ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses types of English and focuses on the relationships and differences between them. Since RP speakers make up a very small percentage of the English population, many native speakers working as teachers of English are not native speakers of RP. Some English journalists have also been very excited about the development of what they call ‘Estuary English’. ‘Estuary English’ is basically a group of south-east-of-England accents which are used by middle-class speakers from the Home Counties. Variety of English which has attracted British media attention is a relatively new variety of English which is associated with parts of London’ and certain other locations in the English urban south-east, which is known to linguists as Multicultural London English. Multicultural London English is very distinct in a number of respects from Traditional Cockney, notably in its vowel system, and is characterized by a series of distinctive non-indigenous transfer-based phonological features.
