英语听力精选进阶版 11228（在线收听）

Estuary 

Professor David Crystal 

Words based on locations don't become part of the general 

language very often. You do get a few – I mean people talk about 

"Whitehall" meaning the government, or "the White House" in 

America, meaning the American government, but not very often, 

and certainly part of a river  – 'estuary'! I think that's a first; I don't 

remember hearing that before ever.  

Now the estuary in question is the River Thames, and during the 

1980s the word estuary came into the language referring to the 

kind of speech that people are using around the estuary of the 

River Thames, in places like Essex, in the north of Kent, and it 

was a new kind of accent: a sort of cross between Cockney and 

Received Pronunciation.  

And if somebody said he speaks estuary, it would mean he speaks this kind of 

mixed accent. In RP, in Received Pronunciation, you'd say that the word was 'wall' 

– the thing that holds a house up – a wall; in Cockney of course it's a 'wall', a 'wall' 

and in estuary English of course it's a sort of mixture of the two: a 'wall', a 'wall', 

with a 'l' sort of sound. It's one of the fastest moving accents of modern times.