The Language Wars

by Henry Hitchings

  At Christmas 1858 Dickens published in his magazine Household Words a story entitled ‘A House to Let’, written by him and three others. In the chapter written by Elizabeth Gaskell, the Lancastrian salesman Mr Openshaw pictures smart Londoners ‘lounging away their days in Bond Street, and such places; ruining good English, and ready in their turn to despise him as a provincial’; he delights in addressing his son ‘in the broadest and most unintelligible Lancashire dialect, in order to keep up what he called the true Saxon accent’.

  This business of true Saxonism is familiar from an earlier chapter, and Gaskell had written about it before. In North and South (1855), her fictional portrait of the social effects of industrial change, the mill owner Mr Thornton, a man for the most part shy of talking about himself, says, ‘I belong to Teutonic blood; it is little mingled in this part of England to what it is in others; we retain much of their language; we retain more of their spirit; we do not look upon life as a time for enjoyment, but as a time for action and exertion.’

  Charles Reade’s Christie Johnstone in the 1853 novel of that name ‘came to London with a fine mind, a broad brogue, a delicate ear; she observed how her husband’s friends spoke, and in a very few months she had toned down her Scotch to a rich Ionic coloring, which her womanly instinct will never let her exchange for the thin, vinegar accents that are too prevalent in English and French society’. Reade has a number of pointed things to say about language, usually uttered as asides but with real tartness. The Anglo-Saxon forms are ‘the soul and vestal fire of the great English tongue’, yet one of his characters, contemplating a certain monosyllablic word (‘a stinger’ – i.e. ‘fuck’) considers it ‘a thorn of speech not in her vocabulary, nor even in society’s’. Noting one character’s incorrect usage, Reade writes, ‘Lucy’s aunt did not talk strict grammar. Does yours?’

  Among twentieth-century English novelists George Orwell, who scrupulously described himself as ‘lower upper-middle class’, is especially sensitive to these matters. When Dorothy Hare in A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935) looks for lodgings in the shabbier parts of South London, ‘Her ragged clothes and her lack of references were against her, and her educated accent, which she did not know how to disguise, wrecked whatever chances she might have had. The tramps and cockney hop-pickers had not noticed her accent, but the suburban housewives noticed it quickly enough, and it scared them in just the same way as the fact that she had no luggage had scared the landladies.’ In his non-fiction book The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) Orwell remarks, ‘In a Lancashire cotton-town you could probably go for months on end without once hearing an “educated” accent, whereas there can hardly be a town in the South of England where you could throw a brick without hitting the niece of a bishop.’ From his own point of view this was beneficial: in Lancashire ‘your “educated” accent stamps you rather as a foreigner than as a chunk of the petty gentry; and this is an immense advantage, for it makes it much easier to get into contact with the working class.’ In addition, ‘If social stratification corresponded precisely to economic stratification, the public-school man would assume a cockney accent the day his income dropped below £200 a year. But does he? On the contrary, he immediately becomes twenty times more Public School than before. He clings to the Old School Tie as to a life-line.’

  In his long essay ‘The English People’, written in 1944 but not published until 1947, Orwell diagnosed a number of problems in the use of English, claiming that ‘The language of the BBC is barely intelligible to the masses’ and that ‘English working people … think it effeminate even to pronounce a foreign word correctly’. Yet since the First World War an ‘important section of society’ had consisted of the ‘nearly classless’. Its habits of speech were changing English. Arguing that ‘the great weakness of English is its capacity for debasement’, Orwell asserted that its ‘deadliest enemy’ was the ‘dreary dialect’ of political speeches and news bulletins. The result was a condition of decadence.8 He sensed an increasing detachment between the affluent and the working classes. The fabric of society was changing: one aspect of this was the growth of an artificial middle-class manner of speech, and another was the erosion of some of the most poetic, historically resonant local language.

  This had been anticipated by Joseph Wright. His great dialect dictionary was the fruit of a programme of research and publication initiated by the English Dialect Society, founded in 1873. Tellingly, once the Society had turned its findings over to Wright, it promptly disbanded, on the understanding that its work was done. Wright felt the same: in the future, dialect would be less copious. But he and the EDS were wrong. The Survey of English Dialects, conducted under the direction of Harold Orton in the 1950s, confirmed that the picture had changed since the time of Wright and the EDS – and was remarkably complex. The work continues, now under Sally Johnson and Clive Upton, and will have to keep being enlarged.

  Dialects have long been regarded as an unsexy area for research. Traditionally, the study of English has concentrated on its development towards a standard form, and narratives outside this central story have been given little space. Pertinently, some of the most distinguished books about regional English usage have been produced by foreigners, fascinated by matters that to many natives have seemed merely parochial – or rather mucky. For instance, a study of the dialect of Pewsey in Wiltshire was published in 1903 by a Swede, John Kjederqvist, whose main sources of information were a middle-aged plumber and the ‘worst speakers’ in the local schools, and a substantial 1905 thesis on the dialect of West Somerset was the work of Etso Kruisinga, a Dutchman. Then again, the twentieth century’s most substantial scholarly grammars of English were the work of Hendrik Poutsma, another Dutchman, and Otto Jespersen, a Dane.

  The ‘worst speakers’ are a subject of great interest. It helps make this interest sound respectable if we use a different adjective. But ‘worst’ is how we tend to think of them. Discussion of what is worst implies that we have an idea about what is best – a prestige form of speech that will be labelled ‘standard’, though it has never been practised by the majority. People who use standard English allege that those who fail to do so lack linguistic ability, but in reality people using stigmatized forms of English may have complex abilities as speakers – incomprehensible to many observers, but powerful among their peers. Furthermore, testing of people’s linguistic abilities tends to focus, for obvious reasons, on events that happen in the classroom or in interviews, rather than on spontaneous expression.9

  One can speak standard English without a standard accent. But standard English has such an accent: it is widely known as Received Pronunciation (RP). This has tended to be associated, especially in the minds of its critics, with public (i.e. private) schools. Daniel Jones, who promoted the term, suggested in 1917 the alternative name Public School Pronunciation. But the name RP prevailed. Jones was not the first to refer to it; John Walker had written of ‘received pronunciation’ in 1774, and Alexander Ellis in 1869, but it was Jones who gave it those telltale capitals.

  The stigma of a non-standard accent was renewed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, at a time when the influence of Britain’s public schools was growing. The leading public schools, and the many new ones established between 1840 and 1870, preached the virtues of individualism while inculcating, through their rules and hierarchies and customs, a strong sense of the importance of institutions. Many of them were foundations of long standing, but now their influence magnified, and they were organized into a ‘system’, partly through the Headmasters’ Conference (begun in 1869), but mainly through the interactions of their pupils on the sports field and in other arenas. The result was a new caste, the ‘public school man’, whose education imbued him with certain attitudes and assumptions, among which was an idea of how one should speak. ‘Imbued’ is not too strong a word; boarding schools differed from day schools in the scope they allowed for establishing and steadily reinforcing patterns of behaviour. The culture and character of the public schools
were advertised and celebrated to a remarkable degree in newspapers and magazines, in stories and annuals, and in other sectors of the education system. The answer to the question ‘Where were you at school?’ influenced whether one gained admission to clubs, coteries and indeed jobs. In the 1880s and ’90s, inspectors monitoring the use in schools of government money began commenting on the value of lessons that taught pupils to lose their picturesque provincial accents and move towards a standard pronunciation. In 1898 the government’s department of education prescribed a method of teaching pupils how to sound their vowels.10

  With the creation of the British Broadcasting Corporation in 1922, radio became an important medium for the diffusion of RP. Within three years of its foundation, the BBC was reaching as many as 10 million listeners with its broadcasts.11 The influence of these, and later of the BBC’s television broadcasts, was strong, encouraging the belief that acquiring RP was a means of social advancement. For many, exposure to the English of the BBC was a means of remedying their deficient speech – whether they had arrived at this perception on their own or had been nudged towards it. For others, of course, it caused resentment; accents other than RP seemed to be used mainly for comic effect. Only in the 1960s did the BBC begin to feature many presenters who did not use RP.

  In fact, there is more than one kind of RP. One distinction that it is possible to draw is between the ‘marked’ and ‘unmarked’ forms. The marked form, which one hears less and less, is a more obvious sign of a person’s being blithely upper class even than a signet ring engraved with a coat of arms. This isn’t merely ‘talking proper’, but ‘talking posh’ – which is regarded as an affectation. It is noticeable that the younger members of Britain’s Royal Family and many of today’s aspiring politicians strive to avoid marked RP, for fear of being considered aloof or fusty.

  Since the 1960s a new kind of standard has been emerging. In 1984 David Rosewarne, a phonetics expert, labelled it ‘Estuary English’ – a reference to the estuary of the River Thames, in Essex and Kent. The development of Estuary English has involved working-class and lower-middle-class accents shifting slightly in the direction of RP, while RP and accents close to it have levelled downwards. Characteristics of Estuary English include the intrusive linking r sound one hears between idea and of in ‘the idea of going’, the smearing of the l sound so that it is more like a w in words such as milk and bundle, and ‘yod-coalescence’, which creates the impression of a j in words such as Tuesday and leads to dew and Jew being pronounced the same way.

  For now RP, rather than Estuary English or some other variant, gets taught to non-native speakers. But there is a move to change this. Given the increasing paucity of RP speakers, it might for practical purposes make more sense to teach foreign learners a different accent. Certainly, some non-native speakers are stunned to discover, on arrival in Britain, that the RP accent they have cultivated is considered by many native speakers to be superannuated and embarrassing.

  In London, where I live, an increasing number of young people, from a variety of ethnic backgrounds, speak what’s come to be known as Multicultural London English. This street dialect is replacing what George Steiner called ‘the thick twilight of Cockney speech’.12 It is intriguingly free from institutional influence – indeed, from the influence of adults. Its distinctive features include Afro-Caribbean cadences, vocabulary absorbed from a wide range of sources (Jamaican Creole, certainly, but also Bengali, Hindi, Urdu, Romani and various African Englishes) and a relentless use of question tags, of which innit? is one of the less confrontational examples. The question seeks confirmation yet can also be a challenge.

  One of the features that seems likely to have inspired Steiner’s image of Cockney’s ‘thick twilight’ remains: the glottal stop – or, to give it its fuller name, the voiceless glottal plosive. It is something you hear every day if you live in London, and indeed if you are in Glasgow or Barbados, Newcastle or New York, but you will hear it less in the English spoken in Australia or southern Ireland. It occurs when the space between the vocal cords completely closes, followed by a pop that is like a little explosion. You hear it when the t disappears in mountain or quality, in the word uh-oh, and more exaggeratedly when you cough. The absence of the glottal stop has traditionally been a marker of RP, although some RP speakers do occasionally use glottal stops.

  There now appear to be fewer accents in Britain than there were a generation ago. There is a pattern of supra-regionalization: in populous areas which are socially mixed, differences between minor local varieties are fading. This happens as speakers unconsciously reach a kind of accommodation, in which they converge on a new variety of speech that preserves distinctive regional features but bears few marks of affiliation to the smaller, close-knit communities of their grandparents. One of the reasons for this is the decline of industry and farming; today’s school-leavers are less likely than previous generations to go into jobs which are tightly linked to local traditions and identities. However, while mobility within regions has greatly increased in the last fifty years, larger regional ties are strong. The homogenization of British life – the sameness of high streets and shopping malls, the pervasiveness of the most popular entertainment – means that accents and dialects provide precious opportunities for people from different areas of Britain to assert their distinctiveness. Precious, that is, because so many traditional marks of distinctiveness have gone.

  When people express their identity through accent, the effect is powerful. I am fond of David Crystal’s observation that this is because ‘the voice – unlike, say, distinctive clothing, facial features, or ornaments – is perceptible around corners and in the dark’.13 As Anne Karpf comments in her illuminating book on the subject, the human voice ‘bridges our internal and external worlds, travelling from our most private recesses into the public domain, revealing not only our deepest sense of who we are, but also who we wish we weren’t. It’s a superb guide to fear and power, anxiety and subservience, to another person’s vitality and authenticity as well as our own.’ We milk it for information, and our interpretation of voice reflects our acoustic capacities.14 The ways we talk remain, to a perhaps terrifying degree, significant.

  18

  The Alphabet and the Goddess

  Literacy, gender and sexist language

  It is common to associate the use of a stigmatized dialect with illiteracy. Victorian writers on education equated ‘provincial’, ‘incorrect’ or ‘improper’ pronunciation and choice of words with ignorance and indeed often with basic mental deficiency. This is wrong. But in any case, questions of literacy and its absence need unpacking.

  The word illiterate used to mean ‘unlettered’ – that is, having no acquaintance with writing. Now it is used as a synonym for stupid. The degree of social judgement it entails has led to the rise of pre-literate and non-literate, terms intended to diagnose rather than condemn. We also hear about the ‘functionally illiterate’; the term denotes people who can read and write, though not well enough to cope with life’s everyday requirements. Hysterical comment, especially in the US, presents functional illiteracy as a disease threatening to eat away the very core of society. It is not easy to define, but a report in the Guardian in July 2007 suggested that in the UK there are approximately 100,000 functionally illiterate school-leavers every year.1 The problem is worse elsewhere. An article in the Jamaica Observer in April 2010 suggested that while the official literacy rate in Jamaica is 89 per cent, ‘about half of the population are functionally illiterate’.2

  Language is primarily speech. ‘Writing,’ asserts the linguist John McWhorter, ‘is just a method for engraving on paper what comes out of our mouths.’3 He does not mean to belittle writing – which is, after all, the medium in which he is making this point – but rather to affirm an important truth: speech came first. McWhorter’s position, largely orthodox, is that the written word is a substitute for the spoken one, and is artificial. Writing using an alphabet is one of the technologies that enhanc
e life. But it is a technology that has existed for not much more than five millennia, and most of the languages that have been spoken in the history of humanity have not been written down. Although alphabetically arranged dictionaries may make it look as though it must be the other way round, genetically we are primed for talking, not for writing. Yet statements about language before the invention of writing – which is to say, statements about more than 100,000 years of language use – are speculative.

  Actually, it is not quite accurate to state that writing is merely a way of recording what comes out of our mouths. Writing has distinctive features – particular functions and forms that speech does not have. Moreover, while speech certainly influences writing, writing also influences speech. But whereas it is common to think of writing as a way of representing speech, in fact both speech and writing are realizations of the fundamental system that is language.

  We tend to accept that the written word is permanent and the spoken word short-lived. While it is true that the things we say cannot be deleted, and they linger in other people’s memories longer than we may find it comfortable to imagine, the spoken word does not leave a tangible residue. The grandeur of the written word is often conceived in architectural terms: it is planned and highly structured and balanced. By implication, speech lacks style: spontaneous and ephemeral, it is without control and technique. Yet in reality all sentences, whether written or spoken, are complex actions. You may reasonably say, ‘I can think of a sentence that isn’t at all complex’, but even that sentence is the product of intense electrical activity in your brain, transmitted via the cranial nerves to your vocal apparatus. This apparatus includes your lips and teeth, your nasal cavity, the apex and blade and back of your tongue, your windpipe, your hard palate and soft palate, the alveolar ridge into which your upper teeth are fixed, your vocal cords, your diaphragm and your lungs.