ABSTRACT
SO far in this preliminary sketch of the history of Cockney we have had no authoritative comment upon which to rely. The scholars who wrote upon English speech in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were concerned mainly with formulating rules for correct speech, and apart from the permitted exceptions to their rules they rarely discussed variant pronunciations. It was not until the eighteenth century, when the standard of correctness had been fairly well settled, in theory if not always in practice, that orthoepists and grammarians began to discover the interest of non-standard forms of speech. In consequence, we have had to wait until the middle of the eighteenth century for any valuable comment upon the characteristics of the vulgar speech of London.
