Having been told as a schoolchild that the habit of starting sentences with But or And was new and faddish, it came as a surprise to me when much later I encountered King Alfred’s ninth-century prose, which positively favours this feature. Any rhetorical gambit will, if overused, begin to seem crass, and a piece of writing in which a large number of sentences begin with a conjunction may strike us as crudely conceived. However, the fusspots provide no such argument. As Kingsley Amis pointed out in The King’s English, his complement to Fowler, modern ‘grammatical martinets’ often have no actual knowledge of grammar. But they like the idea of grammar because they see in its structures a model of how they would like society to be – organized and orderly, governed by rules and a strict hierarchy.
16
‘Speak that I may see thee’
Of dialects and diction
Fowler gives guidance about the pronunciation of troublesome words. In many cases his preferred pronunciation differs from today’s norm. For instance, he advises that waistcoat should be ‘weskut’ and that the i in vertigo should be long. Remarkably, though, he has little to say about dialects. There are passing comments, as when he mentions the different regional names for the bluebell, but where one might expect a separate entry on the subject he directs us to his discussion of jargon. There the question of dialect is dealt with in a single unmemorable sentence: ‘dialect is essentially local; a dialect is the variety of a language that prevails in a district, with local peculiarities of vocabulary, pronunciation, & phrase’.1
Many of Fowler’s fans must have been disappointed by his reticence. Surely he ought to have had something trenchant to say? One explanation is that he felt he lacked the required academic expertise. In the last third of the nineteenth century the study of English dialects, previously little more than a byway of local history, had become academically respectable, and its crowning achievement was Joseph Wright’s The English Dialect Dictionary (1898–1905). This six-volume publication showed the kind of effort it took to cover the domain. Additionally, Fowler would have been influenced by the policy of James Murray since he admired the OED and Murray’s methods. The OED admitted dialect forms only up till 1500; its introduction stated that dialect words ‘require a method of treatment different from that applicable to the words of the literary language’. Fowler may simply have chosen to steer clear of them.
Studying and mapping dialects calls for a great deal of philological dexterity. Many people have been moved to wonder what the point of all the effort is. This is an area in which the disjunction between what happens in universities and what happens outside them is palpable. In the public sphere, dialects are routinely demonized. It is common to treat ‘dialect’ as though it is somehow opposed to ‘language’ – as an enemy of language rather than as a part of it. The negative connotations of the word are bound up with false notions: that dialect, like hell, ‘is other people’; that dialects are the result of people’s failed attempts to govern their language properly; that they are deviant forms of correct speech and writing, rather than having their own distinct patterns and features; and that they are only used by the socially disadvantaged. This is not something uniquely English. Denmark is a good example of a country where dialects have traditionally not been valued. By contrast, in Germany some dialects enjoy considerable prestige.
In any discussion of the subject, it is essential to clarify that accent and dialect are different. Both words were first used in the sixteenth century, when some authorities began to argue that there was such a thing as correct pronunciation. Accent is only one feature of a dialect, which is a variety of language that also differs from other varieties in its vocabulary and grammar. Moreover, while a dialect has its own slang, it is wrong to say that dialects are slang.
Regional features mostly disappeared from written English in the fifteenth century, but they endured in the spoken form. Studying them is a specialized discipline. However, many of us are apt to behave as though we are experts in the field. The narrator of H. G. Wells’s novel In the Days of the Comet (1906) describes a character who tells a story ‘in an Anglian accent that sounded mean and clipped to my Staffordshire ears’. Statements of this kind betray our tribalism. There are, as we all know, pronunciations that are local – not necessarily local to a geographical place, but possibly local to a social group. In Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), Mr Ramsay’s children notice as he talks to the local sailors ‘the little tinge of Scottish accent which came into his voice, making him seem like a peasant’, and Woolf’s other novels are full of references to accents – some characters are ashamed of theirs, and when one, a Yorkshireman, ‘increased his accent as if he were proud of it’, we pick up in the cool puzzlement of ‘as if he were proud of it’ the author’s sense that this is ridiculous.
For the most part, people do not choose to use particular accents or indeed dialects. Clive Upton, a leading scholar of English dialects, explains that ‘far from being in free variation, available to be chosen at will, [they] have social meaning’.2 That social meaning is emotionally charged. William Labov, who founded the discipline of sociolinguistics, published in 1963 a study of the different styles of speech he had heard in Martha’s Vineyard, an island off the Massachusetts coast. Once a centre of whaling, Martha’s Vineyard has for more than a hundred years been a popular destination for vacationing New Yorkers. Labov perceived that, as if to distinguish themselves from the visitors, many permanent residents unconsciously exaggerated the local accent. Young people who expected to leave the area after completing their education noticeably adopted the speech habits of the mainland. Meanwhile, those who planned to stay spoke like the middle-aged fishermen who were the most stubborn defenders of the island’s independent character. They did this intentionally and – yes – with pride. In the sixties, Labov also analysed the speech of salespeople at department stores in New York. He found that at Saks Fifth Avenue those on the higher floors, where the goods were more expensive, were unlikely to drop their rs. At Macy’s the men who stocked the shelves all dropped some of their rs (‘Toidy-toid Street’), whereas the staff who walked the floors rarely did so.3
All widespread languages exhibit regional variation. There are large and obvious differences in the pronunciation of different Englishes. The English spoken in Canada is perceptibly different from that in Liberia; a Canadian and a Liberian might have some difficulties understanding each other. Within English-speaking countries there is variation, too. Many people regard Australian English as uniform, and embrace Anthony Burgess’s line that ‘Australian English may be thought of as a kind of fossilised Cockney of the Dickensian era.’4 But there are discernible differences – certainly discernible to many Australians, if not to most outsiders – between the accents of Sydney, Adelaide and Hobart, to name only three cities. Equally, it is received wisdom that one Canadian cannot tell where another is from merely by listening to him, but there are differences in pronunciation, as well as in vocabulary, between the English spoken in Newfoundland and that used in British Columbia, and there is some divergence between, for instance, that of Quebec and southern Ontario.
In America, there are clear differences – as between the accents of, say, eastern Connecticut and the Dakotas, or Wisconsin and Mississippi. In John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939) the Oklahoma folks claim they can barely understand anything said by a woman from Massachusetts. The present range of accents on the East Coast reflects differences established before American independence. These were partly the result of the varied origins of the successive waves of settlers who arrived there in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: Puritans from East Anglia made their home in Massachusetts, farmers and artisans from the south and west of England in Virginia, Quakers from the Midlands in the Delaware valley, and families from Scotland, Ireland and the north of England in Pennsylvania, Georgia and the country in between.5
Other factors were involved in shaping American accents and, more generally, dialects. The dia
lect of the Hudson Valley area shows the influence of Dutch. Some of the differences between eastern and western New England are the result of the early eastern residents depending on the sea for their livelihood; the dialect of eastern New England has a distinctive nautical element. There are also, as a result of geographical barriers to change, pockets of insularity where new forms have failed to make much impression. While it is a myth that people in the Appalachian Mountains or on the Outer Banks of North Carolina speak Elizabethan English, their local dialects do contain relic forms that have disappeared everywhere else. As one travels west, the main dialect areas become larger; when settlers fanned westward in the nineteenth century, their dialects mingled and differences were levelled. The story is of course more complex than these few sentences suggest, but regional variation in the United States, while less intense than in Britain, is a commonly observed fact of life, and when people who use different dialects meet, it is likely that each party will feel that the other speaks strangely. Statements about others’ poor use of language – the drawling of Southerners, the r-less preciousness of Bostonians, the easily caricatured accent of New Yorkers (mainly outside Manhattan) in which dog becomes ‘doo-og’ – are much more frequent than statements about people using it well.
Within Britain there are big disparities. Daniel Defoe noticed some of these in his Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–6), commenting on the ‘boorish’ Somerset dialect and the jarring rs in Northumberland. Local features have often been used for literary effect, as by Shakespeare, Hardy, D. H. Lawrence and Henry Green; and for comic effect, as in the joke about a Northumbrian landlord who stops a poacher, saying, ‘You do realize there’s no shooting here?’, and is met with the response, ‘Shootin’? Aa’s nivver oppened me mooth!’
In Pygmalion, Henry Higgins asserts that ‘You can spot an Irishman or a Yorkshireman by his brogue. I can place any man within six miles. I can place him within two miles in London. Sometimes within two streets.’ George Bernard Shaw was paying tribute to the skills of the best phoneticians. Later, beginning in the 1960s, these skills would receive more publicity when a specialist in the field, Stanley Ellis, brought just this kind of expertise to bear on criminal investigations, most notably the case of the Yorkshire Ripper. Besides acknowledging scholarly skill, Shaw was reflecting on the many different accents audible in England, and he was making fun of the deep English sensitivity to the minute differentiating features of class and background. With good reason he observed in the preface to Pygmalion that ‘it is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him’.6 That Shaw saw this as a two-way street is apparent in the pained reaction of Alfred Doolittle, Eliza’s dustman father, when Henry recommends him as a lecturer on moral matters: ‘I’ll have to learn to speak middle-class language from you, instead of speaking proper English.’
It is tempting to imagine that Shaw’s view was more accurate then than it is now. But I am not sure this is the case. Still, it is hard to imagine a respected university professor writing today, as Thomas Lounsbury did in 1904, that ‘there is a body of English words certain pronunciations of which every cultivated man the world over recognizes at once as belonging to the speech of the uneducated’, and stating that for the purposes of his view of the subject ‘it is the usage of the educated body alone which is assumed to be under consideration’. As for those whose pronunciation betrays ‘social inferiority if not … vulgarity’, Lounsbury alleges that ‘the most saddening thing … is the hopelessness of their situation. For them there is no relief in sight’.7 We may also frown at How Should I Pronounce?, a book published in 1885 by William Phyfe, in which he writes: ‘We are told that, in the days of ancient Greece, so critical were the Athenians that if an orator mispronounced a single word, they immediately hissed him … The accuracy of the citizens of Athens is greatly to be admired.’8
While hostility to particular accents appears to have a long history, the story is not straightforward. In the fourteenth century Chaucer made fun of northern accents in ‘The Reeve’s Tale’; some scribes copying his works, which circulated in manuscript, failed to spot his intention and corrected what they took for mistakes, and others, it seems, added extra touches of northern dialect to help along his jokes. Writing at around the same time, John Trevisa, a Cornishman, expressed concern about the ‘scharp, slyttyng, and frotyng’ speech of Northerners, which he attributed to their proximity to ‘strange men and aliens’ and distance from the centres of royal power. When Shakespeare wanted to show Edgar in King Lear transformed into a country beggar he put in his mouth pronunciations that a contemporary audience would have recognized as South-Western: zwaggerd rather than swaggered, vortnight for fortnight, and chud instead of ‘I would’.
In the sixteenth century the leading authorities, though concerned that people should cleave to a single written standard, accepted that accents would vary. The first printed mention of a ‘broad’ accent is in 1532; ‘strong’ accent is not found until the nineteenth century, though in the seventeenth century one’s accent could be said to possess ‘tang’. Comments on people’s styles of speech had more to do with manner than with regional background: in the age of Shakespeare, for instance, you could have been mellifluent, gold-mouthed, tongue-gilt or nectar-tongued, but also fumbling, maffling, babbling, snuffling or snaffling. In As You Like It, Orlando encounters Rosalind in the Forest of Arden; she is in disguise, pretending to be a saucy native of the woodland, but Orlando finds her manner of speech incongruous and observes, ‘Your accent is something finer than you could purchase in so removed a dwelling.’ Rosalind’s explanation is that ‘an old religious uncle of mine taught me to speak’ and he ‘was in his youth an inland man’. The exchange would have struck a chord with a contemporary audience increasingly aware of the gap between rustic and urban modes of speech.
In a guide for poets published in 1589 the ambitious critic and expert orator George Puttenham tellingly advised using the language spoken at the King’s court ‘or in the good townes and Cities within the land’; he warned against that used in ports and frontier towns or ‘in Universities where Schollers use much peevish affectation’ or ‘in any uplandish village or corner of a Realme, where is no resort but of poore rusticall or uncivill people’. Puttenham suggested that one should avoid imitating the speech of craftsmen and carters, poets such as Chaucer whose language ‘is now out of use with us’, ‘Northern-men’ – by which, he explained, he meant anyone who lived north of the River Trent – and the ‘far Westerne’. Good English, he felt, was spoken only within a sixty-mile radius of London.9 One of the interesting features of Puttenham’s advice is the implication that a standard form of English had not yet infiltrated the area north of the Trent. The sixty-mile rule in fact meant avoiding forms used anywhere much beyond Cambridge. He even specifically mentioned the good quality of the English used in Middlesex and Surrey.
Others echoed Puttenham’s preference for a southern form of the language, but voiced different antipathies. In 1619 Alexander Gil, a grammarian and London headmaster whom we have previously encountered as a critic of the cant of ‘wandering beggars’, mocked the rustic talk of people in Somerset, who sounded to him as though they were speaking an entirely separate tongue. A few years earlier, Richard Rowlands Verstegan had told the story of a London courtier writing ‘to a personage of authoritie in the north partes, touching the training of men and providing furniture for warre’. The courtier ‘willed him among other things to equippe his horses’, and the letter’s recipient was baffled by the word equippe, wondering if it was something to do with ‘quipping’ or ‘whipping’. In the end he sent a messenger back to London ‘to learne the meaning thereof’.10
The emphasis on London is not surprising. Political and commercial power had been concentrated there since the Middle Ages. No other town in the British Isles approached it in importance, and in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it was growing much faster than other major E
uropean centres such as Paris, Venice, Naples and Madrid. People were pulled to London, by higher wages and greater opportunities (thanks especially to its central role in the trade in woollen cloth), but were also pushed towards it by falling standards of living elsewhere. The period between 1580 and 1640 saw a dramatic increase in population, and the city had the highest level of literacy nationally, as well as being a seedbed of medical and scientific innovation.11 Whether or not London English genuinely was the purest form of the language, the repeated assertion of its refinement and purity enhanced its status.
As foreigners and country folk were drawn to London, guides to the norms of its language were needed. When Ben Jonson produced his Grammar, it was intended, according to its title page, ‘For the benefit of all Strangers’. Jonson’s powers of observation meant he could see the true variety of usage, and he brought together some of his insights in his commonplace book, posthumously published in 1641 as Timber, or Discoveries Made Upon Men and Matter. ‘Speech,’ he noted, ‘is the instrument of society,’ and ‘Custom is the most certain mistress of language, as the public stamp makes the current money.’ The best-known statement in Timber is ‘Language most shows a man: “speak that I may see thee.”’ Less well-known is the way Jonson then expands on this: ‘It springs out of the most retired and inmost parts of us, and is the image of the parent of it, the mind. No glass [i.e. mirror] renders a man’s form or likeness so true as his speech … Would you not laugh to meet a great counsellor of state in a flat cap, with his trunk-hose and a hobby-horse cloak, his gloves under his girdle, and yond haberdasher in a velvet gown furred with sable? There is a certain latitude in these things by which we find the degrees.’12
The Language Wars Page 24