class, age, upbringing etc. so the term ‘London accent’ is quite an ambiguous one. The general London accent is somewhere between R.P. and Cockney. The recording above is of a South London speaker.
Tips for learners:
• There is a tendancy to drag the jaw back and down while speaking.
• /l/ is “clear” before a vowel sound, and “dark” in all other environments, very often vocalised.
• The London accent is non-rhotic, so /r/ is only pronounced before a vowel sound, but not a consonant sound.
• /h/ is sometimes dropped, more so in pronouns and mid-sentence environments, but sometimes in nouns and main verbs etc.
• /j/ is not dropped following alveolar consonants in words such as new, duty, tune, assume.
• ‘th’ sounds are sometimes substituted with ‘f’, more often in word final positions than at the beginning of words.
• word final and inter-vocalic ‘t’ is sometimes replaced with a glottal stop in words such as ‘cat’ and ‘better’.
• Native London speakers »only pronounce a word final ‘r’ if the next word starts with a vowel and often use the intrusive ‘r’