Watching English Change

An Introduction to the Study of Linguistic Change in Standard Englishes in the 20th Century

Laurie Bauer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317894049
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Examines the ways language has changed in the twentieth century. It concentrates on standard English and takes a historical rather than sociolinguistic view of the changes which have occurred.

CHAPTER 1

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Introduction

1.1 Background to this book

Many lay people think of language change as something which happened in the past, but does not happen any longer. Until recently, many people also thought of standard English as something fixed and unchanging. To such people, a book about change in current standard English (or, as we shall see, standard Englishes) is thus doubly surprising.

This book will show that English is changing today and that you can watch the changes happening around you. This first chapter deals with some of the background required before we go on to look at actual cases of change.

1.1.1 What are standard Englishes, and why is there more than one?

Most educated people appear to have a fairly clear idea about what standard English is. It is the kind of English you are expected to have to speak if you want to get a job in broadcasting, the kind of English you must be able to use in the professions, the kind of English the teachers expect you to write in schools. It does not contain double negatives such as We haven't got no pets; words like done and seen are exclusively past participles in standard English, not past tense forms, so that sentences such as I done it yesterday or J seen her yesterday are not part of standard English. Moreover, people feel that something either is standard English, or it is not: there are no half measures. Some people might think it is standard English to say It was different than I had expected, others might think it is not, but both groups would expect that there should be a single right answer to the question, which could be discovered by appeal to the proper authority (possibly The Concise Oxford Dictionary, or some similar publication).

There are, however, numerous problems with this view. An obvious one is that the standard changes. If the standard never changed, it would still be standard to say Our father, which art in heaven as in the King James version of the Bible. Nowadays, except in direct quotation, we would have to say Our father, who is in heaven. The seventh edition of The Concise Oxford Dictionary (1982) suggests that It was different than I had expected is not part of the standard, the eighth edition (1990) suggests that it is. We presumably do not wish to suggest that a lot of people who previously spoke standard English suddenly started speaking nonstandard English in 1990 because they still said It was different from what I had expected. Nor would we wish to suggest that a lot of people who spoke non-standard English in 1982 started speaking standard English in 1990 for that reason. There has to be a certain amount of room for variation within a standard.

A second problem is this: people who have jobs in broadcasting, or who have jobs in the professions, do not all speak or write in the same way. Teachers do not all try to teach precisely the same form of English to their students: in Britain only about 3 per cent of the population speak with a standard accent (Trudgill and Hannah, 1982, p. 2), so most teachers cannot model the standard accent for their students, even if they use standard grammatical patterns. Even in grammar there are differences between what is normal in the North and South of England. In the North You haven't got to eat your cabbage may mean ‘You must not eat your cabbage’, while in the South it can only mean ‘You are under no obligation to eat your cabbage’. If the view presented above were correct, we would have to say that people who deviate in any way from some arbitrarily chosen notion of ‘correct’ do not speak or write standard English, only something close to standard English. In fact, we might not be able to find anyone who speaks standard English in this narrow sense: standard English would be a fictional standard rather than a genuine variety of English. There is not necessarily any conflict here. It might be said that standard English is a variety which people like broadcasters and teachers should aim at, even if they do not attain it. We certainly know that if they fail to attain it by too wide a margin, many people write letters of complaint to broadcasting or educational authorities. The function of such complaints can be seen as an attempt to maintain and define the standard (Milroy and Milroy, 1985). But if we accept that the standard is not a single monolithic entity, but allows a certain amount of variation, then the pointlessness of some of these complaints can be easily seen.

Even if standard English is not monolithic, there are problems with defining a single standard for all dialects of English. English is spoken natively by over 300 million people all round the world, and the English used in broadcasting and the professions in, say, Washington DC is different in many ways from the English used in broadcasting and the professions in Canberra. That is, there is regional variation between varieties of English, each of which is recognized as a standard in its own sphere of influence. These spheres of influence usually (but not invariably) correspond to countries. So we might wish to distinguish between standard US English and standard Australian English, between standard New Zealand English and standard Canadian English. It is in this sense that there are a number of different standard Englishes. Certainly, these different standards have more features in common than they have distinguishing them, but they are none the less distinct. Once we accept that, it becomes an open question how many standard varieties there are in a given country, for example. Should we distinguish a standard Norwich English from a standard Nottingham English, a standard Seattle English from a standard San Francisco English, a standard Sydney English from a standard Melbourne English? In principle, there seems to be no reason why we should not. In practice though this is not done, and one reason is that these various local standards are not codified.

It seems to be widely accepted that a standard requires a certain amount of codification. There needs to be some arbiter of what is or is not standard, and this requires some description of the standard. Such descriptions come in the form of dictionaries, descriptive grammars, books for teaching the language to foreigners, books describing ‘good’ usage and the like. These appear to make generalizations over national rather than sub-national varieties. We find dictionaries written specifically for Canadians, South Africans or New Zealanders. We find grammars of American and of British English (by which is usually meant English English, to the exclusion of Scots, Welsh and Irish varieties). Where we find descriptions of the language of particular localities within these larger national entities, they tend to focus on usages which are not presumed to be standard, but which contrast with the standardized national usage. In this book, following this pattern, the standard Englishes which will receive most attention are standard southern British English and standard American (i.e. United States) English (these being the varieties for which the most comprehensive descriptions are available), but reference will also be made to other national standard Englishes.

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Q Can you think of things besides those listed earlier which you hear regularly but which are not part of standard English? In discussion with your class-mates, try to list five.

Who do you know who you think speaks standard English? Do you ever hear them say the things you've just listed? If so, how do you know they are not part of the standard?

A You will probably have listed some shibboleths, like using a preposition to end a sentence up with, or using four-letter words. The chances are that the people who you think speak standard English also say these things. You may have difficulty in deciding how you know about the standard, but you probably have to make appeal to some external authority: a parent, a teacher, a dictionary, etc. If you appealed to a person as an authority, you might like to ask them how they know what is standard, and discuss the answer you receive. A dictionary or other written source represents the codification discussed earlier.

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1.1.2 Do standard Englishes change?

The following passage is a remedy for wolf s-bane poisoning, written in English in the tenth century.

Gif mon þung ete, ākege buteran ond drince; se þung gewīt on þā buteran. Eft wil) þon stande on hēafde; āslēa him mon fela scearpena on þām scancan; þonne gewīt ūt þæt ātter þurh þā scearpan.

Without special training, no-one today can read such material; it is clear that English has changed since the tenth century. A modern translation of this passage is as follows:

If you eat wolf s-bane, take butter and drink; the poisonous plant will transfer to the butter. Then stand on your head. You should be scratched many times on the shanks; then the poison will pass out through the scratches.

This is not necessarily recommended as a treatment for wolf s-bane poisoning today! Perhaps it is just as well that most people would not be able to understand the tenth-century remedy without the translation.

The English of the fourteenth century is easier to understand for the modern reader, but still requires a certain amount of training. The following passage of Middle English written by John of Trevisa (d. 1402) is a translation of a text from earlier in the fourteenth century makes this point.

Also Englyschmen, þeyʒ hy hadde fram þe begynnyng þre maner speche, Southeron, Northeron, and Myddel speche in þe myddel of þe lond, as hy come of þre maner people of Germania, noþeles by commyxstion and mellyng, furst wiþ Danes and afterward wiþ Normans, in menye þe contray longage ys apeyred, and som vseþ strange wlaffyng, chyteryng, harryng, and garryng grisbittyng.

This is easier to understand, but a translation (provided immediately below) is still of great help in allowing us to understand certain parts of this passage:

Also though Englishmen had from the beginning three kinds of speech, southern, northern and middle speech from the middle of the country, as they are descended from three kinds of Germanic people, and also by mixing, first with the Danes and then with the Normans, the country language has deteriorated in many, and some use strange stammering, chittering, snarling and grating gnashing of teeth.

Again, the factual accuracy of the passage is not vouched for! The passage should, however, make the point that English has changed since the Middle English period.

Parts of Shakespeare are difficult to understand for a modern audience, so English has changed since the sixteenth century. Changes can be seen in the following brief passage from Act III Scene i of Romeo and Juliet.

Thy head is as full of quarrelles as an egge is full of meate, and yet thy head hath bene beaten as addle as an egge for quarrelling: thou hast quarreld with a man for coffing in the streete, because hee hath wakened thy dogge that hath laine asleep in the sun. Didst thou not fall out with a taylor for wearing his new doublet before Easter, with an other, for tying his new shooes with an old riband, and yet thou wilt tuter me from quarrelling?

There are various changes to spelling obvious from this brief extract. We would today write (and say) has rather than hath, we would use you rather than thou and we would not speak of an egg being full of meat. Despite these differences, we can understand this passage without a modern translation.

Pope and Dryden tend, on the whole, to be comprehensible to modern readers. Consider the following excerpt from Pope's A Discourse on Pastoral Poetry, written in 1704:

If we would copy Nature, it may be useful to take this Idea along with us, that Pastoral is an image of what they call the golden age. So that we are not to describe our shepherds as shepherds at this day really are, but as they may be conceived then to have been; when the best of men followed the employment.

In the light of examples like those presented here, it is tempting to suggest that English stopped changing in the eighteenth century, and has not changed since then. After all, most of the oddities in Dickens or Thackeray can be attributed to the prosiness which characterized the period or the individuals’ style rather than to a change in the language: the works of L. Durrell or M. Peake are just as odd in their own way. Compare the following passages from Dickens and Peake, which, on the surface at least, do not show any differences of language that are not differences of style:

The difference between them, in respect of age, could not exceed four years at most; but Grace, as often happens in such cases, when no mot...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• How to use this book
• Guide to phonetic symbols
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Lexical change
• 3 Grammatical change
• 4 Sound change
• 5 Other changes
• 6 Theoretical perspective
• Suggested answers to exercises
• References
• Index