The English Language: A Guided Tour of the Language

by David Crystal

  The different Caribbean islands have since developed their own varieties of creole English, and display a range of dialects which have been influenced by the standard language to varying degrees. In the varieties furthest away from the standard, there are many identifying features of pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary. In Jamaican English, for example, there is no distinction between the [a] and [ɒ] vowels, so that such words as pat and pot rhyme, both being pronounced with an [a]. A very noticeable feature is the way syllables tend to be equally stressed, so that a word like Jamaica comes out with three more-or-less equal beats. This rhythmic difference is the main problem for people who are used only to standard British or American English (with its ‘te-tum, te-tum’ rhythm) when they listen to West Indian speakers. Amongst the grammatical differences, nouns often do not mark plurals (three book) or possessives (that man house), verbs do not use the -s ending (he see me), and be may be absent (he going home). There is a large regional vocabulary: the Dictionary of Jamaican English (1967) contains around 15,000 entries, including:

  chillum (pipe), dreadlocks (Rastafarian hair style), duppy (ghost), ganja (cannabis), Jah (God), John Canoe (chief dancer), lick (hit), quashie (fool), rasta (Rastafarian), something (thing), so-till (until), susumba (plant), trust (give/get credit)

  In recent years, of course, West Indian speech has moved well outside the Caribbean, with large communities now to be found in Canada, the United States and Britain. As we might expect, these new locations have brought new speech styles; there are now noticeable differences between the speech of the children of those living in London (many of whom have never been to the West Indies) and their counterparts in the Caribbean.

  A similar pattern of development is found in the United States, where one contemporary variety in particular – the language used by lower-class blacks in urban communities – has been the focus of linguistic study in recent decades, under the heading of ‘Black English Vernacular’. It is thought that some 80 per cent of present-day black Americans speak this variety of the language. The remainder use a range of varieties influenced by the standard language, reflecting a gradual process of integration and the rise of a black middle class. Creole English is not apparent in the public speech of many black professionals and politicians, though several maintain two dialects side by side, standard and creole – something which has often been recommended by black educationists.

  The history of black English in the United States is complex, controversial, and only partly understood. Records of the early speech forms are sparse. It is unclear, for example, exactly how much influence black speech has had on the pronunciation of southern whites; according to some linguists, generations of close contact resulted in the families of the slave owners picking up some of the speech habits of their servants, which gradually developed into the distinctive southern ‘drawl’. Information is clearer after the American Civil War (1861–5), when the slaves received civil rights for the first time. There was a widespread exodus to the industrial cities of the northern states, and black culture became known throughout the country, especially for its music and dance. The result was a large influx of new, informal vocabulary into general use, as whites picked up the racy speech patterns of those who sang, played, and danced – from the early spirituals, through the many forms of jazz and blues to the current trends in soul music and break-dancing. And in recent years, the linguistic effects of freedom fighting and integration can be seen in any representative list of black English vocabulary:

  beat (exhausted), cat (jazz musician), chick (girl), dig (understand), groovy, hep, hepcat, hip, honkey (white person), jam (improvise), jive-talk, nitty-gritty, pad (bed), rap (street talk), right on!, sit-in, solid (great), soul, soul brother, square (dull)

  Some grammatical features of black English vernacular

  No final -s in the third-person singular form of the present tense, e.g. he walk, she come.

  No use of forms of the verb be in the present tense, when it is used as a ‘linking’ verb within a sentence, e.g. They real fine, If you interested.

  The use of the verb be to mark habitual meaning, but without changing its grammatical form, e.g. Sometime they be asking me things.

  Use of been to express a meaning of past activity with current relevance, e.g. I been know your name.

  Use of be done in the sense of ‘will have’, e.g. We be done washed all those things soon.

  Use of double negatives involving the auxiliary verb at the beginning of a sentence, e.g. Won’t nobody do nothing about that.

  Australia and New Zealand

  The remaining major areas where English is used as a mother tongue are in the Antipodes. Australia was discovered by James Cook in 1770, and within twenty years Britain had established its first penal colony at Sydney, thus relieving the pressure on the overcrowded gaols of England. From 1788, for over fifty years, about 130,000 prisoners were transported. ‘Free’ settlers, as they were called, began to enter the country from the very beginning, but they did not achieve substantial numbers until the mid-nineteenth century. From then on, the immigrants came in increasing

  Australia and New Zealand

  numbers. By 1850, the population of Australia was about 400,000, and by 1900 nearly four million.

  In New Zealand, the story started later and moved more slowly. A few Europeans settled in the country in the 1790s, but the official colony was not established until 1840. There was then a considerable increase – from around 2,000 Europeans in 1840 to 25,000 in 1850, and to three quarters of a million by 1900.

  The main source of settlers, and thus the main influence on the language, was Britain. Many of the convicts came from London and Ireland, and features of Cockney and Irish English can be traced in the characteristic pronunciation patterns (the Australian ‘twang’) still heard today. Many of the words now thought of as Australian in fact started out in Britain, and some can still be heard in British local dialects – such as dinkum, cobber, tucker (cf. tuck shop), and joker (person). On the other hand, in recent years the influence of American English has been apparent, so that the country now displays a curious lexical mixture, in some ways resembling that found in Canada (see p. 250). Thus we find American truck, elevator, and freeway alongside British petrol, boot (of a car), and tap.

  People usually think of Australian English as characterized by such Aboriginal borrowings as boomerang, billabong, dingo, kangaroo, koala, kookaburra, wallaby, and wombat; but in fact the English settlers took very few words from the native languages spoken in the two countries. There were various reasons for this. Neither the Aborigines of Australia nor the Maoris of New Zealand were very numerous when the Europeans arrived – perhaps 200,000 of each race at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The Aborigines were nomadic, contact was occasional, and there were many language differences (over 200 languages were in use at the time). As a result, hardly any Aboriginal words came into English, most of the ones that did being plant and animal names. (On the other hand, about a third of Australian place names are unmistakably Aboriginal: Wolloomooloo, Bugarribbee, Warragumby.) Similarly, there are few Maori words in New Zealand English: among the exceptions are hongi (way of greeting), haka (war dance), kiwi, pakeha (a European), and whare (small house). The number seems to be increasing.

  In relation to pronunciation, Australians and New Zealanders can tell each other apart, though the differences are not readily apparent to outsiders, nor are they very great (mainly a matter of slight changes in vowel quality). But within each country, few regional dialectal differences have been noted – which is surprising, considering the vast distances between the centres of population in Australia, and the considerable size of some of the cities. The country is some thirty times the size of Britain, with large tracts of uninhabited desert, and the bulk of the population is concentrated in the fertile areas near the coasts. Today, two cities (Sydney and Melbourne) contain nearly half the population.

  The absence of dialect differences within Australia an
d New Zealand may be more apparent than real, given that very little detailed regional study has taken place. Where major geographical boundaries exist (such as between Western Australia and the rest of the country, or between North Island and South Island in New Zealand), we would expect dialects to develop. People do sometimes claim to be able to tell that someone comes from a certain part of the country, but few systematic variations have yet been described. One clear case is the use of a rolled r in parts of South Island, where the influence of early Scots settlement can still be heard.

  Some Australian words and phrases

  this arvo (this afternoon), ball-up (in Australian football), bathers (swimming costume), beaut (expression of approval), biggie (big one), bushman, bush telegraph, crook (unwell, irritable), drongo (fool), flying doctor, footpath (pavement), frock (dress), goodday (hello), lay-by (hire purchase), lolly (sweet), outback, paddock (field of any size), sheep-station, sheila (girl), singlet (vest), washer (face-cloth), weekender (holiday cottage); bald as a bandicoot, better than a kick in the tail, scarce as rocking-horse manure, starve the crows

  Some New Zealand words

  bach (holiday cottage), fantail (type of bird), gully (valley), lancewood (type of tree), section (housing plot), tramping (hiking), waxeye (type of bird)

  A few regional lexical differences have been noted – for example, a small ice cream carton is a pixie in Victoria, and a bucket in New South Wales; a child’s push-chair is a stroller in New South Wales, and a pusher in South Australia. This kind of variation should be on the increase as cities grow, and immigrants arrive. The non-English-speaking immigrants, in particular, may well exercise some influence on the development of Australian English: over 15 per cent of the population now comes from a background where English is a foreign language.

  Although there seems to be little regional speech variation, factors to do with social prestige are important. In particular, Received Pronunciation (see p. 64) continues to exert a considerable influence. The variety known as ‘cultivated’ Australian English, used by about 10 per cent of the population, shows this most strongly: in some speakers the accent is very close to educated southern British, with just a hint in certain vowels and in the intonation of its Australian origin. At the opposite extreme there is the ‘broad’ Australian accent, used by some 30 per cent, and most clearly identified as ‘Australian’ in the popular mind abroad from the characters portrayed by such comedians as Paul Hogan and Barry Humphreys. In between, there is a continuum of accents often called simply ‘general’ Australian, used by the majority of the population. A similar situation exists in New Zealand, though that country tends to be rather more conservative in speech style, with RP-influenced accents more dominant, and it lacks the extremely broad accent found in Australia.

  The accent variations have provoked not a little controversy in recent years, with the broad Australian accent in particular having its critics and its defenders. There is ongoing debate about whether Australians should be proud of their distinctive speech, and stress its features, or whether they should aspire to use a more conservative style, associated with the traditional values of educated British speech. The picture has been complicated by a generation of Australian comedians who exaggerate and satirize the accent, and whose work has become universally known through the medium of television. When all that other people have to go on is an amalgam of Crocodile Dundee and Edna Everage, it becomes difficult for outsiders to begin to distinguish stereotype from reality.

  South Africa

  One further area where there is a substantial number of mother-tongue speakers of English is South Africa. Although Dutch colonists arrived in the Cape as early as 1652, British involvement in the region dates only from 1795, during the Napoleonic Wars, when an expeditionary force invaded. British control was established in 1806, and a policy of settlement began in earnest in 1820, when some 5,000 British were given land in the eastern Cape. English was made the official language of the region in 1822, and there was an attempt to anglicize the large Dutch- (or Afrikaans-) speaking population. English became the language of law, education, and most other aspects of public life. Further British settlements followed in the 1840s and 1850s, especially in Natal, and there was a massive influx of Europeans following the development of the gold and diamond areas in the Witwatersrand in the 1870s. Nearly half a million immigrants, many

  South Africa

  of them English-speaking, arrived in the country during the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

  The English language history of the region thus has many strands. There was initially a certain amount of regional dialect variation among the different groups of British settlers, with the speech of the London area predominant in the Cape, and Midlands and Northern speech strongly represented in Natal; but in due course a more homogeneous accent emerged – an accent that shares many similarities with the accents of Australia, which was also being settled during this period. At the same time, English was being used as a second language by the Afrikaans speakers, and many of the Dutch colonists took this variety with them on the Great Trek of 1836, as they moved north to escape British rule. An African variety of English also developed, spoken by the black population, who had learned the language mainly in mission schools, and which was influenced in different ways by the various language backgrounds of the speakers. In addition, English came to be used, along with Afrikaans and often other languages, by those with an ethnically mixed background (Coloureds); and it was also adopted by the many immigrants from India, who arrived in the country from around 1860.

  Some South African English words and phrases

  aardvark, Afrikaner (white Afrikaans-speaking South African), apartheid, bakkie (type of truck), biltong (strips of dried meat), braai (barbecue), busy with (engaged in), camp (paddock), classify (assign to a racial group), commandeer, commando, dinges (thingummy), dorp (village), fundi (expert), gogga (insect), homeland (area set aside for an African population), indaba (meeting), just now (in a little while), kloof (ravine), kraal, land (cultivated field), lekker (nice), location (black residential area), reference book (identity papers carried by Africans), robot (traffic light), spoor, trek, veld, voorskot (advance payment to a farmer)

  Present-day South African English thus comprises a range of varieties, but from a social point of view they are unified by the tension which exists between the use of English and the use of Afrikaans. English has always been a minority language in South Africa. Afrikaans, which was given official status in 1925, is the first language of the majority of whites, including most of those who have held positions in government, and acts as an important symbol of identity for those of Afrikaner background. It is also the first language of most of the Coloured population. English is used by the remaining whites (of British background) and by increasing numbers of the majority black population (blacks outnumber whites by over six to one). There is thus a linguistic side to the political division which marked South African society for several decades: Afrikaans was perceived by the black majority as the language of authority and repression; English was perceived by the white government as the language of protest and self-determination. Many blacks saw English as a means of achieving an international voice, and uniting themselves with other black communities.

  On the other hand, the situation regarding the use of English was more complex than this opposition suggests. For the white authorities, too, English was important as a means of international communication, and ‘upwardly mobile’ Afrikaners became increasingly bilingual, with fluent command of an English that often resembled the British-influenced variety. The public statements by white South African politicians, seen on world television, illustrated this ability. As a result, a continuum of accents arose during the apartheid era, ranging from those strongly influenced by Afrikaans to those very close to Received Pronunciation (see p. 64), and there were corresponding variations in grammar and vocabulary. Such complexity is inevitable in a country where the overriding issue is social and
political identity, and people strive to maintain their deeply held feelings of national and ethnic identity. With eleven official languages named in the 1993 Constitution, this complexity is set to increase. English will doubtless strengthen its role as a lingua franca, but will be increasingly influenced by its linguistic neighbours.

  British and American English

  There is no definitive survey of all the differences between American English (AmE) and British English (BrE). The only safe statement is that there are far more of them than are usually recognized. A small number have entered the standard written language of each nation, and these are quite well-known. But they form just a fraction of the thousands of non-standard and regionally restricted words in daily spoken use which would be totally unknown outside each country. Informal idiomatic phrases are particularly numerous – as this author found to his cost when he first encountered egg-ordering procedure at breakfast-time in a US hotel. Having asked for ham and eggs, the question ‘How would you like your eggs?’ left him nonplussed, as he was unaware of the linguistic (let alone the culinary) possibilities expected of him – such as (immediately learned, due to hunger) once over easy and sunny-side up. Culture-specific phrases of this kind are often absent from dictionaries, and they are very numerous.