The sociolinguistic concept of ‘enregisterment’ describes processes and practices that lead to speakers conceptualising ways of speaking by ‘indexing’ linguistic forms and repertoires with social meanings and values (Agha 2007; Silverstein 2003). A ‘register’ in this sense is the concept or knowledge a speaker has of a dialect. Processes and practices leading to enregisterment can be observed in meta-linguistic discourse as, e.g., elicited in interviews.

This paper studies the formation and consolidation of the ‘registers’ associated with London, focussing specifically on traditional ‘Cockney’ and the innovative ‘Multicultural London English’ (MLE). It seeks to answer how speakers conceptualise each variety in terms of linguistic shibboleths, which social meanings and values they associate with each register, and how these register indexes are constructed in relation to each other.

The ‘London Talks’ interviews were conducted in London in 2021-22 and provide a corpus of elicited metacommentary from 54 female and male Londoners of various social and ethnic backgrounds and ages. The interviews are qualitatively and quantitatively analysed by means of MAXQDA, a computer-assisted qualitative discourse analysis software.

Speakers' comments on typical speaker personae and contexts reveal a large and varied ‘indexical field’ (Eckert 2008) and intricate meta-discursive knowledge influenced by the speakers' dialect socialisation and (linguistic) identity construction. Where in public metadiscourses such as in newspapers, ‘Cockney’ and ‘MLE’ are often represented as two opposing, mutually unintelligible varieties, with the latter encroaching on and ‘replacing’ the former, Londoners rather view these registers as part of the same linguistic reality and evaluate each more positively and with more nuance.

In studying speakers’ conceptualisations of London ways of speaking, the paper adds a layer of analysis to existing research on London dialects and endorses a novel approach that places the discursive/register level of variation on a par with the traditional, structural level of sociolinguistic analysis.