The English Language: A Guided Tour of the Language

by David Crystal

  PART II

  The Uses of English

  The uses of a language are as varied as life itself. It would make this guide considerably overweight to deal with the thousands of ways in which people all over the world alter aspects of English structure in their professional and daily lives. Part II therefore does not attempt to be comprehensive, but rather isolates several general themes which are at the heart of the matter.

  Chapter 6 deals with some very general ways in which English can vary. There is geographical and social variation, in the form of distinctive accents and dialects. There are the many differences between spoken and written language, whose importance is usually underestimated. And there are the varieties associated with different occupations and activities. We look in some detail at two of these varieties, and illustrate several more.

  English at work in Chapter 6 contrasts with English at play in Chapter 7. There are many ways in which we play with the language – jokes, riddles, verbal contests, comic alphabets, and word games, to name but a few. These are described and illustrated, and the chapter concludes with a survey of the symbolic meaning of sounds in the language.

  Chapter 8 deals with what is the most far-reaching influence on variety development in contemporary English – technology. The focus of the chapter is the Internet, in its various manifestations. We examine the distinctive nature of Netspeak and the way in which it has already begun to affect the language as a whole.

  English can be used to identify regional or social groups, but it can also be a sign of individuality. Chapter 9 therefore looks at some of the ways in which a person’s own style can be identified. The field of authorship research takes us into the domain of literature (who wrote Shakespeare’s plays?) and forensic science. And the range of ‘deviant’ forms of English makes us consider the way sounds, spellings, grammar, and vocabulary are used distinctively in poetry. Part II then concludes with some general observations on the possible existence of statistical laws in the language.

  6

  Language Variety

  Experts on English these days are fond of the unexpected plural: we find books and articles talking about ‘the English languages’ or ‘the new Englishes’. What they are emphasizing is the remarkable variety which can be observed in the way sounds, spellings, grammar, and vocabulary are used within the English-speaking world. There have been hints of this in the first part of the book, but there the focus was on the common core of the standard language – on the facts and factors which need to be

  ‘Tell me, do I detect a trace of northern mid-Atlantic accent in that Home Counties mid-Atlantic accent?’

  Punch, 2 January 1985

  taken into account regardless of the kind of English we choose to study. Now we must reverse the viewpoint, and look at the way the structure of the language changes depending on which people are using it, where they are, and what they are doing.

  Accents and dialects

  The variations that are most often noticed and commented upon are those arising out of our geographical background. This is mainly a matter of regional accent – a way of pronouncing the words and sentences of the language that identifies the speaker’s geographical origin. Everyone has an accent. The identification is often a very general one: ‘American’, ‘Australian’, ‘British’, ‘English’, ‘Irish’, ‘Welsh’, ‘north-country’, ‘west-country’, ‘east-coast’. But just as often it is quite specific, referring to individual counties, cities, or smaller localities: ‘Yorkshire’, ‘Lancashire’, ‘Liverpool’, ‘New York’, ‘Brooklyn’. Within a country, an accent may become so much an educated standard that it conveys little or no regional information. This is what has happened in the case of Received Pronunciation (see p. 64). You can’t tell where RP speakers are from; all you can say is that they have received a certain kind of education. But on the world stage, RP speakers are not accent-less: they are very definitely British.

  Some people are very good at identifying accents. There have been radio shows in which experts have tried to identify the regional background of members of the audience, just from their voices. In Pygmalion, George Bernard Shaw has Henry Higgins claiming: ‘I can place any man within six miles. I can place him within two miles in London. Sometimes within two streets.’ Higgins wouldn’t have so much success now. These days, it is much less usual for people to live their whole lives in one place, and ‘mixed’ accents have become more widespread (p. 63). I am a typical example. After twelve years in North Wales, ten years in Liverpool, twenty years in Berkshire, and a subsequent period back in Wales, my own accent is perhaps most charitably described as a hybrid – or mess, if you prefer. It shows features associated with these different areas; and it is not entirely consistent. To take just one example, I sometimes use the northern short a and sometimes the southern long a. I find myself pronouncing example with both kinds of a, and I have a bath (short a) at home, but go to the

  Three British accent boundaries

  A. The map shows the parts of England where many people – especially the more conservative speakers in rural areas – still pronounce r after vowels (as in car, four): parts of Lancashire, Northumberland, and the whole of the ‘west country’ This pronunciation was originally found throughout England, but it has been receding since the seventeenth century.

  B. North of this line, the vowel in such words as come is traditionally pronounced with the lips rounded.

  C. This line shows the southern limit of the short a vowel, in such words as bath.

  swimming baths (long a). People have tried to ‘place’ me in Britain, and often say ‘north’, but, when pressed, guesses range from Scotland to Cornwall.

  Received Pronunciation has also been affected, as we have seen. Especially around London, ‘pure’ RP speakers are nowadays far outnumbered by those who speak a ‘modified’ form of RP – an accent which shows the influence of a region – especially the variety known as ‘Estuary English’ (p. 65). Cockney vowel qualities can be sensed. Glottal stops are heard, not yet in the middle of such words as bo’le for bottle, but at the end, so that smart is often pronounced smar’. Among the London commuters who have moved west out to Berkshire and Wiltshire, there are many who have begun to introduce a hint of an r sound after vowels, in such words as four.

  At the same time, there are changes at work in the opposite direction. People with a regional background come into contact with RP, and their speech becomes influenced by it. There are several BBC announcers and personalities whose regional origins are evident in their speech, but the accents are not as distinctive as they would be were the speakers at home. The ‘rough edges’, as some would have it, have been removed. The same kind of effect can be heard in the speech of Members of Parliament, university students, and members of the armed forces. All classes are affected. If people want to be accepted and respected (and even, in the case of some accents, understood), they must adopt some of the norms of pronunciation used by the new community to which they belong.

  Everyone is affected, but some more than others. The changes are less noticeable in old people and in people who ‘live’ by their accent, such as professional comedians. They are most noticeable in teenagers and people at an early stage in their careers. Women change their accents more quickly than men. The changes take place unconsciously, usually over several years. People often don’t realize how much their speech has altered until they go back to visit friends and relatives, who may comment on it. Their accent may not have changed completely, of course – in particular, traces of the original intonation, or melody, can stay a very long time – but the changes can be enough to make a speaker extremely self-conscious. A fortunate few have the ability to be ‘bilingual’, switching back into their original accent without difficulty.

  Who drops their aitches?

  Several sociolinguistic studies in recent years have been devoted to plotting the way a sound change moves through a community. They show that, in addition to age and sex, social class is also an impo
rtant factor. The figures below (from a 1980s study) indicate what proportion of people in two English cities ‘drop their hs’ at the beginning of such words as head. The speakers were divided into five social classes, based on their income, occupation, and type of education. In both cities, there is a steady increase in the amount of h-dropping as you go down this social scale. The proportion is always greater in Bradford, suggesting that h-dropping has been a feature of that city for a longer period of time. But note that, in both cities, not all the working-class people drop the h, and not all the middle-class people keep it.

  Bradford

  (%) Norwich

  (%)

  Middle middle class 12 6

  Lower middle class 28 14

  Upper working class 67 40

  Middle working class 89 60

  Lower working class 93 60

  Many of these points emerge again when we take up the notion of dialect, which is a much broader concept than that of accent. Accents are restricted to matters of pronunciation, whereas dialects include variations in grammar, vocabulary, and spelling. If we heard one person say He be ready and another say He is ready, we would say they were using different dialects, because this is a difference of grammar. Similarly, if one person said pavement where another said sidewalk, this too would be considered dialectal, because it is a matter of vocabulary. And the use of color instead of colour illustrates a dialectal difference in spelling.

  Just as everyone has an accent, so everyone speaks a dialect. This point sometimes comes as a surprise to people who have been brought up to think of ‘dialects’ as belonging only to country yokels. But rural dialects make up only some of the regionally distinctive varieties of English. Urban dialects exist too – indeed, they are on the increase as cities grow. (It is often said that dialects are dying out, but this is true only of some rural dialects.) And there are also national dialects of English – words and (to a lesser extent) grammatical constructions that identify which part of the international English-speaking world you are from. If you have lived all your life in the USA, your vocabulary, grammar, and spelling will signal to any outsider that you are American. Similarly, there are words and structures which are distinctively British, Australian, Indian, South African, and so on (see Chapter 13). Dialect signals are an inevitable part of speech and are often reflected in writing.

  Having said this, it is important not to overstate the extent to which dialect features are used, especially in the written language. The local newspapers of New York, London, Sydney, or Toronto contain very few words that are not also used or recognized in English-speaking countries everywhere. And from the transcript of an international debate on television between an American and a Briton you would only occasionally be able to distinguish between them on dialect grounds. There may be several thousand dialect words in a community, but these tend to be restricted to informal speech or to literature. This is also a very small number compared to the hundreds of thousands of words that are accepted by educated users of the language all over the world and comprise the vocabulary of standard English. This point applies even more strongly

  The survey of English dialects

  Between 1950 and 1961 a large-scale dialect survey was undertaken in 313 localities throughout England by Harold Orton and Eugene Dieth. The localities were usually not more than fifteen miles apart, and generally consisted of villages with a fairly stable population. The informants were natives of the locality, mainly male agricultural workers over sixty years of age. Around 1,300 questions were used, on such themes as farming, animals, housekeeping, weather, and social activities; over 404,000 items of information were recorded. Between 1962 and 1971, the basic material of the survey was published in several volumes. The map opposite shows the kind of information the survey provided – the different words for newt and their locations.

  Regional forms of ‘newt’

  to grammar, where non-standard variations form but a tiny minority of the constructions used in the language.

  Speech and writing

  In any account of the varieties of English, special attention has to be paid to the fundamental differences that distinguish spoken from written varieties of the language. The contrast goes deeper than the superficial difference between the use of sounds and the use of graphic symbols. Grammar and vocabulary differ too, sometimes in quite radical ways. The contrast is most noticeable when a formal written style is compared to everyday conversation.

  Conversational language is often inexplicit, because the participants are face-to-face, and can rely on the situation to clear up any problems of meaning. Phrases such as that one over there are regularly found in speech, but would be out of place in writing. Writers are not usually present when their output is read, so they must make their language sufficiently clear and precise that it can be interpreted on its own.

  Conversation is usually spontaneous; speakers have to ‘think standing up’. They therefore do not have the time to plan out what they want to say, and their grammar is inevitably loosely constructed, often containing rephrasing and repetition. Sentences lack the intricate structure often found in writing. Lengthy sequences can be heard, linked only by and (see p. 25). Phrases such as you know, I mean, or you see are common in speech, but not in writing.

  The vocabulary of everyday speech tends to be informal, domestic, and more limited than in writing. There is a much greater likelihood of slang and taboo words being used, as well as empty nonsense words (such as thingummajig and whatchamacallit), which would never be found in writing. Conversely, writing tends to make greater use of vocabulary whose meaning is precise. Writers can ponder a while, and look a word up before they write it. This option isn’t usually available to speakers.

  The interactive nature of conversation requires a great deal of ‘man-œuvring’ which would not usually be found in writing (unless an author were trying to portray speech). There are special ways of opening a conversation (Excuse me…, Guess what…, I say…), of checking that the listener is following (Are you with me? Let me put it another way…); of changing a topic (That reminds me…, By the way…, Where was I?); and ending (Nice talking to you; Gosh, is that the time?). Such strategies are unnecessary in writing, which has its own ways of organizing the exposition of a text (e.g. prefaces, summaries, indexes, sub-headings, and cross-reference conventions like see p. 666).

  Punctuating speech with. Pauses.

  The pauses, rhythms, and melodies of speech provide the basis of our punctuation system. There is usually a broad correspondence between the way we punctuate our sentences and the way we speak them. Each of the sentences in this paragraph, for example, would be spoken aloud with the punctuation marks expressed by different amounts of pause, or by variations in the rate of utterance. When speakers fail to preserve this correspondence, it tends to be noticed, and the speech style may be criticized, especially if it is used in public. The most noticeable instance of such a style is the ‘on-the-spot’ report given by radio and television reporters, which was amusingly satirized in this 1963 Guardian editorial. (It should be added that the style is by no means restricted to the BBC.)

  The BBC has introduced a. New method of disseminating the spoken word at any rate we think it is new because we don’t. Remember hearing it until a week or two ago it consists of. Putting the fullstops in the middle of sentences instead of at the end as we were. Taught at school as a corollary to this new sentences are run on without a break readers will say we are in. No position to talk but this appears to be a deliberate policy on the part of the BBC whereas our. Misprints are accidental.

  The practice seems to have started as a. Means of enlivening the reports of otherwise tedious football matches on a. Saturday afternoon now it has spread to the. News columns as it were and the effect is to make the subject matter. Confusing the interest of the listener is directed to the. Manner of delivery rather than the. Events recounted we tried to discover whether the ellipses or hiatuses followed a. Definite pattern or whether the bre
aks were made. Arbitrarily a pattern did emerge it seems that most of the breaks come after the. Definite or indefinite article or after a. Preposition sometimes they follow. Verbs but they always come when you. Least expect them and they constitute an outrage on what. We in the trade call the. Genius of the language.

  Conversation can use a wide range of tones of voice which are difficult to convey in writing (apart from through the use of a few typographical effects and punctuation marks). On the other hand, writing has a wide range of graphic features that do not exist in speech (such as colour, layout, capitalization). There are many vocal sound effects which cannot be satisfactorily written down, though novelists try. Equally, there are many written effects which cannot easily be spoken (such as train timetables, graphs, and formulae).

  Written language is usually much more permanent and formal than speech. Because of its permanence, it also has a special status, being used where it is necessary to make something legally binding (as in contracts) or to provide a means of identity or authority (as in the sacred literature

  An unspeakable piece of writing

  ‘We might go in your umbrella,’ said Pooh.

  ’?’

  ‘We might go in your umbrella,’ said Pooh.

  ’??’

  ‘We might go in your umbrella,’ said Pooh.

  ‘!!!!!!’

  For suddenly Christopher Robin saw that they might.

  A. A. Milne, Winnie the Pooh