Even though Estuary English is a prominent accent in today’s world, it is not an easy task to find someone who is unanimously seen as its speaker. For my case study I chose a person who has become quite a classical example of an Estuary English speaker – a British celebrity chef, restaurateur and TV show host Jamie Oliver.
The speech analysed in this case study – Teach every child about food – was presented in the TED2010 conference. In it Jamie Oliver not only shares some shocking and valuable information on the importance of nutrition, but also demonstrates a number of accent features characteristic to Estuary English. However, since the speech is quite lengthy (it is more that 20 minutes long), I will be concentrating on the most prominent aspects of the accent. All the transcripts used in the analysis were taken from the official TED site. The full transcript can be accessed via this link.
The following analysis is organized according to the order in which Estuary English characteristics were presented in the Features section. The words in bold are marked for their phonological significance. All such markings were done during the analysis and are not present in the original transcript.
Consonants
t-glottalization
I’m not a doctor; I’m a chef. (00:40)
The glottalization of the sound /t/, one of the most prominent features of Estuary English, can be heard in Oliver’s speech even before he hits the one minute mark. Instead of /t/ there is a glottal stop, a slight pause, “a catch in the throat” (Wells 1998). The example above, I’m not a doctor, demonstrates quite a typical case of a glottal stop – it happens in the syllable-final position and makes the word not sound more like [nɒʔ] instead of the Standard English [nɒt].
Other examples of t-glottalization in the speech include I came here to start a food revolution that I so profoundly believe in (03:27) ([ðæt] becomes [ðæʔ]), the second most important man in her life (05:09) ([ɪmˈpɔːtnt] becomes [ɪmˈpɔːtnʔ] and many more.
l-vocalization
Supermarkets as well. (06:30)
The vocalization of /l/ is not a very strong feature in Jamie Oliver’s speech. There are some instances, like the one above, where the /l/ sound is clearly not as prominent as it would be in an RP speaker’s speech, but it could be argued that it is not a clear [wew] instead of [wel] also.
yod-coalescence
Or it was last year. (3:51)
There were not a lot of instances of yod-coalescence in this speech, but some could still be found. One of them, given above, is quite a typical case. RP’s [ˈlɑːst jɪə] becomes [ˈlɑːstjɪə] in Jamie Oliver’s rapid Estuary English speech.
Non-rhoticity
You see, the thing is, obesity and diet-related disease doesn’t just hurt the people that have it; it’s all of their friends, families, brothers, sisters. (05:16)
Non-rhoticity, characteristic to both Estuary English and Standard English (or, rather, to RP), is also prominent in Jamie Oliver’s speech. In the example given above he omits the /r/ sound in words brothers and sisters, so they sounds like [ˈsɪstəz] rather than [ˈsɪstərz] and [ˈbrʌðəs] rather than [ˈbrʌðərs]. However, the /r/ sound followed by a vowel is pronounced without a problem (e. g. Every single one of those in the red is a diet-related disease (2:22) – all /r/ sounds are realized ), which is in line with the non-rhoticity of the English language.
Intrusive r
Jamie Oliver’s speech does not seem to feature this characteristic of Estuary English.
Vowels
Jamie Oliver’s pronunciation of vowel sounds is pretty standard, mostly in line with the RP accent. Since Estuary English does not have any prominent characteristics related to vowels, no further discussion regarding this topic will be offered at this time.
Some final remarks
Not all characteristics of Estuary English are features with the same prominence in Jamie Oliver’s speech. For instance, t-glottalization is impossible to miss out on, while intrusive /r/ is nowhere to be found. Also, th-fronting, believed by Wells (1998) to be foreign to Estuary English speakers, is clearly present in the chef’s speech. This may be explained in two ways: either it is a part of Jamie Oliver’s idiolect, or th-fronting is indeed entering Estuary English and becoming one of its defining features.
Estuary English 