Jonson is right: it is significant not only that pronunciation and accent vary, but also that we notice others’, that we may be teased or admired on account of our own, and that a mode of speech considered deficient is likely to affect a person’s social mobility. Our awareness of the differences informs stereotypes: we hear a certain accent, associate it for traditional and largely artificial reasons with particular patterns of behaviour, and are surprised and even unhappy if our expectations are not borne out. When we appraise people’s accents, though, we are less aware of our prejudices than of the degree to which the way they speak affects their intelligibility to us and distracts us from their meaning and purpose. Of course, sometimes we claim people are unintelligible when really we are refusing to make the effort to understand them.
In The Spectator in 1711 Joseph Addison could claim, ‘The Sounds of our English Words are commonly like those of String Musick, short and transient’ and ‘rise and perish upon a single Touch’, whereas ‘those of other Languages are like the Notes of Wind Instruments, sweet and swelling’. That same year the grammarian James Greenwood asserted that ‘the English do … thrust their Words forwards, towards the outward part of the Mouth, and speak more openly; whence the Sounds become also more distinct. The Germans do rather draw back their words towards the hinder part of the Mouth, and bottom of the throat; whence their Pronunciation is more strong. The French draw their Words more inward towards the Palate, and speak less openly … So the Italians, and especially the Spaniards speak more slowly; the French more hastily, and the English in a middle way betwixt both’.13 This contains some truth, but it is symptomatic of a tendency for prejudice about national character to be dressed up as phonological insight.
The transition to finding variety of pronunciation embarrassing seems to have taken place in the half-century after Addison was writing. Dr Johnson believed that the best pronunciation was that which most closely followed the way a word was spelled, and Lindley Murray echoed him. It does not require much effort to see how inadequate a belief this is, and others sought to treat pronunciation with more conviction. This involved making qualitative judgements. As early as 1650 one Balthazar Gerbier had published a lecture on ‘The Art of Well Speaking’. As a genre, this kind of publication took off with John Mason’s An Essay on Elocution (1748), and the word elocution now began to be used in its modern sense.
The most notable authority on the subject was Thomas Sheridan. Originally both an actor and a theatrical manager, he was beset by financial and digestive problems, and in his forties he tried to reposition himself as an expert on language and education. In 1762 he brought out a series of lectures on elocution; Robert Dodsley was one of those involved in the publication. Sheridan adopted a tone of authority that his predecessors had not managed. He believed that ‘vicious’ habits of pronunciation were acquired from nurses and favourite servants, and that speaking dialect was a ‘disgrace’. When later he produced a dictionary, he claimed that as recently as the reign of Queen Anne, in the first decade of the century, spoken English had been in a state of perfection. His beliefs were taken seriously, although a less than perfect advertisement for his methods was the persistence – despite considerable efforts on his part – of his daughter Betsy’s Irish accent; even his socially ambitious son, the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, was mocked by the novelist Fanny Burney for pronouncing kind as though it rhymed with joined. Still, his public lectures were hugely popular, and he earned a great deal from them. It would have cost a young clerk a quarter of his weekly salary to go on one of Sheridan’s courses, and it was possible for there to be 1,600 students enrolled at any one time. A single course may have made Sheridan the equivalent of £150,000 in today’s money.14
Sheridan’s main success, says Lynda Mugglestone in her history of English accents as social symbols, lay in creating a set of beliefs about habits of speech. He could not bring about wholesale reform, and many of his individual recommendations came to nothing, but he created a new consciousness about pronunciation.15 His work advanced an idea of a standard or proper English accent. He believed a standard accent would enable greater social equality. His contemporary James Buchanan, a Scot, suggested in An Essay towards Establishing a Standard for an Elegant and Uniform Pronunciation of the English Language (1766) that a standard accent would reconcile the peoples of England and Scotland: ‘To carry this truly momentous design into proper execution, cries aloud for the helping hand of every man of sense; particularly when he considers that he will be … removing national prejudice, which has too long subsisted, and been chiefly fostered betwixt the two kingdoms from their different forms of speech!’ A single form of pronunciation will create ‘much more benevolent and generous ties than that of a political union’, and ‘nothing is so likely to effect and thoroughly rivet’ what he calls the ‘most lasting bonds of brotherly love and affection!’16
One popular scheme of elocution was presented by William Enfield, a friend of Joseph Priestley. In 1774 he published The Speaker, a chunky anthology of literary extracts, presented under generic headings such as ‘On Sincerity’ and ‘The Origin of Superstition and Tyranny’. With this publication he intended to ‘facilitate the improvement of youth in reading and speaking’. In Enfield’s view, articulation should be ‘distinct and deliberate’, pronunciation ‘bold and forcible’, the ‘height’ of one’s voice should have ‘compass and variety’, words ought to be pronounced ‘with propriety and elegance’, a word of more than one syllable should be stressed consistently, the most important words in any sentence should be emphasized, and one’s pauses and cadences should have plenty of variety. Furthermore, it was good to ‘Accompany the Emotions and Passions which your words express, by correspondent tones, looks, and gestures’.17 The principles he sets out here hardly amount to a system, but the success of The Speaker demonstrated the rise of public speaking as an accomplishment expected of educated young men.
In 1811 Anna Laetitia Barbauld, who had been friendly with Enfield during the time they both lived in Warrington, published The Female Speaker, which extended instruction in this art to young women. Barbauld’s anthology suggests the different oratorical skills expected of women and manifests ‘a more scrupulous regard to delicacy in the pieces inserted’ as well as a ‘choice of subjects more particularly appropriate to the duties, the employments, and the dispositions of the softer sex’.18 Its subjects include ‘Female Economy’, ‘Qualities requisite in a Wife’ and ‘Dissipation of the rising Generation’.
However, the most influential figure in the field was John Walker. He described in detail the pronunciations that he recommended, using numerals to indicate the different stresses on a word’s syllables – a method introduced by William Kenrick’s A New English Dictionary (1773). Aware that usage was variable, Walker argued in the preface to his pronouncing dictionary that the London style of pronunciation was the best. Its superiority was in part a matter of possessing more ‘courtesy’. Besides this, London was the British capital and, to an even greater degree than in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, the seat of political and cultural influence, so its pronunciations were already ‘more generally received’. This advantage meant, however, that Londoners who pronounced English poorly were ‘more disgraced by their peculiarities than any other people’. Consequently, ‘the vulgar pronunciation of London, though not half so erroneous as that of Scotland, Ireland, or any of the provinces, is, to a person of correct taste, a thousand times more offensive and disgusting’.19
17
Talking proper
Noticing accents, noticing tribes
John Walker’s indictment of offensive and disgusting London pronunciation was frequently repeated in the nineteenth century. It became a commonplace, and one person who felt its effect was the poet John Keats. Incorrectly believed by his contemporaries to have been born in Moorgate at a coaching inn where his father was the ostler, Keats was hounded for his pronunciation, both actual and implicit. He faced particular condemnation f
or rhyming words that to his ear sounded alike but to others seemed different. One example was his decision to rhyme thoughts and sorts, and his notion of r sounds earned him the censure in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine of the reviewer John Gibson Lockhart, who accused him of ‘loose’ versification and ‘Cockney rhymes’. The critic Leigh Hunt condescendingly called him ‘Junkets’, on the grounds that this was how the supposedly Cockney poet pronounced his own name.
At that time the word Cockney had for over two hundred years been an abusive term for a Londoner; some had worn it as a badge of pride, inviting further abuse. In the early seventeenth century John Minsheu suggested an etymology for the word, telling the story of a young Londoner who went with his father to the country and, having been informed that the sound a horse made was ‘neigh’, wondered, when he heard a cock crow, ‘doth the cocke neigh too?’ According to Minsheu, the word had ever since signalled someone ‘raw or unripe in Country-men[’]s affaires’.1 It was Minsheu, moreover, who defined a Cockney as one born within sound of Bow Bells.
It is not just in Keats that we find evidence of past pronunciation; in general, poetry is a good source of this kind of information. Poems draw our attention to words that once rhymed but no longer do so, and also to words that only some believed to rhyme. When Christopher Marlowe writes, ‘Come live with me and be my love / And we will all the pleasures prove’, we infer that in the sixteenth century love and prove had a similar sound. More concentrated evidence can be found in rhyming dictionaries. Joshua Poole’s The English Parnassus (1657), subtitled ‘A Help to English Poesie’, rhymes aunt, chant and grant with ant and pant as well as with want, while Elisha Coles in The Compleat English Schoolmaster (1674) suggests that the oo sound is equivalent in boot, nook and could. When Shakespeare rhymes clean with lane, or when one of his many puns suggests that he pronounced reason and raising similarly, we may be tempted to wonder whether this is evidence of a Warwickshire accent. But the evidence is much weaker than that for the London accent of John Keats.
It is easy not to give any thought to the way eminent figures in the past spoke. In most cases the evidence is limited. It may surprise us that Mrs (Elizabeth) Beeton, author of the celebrated Book of Household Management (1861), is believed to have had something close to a Cockney accent and that Jane Austen, associated by many with polite refinement, is thought to have had a rustic Hampshire burr. Looking further back, we know that the explorer Sir Walter Raleigh, an Elizabethan favourite, was mocked for his ‘broad Devonshire’ speech, but he seems to have felt no anxiety on account of it, and it proved no obstacle to success. In the nineteenth century, as class sensitivity sharpened, commentary on accents took on a new pointedness. Sir Robert Peel, who twice served as Prime Minister in the 1830s and ’40s, retained throughout his life traces of a Staffordshire accent, which was mocked by Disraeli. William Gladstone had traces of a Lancashire accent, and, while this did not prevent his being Prime Minister four times between the 1860s and ’90s, it allowed his critics to stress that he was no gentleman.
To speak of someone using a ‘regional’ dialect is to mark oneself as a speaker of standard English, and in Britain the habit of unreflectingly doing this begins in the eighteenth century. But standard British English, the native form used by an elite comprising perhaps a tenth of the population, is itself a (social) dialect. Its ‘standard’ nature is hard to define and is not regulated by an official body. In reality, a language is a parcel of dialects. When I talk about the ‘regional’, it is with a heavy awareness that this is a fiction. All usage is regional; it is just that some regions are less readily identified, and others are more assertively stigmatized.
There are many people who delight in regional accents and vocabulary, revelling in the Lincolnshire term water whelp for a dumpling or the Durham shig-shog for a seesaw. This is hardly novel; in 1674 the naturalist John Ray published a collection of English words ‘not generally used’ and recorded with pleasure items such as the Cumbrian towgher (a dowry) and the Suffolk term puckets for a caterpillar’s nest.2 Most people who use local words of this kind do so without giving the matter any thought. Do you lay the table or set the table, speak of someone being cross-eyed or boss-eyed, refer to an armpit or an armhole, curse or cuss, pronounce Tuesday as if there were a j in it or not? Very likely, you know which you do but have not examined how this relates to where you were brought up or where you now live.
Some people are incurious or simply lack self-consciousness. Others sneer at particular regionalisms because they believe their own usage superior. As we have seen, they crassly equate usages that differ from their own with stupidity, separatism, a lack of skills, insecurity and obstinacy. This applies particularly to regional variations in grammar. These are considered unacceptable in most schools and many places of work, but they are frequently heard in informal situations. You might come across the demonstrative ‘Good as gold, that there thing was’ in rural Devon, what’s known as a ‘double modal’ in some people’s Scots (‘I didnae think he’ll dae it, but I suppose he might could’), verb forms with an unexpected final s in urban Sydney (‘They were watching television so we gits on the floor and we crawls in my bedroom’), an emphatic adverbial done in the Southern states of the US (‘You didn’t know about it until it was all done planned and fixed’), or in the Appalachian Mountains an a-prefix in a statement such as ‘He just kept a-beggin’ and a-cryin’ and a-wantin’ to go out’.3 Sometimes a single word can perform a different function from the one it usually achieves, in a way that will strike an outsider as strange. Misunderstandings may result. There is a story (apocryphal?) about a Yorkshireman who, drawing up at a level crossing in his car, saw the sign ‘Wait while the red light flashes’ and, when the light flashed, crossed and was crushed by an oncoming train. In Yorkshire while can mean ‘until’.4
Here is George Sampson, a crusading South-East London teacher, writing in the 1920s about what he perceives as the divisiveness of regional variation: ‘The country is torn with dialects … Enthusiastic “localists” cling to their dialects … The untutored speech of the multitude does not necessarily represent the unspoiled freshness of a beautiful patois.’ He goes on to say that ‘Standard English need not be fatal to local idiom. Where a dialect is genuinely rooted it will live; where it is feeble but curiously interesting, it may be kept artificially alive by enthusiasts; where it has no real reason for existing it will perish, as all provisional institutions will perish.’ Sampson’s notion that people keep dialects alive the way they might preserve a favourite old houseplant is doubtful. Dialects are not decorative. As for the conventional form of the language that he proposes as the medium for all school instruction, ‘There is no need to define standard English speech. We know what it is, and there’s an end on’t. We know standard English when we hear it just as we know a dog when we see it.’ Sampson goes on to discuss what he considers the tragedy of education: in London ‘the elementary school boy takes out of school at fourteen, unmitigated and unimproved, the debased idiom he brought into it at seven, and even in that he is but semi-articulate … The first healthy impulse of any kindly person confronted with a class of poor, inarticulate children should be to say … “I must teach you how to speak like human beings.”’5
Contrary to what Sampson imagines, standard English as we know it is a construct. In the nineteenth century it was promoted by educators, patriots and pedants (three groups not mutually exclusive). In truth, it might better have been dubbed prestige English, since those who boosted it were keen to congratulate themselves while condemning most of society for not being able to speak their own language properly. Standardization has general benefits, but often it has been practised not so much in the interests of the public at large as in those of the small authoritarian group who have enthroned their English as the best English. Yet, to flip things around, I could argue, as Thomas Sheridan did, that a standard form of English is a means of bringing about that great chimera, a classless society. In recent decades, this tensi
on has been central to political debate about how English should be taught in schools: is the teaching of standard English a means of reinforcing the existing class structure, or does it offer children from less privileged backgrounds a passport to freedom? On both sides, disdain masquerades as right-mindedness; the argument is a variation on the familiar contest between the prescriptive and descriptive schools.
The idea of a standard form of the language really being a prestige form was of course not new in the nineteenth century. But in that period scholarship crystallized the standard form, often through inaccurate statements about non-standard forms, such as the assertion (in 1900) by Henry Sweet that ‘Most of the present English dialects are so isolated in their development and so given over to disintegrating influences as to … throw little light on the development of English, which is more profitably dealt with by … [studying] the educated colloquial speech of each period’.6 Standardization always involves passing judgement on the value of variant forms, and mostly this judgement is briskly negative. One of Sweet’s inheritors, H. C. Wyld, alleged that the pronunciation of what he called the Received Standard was ‘superior, from the character of its vowel sounds, to any other form of English, in beauty and clarity’, possessing ‘a sonorous quality’ and ‘greater definiteness of sound’.7 This was really a fantasy, and Wyld’s notion of an easy, unstudied kind of pronunciation, springing from a gracious tradition, was a paean to what he thought of as upper-class manliness.
Nineteenth-century British novels abound with comments about what are perceived as regional deviancies, and about their charms. For the novelist, dialect was a convenient way of suggesting the richness of a local culture. Sir Walter Scott is an especially detailed recorder of dialect forms, but they are on display in at least some of the works of all the period’s major writers of fiction – in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and George Eliot’s Adam Bede, for instance. In Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868) one of the novel’s many narrators – or is it Collins himself? – loudly draws our attention to the fact that he has chosen to ‘translate’ one character ‘out of the Yorkshire language into the English language’, adding that, since even an ‘accomplished’ listener has trouble understanding her, ‘you will draw your own conclusions as to what your state of mind would be if I reported her in her native tongue’.
The Language Wars Page 25