This book discusses the phonetic make-up of the teenage speech in the Home Counties in order to verify the status of a putative new variety referred to as «Estuary English». The study compares the findings of a field research carried out by the author in the vicinity of London in 1998/1999 with the data from the Survey of English Dialects obtained half a century earlier. The results of the research show that «Estuary English» should be viewed as a number of distinct accents with some influences of London speech, not a single and definable variety.

The Author: Joanna Przedlacka was born in Warsaw, Poland, in 1971. She graduated from Warsaw University in 1995. In 1997-1999 she spent three semesters at Wolfson College, Oxford University where she was working on her Ph.D. monograph. In 1999 she obtained a Ph.D. degree for her study of the speech of the Home Counties. Currently she holds the position of Assistant Professor at the Institute of English Studies, Warsaw University.