Early BBC recordings show the remarkable extent to which RP has altered over just a few decades, and they make the point that no accent is immune to change, not even the ‘best’. In addition, RP is no longer as widely used as it was fifty years ago. Less than 3 per cent of people in England speak it in a pure form now. Most other educated people have developed an accent which is a mixture of RP and various regional characteristics – ‘modified’ RP, some call it, or perhaps we should talk about modified RPs, as in each case the kind of modification stems from a person’s regional background, and this varies greatly.
Regionally modified speech (see Chapter 7) has begun to make a come-back in educated British society. In late Victorian times, regional accents were heavily stigmatized, and this attitude is still to be found, as we have seen (p. 63). But times are changing. Several contemporary politicians make a virtue out of their regional background, and the BBC employs several announcers with regionally modified accents. Nor is it uncommon, these days, to find educated people expressing hostility towards RP, both within and outside Britain, because of its traditional association with conservative values.
RP continues to be a widely used accent in the Court, Parliament, the Church of England, the legal profession, and in other national institutions. It has received more linguistic research than any other accent. It is still the only accent taught to foreigners who wish to learn a British model, and it is thus widely used abroad. In fact, today there are far more foreign speakers of RP in other countries than mother-tongue users in Britain.
Probably the main challenge to the position of RP in contemporary England is the rise of a modified accent which since the 1980s has come to be called ‘Estuary English’. The estuary in question is that of the River Thames, and the term tries to capture the emergence of an accent in the counties surrounding that river, in which various features of traditional London English (Cockney) have merged with RP or with local regional accents. Among the accent features are the use of glottal stops in place of
Some voices from the past
It is curious how fashion changes pronunciation. In my youth everybody said ‘Lonnon’ not ‘London’… The now fashionable pronunciation of several words is to me at least very offensive: CONtemplate is bad enough; but BALcony makes me sick.
Samuel Rogers, Recollections of the Table-talk of Samuel Rogers (1855)
These were new stress patterns in Rogers’ day; earlier, the words were pronounced conTEMplate and balCOny.
I have lived to see great changes in this respect. I have known the mute ‘h’ to become audible, and the audible ‘h’ to become mute. I was taught to pronounce the words humble, hospital, herbs, honest without an ‘h’, and can’t get out of my old fashion without a struggle. Nevertheless people now talk of humble, hospital, herb, and I have heard people talk of a honest man.
Samuel Lysons, Our Vulgar Tongue (1868)
Grannie used to talk of chaney (china), laylocks (lilac) and goold (gold); of the Prooshians and the Rrooshians; of things being ‘plaguey dear’ and ‘plaguey bad’. In my childhood, however, half my elders used such expressions, which now seem to be almost extinct. ‘Obleege me by passing the cowcumber’ Uncle Julius always used to say.
Augustus Hare, The Story of My Life (1896)
[George IV, telling what happened when he offered snuff to the actor, Kemble]: ‘If you will take a pinch… you will much obleege me.’ Kemble paused for a moment, and, dipping his fingers and thumb into the box, replied, ‘I accept your Royal Highness’s offer with gratitude; but, if you can extend your royal jaws so wide, pray, another time, say oblige.’ And I did so, ever after, I assure you.
Mrs Matthews, Memoirs of Charles Matthews, Comedian (1839)
certain consonants in certain parts of words (e.g. replacing the /t/ sounds in Gatwick Airport) and the articulation of a more vowel-like resonance for /1/ in such words as wall. Certain dialect features (of grammar and vocabulary) are also involved, such as the substitution of tag-questions (I’m going, aren’t I?, They should ask, shouldn’t they?) by an unvarying word: I’m going, right?, They should ask, right?
‘Estuary’ did not suddenly emerge in the 1980s. Rather, it is the outcome of several processes of pronunciation change which can be traced over several decades. But what brought it to people’s attention was the way in which the accent seemed to be emerging in two groups of people associated with different class backgrounds, and thus might be taken as an indicator of a significant change in social class. Mobility was plainly a crucial factor. On the one hand, ‘upwardly mobile’ people from London were moving out of the city, and adapting the Cockney element in their speech to the accents they encountered in their new locales; on the other hand, people from outside the capital were moving into London as part of the process of finding jobs or promotion, and adapting their RP or regional accents to what they heard in their new work environment. The process was fostered by the growth of the motorway and rail system, which enabled increasing numbers of people to commute to London. Cities such as Hull, York, Leeds, Manchester, Liverpool, Bristol, and most of the south coast to the east of Plymouth became commuter territory – a journey of two hours or so (on a good day!). The accent seemed to follow these communications routes, as features associated with Estuary English came increasingly to be noticed in these cities during the 1980s and 1990s.
Not only did the accent forms change, public attitudes towards these modified accents also began to change. For example, senior managers listening to recordings of RP and Estuary voices would report the former as ‘posh’ or ‘distant’ and the latter as ‘warm’ and ‘customer-friendly’. Such negative attitudes towards RP would not have been likely, among such a group, a generation ago. And the evidence that many kinds of regional accents are nowadays perceived to be warmer than they used to be lies in the way they are nowadays given public exposure. In today’s Britain, regional accents are now commonplace on radio and television. And in the processing of telemarketing enquiries, national timetable enquiries, and other such telephone-mediated activities, we will very likely encounter an operator whose accent is not RP. Edinburgh Scots, Yorkshire, and a few other accents have come to be the preferred voices, and many businesses have relocated to parts of the country where such accent pools are near by. Not all accents are attractive, in such contexts: urban English accents, such as those associated with Birmingham, Liverpool, and Newcastle, are still viewed negatively, and would be unlikely to be heard in a national tele-setting. What is a truly dramatic change is that RP is less likely to be heard, either. For the first time since the eighteenth century, the ‘prestige accent’ has begun to pick up some of the negative aura which traditionally would have been associated only with some kinds of regional speech.
5
Spelling
Though the rough cough and hiccough plough me through, I ought to cross the lough.
Beware of heard, a dreadful word,
That looks like beard and sounds like bird,
And dead: it’s said like bed, not bead,
For Goodness’ sake, don’t call it deed!
Watch out for meat and great and threat,
They rhyme with suite and straight and debt.
Anon
‘Chaotic’, ‘unpredictable’, ‘disorganized’, ‘a mess’ – these are just a few of the more repeatable expressions used to describe English spelling. And with examples such as the above to use as evidence, the descriptions seem quite apt.
On the other hand, I could have begun this chapter with a quotation from a different kind of poem, such as this one from Dr Seuss’s The Cat in a Hat (1957):
I can hold up the cup
And the milk and the cake!
I can hold up these books!
And the fish on a rake!
I can hold the toy ship
And a little toy man!
And look! With my tail
I can hold a red fan!
Punch, 15 September 1982
Most of the word
s in this extract are spelled in a perfectly regular way. Look at how the /I/ sound is routinely i in milk, fish, ship, and little; or the /a/ sound is a in and, can, man, and fan. There’s little sign of chaos here.
There seems to be both regularity and irregularity in English spelling. It isn’t totally chaotic. But the question remains: just how chaotic is it?
It isn’t easy to arrive at a definite figure – to say that X per cent of English words are irregular in their spelling. For a start, it isn’t obvious just how many words there are (see Chapter 3), or whether all words should be considered. If we include all the proper names (of people and places), the irregularity percentage will be enormous, for there are thousands of idiosyncratic name spellings (most noticeable in such famous cases as Featherstonehaugh, pronounced ‘Fanshaw’). People who find their name being regularly mis-spelled, or who find it necessary to spell out where they live each time they give their address over the phone, are thoroughly familiar with this point. On the other hand, if we include the thousands of lengthy scientific or technical terms in English (such as the full name of DDT – dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane), we will find that the vast majority of the syllables are spelled according to quite regular rules, as we sense when we ‘sound out’ these long words to ourselves, syllable by syllable. The irregularity percentage will then be tiny.
Even if we restrict the question to ‘everyday’ vocabulary, there is still a problem: namely, how do we deal with related words? If we say that friend is irregular, then do we say that friends is another irregular word, or is it the same word with an -s ending? The same point would apply to their and theirs, do and does and many more. If we go the first way, we dramatically increase the total of irregular words in the language; if we go the second way, we keep the total down.
We can make this point in a more general way by considering the present paragraph. It consists of forty-five words. Now, let us focus on just one of the irregularly spelled words it contains, the. What percentage of the paragraph is made up of the?
There are two answers to this question. If we count every single instance (or ‘token’) of the, we obtain a total of five – 11 per cent of all words in the paragraph. However, if we look at the number of different words (word ‘types’), counting each word only once, regardless of how many times it is used, then we get a quite different figure. There are thirty-five different
Some irregular English spellings
although could key said
among course lamb salt
answer debt listen says
are do move shoe
aunt does none shoulder
autumn done of some
blood dough once sugar
build eye one talk
castle friend only two
clerk gone own was
climb great people water
colour have pretty were
comb hour quay where
come island receive who
cough journey rough you
words in the paragraph. From this point of view, the is just one of the thirty-five – about 3 per cent. Hence if we were to count all the irregular words in a large sample of English writing, the results would vary enormously, depending on whether we were counting word types or word tokens. If we calculated the irregularity based on word types, the percentage would be very much smaller than any count based on word tokens.
A failure to appreciate this distinction between types and tokens lies behind the view that English spelling is mad. There are only about 400 everyday words in English whose spelling is wholly irregular – that is, there are relatively few irregular word types (some are given in the panel on p. 71. The trouble is that many of these words are among the most frequently used words in the language; they are thus constantly before our eyes as word tokens. As a result, English spelling gives the impression of being more irregular than it really is.
This is both bad news and good news for the child learning to spell, of course. A child who could not spell the correctly would automatically have errors totalling 11 per cent in the above paragraph (ignoring what would happen to the other words). Failing to know just this one word would produce a large number of errors. On the other hand, once the child learned to spell the, the number of errors would fall immediately by 11 per cent. Learning this one word would produce a noticeable general improvement. Not that the is a very realistic example, as few children have trouble with this particular word, but the principle involved applies to all words, including those which are well-known problems (such as their, does, friend, once, and was).
Don’t be surprised, then, to hear very different figures cited in answer to the question, ‘How irregular is English spelling?’ Everything depends on what is counted, and how. Also, some people who argue this issue have an axe to grind. For instance, they may have an interest in promoting a particular system of spelling reform (see p. 82), and therefore they will wish to stress the irregularity in the language. However, the main conclusion from the studies which have been carried out is that we must not exaggerate the problem. English is much more regular in spelling than the traditional criticisms would have us believe. A major American study, published in the early 1970s, carried out a computer analysis of 17,000 words and showed that no less than 84 per cent of the words were spelled according to a regular pattern, and that only 3 per cent were so unpredictable that they would have to be learned by heart. Several other projects have reported comparable results of 75 per cent regularity or more. Accordingly, the suggestion that English spelling is fundamentally chaotic seems to be nonsense.
Spelling rules
If this is so, then why all the fuss? Why are there so many people who have unhappy memories of ‘learning to spell’? Why are there thousands of children right now having to spend hours practising their spellings, at home or in school? Why are there so many who, having devoted so much time and energy to the task, are still unable to spell with confidence? According to some estimates, as many as 2 per cent of the population have a major, persistent handicap in spelling, and innumerable people claim to be ‘terrible spellers’.
The answer is simple. Children are rarely taught how to spell. They are told they must learn spellings off by heart, of course, and they are rigorously tested in them. But to learn something by heart doesn’t explain what it is you have learned. In order to understand the spelling system of English, children need to be given reasons for why the spellings are as they are, and told about how these spellings relate to the way they pronounce the words. But the children are rarely taught about these principles. Spelling becomes a massive, boring memory task – ten words a night, for ever, it seems. As a result, they never develop a sense of the system which is present, so that when they encounter new words, they have to resort to guesswork.
Teachers often express surprise that a child who has been quick to learn to read should be a poor speller. They assume that reading, once taught, automatically means that spelling will be ‘caught’. But there is no correlation between reading ability and spelling ability. Totally different skills are involved. Spelling involves a set of active, productive, conscious processes that are not required for reading. To take just one contrast: it is possible to read very selectively, by spotting just some of the letters or words in a piece of writing, and ‘guessing’ the rest (as we do when we ‘skim’ a newspaper story). You can’t spell in this way. Spellers have got to get it all right, letter by letter.
Also, more things can go wrong when you try to spell than when you try to read. Take the word meep. Faced with this word on the page
A page from Group 3 of Schonell’s The Essential Spelling List (1932), which continues to be widely used in schools today. The words selected are those that its author had found to be commonly used in children’s writing. They were useful words, as can be seen from the way the list brings together words related in grammar or meaning (e.g. goose/ geese). But it is not possible to see the spelling system when working through words like this. Regular and irregula
r spellings are put side by side (e.g. patch/watch) with little apparent order.
match June picking
catch July picked
patch September learned
watch November reached
fetch ditch snatch everyone
care infant tender
careless darling gentle
useless cradle weak
useful young dull
purse nurse fur beak
hammer too lunch
bench tool buy
blade stool beef
wire fool cloth
blood goose geese cheese
change break brighter
changed broke brightest
taken broken safer
eaten stole safest
cooler deeper finer miner
hiding skate chief
shining skating thief
smiling darkness grief
hoping illness burnt
should cheer quickly nearly
(whatever it might mean), there is really only one possible way of pronouncing it. The task of reading it aloud is easy. But if you heard this word pronounced, without ever having seen it, and were then asked how to spell it, you would be faced with at least three alternatives: is it meep, mepe, or meap? The task facing you as a speller is far greater than that facing you as a reader. (However, the situation is helped by the way that some spelling patterns are much more common than others – in RP the same vowel sound turns up in cot and wash, but the o spelling accounts for 95 per cent of the cases.)
The English Language: A Guided Tour of the Language Page 8
