THE WAY WE SPEAK

New Zealand Listener, Volume 11, Issue 271, 1 September 1944, Page 8

THE WAY WE SPEAK

What Is Standard English ’

(Written for "The Listener" by PROFESSOR IAN

A.

GORDON

N recent weeks the correspondence columns of The Listener have had many letters from enraged English residents and angry New Zealanders on the pronunciation of English in this country. Do we speak Standard English? Do we want to speak Standard English? Is there a New Zealand English? What, after all is Standard English? Should we say Mundi or Mon-day? The answer, let it be said, is not in Daniel Jones or Webster or the Oxford Dictionary, as so many correspondents assume, but in the whole history of the way in which Standard English has developed. "Standard English" is of comparatively recent growth. It was not, after all, spoken by Shakespeare or by Swift or by Keats or by Matthew Arnold. The truth is that Standard English has always been the language of the dominant group in England, When "English" came to England in the fifth _ century, it came as three. Germanic dialects spoken by the Jutes (who settled in Kent), the Saxons (who settled mainly in the south-west or "Wessex’), and the Angles (who settled the country from the Forth in the north to the Thames in the south), Though the English of the fifth century is now a foreign language, which has to be learned like any other foreign tongue, these three dialect divisions and their geographical dispersal are with us to the present day. In the seventh and eighth centuries, Standard English was the English of the Angles, Politically and culturally they were the dominant group, and all our earliest poetry like the epic of Beowulf was written in the speech of the area which is now round Newcastle.

By the ninth century political power had shifted to Wessex, and the Standard English of the years between 900 and 1000 was West-Saxon, the speech of Alfred the Great. Anglian and Kentish sank to the status of mere dialects. Virtually all the literature of the period that has survived was written in, WestSaxon — even Beowulf was translated from its original Anglian, and_ exists now only as a West-Saxon poem. Traces of West-Saxon are to be found even at the present-day -- the word bury, for example, we pronounce with the profiunciation of Chaucer, but we spell it in the pronunciation of Alfred. A Close Thing for London By the end of the medieval period the kingdom of Alfred was a thing of the past, and his language, too, had sunk to the level of a dialect. By 1400, London was the centre of England. The Court was there. The Universities of Oxford and Cambridge had been established within easy reach. Chaucer and Gower had spent their life there and written their great work in its language. And so the South-Eastern dialect (made up of the old Jute dialect of Kent and the Anglian dialect of the South-East Midlands) of the London area became for the 15th century

Standard English. Geographically speaking, this South-East English dialect has remained the basis of Standard English down to the present day. But the victory of London was a close thing. While Chaucer was writing, a great school of poets were striving hard to establish the language of the West of England as the dominant speech, and they neariy succeeded, Round Malvern way William Langland was writing Piers Plowman; up near the present site of Liverpool a great anonymous poet was composing the masterly romance Gawain and the Green Knight. Had economics favoured the west (if America and fast transport had been discovered in time!) we should all be speaking to-day the language of Stanley Holloway and Gracie Fields and. slyly laughing at the uncultured country accents of the BBC announcers. But the South-East dialect won and became Standard English, and the other 10 English dialects remained mere dialects, which have from time to time lent a rich expressive word to the Standard tongue, but which have never since raised themselves in the world. A Class Dialect Standard English is a regional dialect. But it is more than that. It is also a class dialect, the language spoken by the educated classes in the South of England particularly, and to a somewhat lesser extent in the remainder of the British Isles. The Professor of English Language at the University of Oxford (as he says, "at the risk of offending certain susceptibilities") defines Standard English as "Good English, Well-bred English, Upper-class English . . . if we were to say that it is Public School English, we should not be far wrong." All variations from this Standard. speech (discounting purely local dialects like Broad Scots or

Zummerset) are defined as Modified Standard . .. the typical educated man or woman from Manchester or Newcastle or Glasgow or Cardiff tends to speak Modified Standard and not Standard English. There are no statis-

tics available, because the research work on the problem has never been carried out, but I think it is true to say that Standard English is to-day even in England itself the speech of a minority of the population. But it is still as it has always been, the speech of the dominant group. Overseas English The development of English has not ceased with the development of Standard English. From the English of the 16th and 17th centuries, transported across the Atlantic and so no longer sharing in the development of the tongue in England, has grown American English. The time is long past when we can regard American as an inferior brand of English. It is not English. . (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) It is American English with its own idiom and sound-system and its own, great Dictionary of American English parallel to the Oxford English Dictionary — in fact, William Craigie, the editor of the American Dictionary, is also the final editor of the Oxford. In Canada the "nglish tongue has been very considerably modified by the nearness to America and the high proportion of Scottish immigrants, and Canadian English is distinctive both from American and from Standard English. To a lesser extent the same thing has happened in the Southern Dominions, South Africa. Australia and New Zealand. The minority in these countries who speak Standard English is yery small indeed, and in all three countries certain things have happened to several of the vowels of Standard English that call, it seems to me, for scientific analysis rather than mere howls of protest about the "New Zealand accent." If you doubt this, listen for a few evenings to that remarkable cross-section of New Zealand speech, the hello-mum, hello-dad messages from the men overseas, and then switch over to the BBC. New Zealand has developed its own modification of Standard English, and no one can change it merely by insisting that so-and-so is the "correct" pronunciation. Some Problems Such a situation has its problems. If we are clear about the issues, we can seek a solution more _ intelligently. Problem One is the fundamental question: Do New Zealanders speak Standard. English? The answer is "No." Thefe are what the military strategists used to call "pockets of resistance," certain areas, certain , families, certain schools which are proud of the Standard quality of their diction] but the average New Zealander is unaffected, Problem Two is the question: Can we speak Standard English? Here the answer is a very -qualified "Yes." With careful education it is possible. You would, of course, have to start on the teachers, iron out the irregularities in their speech, and compel them to use only English vowels, and behind them the Same process would have to be carried out on the students, the training college lecturers, and I fear (since there is only one teacher out of a staff of about 40 in my college who speaks Standard English as defined above) on the lecturers, and even the professors of the university. The alternative would be to import sufficient Standard ‘English speaking teachers. Several schools used to make a practice of it before the war. To hear the pupils recite English poetry was a delight, only comparable with the delight of hearing

them afterwards in the playground speaking to each other in their own tongue, Problem Three is the real problem: Do New Zealanders want to speak Standard English? Here I cannot give even a tentative answer. My own speech is Modified Standard (my | listeners on the air will no doubt remember what my particular modification is) and I must leave problem Number Three to be answered by New Zealand-born speakers. Personally, I think that in small groups who can be kept in a fair degree of isolation, Standard English is possible. For the average person, reared in the equalitarian atmosphere of the Dominion, Standard English is something very difficult to achieve, because it is no longer the speech of New Zealand. Might it not be better to admit that there is a New Zealand modification of the Standard and using that as a basis, work for clear diction and easy fluency? A mere artificial imitation of Standard may result in that appalling genteel tongue (over-prectise in diction and over-corrected in vowel sounds) that is heard on the lips of shop assistants in most English cities. The statement of the problem is a job for professors; but the solution lies with the speakers themselves. ‘ :