How Educated English Speak English : Pronunciation as Social Behaviour 9783732900626, 9783732999156

Table of contents :
Contents
Foreword
Preface
Preface to the Second Edition
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter One: The Relevance of Speech Accent in England
Chapter Two: Prestigious Speech Versus Regional Dialect
Chapter Three: Reactions to the Traditional Language Hierarchy
Chapter Four: Broadcast English as mirror and indicator
Conclusion
Notes
References

Citation preview

SPRACHWISSENSCHAFT

How Educated English Speak English Pronunciation as Social Behaviour Ingrid Wotschke

Frank & Timme Verlag für wissenschaftliche Literatur

Ingrid Wotschke How Educated English Speak English

Sprachwissenschaft, Band 21

Ingrid Wotschke

How Educated English Speak English Pronunciation as Social Behaviour

Verlag für wissenschaftliche Literatur

Umschlagabbildung: EEE (Educated English English) Model

ISBN 978-3-7329-0062-6 ISSN 1862-6149 © Frank & Timme GmbH Verlag für wissenschaftliche Literatur Berlin 2014. Alle Rechte vorbehalten. Das Werk einschließlich aller Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlags unzulässig und strafbar. Das gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Übersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen. Herstellung durch Frank & Timme GmbH, Wittelsbacherstraße 27a, 10707 Berlin. Printed in Germany. Gedruckt auf säurefreiem, alterungsbeständigem Papier.

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To my Mother in her great trust and help

Contents Foreword by J. D. A. Widdowson, PhD ..................................................... 11 Preface........................................................................................................... 15 Preface to the Second Edition ..................................................................... 17 Acknowledgments ........................................................................................ 19 Introduction .................................................................................................. 21 Chapter One – The Relevance of Speech Accent in England ................... 23 1.1 Regional accent as social marker ........................................................ 23 1.1.1 Traditional accents and dialects ............................................... 23 1.1.2 Modern Dialect areas ............................................................... 29 1.2 Sociolinguistic consequences of accented speech............................... 33 1.2.1 Social significance ................................................................... 33 1.2.2 Ethnicity ................................................................................... 35 1.2.3 Problems in education .............................................................. 37 1.3 Psycho-social implications of accent features .................................... 39 1.3.1 Regional accent perception ...................................................... 39 1.3.2 (Dis)qualifying accent judgements ........................................... 43 1.4 Evaluation stereotypes ........................................................................ 46 1.4.1 1.4.2 1.4.3 1.4.4

From personality traits to North/South divide .......................... 46 The accent prestige continuum ................................................. 49 Reactions to RP ........................................................................ 50 Linguistic self-hatred................................................................ 54

1.5 RP: the controversial image ................................................................ 55 1.5.1 Recent criticism ........................................................................ 55 1.5.2 Social prestige .......................................................................... 59

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Chapter Two – Prestigious Speech Versus Regional Dialect .................... 63 2.1 Origins of a prestige accent ................................................................. 63 2.1.1 English resurrection and Southern bias ..................................... 63 2.1.2 Emergence of a “standard” language ........................................ 68 2.1.3 A “standard” for pronunciation ................................................. 72 2.2 The consolidation of RP ...................................................................... 74 2.2.1 Towards non-regional prestige ................................................. 74 2.2.2 Accent stereotyping by the BBC............................................... 78 2.2.3 A “standard’s” criticism and defence........................................ 82 2.3 Post-War variability ............................................................................ 86 2.3.1 Traditional prestige ................................................................... 86 2.3.2 Democratic change ................................................................... 90 2.3.3 The young elite ......................................................................... 94 2.4 Accent change and social relevance .................................................... 97 2.4.1 Exclusive fashions or popular influence ................................... 97 2.4.2 New acceptability ................................................................... 102 2.5 RP: conceptions of a “standard” ........................................................ 105 2.5.1 What kind of “standard”?........................................................ 105 2.5.2 RP: the changing concept........................................................ 108 2.6 A “standard’s” functions revisited ..................................................... 113 2.6.1 Regional neutrality .................................................................. 113 2.6.2 RP and the BBC ...................................................................... 116 Chapter Three – Reactions to the Traditional Language Hierarchy ..... 123 3.1 Standardizing processes..................................................................... 123 3.1.1 Speech habits and social ambitions......................................... 123 3.1.2 Upward convergence .............................................................. 125 3.1.3 Near-RP accents ...................................................................... 129

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3.2 Educated accent prestige ................................................................... 131 3.2.1 From common roots to regional standards ............................. 131 3.2.2 The academic revolt and its consequences ............................. 135 3.3 Recent fashions and tendencies ........................................................ 141 3.3.1 Young accent loyalty.............................................................. 141 3.3.2 Outward-looking tendencies .................................................. 143 3.3.3 Fashionably Southern ............................................................. 146 3.4 Estuary English ................................................................................. 149 3.4.1 The concept and its conception .............................................. 149 3.4.2 Origins and distribution .......................................................... 152 3.4.3 Public criticism and future prospects ..................................... 156 3.5 New parameters for educated speech ................................................ 159 3.5.1 Educated acceptability............................................................ 159 3.5.2 Educated standards and the EEE model ................................. 165 3.5.3 Standards in the public mind .................................................. 170 Chapter Four – Broadcast English as mirror and indicator .................. 173 4.1 The post-War revolution in broadcasting.......................................... 173 4.1.1 Criticism and change .............................................................. 173 4.1.2 In defence of language “standards” ........................................ 177 4.2 Prestigious accents on the BBC ........................................................ 181 4.2.1 Changing fashions .................................................................. 181 4.2.2 Nostalgic modes and unresolved features .............................. 184 4.3 Recent policies and criticism ............................................................ 186 4.3.1 Wide acceptability .................................................................. 186 4.3.2 New horizons ......................................................................... 189 4.4 The language of current affairs units ................................................ 195 4.4.1 Relaxation of habits................................................................ 195 4.4.2 Regional features and National accents .................................. 199 4.4.3 Recent fashions and styles...................................................... 201

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4.5 Language fashions in entertainment programmes ............................. 203 4.5.1 The trendy and the popular ..................................................... 203 4.5.2 Approaches to youth culture ................................................... 206 4.6 BBC Local Radio and Independent Radio stations ........................... 208 4.6.1 New ways................................................................................ 208 4.6.2 Language features ................................................................... 211 4.6.3 Broadcasting for ethnic minorities .......................................... 215 4.7 The language of radio: its influence and feedback ............................ 218 Conclusion ................................................................................................... 222 Notes............................................................................................................. 225 References.................................................................................................... 231 Books and contributions ........................................................................... 231 Articles in newspapers and periodicals ..................................................... 244 Dictionaries (chronological) ..................................................................... 245 General .............................................................................................. 245 Special ............................................................................................... 245 BBC and Radio Authority publications and documentations (chronological) ........................................................ 246 BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) .......................................... 246 Radio Authority ................................................................................. 247 Radio and television stations .................................................................... 247 BBC ................................................................................................ 247 Radio Authority ................................................................................. 248

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Foreword

The notion of a standard form of English, both spoken and written, has provoked debate for more than a hundred years – a debate which intensified as the twentieth century progressed. The perceived need for a standard form of the language is deeply rooted in the complex history of English which, rather than being a single homogeneous entity, has from the outset comprised several distinct, though closely related, dialects. Add to this a Celtic underlay, the highly influential contributions of Latin, Norse, and French in the Old English and Middle English periods, and its extraordinary receptiveness to borrowings from many other languages across the globe, and we begin to understand the complexity of its development. Today, English can lay claim to be a world language, aided in no small measure by the rapid advances of information technology. The concept of a standard form of the language emerged in the midnineteenth century and, fueled in part by the advent of universal education in this country, with its demands for authoritative textbooks for use in teaching the language, it gradually asserted itself in the academic sphere. Being essentially prescriptive, especially within the education system, it exerted a powerful influence which for many years remained unquestioned. During the decades immediately following World War II, however, the superimposition of an authoritarian set of rules for “correct” speech and writing came under increasing scrutiny. In the emerging cultural and social upheaval, the shift from a prescriptive to a descriptive approach to language, as advocated by postwar linguists whose revolutionary zeal discarded long-established traditional grammar in favour of radical new descriptions of language, had a major impact on perceptions of speech and writing, and on attitudes towards language in general. At a time when established institutions were being challenged by a society which was seeking a more democratic and egalitarian future, concepts such as Standard English and Received Pronunciation became increasingly controversial. In response to these iconoclastic attitudes on the part of both society and of the advocates of the “new” linguistics, there was inevitably a loosening of the tenets and strictures which until

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then had characterised the concept of standard forms of speech and writing in England. It is perhaps unsurprising that dissatisfaction with these concepts centres on the meaning and perception of the terms “Standard English” and “Received Pronunciation”, not least because of the inherent ambiguity and potential misinterpretation of their nomenclature. The word standard refers both to a recognised exemplar of correctness (authoritarian, prescriptive) to which one might aspire, but also to what is considered to be normal, usual, customary (egalitarian, descriptive). The sense in which the recondite and somewhat archaic word received is used in this case implies “generally adopted, accepted, approved as true or good” (OED), which leaves open the possibility that the speech referred to is both generally used and approved – a latent ambiguity matched by an apparent unwillingness to choose a more explicit word in its stead. Its use inevitably raises the question “Received by whom?” Against this background, and in view of the rapid acceleration of cultural, social, and linguistic change in the later decades of the twentieth century and into the twenty first, it is surprising that no detailed full-length study of the subject has been published. While it is true that Standard English and Received Pronunciation have received considerable attention in recent years, these topics are generally discussed as part of wider accounts of various aspects of English. One reason for this apparent anomaly may well be the daunting prospect of investigating the totality of this complex and controversial subject. The study presented here is therefore both timely and welcome, notably because it fills a major gap in our knowledge of the ethos of Received Pronunciation and of the spoken language in England at this fascinating stage of its history. Ranging widely over the whole field, Dr. Wotschke provides a comprehensive overview of the subject. Undaunted by the challenges of untangling the intricate interrelationships of the forces currently at work in the spoken language in England, she draws together for the first time an impressive body of evidence on the changing fortunes of Received Pronunciation and its interaction, not only with regional dialects and other varieties of English, but also with social, attitudinal, and linguistic changes in the country at large and in the mass media. The title of the book speaks for itself, specifying the central focus on the pronunciation of educated English in England, which in itself invites comparison with all other varieties of speech and their relationship with a per-

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ceived “standard” in whatever sense the latter is interpreted. The work opens with an in-depth discussion of the sociolinguistic relevance of accent in England. It moves on to consider reactions to the traditional language hierarchy, culminating in the author's innovative and carefully considered proposal for defining Educated English English (EEE). The new model centres on a common core of features interacting and overlapping with three principal variants: socially prestigious, fashionably relaxed, and regionally affiliated. The model is usefully summarised diagrammatically to indicate the interrelationship of its components. This leads on to a wide-ranging and highly informative exploration of broadcast English as a mirror and indicator of changing speech and attitudes. The outcomes of the investigation are succinctly summarised in a concluding section, which is followed by notes, a revealing appendix of printed source material, and a substantial bibliography. By any standards (in both senses of the word!) this is a remarkable study. It traces the development of perceptions of and attitudes to Received Pronunciation in England from the inception of the term to the present day. It documents the cultural, social, and psychological changes which in turn have led to a significant re-evaluation of the concepts of Received Pronunciation and Standard English. Backed by a wealth of primary source material gathered in the process of the investigation by listening closely to a fascinating variety of spoken and broadcast usage, the study offers unique insights into the ways in which the original concept of Received Pronunciation is out of tune with today's more open and egalitarian culture. Above all, it is a balanced and dispassionate account, capitalising on the objectivity of an unbiased observer who has the advantage of an intimate knowledge of recent and current trends in the English language. The host of illustrative examples, accompanied by detailed phonetic transcription, add weight to the argument, and provide convincing evidence in support of the proposed model and of the extraordinary pace of change in English in recent decades. In summary, Dr. Wotschke's groundbreaking study not only succeeds in charting the progress of the concept of Received Pronunciation and of the changing attitudes to it, but also provides a starting point for further investigation. Although the process of change is of course inevitably continuous, this work is an admirable encapsulation of “the story so far”. As for the future, the author rightly suggests that “the tensions between persisting ‘standard’ notions and liberal attitudes will keep English speakers in Britain

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engaged for generations to come”, and that “Whatever features will stand the trials of time, new patterns seem to be taking shape, some of which may well leave their traces on tomorrow’s educated speech”. J. D. A. Widdowson, MA, PhD, Dlitt (Hon.) Emeritus Professor of English Language and Cultural Tradition University of Sheffield

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Preface There was no doubt in the mid-fifties: English was strikingly different from what it had been, and particularly so in its pronunciation. Trendy novelties were infiltrating even the prestigious language of the BBC World Service and, in due course, became successively included in the description and transcription of educated pronunciation, at that time still largely considered identical with RP (Received Pronunciation). On a wider sociolinguistic level, pronunciation habits and criteria of acceptability were changing so radically that, beyond traditional linguistic work, research began to be carried out into the social roles and perspectives of English speech accents as well as into the backgrounds of language variation, in a period when new tendencies were waiting to be interpreted and defined. As, towards the turn of the century, changes in the educated pronunciation of English English had proceeded so far that it could no longer be adequately described on the basis of the traditionally RP-oriented concept, an attempt became worthwhile to reassess its traditional relevance and redefine its current range and functions in the light of recent developments. It was then that an alternative conception of educated pronunciation was first considered and proposed at various academic events in England and abroad and closer investigations were taken up with the aim to illuminate the sociolinguistic backgrounds of the new variability in educated speech. When, in the following study, educated speech in England is going to be investigated in its historical continuity and current relevance, the evaluation of pronunciation features will rely on early written sources, later linguistic descriptions and recent investigations and as well as on language samples taken from radio broadcasts, all of which are considered to reflect the respective language situation and therefore regarded as documentary in the historical sense. Thus, on the verge of a new century when, at the meeting point of the past and the future, in A. C. Gimson’s words the speech of any community may be said “to reflect the pronunciation of the previous century and to anticipate that of the next” (1962: 69), the foundations are provided for an alternative concept allowing for comprehensive description and unbiased discussion of pronunciation features and tendencies in current educated pronunciation in England. Ingrid Wotschke

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Preface to the Second Edition Just as its predecessor of 2008, this new edition of the book is on educated pronunciation in England as set against varying historical backgrounds, with its main focus on the decades around the turn of the millennium. As language evidence from the relatively short period between the compilation of data and the present day cannot be supposed to yield sufficient information in order to allow for the further conclusions on educated pronunciation change, the body of speech data and its discussion have remained largely untouched. Consequently, revision here only means, beside correction of errata, the inclusion of a small number of additional items considered worth mentioning in the running text and their corresponding sources in the References. Within coming decades, time will show wether or not, how far-reaching and in what way current educated pronunciation tendencies, such as those discussed in this book, will prove to be of lasting effect on the educated pronunciation of future generations in England. Ingrid Wotschke

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Acknowledgments

Looking back over the years to the time when the foundations were laid for the project, I am thinking with gratitude of the understanding support I received from the late A. C. Gimson (London) in the 1980s. I also feel grateful to Ch.-J. N. Bailey (Kea’au, Hawaii), Crawford Feagin (Arlington, Virginia), Gerhard Leitner (Berlin, Germany) and Anna-Brita Stenström (Kristianstad, Sweden) for their very helpful correspondence, while I am deeply indepted to J. D. A. Widdowson (Hope Valley, England) for his great encouragement and scholarly advice. Among those who kindly contributed to the provision of language samples I would particularly mention Mary Grover (Sheffield, England) and John Slattery (Lewes, England). Further, the wide range of materials provided by the BBC World Service and Radio Authority information departments as well as by BBC Radio Leeds, Capital Radio London and Sunrise Radio London were highly appreciated. Last but not least, thanks go out to Gebhard Engelmann (Magdeburg, Germany) and to Sylvia Macey (Elkton, Florida) for their expert assistance in the technical preparation of the manuscript. It is the helpful generosity of all those mentioned here that has made work possible on an issue as complex as this.

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Introduction

Post-War tendencies in educated pronunciation in England have led to its widening articulatory range and social relevance, exceeding the borders of anything so far considered to comply with educated standards, let alone a generally accepted “standard” of pronunciation. As a considerable number of novelties may be related to English regional accents, an analysis of the sociolinguistic relevance of speech accents in Chapter One will serve as a basis for a closer investigation of pronunciation habits and criteria of acceptability in the new situation of cross-cultural influence on the educated language, as analysed by sociolinguists such as David Abercrombie, Howard Giles, Peter Trudgill and the Milroys. On grounds of the sociolinguistic situation in the late twentieth century, social, educational end ethnic issues will be taken up and regional accents investigated in their significance to the individual speaker and to the speech community as a whole. Regional speech will be conceived in its role as social marker and language judgements traced back to their socioeconomic roots and psychological implications. Reactions to traditionally prestigious RP (Received Pronunciation ) are going to be discussed on the levels of the individual listener, of wider public opinion, and of contemporary linguistic criticism including recent assessments in the columns of leading dictionaries. In order to assess the sociolinguistic relevance of traditionally prestigious pronunciation, historical investigations in Chapter Two will trace it back to its origin at the medieval Court, in the Capital of London and in aristocratic Southern England, in connection with the growth of an emerging standard language. The disputable conception of the prestige variant as a “standard” of pronunciation for England, Great Britain and the whole English-speaking world will be discussed on early written sources, on later scholarly descriptions including the works of Daniel Jones, and on more recent conceptions such as those by Charles Barber and Randolph Quirk. With regard to the general image of the prestige accent, the traditional relations between RP and the BBC will be investigated in the light of their mutual influence and recent criticism. Basing its arguments on linguistic research by A.C. Gimson, Susan Ramsaran, J.C. Wells and others, a discussion of twentieth-century changes in

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the articulatory pattern and the social validity of RP will reflect the accent’s changing role in a time when its relative uniformity was giving way to an unprecedented variability within the variant. Relying on both traditionally and non-traditionally educated speech, Chapter Three will discuss characteristic post-War tendencies under the conditions of social mobility and resulting contacts between the classes. Important consequences of the post-War language situation will be encountered in various forms of upward convergence, in the emerging regional standards and in the new prestige of socioregional speech in the educated language. With regard to more recent decades, outward-looking tendencies among the young generation of regionally accented speakers are going to be discussed, in connection with Southern fashions culminating in the recent variant of Estuary English. The much-debated issue of a possible “standard” in pronunciation will be reviewed against the background of late twentieth century linguistic discussion and public opinion, and an alternative conception of current educated pronunciation standards is proposed with the term and model of Educated English English, allowing for the representation of the wide range of current educated pronunciations in England and thus offering an alternative to previous conceptions exclusively representing traditionally prestigious speech. With its wide reach and traditionally high prestige, the language of radio has proved to be of particular interest with regard to its relevance to ongoing pronunciation change. When, in Chapter Four, novelties in broadcast speech are linked to matters of programme presentation in a period of profound reorganization of the broadcasting services, special weight will be placed on revolutionary changes in the presentation of news broadcasts, on the new significance of entertainment programmes with regard to young speech as well as on the sociolinguistic peculiarities and functions of local radio stations. Pronunciation features as exhibited by newsreaders and announcers, presenters and correspondents between the early seventies and the present day will be compared to the characteristic articulatory tendencies encountered in the wider educated language. Finally, the issue of a possible influence of the radio on current educated pronunciation is going to be reconsidered on the basis of recent opinions and arguments, in a period of dynamic change when traditional values are most seriously questioned and new ones are as readily taking their places in the minds of the public.

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Chapter One The Relevance of Speech Accent in England 1.1

Regional accent as social marker

1.1.1

Traditional accents and dialects

It has long been an acknowledged fact that most English people are not speakers of what is commonly called Standard English but have various degrees of dialect forms in their speech, depending on their social background, education and profession. In the second half of the twentieth century, regional pronunciation was to be found in highly educated and less educated speech, and even the majority of those who by birth or education or both had had the chance to acquire a widely acceptable grammar and usage overwhelmingly had a local accent, except for the tiny tip of the traditionally educated who had acquired RP together with upper (middle)-class speech in their early lives (cf. Robinson 1973: 435). In spite of reduced dialectal differences through the standardizing influence of some schooling, the media, traffic and industrialization on nearly everybody since the 1950s, regional accent was considered to permeate a pronunciation cone or pyramid1 from bottom to top. Gimson noticed “a great number of gradations” in popular London speech and in the varying mixtures of regional and RP as typical of suburban districts (cf. 1962: 84 f.), and, in Barber’s description, nearly everybody from the millhand to the lawyer or company director spoke a local variant or “subvariant”, corresponding to a certain degree with the local social structure (cf. 1964: 17). As anywhere else in the world, the social seclusion of the remaining rural areas and the traditional cohesion of some urban communities were securing a relatively strong survival of traditional forms in popular speech. When grammatical and lexical distinctions were increasingly lost under the influence of standardization, what seemed to remain of broadly regional speech were largely strong accents regarded as “dialects” by Halliday in 1968 (cf. p. 147f.; cf. Giles/Powesland 1975: 26), and later described by Kellett (2002: XVI) as “‘regional speech’, distinguished from Standard English mainly just by accent and intonation”. In

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spite of substantial loss of dialectal vocabulary, however, dialectal lexis and distinctive grammatical forms, along with a few aspects of syntax, still remained in the final quarter of the last century (special features cf. Widdowson, 1999: 16 f.). Modern times had changed but not exterminated regional speech, which was living on in various forms and degrees in the speech of the younger generations. It was the kind and degree of dialect features that distinguished speakers of different social status and pretensions through what was considered but “a question of relatively more-or-less” along a regional and social dialect continuum, running from the North to the South of England, with regional and social aspects closely interwoven (cf. Giles/Powesland 1975: 21; Trudgill 1975: 22; Hughes/Trudgill 1979: 6). On grounds of geographical distance from the capital and of special historical developments and regional characteristics, the North was preserving a particularly large number of original dialect features and, consequently, continued to show the greatest deviation from RP in a number of vernacular forms, such as [hiem] or [(w)ʊm] for home, [hiç] for high and [kʉ:] for cow, or in conservative dialect words and expressions as fleffs for fleas, loup for jump or switch t’leycht on (cf. Wright 1978: 48; Köppl et al. 1983: 40, et al.), sounding “most outlandish in modern ears” (Ellis 1972: 878) with their historical Anglo-Saxon or Viking features. In the early 1990s, a Yorkshireman’s ax instead of ask was still close to Anglo-Saxon āxian, the historical pronunciation was kept in [hu:s] for house and [lang] for long, and in Ah’m starved ter deeath the verb was used in its original sense of suffer intensely, in the sense of the Old English verb steorvan meaning to die and not necessarily connected with being hungry as in modern standard usage (cf. Kellett 1991: 5, 11 ff.). Once referring to the three parts of the territory around the Viking town of Yorvik (later York), the Scandinavian word thridding, meaning a third, continued to name the North, East and West Ridings up to the present day (cf. ibid. 2). In the nineteenth century, popular forms of dialect literature had been initiated with the early urban broadsheets of the West Ridings, distributed in dialect and standard between 1800 and 1850, as well as with dialect pamphlets. Almanacs and paperback annuals had followed since the 1830s, accompanied by an uprising dialect literature as part of working-class culture in a language “so vivid and forthright, and to some ears so loud and strident, associated with the mills and mines of the industrial revolution” (ibid. 1991: 6, cf. 14 f.). In the rural North and East Ridings, where speech had remained “quieter and 24

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gentler, more associated with shepherds, farmers and village folk” (ibid. 6), a strong popular poetic tradition was surviving the times. When, in 1963, Bill Cowley’s Cleveland Anthology with the subtitle of Dialect Poems from Cleveland and the North Yorkshire Moors presented recent dialect poetry and similar collections from the Ridings could follow, this proved the survival of traditional language and cultural values in the minds of the local people. While, however, the relatively flexible dialect of the industrialized West Ridings largely remained “the language of everyone” well into the 1960s on grounds of its adaptability to modern idiom and context, the traditional dialect of the rural North East had by the time become “a forgotten language” to the majority of inhabitants, as its more static and historical pattern “just [did]n’t go” with industrialized agriculture (cf. Cowley 63: 10). In Cowley’s words, “Near the hills the younger generation can still speak it, with a limited vocabulary. Ten miles away on the plains it is already one generation and on Tees-side two generations away” (ibid.). As pure dialect literature in its historical dimension had ceased to be fully intelligible to everyone, writers recently began to avoid overuse of archaic words in order to remain accessible to their audiences (cf. Widdowson 2005:14). Although, in comparison to the North of England, articulatory differences between Southern dialects and standard forms were found to be relatively small on all levels, there were clearly noticeable vernacular characteristics, as H-dropping rendering heat and eat homophones, word-initial [d] for [ð] in that, surviving late medieval long [i:] for [aɪ] in hide, an open diphthong [ʌʊ] in home, and the glottallization of intervocal and final /t/ in water and hot (Barnickel 1982: 157; Wells pt. 1 1982: 252 ff.). In spite of their relative linguistic triviality, however, features like these were judged “socially very significant” by Trudgill in 1979 (p. 11 f.) and are still considered strong enough to cause problems of comprehension in the South West and perhaps other southern counties, such as Sussex, Kent, and East Anglia (inform. Widdowson 2003). Even in the capital of London, which had become a vast city sixty kilometres across by the twentieth century, the working-class accent of popular London had preserved a large number of South Eastern regional features. In Wells’ description of 1982, these peculiarities included, among others, a wide range of diphthong shifts, as raised [æʊ] for RP [aʊ] in mouth, lowered and diphthongized [ɪ • i] for RP [i:] in fleece, and [ʌɪ] for RP [eɪ] in face (p. 308). T-glottalling was also found to be “widespread in all kinds of popular London speech” (ibid. pt. 2: 327), although the use of glottal stop for other

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consonants remained restricted to original London Cockney (see below). Besides, several subvarieties were detected, such as the lower middle-class “refayned” accent, not only avoiding diphthong shift but also “going too far in the other direction” (ibid. 302; upward convergence see 3.1.2), beside certain Jewish peculiarities characterized by special realizations of /t/ and /d/, a dark [ʊ] for /r/ or the use of [Nɡ] in singer (ibid. 303). Nevertheless, popular London speech might be described as “one which share[d] the general characteristics with Cockney” (ibid.; recent ethnic involvement cf. Stenström 2002: 13, 22; see 1.2.2). Popular urban traditionalism remained most impressively represented by East London Cockney which, in its historical contrast to prestigious London speech, remained relatively close to the surrounding country dialects, with its open diphthongal onsets and strong levelling tendencies in late [laɪt], mouth [mæ:f~ma:f] and time [ta:m]2, its silent g in the endings of askin’ and mornin’, and its omission of /j/ in tune [tu:n] and duke [du:k], the latter increasingly infiltrating educated speech (see 2.4.1 and 3.3.2). Its sounds deleted in thunner (thunder) or -prentice (apprentice) and its extra vowels inserted in loverly (lovely) or umberella (umbrella) as well as its strongly stigmatized intervocal glottal stop /ʔ/ for /t/ in better, its H-dropping in ‘usband, and its /ɵ/ and /ð/ replaced by /f/ and /v/ in thin and brother kept their particular social significance (cf. Wells 1982 pt. 2: 302 ff.; Honey 1989: 90). Corresponding grammatical dialect features, such as generalization of third person in singular verb forms as (I) sees, (you) gives and double or multiple negation as in that boy don’t care nothing for nobody (cf. Arnold/Engel 1978: 49), were rounding the picture off. Last but not least, traditional lexical usage and a host of slang expressions in examples as keep your hair on for keep quiet, laugh and joke for smoke and elephant’s trunk, generally reduced to Elephants for drunk, as in Bill’s Elephants (Franklyn 1991: 13, 62; cf. Wright 1974: 88; Arnold/Engel 1978: 49)3, were adding to the particular flavour of speech “within the sound of Bow Bells”. Its deep cultural embedding in local traditions made the possibly oldest English city dialect of London Cockney a unique symbol of communal identity and local pride. Remaining close to the rural South East not only linguistically but also culturally, with cowsheds as a feature of Petticoat Lane well into the 1920s, it preserved an almost rural sentimentality in songs like that of the “watercress girl”, gathering her “creeses” early in the morning under the eyes of her fond lover (cf. Smith 1969: 7), and in traditional tales like that of Jack the Ripper, extending protection and generosity to a mother

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and child, asking ‘What are you doin’ aht so late with a baby?’ and telling her ‘Look, don’t be afraid of me. I’ll take you up to the Buildin’ and I’ll see you indoors.’ When he went away he gave her some money, and he says, ‘I was Jack the Ripper’ (ibid. 67). Having been primarily a language of lower class “insiders” – of native East Londoners and of thieves in the real underworld, of boatloads of London prisoners on their way to Australia, of the American West coast crooks, and of nineteenth century navvies (i. e. workmen) who brought it to Ireland (cf. McCrum 1986: 307 ff.; Franklyn 1991: 18 ff.) – the dialect also became enjoyed and used by members of other social backgrounds, with its witty contrasts and curses, its amusing connotations and its rhyming slang. It might be found in the columns of the English Sporting Times called “The Pink ‘UN”, heard among members of a Belfast or Dublin sporting fraternity, and enjoyed by the Bohemians who, in Franklyn’s words “laughed their way through life, taking their nourishment with a dash of rhyming slang in every glassfull” (ibid. 24). Moreover, it found its way into Charles Dickens’ extremely popular Pickwick Papers (1837) and into his best-selling novel of Oliver Twist (1838). A number of rhyming slang expressions were deriving from the theatrical profession, such as the early twentieth century currency of happy hours for flowers and the still current greengage for stage and greengages for wages, later nearly always reduced to greens (ibid. 74, 72). Since its wide geographical and social spreading, the dialect had never been uniform, not even in its place of origin, and when its London variant became theoretically divided into broad and light Cockney by linguists, this rough distinction did by far not reflect its sociolinguistic complexity (cf. Arnold/Engel 1978: 48 f.). Strengthened by a great vernacular language loyalty within the East London speech community and furthered by the general prestige of the Capital, some of its most characteristic features were adopted by young post-War RP (see 2.3.2 and 2.3.3), while others were filtering into fashionably educated speech, particularly so into the Cockney-like pattern of Estuary English (see 3.4 and 3.4.1), and spreading to the modern industrial dialects of the North. But first and foremost, genuine Cockney has remained the traditional lower-class ingroup language of London, at times unintelligible to outsiders but fully shared by those who know and identify – even though, according to an article in The Express (Forbes, 5/6/98: 10), first signs of the decline of original dialect substance have appeared, suggesting that “true Cockney is no longer heard. It died with the real London fogs”.

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The fact that, by the middle of the last century, pure local speech had become a rare relic only heard among the oldest of the rural population, developments like these were spurring the compilation of materials for various surveys of English dialect and culture, among them the Survey of Language and Folklore, established by the National Centre for English Cultural Tradition at the University of Sheffield in 1964, as well as the Survey of English Dialects (1971) based on fieldwork of the 1950s and 1960s and the Linguistic Atlas of England (1978), compiled on its basis at the University of Leeds4. During the second half of the century it became evident that this had been the last opportunity to collect comprehensive evidence from people still retaining “the old rural pattern” and “the old prior culture” (cf. Widdowson 2005: 10), whose distinctiveness was “steadily and inexorably eroded over the past half century – a process which has apparently accelerated in the years immediately preceding and following the beginning of the new millennium” (ibid.). Various dialect words and expressions, however, which had not been included in the SED or LAE, were found to be taking the places of old ones. Deriving from slang and colloquial usage, they were used in various urban vernaculars or clustering in specific geographical regions, while others were frequent among particular ethnic groups in urban areas. The present state-of-affairs has been recorded in the BBC’s “Voices” project of 2005, including information from over thirty thousand respondents and surpassing the 1971 SED in the number of variants for many single items (cf. ibd. 13)5. Analysis of the project’s result is going to serve as a basis for a forthcoming Survey of Regional English (cf. ibid.), whose comparison with the entries in the old SED will offer new insight into the mechanisms of ongoing dialect change in England. Serving the issue of regional dialect maintenance in a less academic and more popular way, The Yorkshire Dictionary of Dialect, Tradition and Folklore by Arnold Kellett has been designed to contribute to the preservation of “the best kind of regionalism, with its distinctive speech, tradition and folklore” (2002: 10). Supplemented by an Introduction to the Yorkshire past and to peculiarities of Yorkshire pronunciation, 214 partly-illustrated pages present an extensive collection of dialect words, special terms and idioms, either still in active use or at the point of dying out together with many of the traditional crafts, customs and kinds of folklore. Basing all its entries on a lifetime of personal experience, this “personal and autobiographical” work is intended by its author to “provide a reference book of Yorkshire heritage …, an alphabetical compendium of the life and lore of ordinary Yorkshire people”, in which lan-

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guage samples are overlapping with items of folklore and legend (cf. ibid. XVI f.). This survival of local speech, however, will depend on its actual usage or, as Widdowson put it in his Preface to the compendium, “this is your dialect. Use it or lose it” (XIV).

1.1.2

Modern Dialect areas

Although most of the English population had been living in industrial cities or on their fringes since the nineteenth century (amounting to three-quarters by 1900, cf. Wright 1957: 234) and thus overwhelmingly belonged to the vernacular speaking classes, very little research had been done into the modern urban or industrial dialects until the 1970s, when dialect forms and accented speech became increasingly viewed as indicators of social background, education and occupation and consciously related to social class in England. On the basis of John Wright’s programmatic work Urban dialects: a consideration of method (1957), indicating the main issues and methods of research into sociolinguistic change in urban vernacular speech in England, new weight began to be placed on the social implications of industrial dialects in the works of Stanley Ellis, the Milroys, Peter Trudgill and others. Early research found younger standard forms, vulgar language, jargon and rhyming slang beside traditional vernacular forms, in a confusing mixture of dialect and accent, among the majority of broadly accented speakers of the traditionally vernacular-speaking classes, travelling to work in towns or factories or living in the huge industrial centres (cf. Ellis 1972: 877; Wright 1979: 48 ff.). As Wales pointed out in connection with the emergence of those new mainstream dialects, the results might either be the assumption of the dominant regional urban accent or the use of intermediate forms situated between traditionally local and RP, such as Merseyside and newcastle schwa being neither /ʊ/ nor /ʌ/ in mud, and a similar Merseyside “compromise vowel” being neither /a/ nor /æ/ in ant (cf. p. 172 f.) Dialectal mergers like these were considered to have been increased by geographical mobility out of inner cities into suburbs, smaller towns and “new towns” – the latter originating since the 1960s and numbering thirty-five by the late 1990s – and to be accompanied by social mobility, with young men of working-class background taking up white collar work, as well as by the contribution of immigrants from different parts of the world (cf. Williams/Kerswill 1999: 149; Widdowson 2005:9). The resulting weakening and final breakdown of traditional social networks was made responsible for extensive dialect levelling within local regions and larger areas and for a move towards more urban

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and standardized speech (cf. Foulkes/Docherty 1999: 14), until, under advanced circumstances, certain local dialects were becoming indistinguishable from those of the larger region since about 1980 (cf. Newbrook 1999: 105), depending on the social stratification of the respective communities and thus differing from place to place and from region to region. In addition to local levelling processes, dialects were mixing and merging over larger distances so that h’s began to be dropped in Norfolk where they were originally sounded, and vernacular features were dying out on their traditional territories, as North West Midland [Nɡ] in long and rhotic speech which, in the early eighties, seemed “unlikely to survive for more than a century” (Leith 1983: 138). With regard to ongoing change, recent findings by Kerswill (2006) have shown that children’s speech in the “new town” of Milton Keynes, being the most closely investigated example of wider regional dialect levelling in result of extensive social mobility from London, tends to be more homogenious and thus further advanced in the levelling process than adult speech with its fairly discrete variants, still relying on regional origin and secondary schooling in either London or Milton Keynes (cf. p. 97 ff.). So, in children aged between four and twelve, strongly fronted variants of [æɣ] and [aɪ] for /əʊ/ and opener Southern [a:ə] or [æʊ] for /aʊ/ were not found to be associated with social class or region, while differences were noticed between boys and girls, the latter tending to prefer an RP-like articulation (cf. ibid. 98 f.; upward convergence in female speech see 3.1.2). The fact that a similar situation has been found in the long-established town of Reading, sixty kilometres west of London and a hundred kilometres south of Milton Keynes, suggests the wide range and various possible backgrounds of geographical dialect levelling. According to Trudgill (cf. 1990: 50 ff.), large Modern Nonstandard Dialect areas (see Illustration 1) were originating together with the big industrial centres of North West England, the North Eastern coastal areas and the London-based area, with traditional isoglosses shifting or gaining additional weight, as in the Northern dialect boundary parting North England from Scotland and the central Northern boundary separating Northerners from Southerners in England (cf. Wales 2000: 14)6. While Northern dialects were about to disappear under the influence of the Central North with its new industrial dialect areas around Birmingham, Liverpool, Stoke and Derby, old Traditional Dialect areas in the South and its adjoining areas to the East and West were being swallowed up by a London-based Home Counties Modern Dialect area (cf. Trudgill 1990: 76 ff.). Thus, by about 1990, traditional rural

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dialects had either completely vanished or become confined to remote rural areas and some North and West urban communities (cf. ibid. 5), their place being taken by what Charles Barber called the “new mixed dialects, based on the great urban centres” (1993: 264). Consequently, after Widdowson (2005), the attention of researchers has moved “from rural to urban areas” and “from the historical to the contemporary dimension”, recognizing and accommodating recent and emerging phenomena in this transitional period when dialectal speech is underlying fundamental change (cf. p. 14). Initiated through a new wave of geographical mobility from London and the South East to the Home Counties and beyond and promoted by the attraction of London cultural and economic activities, South-Eastern traditional features, popular Londonisms, and even most stigmatized Cockneyisms began to be increasingly found in urban accents everywhere in England. By 1970, assimilation in its historical spread to the North had become “seemingly common in all parts of the county” (Wells 1970: 243), and, though perhaps being more usual in the South, might even exceed Southern usage in the Northern devoicing of b, d, g as in good [t] time or big [k] case (Gimson IPE 1970: 294). By the same time, R-insertion had reached a considerable dissemination in non-Southern rural areas and urban speech alike – except for absence in the extreme West (cf. Wells 1970: 241; 1982: 243)7 – in non-standard applications as the window• r• isn’t clean and Last Tango• r• in Paris (Wells 1982: 226 f.). London-based changes in otherwise popular speech further included extra open diphthongs in pay [æɪ/aɪ] and boat [ʌʊ], syllabic /l/ in table [ʊɫ], the vocalization of post-vocal /l/ in railway [ˈrɔɪwæɪ], and the diphthongization of close vowels in tea [əɪ] or two [əʊ] (cf. Barnickel 1982: 157), beside a range of highly stigmatized features. Among the latter, originally London Cockney (and Glasgow) T-glottalling in word-medial and final positions, as in [ˈbeʔə] (better) and [nɒʔ] (not), was rapidly spreading to many rural areas in the South and East Anglia as well as to urban accents in Central England, Wales, and the North (see also 3.2.1 and 3.3.3), to regional accents in Scotland as well as to New York and New Zealand, and during its wide spread ceased to be associated with any particular region, sex, or social class in Britain (cf. Wells 1982 pt. 1: 261; Maidment 1994: 2)8. So, whereas in Tyneside speech glottal reinforcement of /t/ as “a male, lower-class and stigmatised norm” (Newbrook 1999: 113) had been long-established preference for local male speakers, the recent innovation of glottal replacement was particularly favoured by middle-class young women as a “prestige/standard

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form” (cf. ibid. 114). In a wider geographic sense, the spread of T-glottalling in Norther England may have been further promoted by the close influence of the Scottish popular movements of the 1960s and 1970s, as an early sign of outward-looking tendencies in young English dialectal speech (see 3.3.2). Hdropping, as traditionally encountered only in London Cockney and Yorkshire dialect, had by the 1980s reached all urban accents of England, except Geordie and Tyneside (cf. Milroy 1980: 97; Honey 1989: 94), followed by the above-mentioned highly stigmatized Cockney replacements of /ɵ/ and /ð/ by /f/ and /v/ in [fɪn] (thin) and [ˈbrʌvə] (brother) (cf. Kerswill 2001: 3; Widdowson 1999: 13). According to Kerswill (ibid.), (f ~ v)-replacement9 was spreading very rapidly within the past twenty or thirty years, from the London area over the South East, Central and Northern England to the Lowlands of Scotland where, in contrast to the above-mentioned T-glottalling, it was not a traditional feature. Having been found in Norwich speakers born after 1970, in young adults in the Midlands and in teenagers in the North of England, it had, by the year 2000, reached young children in Newcastle and Glasgow on its route of regional dialect levelling. The maintenance and spread of the most stigmatized Southern features as markers of vernacular identity and their “enthusiastic adoption” by workingclass young people, also in the North (cf. Williams/Kerswill 1999: 161; see 3.3.2), were largely due to an enormous increase in radio and television programmes, aiming at young people and identifying with their speech in a deliberately informal and non-standard style of presentation. When punk rock was reaching all parts of the country with its “new wave” of low-prestige South of England accents since the mid-seventies, Cockney intervocal glottal stop began to replace post-War Mid-Atlantic [º] in better (see “alveolar flap” 3.3.2; see also “tapped [ɾ]” 2.4.2, 2.5.2), and occasional H-dropping and extremely open diphthongs in face [æɪ], go [æʉ] and out [æ~ɛu] were matched by nonstandard grammatical features, such as multiple negation and the generalization of don’t being also used for doesn’t (cf. Trudgill 1983: 155). The covert prestige of working-class South-of-England accents was the motivation for the young to follow a uniquely British model with a non-American identity, and although English and American low-prestige features were alternating in cases as South-East (English) [ɑɪ] and (American) [a∙] for (RP) /aɪ/ in shy, highly stigmatized features as H-dropping and T-glottalling were clearly workingclass London (cf. ibid.). It was in this sense that Dick Leith underlined the resilience of regional pronunciations, which he considered to be intensified

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through new phonetic differences across generations so that they were “not dying out” among the young (1983: 114). Most probably, the covert prestige of the Cockney tradition was the driving force in the explosive spread of originally stigmatized pronunciations in England, Britain, and even worldwide.

1.2

Sociolinguistic consequences of accented speech

1.2.1

Social significance

In the sociolinguistic discussion of the 1960s and 1970s, accent differences began to be considered as “socioregional” (Halliday 1968: 148) insofar as a regionally accented speaker did not only betray the region but also the social background he or she came from, and “nowhere else in the world [was] this feature found in the extreme form it [had] reached in England” (ibid.). It was the time when an “accent-bar” was considered to be acting like a “colour-bar” (cf. Abercrombie 1965: 15; Halliday ibid. 165), depriving people of their opportunities and, what was even worse, of their social dignity. Linguists were pointing to the “delicate and explosive nature” of the subject and to the large scale of emotions, reaching from deep admiration for the prestige accent to utmost hostility and disgust, not only in Britain but in the whole Englishspeaking world (cf. Abercrombie ibid. 15; Halliday ibid., et al.). Language standards were considered “a badge or a barrier” (Quirk 1968: 68), serving to identify and separate social groups or, in more pointed terms, splitting the country’s population into a “society of two nations” (Trim 1964: 77) and, as a “powerful social determiner”, separating the “haves” from the “have-nots” (Boomer 1976: 18). The reasons for the particularly rigorous social accent differentiation were seen in the century-long existence of a countrywide de facto standard of pronunciation, based on the assumption of the superiority of Southern English (cf. Mittins 1970: 115), thus nourishing the gap between prestigious speech and all other variants of the language. The disturbing fact that any kind of non-standard speech could be a serious obstacle to social ambitions was particularly strongly experienced by those of lower middleclass background who were aiming at higher education and a more prestigious career. So, in an opinion poll of 1972, it was the middle-class group that considered speech the “most important barrier in society”, while in its overall assessment language was ranging after money and education (cf. Gimson 1979: 152). In the urban areas, “non-RP” began to be experienced as a kind of

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social deficiency bearing an immediate “threat to existence” (Kelman 1972: 197), when speech differences became depressingly felt in connection with jobs and careers that required a certain amount of education and were closed to those of working-class background with broad local accents (cf. Honey 1989: 152). In sociolinguistic research, speech became increasingly related to the English class structure, being, after Wells (1970: 248), “significantly linked to social class in England” and often constituting an “important index of class affiliation” (cf. “an outstanding example of a social marker in speech”, Laver/Trudgill 1979: 17). Under post-War conditions, the merging of geographically distanced features and the levelling of original dialect pronunciations in wider-based urban vernaculars did not only iron out regional differences but also increased social bonds and convictions, thus making industrial accents less immediately regional and more obviously a matter of social class. With its common workingclass experiences and ideologies, based on close network ties in industrial work, kin and neighbourhood (cf. Milroy 1980: 177 f., 1982: 141 ff.; Edwards/Giles 1984: 245 f.), urban industrial speech was characterized by attitudes deliberately demonstrating social belonging on a more status-conscious and even militant level. Social identity was calling for contrast, and while some despised regional accents and others were even downgrading their own speech (see 1.4.4), many more disliked RP, in spite of its high prestige, or rather just because of it. It was the “dislike of a prestigious class” (Spencer 1958: 13; cf. Wright 1974: 153) that made many of the working-class despise “posh” or “lah-di-dah”, as they called it, while refusing to bend to any standard of upper middle-class provenance. In a kind of linguistic self-defence, most workers would no longer “scrape their tongue” in the presence of educated speakers of superior status in the 1970s, “even if the doctor or the vicar call[ed] or the boss appear[ed] on a tour of inspection” (Wright ibid.). Speaking the same language was what really mattered, and the lack of linguistic self-confidence in the face of standard English was found in striking contrast to the strong language loyalty in their own ranks. What was judged “ignorant”, “backward” or a sign of “Northern poverty” by the Southerner, or was stamped “corrupt”, “slovenly” and “ugly urban dialect” anywhere in the country, might be linked with a high degree of integrity within the respective group, so that a Northerner’s short [a] in glass was closely linked to his conception of identity and the Cockney speaker’s dropping h’s were regarded as an indispensable attribute to his social group integrity (cf. Giles/Powesland

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1975: 67 f.). Consequently, the vernacular remained widespread in solidarityoriented domains like home and family, neighbourhood and peer group, pubs and clubs, where the sociolinguistic situation tended to be highly integrative in nature (cf. Wright 1974: 153; Giles/Ryan 1982: 219). Compensating for social disadvantages through positive experiences of group cohesion and identity, vernacular speech was acting as a “positive force in direct conflict with standard norms” (Milroy 1980: 19) and thus constituting an important factor in processes of regional dialect maintenance in the face of the “standard” (cf. Milroy/Milroy 1985: 114).

1.2.2

Ethnicity

In addition to the traditional English dialect situation, further sociolinguistic diversity was deriving from the immediate post-War wave of immigration since the late 1940s, when large numbers from India, Pakistan and the West Indies had been called in to compensate for acute labour shortages in Britain in manual and academic work as well – a development which, after Smith and Lance (1979: 27), brought England closer to the American situation of a socioethnic determination of speech, reflecting both social class and ethnic identity. Since the 1960s, additional immigration followed from Central and East Europe and, again, from various Asian countries including Bangladesh, East Africa and China (cf. Harris 1973: 68; Reid 1984: 408 ff., et al.). By the 1990s, there was a considerable spectrum of Asian languages, such as Hindi as the language of the Hindu majority consisting of various ethnic groups, Urdu and Punjabi as spoken by considerable numbers of Muslims and Sikhs as well as Tamil, Bengali, Sinhalese, Cantonese, and, last but not least, Hindustani, being a widely intelligible mixture of Hindi and Urdu (see 4.6.3). With the majority concentrating in decaying centres of large cities, like Blacks at Cardiff, Asians at Leicester and Bradford, Chinese and many others at London, the immigrant population were numbering millions. Totalling about five percent of the population of Britain by 1991, they were a “highly visible presence” particularly in London and the South (cf. Foulkes/Doherty 1999: 16), but also in the large industrial centres of the North West of England. As to the Capital itself, 44.6 percent of Britain’s ethnic minority population were living in the various boroughs, according to the 1991 census, with “deprived” boroughs such as Hackney and Brent being among the top dozen areas for the black groups (i. s. Black Caribbean, Black African and Black Other), Brent and Barnet occupying the same position for the Indian population, and others

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for the Bangladeshi and Chinese groups (cf. Stenström et al. 2002: 22). In an extremely ethnically diverse city as Greater London, the popular accent has meanwhile come to include a considerable amount of minority accents, whose sociolinguistic relevance to the conception of popular London speech (see 3.1.1) may possibly show in the near future. Within the West Indian community, the involvement of socioethnic aspects in the linguistic assimilation process became particularly evident in the language use of successive generations, as investigated by Howard Giles and Richard Bourhis on the changing language situation among Cardiff Blacks in the seventies (cf. 1975: 9 ff., 1976: 108 ff.). After favourable initial circumstances, speed and quality of linguistic assimilation were found to have slowed down with time and proceeded on socially diverse lines: while middleclass families with higher education or of fairly educated background had fully assimilated within two or three generations, experiences of social failure at school and resulting social rebuke and frustration in early occupational life among young people of the least educated social layers were obviously counteracting the assimilation process. In response to the social situation, a shift towards a new ethnic identity in the second generation was emphasising the cultural differences the generation of the parents hat set out to reduce, thus reaffirming the originally bilingual situation in the speech community. It seemed as if the Blacks might soon “move from their traditional assimilationist policy and define their social identity” (1975: 11), with Black English functioning as “a form of secret language, promoting solidarity and intracommunication while excluding outsiders – a common phenomenon all over the world” (Bolinger 1980: 47; cf. “antilanguages”, Halliday 1978: 164). According to Milroy (1985: cf. 112 f.), Jamaican Creole was increasingly taking the role of a “powerful symbol of identity” in young immigrant speakers, while standard English was regarded as “foreign” not only among workingclass groups, but also among those studying at universities and colleges who were stressing their cultural identity and language in opposition to European social “alienation”, or even leaving for the Caribbean to “rediscover” their “origins” after public school education in England (cf. Honey 1989: 161)10. In the wider immigrant community, after Trudgill (1974: 61), individuals might remain more aware of being Jewish or Black than lower middle-class, where working-class resistance to English culture and language was threatening to standardize social failure, while coloured origin was tending to become linked with lower social background and lower efficiency on the side of the English-

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speaking community (cf. Giles/Bourhis 1975: 11). Although, by the turn of the century, race might have become less important for those who had more readily and efficiently accommodated and were, consequently, living more in line with middle-class culture than with black culture, it might still be “an important factor for some speakers and in some situations, where speakers label[led] themselves members of a ‘black culture’” (cf. Stenström et al. 2002: 209). Even if the intensity of racial tensions should have diminished in recent decades – as “social class and race are factors which cross-cut each other” (ibid.) – their consequences have remained strong enough to leave their marks on social relations in England for generations to come.

1.2.3

Problems in education

Relations between an individual’s language and his or her social environment became particularly crucial under the standardizing measures in primary and secondary education, where regional dialects were widely taken as indices of unfavourable personality characteristics and low academic potential (cf. Trudgill 1975: 6; Edwards 1982: 27 ff.). Ethnic language backgrounds were exacerbating the situation by causing severe comprehension difficulties and resulting setbacks in education on the side of the children and the impression of “unintelligibility”, “lack of intelligence” or “speech defects” in immigrant children on the teacher’s side (cf. Harrison 1973: 70; Trudgill ibid. 84 ff.)11. Dialect differences were found to raise hostile feelings between native English and immigrants in London, or even among subgroups of the same ethnic community, and thus aggreviate mutual dislike particularly between English teachers and immigrant pupils, in connection with misinterpretations of ethnic differences in loudness of speech (cf. Milroy 1980: 90) and bodily communication (cf. Bolinger 1980: 48). In the sociolinguistic discussion on the sense or non-sense of trying to change a child’s language, Basil Bernstein’s conceptions of the “two different languages” (cf. 1958: 158) and of the “restricted” and “elaborated” codes (cf. 1971: 76 f.) were taken up again, though not without criticism (cf. Ryan/Giles 1982: 28; Guy 1991: 55). Focusing on the individual’s right to his or her own identity, in connection with Bernstein’s descriptions of the emotional involvement of regionally accented children, and on the reactions of working-class children to attempts to standardize their language habits, Peter Trudgill argued that “a child will not want to change his accent unless he also wants to reject the social group to which he belongs or unless he wants to change his identity in some way” (1975: 58), and that “one

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excellent reason for not trying to change children’s accents in schools is that it will probably not succeed” (ibid. 57). Referring to Bernstein’s theory of “restricted” and “elaborated” codes12, he saw the main reason for the failure of standardizing measures in the general social outlay of schools being unable to provide “the kind of social context in which working-class children are able (or willing) to use language most efficiently” (ibid. 99). The violation of nonstandard speech by educational measures was considered to lead to a further alienation of the child, with the result of an even more negative reaction to the teacher’s “posh” and an even stronger identification with the local speech of the classmates (cf. Cheshire 1982: 63; Edwards/Giles 1984: 148)13. Following Bernstein’s warning of any attempt to change the child’s basic system of perception – “fundamentally the very means by which he has been socialized” (1958: 235) – the situation of children from vernacular-speaking classes aroused urgent calls for more respect of teachers for regional speech in order to prevent emotional damage and intellectual setback with resulting social disadvantages in later life. A “sympathetic awareness” (cf. Cheshire 1982: 59 ff.) of the children’s situation was considered a necessary precondition for the teacher to help them over their difficulties without violating their individual language backgrounds. Under the circumstances of language prejudice and its consequences in occupations and professions, however, the sociolinguistic position of accent tolerance in schools was counteracted by a controversial discussion, stressing the necessity for standardization in a social world traditionally governed by notions of a standard language. So Honey (1989), underlining “a child’s right to an ‘open future’” (p. 175) and regarding “well-spokenness” (i. e. the command of RP) as “an important indicator of an individual’s ability to control the world around him” (ibid. 177), demanded to make it available to the underprivileged in order to foster their ability to be “articulate communicators outside their immediate social groups … even at the expense … of their selfesteem” (ibid. 266). When a certain standardization of children’s regional speech was finally advocated also by liberal sociolinguists, it was in order to “provide the working-class child with a standard accent … to compensate for his low prestige idiolect” through phonological code-switching (Giles 1970: 227). It was the widespread discrimination of regional dialects that Trudgill took as the “one legitimate reason for the teaching of Standard English” to regionally accented children (1979: 20 ff.), with the aim to liberate the individual “from the limitations of his environment, though without loss of identi-

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ty” (ibid. 86)14. After, in 1952, Stanley Ellis had stated with satisfaction that the “standard” norms of schools had “not by any means had a destructive effect on regional speech” so that most people of his generation used some regional forms in their later lives (cf. p. 878), Charles Barber (1964) again considered the effect of schools on local speech in the sixties to be no more than “to tone down the broader dialect elements (both in pronunciation and idiom) without removing regional characteristics altogether” (p. 20). Further, under the radical democratization of the school system promoting mixed ability teaching in comprehensive schools (since 1954)15 and the weakening commitment of teachers and school administrations to support standard speech, “well-spokenness” for the mass of pupils finally seemed to become, after Honey, “an unrealistic target” (ibid.). Admittedly, many teachers were not only hostile to the idea of changing their pupils’ accents but deliberately adopted popular speech for ease of communication with them, and at the few remaining grammar schools, traditionally aiming at RP or educated regional accents, the social background was not seldom working-class so that, at least in industrial towns, the language of pupils was ranging between extremely non-standard and standardized local accents (cf. Honey ibid.; Milroy 1980: 6). New measures in education and changing language attitudes among teachers were about to diminish or even reverse the traditional standardizing effects of the schools in connection with the general move towards the regional and the popular, until, in the early nineties, Barber saw the influence of the schools “towards local accent rather than towards RP” (1993: 265).

1.3

Psycho-social implications of accent features

1.3.1

Regional accent perception

Closely linked to personal surroundings, experiences and convictions, accent has always been felt to be an important identity marker by the speaker and perceived as a significant social indicator by the listener, the more so as its immediate psychological effect tends to make it a kind of “social barometer” (cf. Boomer/Spender 1976: 50) and thus a decisive factor in social interaction. When, following Bernstein’s conception of social language functions, Halliday regarded accent as “a direct reflection of social structure in the phonetic output” (1971: 181), he saw “social man … not simply … in relation to some abstract entity such as ‘society as a whole’, but man in relation to other men”

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(ibid. 165) and the individual as “the focus of a complex of human relationships” (ibid.) in the process of language as a form of social behaviour. Accent use was considered by Robinson (1972: 244) a question of defining and communicating “who we are”, while, on the other hand, the crucial question of “who is likely to be a friend or foe” tends to be answered largely subconsciously by social accent identification or non-identification, or, more practically, by judging from people’s speech, “whether they are one of us and, if not, what kind of outside or oddity they are” (from an article in The Times Educational Supplement of 1989, quoted in Mugglestone 1995: 329). Boomer and Spender (1976: 17) were pointing to the hearer’s ability to “reconstruct a biography” allowing for immediate conclusions concerning, beyond group membership and social background, inferences about attitudes, views and occupations as well as deeper personality traits as revealed by a speaker’s voice and pronunciation and by the way he is putting his speech, and they saw in language “a more powerful social determiner than clothing” (ibid.). Language-based judgements on a stranger’s social affiliation were considered to have far-reaching consequences for an individual’s social integrity and wellbeing (cf. Abercrombie 1951: 385 et al.), as people speak not only “to be heard and understood”, but also “in order to be recognized and accepted” (Janson/Schulman 1982: 336). In the process of oral communication, accent was increasingly considered to be “in the hearer” by Spencer (1958: 23), who perceived distinctive educational and social differences and whose reactions were reflecting the social structure of the community as well as his own social-class attitudes. As, in the eyes of sociolinguists, accent judgements were revealing “class attitudes rather than individual attitudes” (Halliday 1968: 163; cf. Quirk 1968: 71), aspects of social class were considered “the most penetrating idea in English dialect evaluation” (Brook 1979: 17). Correlations between linguistic variables and social affiliation were theoretically established by William Labov, who, in a “concept of language as a form of social behaviour” (1968: 250 f.), referred shared norms and types of evaluative behaviour to abstract patterns of variation in respect to particular levels of usage. Based on his theoretical premises, Milroy and Milroy (1985) considered reactions to speech sounds to be determined more by their social correlates than by their acoustic features, and unfavourable language attitudes were taken to represent social judgements. Consequently, evaluative reactions to speech sounds were regarded as highly arbitrary16 in cases such as H-dropping which, in contrast to its strong 40

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stigmatization in lower-class speech, was found to have been “no matter of public stigma” before 1800 and to have become a community norm as far north as Durham by the later twentieth century (cf. p. 19 f.), affecting, to some extent, the speech of all social groups (H-dropping in RP cf. Wells 1982 pt.2: 286, see 2.3.1; for popular Norwich and London speech cf. Hughes/Trudgill 1982: 7, see 3.2.1). The concept of arbitrariness was extended to the different judgements on in’-endings which, for all social groups with the exception of the younger generation of U-RP speakers, were regarded as subject to style shifting, and whose social stigmatization was considered to be based on frequency of occurrence and the speaker’s social status rather than on the sound itself (cf. Milroy/Milroy 93 ff.). Similarly, pronunciations like (-)cos (because), plice, Satdy, businessm’n and strugg[ə]ling, though a “growing habit” and “very common” in colloquial style in the early eighties, were found to be castigated as “industrial accent” by listeners in connection with working-class surroundings (cf. Wright 1974: 47; Zimmermann 1982: 430 f.), and opinion polls in the early seventies proved that instant judgements on a stranger’s social class were made primarily on the basis of his accent (cf. Wells 1982 pt. 1: 15, 29). It was the knowledge of who used the accent that obviously determined evaluative results, so that reactions to speech sounds came to be considered “a function of raters’ social attitudes” (Giles 1972: 168; cf. Halliday 1968: 163). The “socially sharpened” ears of the English (cf. Abercrombie 1956: 49) seemed to be particularly sensitive to variations in pronunciation signalling cultural and social differences, and a “mispronounced” vowel might be a more serious offence to linguistic conventions than grammatical dialect forms, which might go unnoticed as long as the pronunciation was RP (cf. Bolinger 1980: 45; Halliday 1968: 167). Generally, an RP voice was associated by the hearer with upper (middle)-class background and education everywhere in England, while intermediate levels of pronunciation, ranging between regional accent and standard classified the speech of various intermediate social layers, and a broad local accent, irrespective of its region, was linked with the working class (cf. 1970: 248). So, in the North, the RP-vowels in mud /ʌ/ and past /ɑ:/, instead of local [ʊ] and [æ], respectively, gave an immediate impression of a modified middle-class voice (cf. Knowles 1978: 80), whereas there and elsewhere strongly regional accents were associated with the uneducated industrial working class. In addition to articulatory features, the creaky voice of Norwich male working-class speakers distinguished them from middle-

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class, both being different from RP-speaking men, with the creak accompanied by low falling tones, and while level tones in questions signified a Scouse (i.e., Liverpool vernacular) voice, a full rise was characteristically local middle-class, both contrasting the RP simple rise (cf. Trudgill 1974: 47; Knowles 1978: 88). Prosodic features in dialectal tone patterns were found to be essential to the full understanding of social meanings and to be immediately interpreted by the hearer as social correlates (cf. Knowles ibid. 81). Introducing the reader to the worries of phoneticians – might their names be Sweet or Higgins – and to those of people troubled by their own accents, Bernard Shaw wrote in the Preface to Pygmalion: “The English have no respect for their language, … and … it is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman despise him” (1916: 5). Indeed, in effect of what Giles and Bradac much later called the “languageattribution-evaluation-connection” (1991: 5), urban accents tended to be looked upon as markers of inferior education and culture, or, in other words, of inferior personality traits in connection with lower-class social background. Working-class stigmatized pronunciations such as /t/ for /ɵ/ in think, in’endings as in drawin’, and glottal stop /ʔ/ for intervocal /t/ in water were branded “ignorant” and “vulgar” as well as widespread dialectal H-dropping or its replacement by /ʔ/ under emphasis in hot – after Wells “the most powerful pronunciation shibboleth in England” (1982 pt. 1: 254) – were not only socially distinctive but psychologically defeating, like dropping catches in cricket (cf. Trudgill 1975: 32). Popular labels like “backstreet twang”, “singsong” or “talking down your nose” for the velarized quality of working-class Liverpool and West Midland speech proved the low prestige of urban vernacular versions, among which Birmingham Brum was particularly castigated for its “ugliness”, while London Cockney was blamed for not being “musical” (cf. Wright 1974: 48; Knowles 1978: 81; Wells 1982 pt. 1: 93). Physiological interpretations with a clear social bias were adding to the discrimination of the vernaculars of big industrial cities such as Birmingham, whose local speakers were quite seriously accused of making “only partial use of their speech organs, their breathing being shallow and their muscular agility weak” – reason enough to declare urban accents to be “debased” in the late 1960s (cf. Macaulay 1977: 70). As late as in the mid-seventies, East London vernacularspeaking children were still blamed for “lacking entire sounds and words in their vocal repertoire”, and grammatical urban dialect features were judged “incomplete”, “lazy”, “wrong”, and therefore “inferior” in an article in The

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Guardian of 6 December 1975 (quoted in Trudgill 1978: 21). Correspondingly, Dwight Bolinger characterized the prevailing language attitudes with the words: “Inferior people speak in inferior ways. Naturally. And the differences that mark their speech tend to be stigmatized” (1980: 45).

1.3.2

(Dis)qualifying accent judgements

Being linked with moral or pragmatic evaluation, aesthetic judgements frequently served to underline and explain the low social acceptability of broadly dialectal speech, in contrast to the highly acceptable “standard” variant. Traditional differences, however, were still valid between a relative acceptance of original country dialects and a general rejection of strong industrial accents. Whereas the former were tending to be considered “quaint”, “soft”, “pleasing” and “musical”, as relics of bygone days in the tranquillity of rural landscapes, strongly urban or industrial accents were stamped “unattractive” and “ugly”, being either associated with the industrial working class and with the noise and dirt of large industrial cities, or simply treated as “errors” (cf. Halliday 1968: 163; Trudgill 1979: 18 et al.). Again, judgements were made arbitrarily on social grounds when the Cockney vowels were rejected as “ugly” in boot [əʊ] and paint [aɪ], while the same features seemed perfectly acceptable in RP boat and pint (cf. Germer 1966: 14), or when use of [n] for [N] in ing-endings in working-class speech was widely stigmatized, after having been firmly established in upper-class speech for centuries (see 2.3.1). What was judged “nice” in RP might be perceived “unpleasant” in an American speaker so that American nasalization was hated by many in the manner of a “moderate form of tribalism” (Mittins 1970: 115; cf. Brook 1979: 11), and when post-vocal r, with its reverse prestige pattern in England and the USA, was generally rejected by members of the older generations – while Americans, in turn, used to accuse the English of dropping their r’s, as r-lessness was judged “ugly”, being an attribute of Black speech (cf. Wells 1982: 35) – exaggerated national feelings among the older generations may have influenced negative accent judgements even more decisively than the traditional contempt for English regional accents. According to Hughes and Trudgill (1979: 3), RP had remained for most people “the best and even the most ‘beautiful’ accent” because of its association with high social status. Even in Scotland, where sociolinguistic patterning was quite different and English RP did “not provide a model for any significant proportion of the population” except among the highest of aristocracy (cf. Macaulay 1978: 139)17, RP was rated most pleasant

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and English urban accents most unpleasant (cf. Trudgill 1979: 18). With his high appraisal of RP, John Honey, in a Wyld-like manner, proved the persisting relevance of traditional aesthetic clichés in upper middle-class accent evaluation, regarding the prestigious accent a “vehicle for elegance and precision” (1989: 177) and the wider language “a treasure trove of precious things whose beauty can, at least in some degree, be measured in the way they are spoken” (ibid. 180; comp. Wyld 1934: 605 ff.; see 2.3.3). More substantial than aesthetic judgements were references to mutual intelligibility between speakers of different English dialects or accents, including the “standard” language and RP. After BBC audience research findings in the 1940s had declared that dialect speakers of the North had relatively little difficulty understanding standard English and RP, comprehension difficulties were in fact admitted in twenty-five percent of listeners in Yorkshire and Lancashire in the late seventies (cf. Leitner 1979: 15). RP speakers, on the other hand, proved unable to understand certain items or sequences of dialectal speech, and different regional dialects, too, might turn out as “mutually incomprehensible” (O’Donnell 1980: 34). Most obvious differences continued to exist between Southern-based “standard” speech and the dialects of the North, between educated regional speech and urban vernaculars as well as between broad dialects of considerable geographical distance, in spite of dialect convergence and standardization under the influence of sociocultural mobility. According to Peter Wright (1974), handicaps to understanding industrial language were numerous on the phonetic level, including contractions in examples as Wossuppal meaning What’s up pal or Groutnshurrup for Get out and shut up (p. 227). By its very defenders, Yorkshire dialect was proudly claimed to be “virtually a foreign language in its spoken form” (Kellett 1991: 4), with an intonation, vocabulary and idiom largely incomprehensible to people outside the county unless modified “for the benefit of unenlightened incomers or off-comed-uns” (ibid.). Similarly, only few speakers of standard English were believed to have the necessary command of rhyming slang (filling 135 pages in Julian Franklyn’s Dictionary of 1991) and the full understanding of London Cockney vocabulary and idioms, let alone the acoustic regulation to follow the speech of insiders within the sound of Bow Bells. In addition to words and pronunciation, to understatements, exaggerations, similes, and to quick and clever replies, speed was considered to give additional problems, as the Cockney “rushes through his sentences at a break-neck speed” (Franklyn 1991: 15), and factory talk can be “agonizingly slow or

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breathtakingly fast” (Wright 1974: 127, cf. 128 ff.). Misunderstandings were considered to be even more serious than temporary communication breakdown, limiting mutual sympathy and thus inhibiting social interaction, and, at the worst, English dialects might become like different languages, acting as “a language barrier in our midst” (Kellett 1991: 4). It was in the same sense that Wright pointed to the existence of “big comprehension problems, particularly in large firms”, and to the necessity to “understand the language of both sides of industry to appreciate their true hopes and intentions” (Wright 1974: 157). However far comprehension difficulties may have gone among speakers of different dialects, claims about the unintelligibility of dialectal speech have to be regarded with caution. So actual articulatory differences between English accents were considered comparatively small and difficulties in fact only temporary and fairly readily overcome in communication by Abercrombie (1951: 381), Trudgill (1979: 18) and Widdowson (personal information 2003), and while the only mutually unintelligible variants have always been some original dialects, the most severe criticism on grounds of unintelligibility was directed at urban industrial dialects, judged “slovenly”, “careless” and “degenerate” (cf. Halliday 1968: 163). Again it was argued by sociolinguists that listeners’ attitudes might be strongly affected by the knowledge of who was likely to use the accent and of his social attributes, and claims about comprehension difficulties on grounds of low accent intelligibility were held to be “probably most often … rationalisations for unfavourable attitudes to lowstatus varieties” (Trudgill 1979: 19) so that, after Halliday, the trouble of dropping aitches lay “not in a different vowel system but in a different value system” (1978: 162). The idea of a relationship between “acceptability” and “status” was confirmed and linked with the concept of “power” by Milroy and Milroy (1985), claiming that in sociolinguistic hierarchies values like logic, beauty and comprehensibility will be attributed to the linguistic variety of “the persons of high status and with the greatest potential for exercising power” (p. 109), what proves true of all prestigious variants of English, from twelfth century London-based Southern speech over RP to alternative conceptions a “standard” pronunciation (see 1.5.1; 2.1.3; and 3.5.1).

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1.4

Evaluation stereotypes

1.4.1

From personality traits to North/South divide

When language judgements were systematically investigated in the 1970s and 80s, more or less psychologically-determined evaluation stereotypes were recognized in connection with the accents of different regions. On grounds of acquired notions of what personal characteristics went together with which accents (cf. Trudgill 1975: 56), certain articulatory norms were found to be aligned to particular social groups and to be linked with psychological, ethical, political and cultural judgements. So, for many, the substitution of [ɪə] by [ɛə] in near suggested an “educated speaker” and “high prestige”, [jə] for [jɔ:] in your unmasked the “transparental populist”, and while the accented first syllable in ‘dispute might betray “Trade Unionists”, the same stress pattern in ‘weekend was considered a “transatlantic offence” (Zimmermann 1982: 430 ff.). Stereotyped qualities were firmly attributed to particular regional communities, such as high self-confidence to Londoners, honesty and reliability to Yorkshire-accented speakers, and “hard” Northern g and k in brig (bridge) and kirk (church) were standing for “hard Northerness” versus “soft Southerness” (cf. Giles 1971: 280; Wales 2000: 10). Likewise, dialectal tone patterns were found to suggest group-specific personality traits, such as an easygoing nature and simple-mindedness in the slow and melodious speaking Southerner, an attitude of boredom conveyed by Tyneside level tones, arrogance and dominance in London Cockney-style speakers, old backwardness in Geordie dulcet tones, and taciturnity and unfriendliness in East Anglians or other rural people (cf. Giles/Powesland 1975: 21; Pellow/Jones 1978: 102; Honey 1989: 127; Trudgill 1990: 14). Even more disturbingly, moralpragmatic status judgements like “corruptness”, “laziness” and “lack of intelligence” tended to be associated with speakers of lower-status groups (cf. Trudgill 1974: 20), and irritating dimensions of accent prejudice were reached in a Labour MP’s judgements branding the Liverpool accent as “a symbol of brutalism”, London Cockney as the accent of “the shrewd operator”, and Yorkshire blunt as “bluff” of “the new men of power” (cf. Honey 1989: 127). The absurdity and the potential hazards of accent judgements, implying not only social but also ethnic assault, was summed up by Robinson (1979) as follows: “The jovial contempt in which Lancastrians and Yorkshiremen are alleged to hold each other is equalled only by the united contempt they both feel for southerners. But all three cooperate sympathetically in the face of a

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common enemy – foreigners” (p. 244). Accent connotations may be astonishingly persistent but also changing with time, though not necessarily for the better, as confirmed by Morrish in 1999: “It is not long since Scouse meant native wit and charm: now it is associated with fecklessness. Brum sounds miserable. Cockney sounds devious and aggressive. West Country speakers, among whom I proudly include myself, sound like simpletons” (p. 3). Although, in the early 1960s, Charles Barber had recognized an “entirely new situation” in the North, especially in Yorkshire and Lancashire, being characterized by a strong local pride and contempt for the “cissy South” (1964: 27), and even though Northern regional speech was beginning to become an important social identity marker in newly educated speech (see below 3.2.1 and 3.2.2), the North remained “another country … rarely seen as essential to ‘Englishness’ and national identity” (cf. Wales, 2006:28) and broad accents continued to be discriminated against Southern-influenced speech to a greater or lesser extent. The sociocultural North-South divide was further widened when, since the later seventies, increasing economic activity and wealth in the South were contrasting with ongoing decline in the North, and overall population movements were proceeding from North to South, with in-migrants predominantly young and well educated (cf. Williams/Kerswill 1999: 160 f.). According to Katie Wales (2000), however, the resulting changes in the Northern and Southern population structures may have accounted for the fact that “North” and “working class” became synonymous for many people in the South, in connection with various kinds of sociopsychological discrimination, and Northerners, in return, came to despise not only RP but all Southern educated speech as “posh” and “la-di-dah”, indistinguishably linked in their minds with /ʌ/ in butter and /ɑ:/ in bath (cf. pp. 6, 10). Moreover, it was the climate, with the mists coming in from the Irish Sea, which was made responsible for the “adenoidal” quality of the Scouse accent, while, according to an article in The Guardian of 10 September 1998, the granite and grid of the Pennines were felt to be matched by the “hard(y) or ‘gritty’ Northerners with their ‘hard’ consonants, ‘granite speech’ and ‘wind-swept vowels” (cf. Wales 2006: 25) In spite of its traditional sociocultural prestige (see above 1.1.1), the Yorkshire dialect was still tending to be regarded by outsiders as “irresistibly comic”, “clownish” and “common” in the early nineties, being associated with the “loud-mouthed, slow-whitted inhabitants of … the barbaric North”, and with stereotyped images of “old chaps in clothcaps and mufflers, or backward yokels mucking out the cows” (cf. Kellett 1991: 3,7). After

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the turn of the century, its accent was still considered “the most commonly mocked accent in the British Isles”, being “forever working-class and therefore comical” (Johnson in The Daily Telegraph 20/11/02: 25). The prejudice had remained so widespread that nearly everybody continued to couch embarrassing features in it, in order to denote his or her own “distance, irony, the feeling of not wanting to be associated too much with the sentiment of “‘E’s a looveleh man’, ‘Nice ‘ere, in’t it!” (ibid.). On grounds of long-established prejudice, the cultural image of Northerners in the media, advertisements, cartoons and jokes continued to be governed by flat caps, brown ale and brass bands, as against the soft, civilized South with its bowler hats, thatched cottages, luncheon and village green (cf. Wales 2000: 5). Newspapers and the radio were proceeding to make fun of Northern language and its speakers, as happened in a headline in The Daily Telegraph of 9 June 1999, running “Ba gum, there’s an ee in t’Oxford Dictionary”, referring to the popular expression Ee by gum! and the entry of this Ee in the revised Concise Oxford English Dictionary (cf. Wales 2000: 10). To do them justice, the Southerners did not only consider Northerners “hard”, “poor” and “uncouth”, but more positive stereotypes were getting ground, with“friendly”, “down-to-earth”, “hard-working” and “sraightforward” (cf. ibid.; Wales 2006:28). This may be the reason why, when people heard a Yorkshire accent, they reportedly “hear(d) ‘moral’ integrity but never condescension” – an aspect that may have made northern English “the Holy Grail for call-centre managers” (Johnson, The Daily Telegraph 20/11/02: 25). Similarly, nonstandard language was increasingly exploited for special effect in film reviews, travel pieces and catchy headlines in newspapers as well as in hundreds of book titles during the 1990s and later so that, in Crystals words, “an element of acceptable non-standard English” had become “part of our everyday consciousness” (cf. Crystal 2004: 514 f.). Nevertheless, the Yorkshire accent of actor Sean Bean was again castigated by a radio theatre critic as being “several rungs below his own servants”, while it was mistaken for Geordie (i. e. Birmingham vernacular) in the Guardian, and associated with football in The Independent (cf. Johnson qoted above). Thus, the North/South prejudice, in Widdowson’s words of 2003, continues to “set one half of the country against the other – and for that matter set one community against its neighbours in a continuing verbal duel” (personal information). As before, North and South are “loaded terms”, and their polarity makes the North of England commonly

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seen as negative as against the superior South, with London as the centre of power and cultural prestige.

1.4.2

The accent prestige continuum

On the basis of language judgements by persons from different social strata and different geographical areas, an accent prestige continuum was conceived in the 1970s, including English regional, Scottish and Irish accents as well as urban vernaculars and immigrant and foreign accents of English beside RP. The more deviation from RP, the lower was the prestige in accent evaluation in the continuum which, after Trudgill, was “ranging from RP, through various local accents, to the most localised accent associated with the lowest social class” (1974: 38), or, as Giles and Powesland put it, “from RP over all other accents to Birmingham” (1975: 28). While RP, Scots, South Irish, General American and French accents were taking the first places, and South Welsh, Irish and further foreign accents were filling the intermediate range, Northern English (particularly Liverpool Scouse), Somerset, Cockney, Birmingham, West Indian and African accents got the lowest scores (cf. ibid.). Thus, North American and French accents of English were rated higher in status than any English regional accent, in a continuum with industrial vernaculars and immigrant speech at the bottom of the scale (cf. Giles 1970: 212; Bourhis 1975: 58 et al.). Even in an age of growing accent tolerance, broad dialect tolerance had remained minimal, and though the clichés were different in judgements on broad country dialects and urban vernaculars, both groups continued to be devalued in the face of “standard” speech. In 1989, John Honey’s judgements were still standing for the traditional attitudes to accent among the most conservative of the middle classes in England: “If we are English, we are likely to rate the speaker more highly on a number of positive qualities if he uses a standard accent, less highly if he uses one of a certain group of non-standard ones, and generally very unfavourably if it is one of the four or five most disfavoured ones” (p. 97). According to findings by Howard Giles and others, RP was scoring high in evaluation tests, being generally upgraded in terms of social prestige and implying personality characteristics as intelligence, leadership, social status and self-confidence, conveniently summed up under “competence”, whereas regional accent meant a “social stigma” (cf. 1972: 168), and non-RP-speaking persons continued to be judged “simple”, “stupid” or “provincial” in evaluation tests (cf. Giles et al. 1991: 207 f.). Through traditional relationships be-

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tween accent prestige and occupational status, RP speech was usually assigned to professional occupations, and arguments of RP speakers might be considered more worthy of consideration and cooperativeness than those of regionally accented speakers (cf. Giles 1970: 225).18 On the other hand, dialectal speech was generally upgraded by its own speakers in terms of social integrity and attractiveness as well as of moral values like honesty, reliability, seriousness and warmheartedness so that requests might be readily fulfilled for a regional speaker, whose accent implied integrity and identification and could thus be more “persuading” than a standard voice (cf. Giles 1972: 169; 1971: 280; Edwards 1982: 24). Similar to RP-speaking men, RP-speaking women were judged more competent but less likeable on all levels of social interaction, being highly self-confident, egalitarian in the home and with fewer children, more aggressive and egoistic, more irritable and less sincere than their regionally accented counterparts, and in a position to exert some control over their social environments (cf. Elyan/Smith et al. 1978: 128 f.). Their voices were linked with intelligence and competence, with high occupation, salary and social status, and with a wide behavioural repertoire and flexibility enabling them to cope with a variety of situations and demands. Judging from the position of the traditional role stereotypes with a clear masculine bias, the startling fact that prestigious speech allowed women “to accentuate femininity and succeed in man-dominated pursuits” made their accent appear as “the voice of perceived androgyny” (ibid. 130). Meanwhile, changes seem to have occurred in the perception of female RP, possibly in connection with the emergence of Estuary English (see 3.4 and 3.4.2) and its perceived “toughness”, in comparison to RP, in both men and women (cf. Coggle 1993: 86). In the early nineties, however, Fairy (washing up ads) was “promoting a soft and gentle image which [was] deemed to be best served by soft-voiced females using conservative RP” (ibid. 79).

1.4.3

Reactions to RP

When Gimson pointed to the “controversies and emotions” RP was arousing in his time (cf. IPE 1970: 83), he referred to the wide range of reactions to its different variants, reaching from deep admiration to utmost hate and disgust as described more closely by sociolinguists as Abercrombie (1951: 385 f.), Atkinson (1975: 70) and others. As the “cut-glass accent”19 tended to be taken as “a mark of affectation or a desire to emphasize social superiority” (Gimson IPE 1970: 86), resulting coldness and even personal rejection on the side of 50

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the listener might be a severe hindrance to social interaction between members of different backgrounds. Just as, after Barber, a World War II barrack room would have reacted unfavourably to anybody thought to be to “putting on linguistic airs” (1964: 26), a notion of upper-class voices “talking people down” and qualifications as “arrogant”, “selfish”, “bourgois”, “pompous” and “patronizing” later made RP increasingly unacceptable for social reasons in characteristically working class environs and situations (cf. Atkinson 1975: 70; Elyan et al. 1978: 123; Crystal 1995: 365) and grossly unadvantageous in connection with issues of national or ethnic identity in Scotland and Wales20. It was particularly the advanced variant that had been losing prestige since the sixties, with a resulting pressure on its speakers to modify extreme accents in the direction of the more generally acceptable (cf. Wells 1982 pt. 1: 248). For many regional speakers, however, all RP was “affected” and thus despised or ridiculed for its “awkwardly old-fashioned effect” (Lewis 1985: 255), in protest against its air of traditional social superiority, and the use of the traditional prestige accent might even be discriminated in a way that listeners came to “attribute to its user social attitudes of an illiberality of which he [was] not guilty” (ibid.). More than a decade later, in an article by Forbes in The Express of 5 May 1998, the social effect of the prestigious tone of voice was summed up with the words: “The one accent which is a positive handicap in New Britannia is the old upper-class bray”. Until recently, RP speakers continued to complain that their accents made them “the subject of prejudice” (cf. Morris 1999: 3) and that they were “blamed” for their characteristic intonation (“and now we are blamed for it”; female senior academic 2006). Giles and others (1991) had found further negative stereotypes in a particular intellectual downgrading of RP, on grounds of certain general linguistic features and lower speech rate associated with elderly speakers, as against young speedy speech, signalling efficiency and competence (cf. p. 199 f., 210). It was assumed that class-based inferences might be mediated decisively by more complex interpretations including assumptions regarding the age and possibly also the sex of the speaker (cf. p. 199 ff.). Under these circumstances, the topic of accent was avoided by the conservative-minded to prevent, in Honey’s words, “scrutiny and possible criticism of the class system of which accent variety is seen as an integral part” (Honey 1989: 165). “Oxford English”, as it was called by those who accepted and admired it (see Dear’s title of Oxford English. A Guide to the Language, published in 1986), but more often so by those who disliked it on social grounds, some-

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times meaning “RP in general” but more often “exaggerated upper-class” (cf. Brook 1979: 40; Wells 1982 pt. 2: 280 f.), was resented as the language of the traditional Establishment mainly by members of the younger generation who were “less and less in sympathy with the attitudes that sustained it” (Lewis 1985: 255). Upper-crust RP, in particular, was generally regarded as incongruous outside the realms of the Royal Family, the greatest of aristocracy, top civil servants and a minority of teachers in some famous public schools and Oxbridge colleges (cf. Honey 1989: 83). Its practical usefulness was considerably diminished in a time when “the imperious tone of marked RP had the distinct power to raise other people’s hackles” (ibid.), and what had once been of great advantage to social standing was now better avoided, having become “more of a liability than an advantage for most purposes” (ibid. 95). As, after Cruttenden (1994: 80), the prestige of what he called “Refined RP” (see 2.3.1) was increasingly declining and the type often regarded as “affected” and severely ridiculed, its speaker might be looked upon as “a figure of fun”, both by speakers of regional accents and by other RP speakers. In a time when the family dining room was becoming “that ‘posh’ room” in the minds of the middle-class young and T-glottalling a “must” in familiar conversation, “posh” became synonymous with a lifestyle exclusive as well as outdated, and with a pronunciation marked by Upper-crust or conservative RP. A list of adjectives found by students when listening to a recording of conservative RP and presented by Paul Coggle in 1993, is speaking for itself: “stiff and starchy, plummy, cold, formal, pompous, posh, stuck-up, exclusive, overprecise, prissy, delicate, effeminate [of a male speaker]” (p. 85). Like “Oxford English”, the word “posh” has in its linguistic sense remained ambiguous, meaning either conspicuous or exclusive RP, respectively. (cf. “RP is the educated English accent of which ‘posh’ is only one variant”; Morrish 1999: 1), or simply referring to RP as a whole (“There never was just one ‘posh’ accent”; ibid.)21. Whatever it was definitely considered to be, everybody had acquired a notion of it by the turn of the century, and there were, after Morrish, “plenty of people who would be ashamed to speak like that” (ibid. 1), both on grounds of its association with the Establishment and of the outdated image of a voice seen as “naff” and “unfashionable” (ibid.). Despite the low rating of RP voices on the integrity scale and the decrease in the accent’s general prestige, however, there remained the striking fact that in evaluation tests the general public seemed more favourably disposed to the RP accent than to others, and this not only in terms of various aspects of com-

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petence, but also of good looks, tallness and cleanliness and even of certain moral values as reliability, solidarity and attractiveness, being attributed to more “standard” speakers (cf. Giles 1970: 168 ff.; Elyan/Smith et al. 1978: 123; Edwards 1982: 3 et al.)22. According to Abercrombie (1951: 386), many reacted as if “no RP – no virtues”, though most of them did not use it themselves, and two decades later a regional voice was still tending to be considered “less good than a standard speaker’s voice” (Ellis 1972: 878). Analogous to persisting notions of the superiority of a “standard”, which for many people was “the only variety that matter[ed]” and the only “real” and “proper” English in the eyes of its defendants (cf. Brook 1973: 24; O’Donnell/Todd 1980: 16 f.), RP appeared to be judged the “normal” accent against “abnormal” nonstandard pronunciation by those who spoke it, and differences from “correct” English tended to be looked upon as “deficiencies to be overcome” (cf. Halliday 1968: 166; Wolfram/Fasold 1979: 186). Towards the end of the century, there was still the impression that “most English people react[ed] with deference to the sound of RP” (Ascherson 1994: 2), and experimental results were suggesting that BBC audiences found an RP voice “more reliable and credible” than a regionally accented one (ibid.). After Kerswill (2006), the “folkloristic perception” was still “one of speaking more or less ‘good’ or ‘bad’ English”, with the “bad” being the localized varieties and the “good” being “tied to the notion that Standard English and RP are ideals” (p. 101). One reason among others for the surprising overall uniformity of speakers’ reactions to RP, irrespective of their social backgrounds, was seen in the special character of evaluation procedures, which might have an additional stabilizing influence on the generalization of institutionally imposed language principles in the results (cf. Strongman/Woosley 1967: 164; Giles/Ryan 1982: 217 ff.). The assumption, however, that there were “stereotyped personality impressions” on grounds of a complex matrix of attitudes concerning the relationship between the language and the speaker’s personality (cf. Giles 1970: 211 ff.; Giles/Powesland 1975: 67) was leading to an “Imposed norm hypothesis”, after which individual judgements on RP were supposed to be determined by common beliefs and prejudices in the form of traditional evaluation stereotypes. Long-term social pressures were supposed to function as “mechanisms of social conditioning” (cf. Giles/Powesland 1975: 11; Halliday 1968: 165), leading to what Milroy and Milroy later described as a “mismatch between actual usage and what people publicly claim to think” (1985: 19), rooted in some agreement in the wider community on the stigmatization or prestige of

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certain linguistic usages. Traditionally internalized attitudes like these were considered to be one of the reasons for the persisting power of RP, deriving its strength from “institutionally recognized ideologies of status and upward mobility” (Milroy 1980: 180).

1.4.4

Linguistic self-hatred

Long-term effects of social conditioning were constituting the basis for linguistic self-hatred and frustration among regionally accented speakers of lower middle- and working-class backgrounds, either through the perception of RP as the voice of social power against “powerless” (socioregional) speech styles (cf. Giles/Ryan 1982: 208), or through its traditional connotation of educatedness (cf. Honey 1989: 681). Under the pressure to conform, people were tending to evaluate their own accent more favourably than the accent of the region, and linguistic snobbery made them think it was RP while their neighbours had “an accent” (cf. Giles 1970: 221). Broadly accented speakers, in particular, became convinced by the influence of schools and the media and by their own experience that they could not speak English properly (“I know I speak terrible”, “I’m a very poor speaker”; cf. Trudgill 1975: 68) and that their regional speech must really be inferior to a standard voice (cf. Halliday 1968: 165; O’Donnell/Todd 1980: 91). The broader the accent, the less prestige it had even among members of the respective speech community23, so that the group of even the most highly accented speakers was found to evaluate RP speakers most favourably, and this not only on competence traits. Being a most spectacular case of linguistic self-hatred, the storm of protest to the Halifax accent of Yorkshire entertainer and newsreader Wilfred Pickles during the War had come from his own region – with the result that the experiment had to be stopped, mainly because he stuck to short /a/ in bath as one of the most salient Northern identity markers (cf. Quirk 1972: 72; Gough 1982: 246; Wales 2000: 12, et al.). More recently, parents were irritated when their children were picking up the Estuary accent at school (see 3.4 and 3.4.2), which was still widely associated in the early nineties with “being badly educated” or with “football hooligans”, and considered to involve “using wrong words” and to limit the “ability to express oneself” (quoted from parents’ letters in Coggle 1993: 91). Even those who were Estuary speakers themselves were demanding to get “something better” for their children (ibid. 92), and there was self-denigration among Estuary-speaking students striving to “improve” their speech which they considered “wrong” or “common” (ibid.).

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The fact that non-standard speakers were tending to share the attitudes of society as a whole was giving rise to anxieties and frustration in connection with speech sounds and to feelings of linguistic inferiority and self-hatred in the face of prestigious speech. As people were “nervous and anxious about their speech sounds” (Abercrombie 1965: 15), ideas might remain unexpressed to avoid language “errors”. Attempts to imitate educated pronunciation might show the inability to do so, exposing the speaker to ridicule or pity on the side of the listener, with the effect that feelings of social embarrassment among non-RP speakers were leading to a far-reaching taboo on accent markers in conversation (cf. Spencer 1958: 19 f.; Barber 1964: 18; Abercrombie 1965: 15; 1952: 385). The “accent-bar” as postulated by Abercrombie and Halliday (see 1.2.1) was considered to be acting like a “colour-bar”, making the speaker feel “ashamed of his own language habits … as indefensible as to make him feel ashamed of the colour of his skin” (Halliday 1968: 165). Characteristically, “unfavourable” (i. e. socioregional) accent connotations were found to be upgraded into more “favourable” (i. e. RP-like) ones through the use of the high speech rate and the high pitch variability of RP, and the perceived low competence of regional speech might be neutralized or reversed by high lexical diversity and a productive communication style, rendering regionally accented speech “quite standard” in the listener’s perception (cf. Giles/Ryan 1982: 210 ff.). Across ethnic barriers, ambitious Blacks were advised to “break into that system by exploiting the standard form of language and accent in Britain” and, through the use of RP, to defuse prejudice by signalling “identification with the values of the wider society” (Honey 1989: 161, 164). It was the tension between the institutionalized upgrading of RP and the downgrading of all other accents which was giving rise to a wide range of judgements on prestigious speech, reaching, in Barber’s words, from “posh” and “affected” to “desirably refined” (cf. 1964: 17).

1.5

RP: the controversial image

1.5.1

Recent criticism

Since the middle of the past century, serious doubts about the rightfulness of the dominating role of a language “standard” as well as a deep aversion to its authoritative character in general and to the RP accent in particular had been leading to alternative conceptions, finally dismissing RP from the inventory.

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In 1951, David Abercrombie regarded it as “an anachronism in present-day democratic society” (p. 386), and, beyond this, he was the first to consider the wider standard language to be in striking social and political contrast to all other varieties (cf. 1956: 44 ff.). Being only “a sign of the type, not of the degree of education” (ibid. 50), RP did, in his view, no longer represent the pronunciation of the educated but, as a status symbol, divided the population into those who spoke it and those who did not, and while placing the former in a privileged social category, exposed the latter to social discrimination (cf. ibid. 53). Peter Strevens who, like many others, accepted the existence of a standard English dialect with largely homogeneous grammatical and lexical patterns within Britain and worldwide, nevertheless denied a standard function of RP, arguing that almost the only people who thought there was a standard accent of English were “a small number of RP speakers who felt that their accent was (or should be) in some way superior” (1964: 26). Whereas O’Donnell and Todd regarded the term “Received” as “at best meaningless, even possibly misleading” so that it was “better to stick to the initials” (1980: 41), it was just the abbreviation of the term to its initials which Ronald Macaulay felt to be an embodiment of authority and an act of conferring additional power, so that the accent appeared to be “a kind of national institution its speakers believed it to be” (1988: 121). Discussing the history of a standard notion of RP under the headline of “RP R.I.P.” (cf. also Crystal’s paragraph on RP entitled “Requiescat in Pace” in 1995: 365), Macaulay argued that there was no longer any justification for assigning a special status to RP for there was “no such entity as RP except as a prescriptive model for the upwardly mobile” (121 f.), and that the sooner the term was dropped the better chances there were for a serious study of English speech (cf. ibid.). The same position was reaffirmed by Ascherson asking about the prestigious accent, “Received by whom, and from whom?” (1994: 1), and by Morrish despising “posh” as its most conspicuous, though in some domains curiously tenacious, variant (cf. Morrish 1999: 1). In both cases, the final judgement was a close end to all RP, either in that “Britain’s crumbling ruling class is losing the accent of authority” (Ascherson ibid.) or that “posh talk becomes passé, and RP dies out” (Morrish ibid.). The tenor of the discussion was brought to a point by Morrish: “The distinctive accent of upper-crust Britain is in danger of extinction, neglected by its owners and threatened by rougher accents off the streets. No wonder some want to put it in a zoo, where it can be studied and admired before it expires” (ibid.). Getting to the core of the matter, Kerswill,

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about a decade later, pointed to the basically social character of attitudes to the accent, statin that the “privileged social position of the users of RP meant, and still means, that discussion of it can be sensitive, and the nuances make a difference” (2007: 48). Though loved by few and hated by many, the image of the traditional prestige accent as a model for pronunciation continued to be maintained in a considerable number of linguistic judgements. In the early 1980s, Wells saw RP as a “de facto standard” (1982 pt. 1: 104), and, defining a standard accent as “the one which, at a given time and place, is generally considered correct; it is held up as a model of how you ought to speak, it is encouraged in the classroom, it is widely regarded as the most desirable accent for a person in a highstatus profession to have”, it was, in his judgement, “RP which enjoy[ed] this status” (ibid. 34; RP as “standard” see 2.5 and 2.6). In his 1990 Pronunciation Dictionary he again gave the transcriptions of a modernized version of RP, which he still considered to be “regarded as a model for correct pronunciation, particularly for educated formal speech”, in England and Wales (cf. p. XII). A few years later, he still recognized a “Platonic notion”, with RP as the ideal accent to which many still aspired (cf. 1994 (1): 4), and McArthur (1992), as before, considered Gimson’s description of RP in the Introduction to the Pronunciation of English “widely regarded as standard”, and the accent itself “often referred to simply as Standard English” (p. 851 f.). Cultural values were brought into play by Honey, relating the importance of the accent to “the value ascribed to certain formal and literary uses of speech” (1989: 176), and by Wardhaugh who, basing his convictions on Marenbon’s English Our English of 1987, underlined the stabilizing and unifying qualities of the traditional bonds of a standard language with the words: “We all believe that there does exist something we can call a standard English … it bonds us” (1999: 100). In addition, there were pragmatic arguments in favour of the “standard” pronunciation, when Foulkes and Docherty (1999: 12) referred to RP as “the standard variety” or “the standard accent”, considered to play a prominent role in phonetic descriptions, with its typological pattern resulting from the social history of the language and the dominance of the standard variety. About the same time, Esling did not hesitate to answer his own question about the one accent accepted as “standard” and enjoying higher prestige than any other with: “This is true of RP (Received Pronunciation) in the UK” (1998: 170). In Katie Wales’ words of the year 2000, RP continued to be associated “not only with royalty and the aristocracy, but with Oxbridge, the public [private] schools

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and the BBC” (p. 10). Kerswill, too, underlined “the powerful position of Standard English, especially when associated with a powerful class accent, Received Pronunciation (or BBC, Queen’s, etc., English” (2001:5). Even though definitions of RP in dictionaries were reflecting basic issues of recent sociolinguistic discussion, it was with a clear bias towards the accent’s traditional prestige. RP was considered “typical of many people in the South of England” in the Dictionary of English Language and Culture 1992 (p. 1151), labelled “Southern British English” in the Cambridge International Dictionary of English 1995 (p. 1183), or characterized as basically “Southern English” in the Oxford Dictionary and Thesaurus 1997 (p. 1277). Its use was extended to “most educated speakers of the language in England” (Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary 1992: 752), and it was further ascribed to “many educated people in every part of Britain” (Dictionary of English Language and Culture 1992: 1151). Linked to the accent’s educated South English background was its social function, in definitions such as “standard Southern British English” (Collins English Dictionary 1992: 1294), “a standard form … often used by the BBC” (Dictionary of English Language and Culture 1992: 1151), or “the standard way in which middle-class speakers of Southern British English pronounce words” (Cambridge International Dictionary of English 1995: 1183). The “standard” function of RP was underlined by the alternative term of “Received Standard” for “received pronunciation” in the Oxford Dictionary and Thesaurus of 1997 (p. 1277), and it was explicitly included in the accent’s definition as “the standard form of British pronunciation, based on educated speech in Southern England” in the 2000 Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (p. 1117). The entry was redefined into “the standard form of British English pronunciation” and supplemented with “widely accepted as a standard elsewhere” for notation in The New Oxford Dictionary of English of 2001 (p. 1548, the latter part replacing a 2000 OALD reference to RP being “most commonly taught in language schools” p. 1117), while in Collins Dictionary for Advanced Learners of 2001, the accent’s standard function became fully reduced to teaching purposes: “Received Pronunciation is a way of pronouncing British English that is often used as a standard in the Teaching of English as a Foreign Language” (p. 1283). However, in consequence of persisting traditions, “The accent represented by the pronunciation in this dictionary is Received Pronunciation” (ibid.). Even more clearly standard-oriented, though socially and regionally confined to southern middle-class pronunciation, the Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of

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2003 again underlined the traditional correlation between RP and the BBC, again defining both “Received Pronunciation” and “BBC English” as “the standard way in which middle-class speakers of southern British English pronounce words” (ibid. 1040, 95; the same definition see above Cambridge International Dictionary of English 1995). Leaving the terms of BBC English and Standard English unrecorded, the 2004 Concise Oxford English Dictionary, in an unexpectedly strong re-evaluation of the accent’s standard function, even more recently declared “received pronunciation … the standard form of British English pronunciation, based on educated speech in southern England” (ibid. 1200). Likewise, the 2005 Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary considered Received Pronunciation or RP to be “widely accepted as the standard accent for both native and foreign speakers of British English” and to be “considered the correct form of speech” (Oxford Advanced Learner’s Compass). Thus, until the turn of the century and beyond, RP continued to be almost unanimously regarded in dictionaries as the typical marker of educated speech and, with it, of standard English (see 3.5.1). Its centuries-long involvement in the realms of high social prestige, with resulting connotations of official authority, cultural value and linguistic perfection, had preserved a traditional image seemingly unchallenged by adverse criticism on grounds of post-War changes in the pattern of educated pronunciation.

1.5.2

Social prestige

In spite of unprecedented diversity in post-War RP24 and a widening range of social applications, the accent remained prestigious and closely associated with its traditional London background. In Daniel Jones’s slightly updated definition of RP in his 1960 Everyman’s Pronouncing Dictionary (p. XV), the accent was still basically defined as the pronunciation “usually heard in everyday speech in the families of Southern English people who [had] been educated at the public schools” as well as of “a majority of Londoners who [had] had a university education” (comp. 1st edn. 1917: VIII). As Trim put it a year later, “the younger and better educated a person is, the higher his social status and the closer his connection with London, then the closer his speech is likely to approximate to RP” (1961: 31). As before, RP was considered to be “associated with a higher level of education, or a higher social class, or both” (Barber 1964: 26); it was held to be closely linked with Oxford, the BBC and professional people in England (cf. Abercrombie 1956: 49; Quirk 1968: 87) and with the great public schools, particularly of Eton and Winchester, tradi-

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tionally regarded as the main factor in the formation of the speech habits of the young elíte (cf. Germer 1967: 14). In a letter of 19 November 1993, J. C. Wells remembered his own days at a public school in the North where “the local gentry (land-owning upper class) spoke in unquestioned RP, in marked contrast to such middle-class people as factory-owners and local schoolteachers”, and where “strong peer pressure was exerted on pupils to conform not only in speech but also in many other matters”. In the 1950s, according to Spencer (1958: 21), the decision on the “acceptable” and the “non-acceptable” continued to lie in the judgements of ex-public school alumni who, by small acoustic differences, distinguished between “those who belong[ed]” and “those who [did] not belong”, knowing “perhaps unconsciously the extent of the phonetic limits of speech which they consider[ed] ‘received’”. Abercrombie, who had seen in immediate post-War RP an accent of privilege and prestige, conferring “considerable advantages on those who [spoke] it” in the 1950s (1956: 49), later again characterized its social role with the words: “There is no doubt that RP is a privileged accent: your social life, or your career, or both, may be affected by whether you possess it or not” (1965: 13). In the 1960s, the “wrong accent” continued to be “an impediment to social intercourse or to advancement or entry in certain professions” (Gimson 1962: 81), while “the right school plus the right pronunciation [would] get you further than a science degree from a redbrick university, plus the wrong pronunciation” (Barber 1964: 25). In 1979, Hughes and Trudgill again underlined the social determination of the prestigious accent which, in their words, had “remained the accent of those in the upper reaches of the social scale, as measured by education, income and profession, or title” and was “essentially the accent of those educated at public schools” (p. 2 f.). The “old boy network” remained an enormous asset in many spheres and a magnet for the upwardly mobile so that RP continued to dominate every major institution of the country, with seventy-seven percent of the members of the Conservative Cabinet25, eighty percent of High Court judges and ninety percent of the Royal Navy senior officers still being from public schools in 1971 (cf. Morgan/Morgan 1980: 85). Under these circumstances, Gimson pointed to the accent’s “association with the Establishment” (IPE 1970: 86), and Lewis later applied to it the label of “Establishment accent” (1985: 240). Until the end of the century, RP remained a minority accent, with numbers of speakers generally considered to vary around three percent of the population in Britain (cf. Hughes/Trudgill 1979: 3; Honey 1989: 79; Crystal 1995:

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365; Morrish 1999: 2). When, in the same period of time, Wells referred to estimates of ten percent (1982 pt. 1: 118), Trudgill supposed a range between three and five percent (1990: 2), and Wales also assumed five percent (2000: 10), their differing judgements will have been due to varying tolerance in the linguistic definition of RP. The social range, however, which Trim had suggested for RP in 1961 (see above), was still reflected in Hughes and Trudgill (1979) stating that “the higher a person is on the social scale, the less regionally marked will be his accent, and the less it will differ from RP” (p. 6) and characterizing the general situation of language prestige in England with the words: “The most prestigious dialect is standard English; the most prestigious accent is RP” (ibid. 12). In the early 1980s RP still was, after Wells (1982 pt. 1: 104), “a suitable accent for a Newsreader, an ambassador, a classical actress, a barrister, a general, a society hostess”, and, a few years later, Honey again characterized it as “spoken by those who are at the top in social, political, and economic terms, and … exploit its special standing in order to keep themselves at the top” (1989: 65). Although the public schools had lost their monopoly of correct speech together with a good deal of their traditional prestige (cf. Gimson 1984: 46; Barber 1993: 233, 265), they continued to provide an exceptional education26 so that McArthur again regarded “Public School English” the basis of RP, being “distinguished primarily by the so-called public school accent (known technically as Received Pronunciation)” (1992: 821). During the 1990s, in spite of a considerable decrease in its general prestige in England and abroad, the accent was still persisting in most of its traditional domains, with its strongholds in the City of London, the higher reaches of the Civil Service, the armed forces, the Foreign Office, and in other services representing Great Britain worldwide (cf. Barber 1993: 265; Crystal 1995: 365; Mc Arthur 1992: 851) – in short, “the voice of the people in power – in the law, in the City, in the establishment” (Morrish 1999: 1). Being no longer strictly confined to but still closely associated with the upper and middle classes, RP continued to embody upper-class heritage and upper middleclass affiliation in so far as its speakers, by education, profession and social status, proceeded to belong to the dominant classes and to draw their socioeconomic roots from the opportunities offered to them by the Establishment.

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Chapter Two Prestigious Speech Versus Regional Dialect 2.1

Origins of a prestige accent

2.1.1

English resurrection and Southern bias

The history of traditionally prestigious speech in England goes back to the thirteenth century when, after two hundred years of French superiority and in the face of the persistent hegemony of Latin in learning and administration, the English language was beginning to become acceptable again in aristocratic and in public life27. After the loss of Normandy under King John in 1204 and the resulting political independence of the English territory, the English language began to be used again in public documents, the earliest of which was a proclamation by King Henry III of 1258 (cf. Burnley 1992: 113)28, and, slowly but gradually, the image of the French-speaking gentlemen was giving way to that of the English-speaking nobleman. So, in the opening lines of a metrical romance called Arthur and Merlin, probably written about 1325, the anonymous poet annonces to write his work in the mother tongue, underlining that “Of Freynsch, no Latin, nil Y tel more Ac on Inglisch Ischil tel ther fore; Right is, that Inglische vnderstond That was born in Inglond” Freynsche vse this gentilman, Ac euerich1 Inglische, Inglische can. (ll. 19–24; cf. Anon. ed.1838: 2). However, he also suggests a widespread use of English even among the nobles born in the country and the inability of many of them to speak French, as ............................................ 1

everyone

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Mani noble Ich haue y-seighe That no Freynsche couthe seye” (ll. 25 f.; cf. ibid.). In a time of transition like that, however, bilingualism seems to have been the norm in the world of social prestige (cf. Barber 1993: 140 f.; Baugh/Cable ibid. 114), where French was still considered an indispensable attribute to the aristocrat by some and looked upon as a passing fashion by others. So, while Robert of Gloucester, in his Chronicle of about 1300, criticized the existing language hierarchy in which a man was despised for speaking English, the language of the low-born, and appealed to the country to hold on to its mother tongue, he also underlined the usefulness of knowing both English and French for the pupose of social recognition, “Ac wel me wot uor2 to conne boþe wel it is, Vor þe more þat a man can, þe more wurþe he is” (ll. 7542–47; cf. Baugh/Cable 2002:115). With regard to Latin, William of Nassyngton, in his Speculum Vitae or Mirror of Life of about 1325, strongly favoured the use of the mother tongue, declaring that he was going to use no Latin in his work but English with its wide currency among the learned and the unlearned as well, “For þat langage is most chewyd3, Os wel among lered os lewyd4” (ll. 67 f; cf. ibid. 145). Nassyngton’s further description vividly portays the multilingual state-ofaffairs, with Latin being linked to a particular education, and French to the realms of the Court, and the command of both languages being inadequate among many, as

............................................ 2

However, I well know that

3

spoken

4

ignorant

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“… some can of Latyn a party, • at can of Frensche but febly; And somme understonde wel Englysch, • at can noþer Latyn nor Frankys” while English again stands out as the language most widely used, for “Boþe lered and lewed, olde and Zonge, Alle vnderstonden english tonge.” (ll. 73–78; cf. ibid.; see also Smeltz 1977:73 f.). It was by the same reason that, in the 1380s, the Oxford Fellow and priest John of Trevisa justified his translating activity in a dialogue preceding his English version of Ranulph Higden’s mid-thirteenth-century Latin Polychronicon – a vast history of the world – for “mo men scholde hem understonde and have thereof konnyng, informacion and lore” (cf. Burrow/TurvillePetre 1992: 215). After a two hundred years’ almost complete absence of writing in English, the country’s traditional language consisted in a vast number of vernaculars, hardly intelligible to each other at larger geographical distances, particularly so between the North and the South of England, as “…men of myddel Engelond …vndurstondeþ betre þe syde longages, Norþeron and Souþeron, þan Norþeron and Souþeron vndurstondeþ eyþer oþer” (Trevisa’s translation of Higden’s Polychronicon, Chap. lix from Sisam 1992: 149). Due to the well-established political centre, the English that began to gain prestige was the rather mixed but basically East Midland dialect of London, with additional influence from the neighbouring South East and South Central Midlands29, and later also from the North Midlands and further Southern areas (cf. Barber 1993: 144 f.; Wales 2000: 10), though still without its modern South Eastern dominance. As, however, the newly emerging educated variant of English was based on the aristocratic speech of the southern half of England, learned descriptions of the language were from the start written with a clear regional bias. Thus, following William of Malmesbury’s complaint of 1125 on the harshness of Yorkshire speech, Trevisa’s translation (see above) considered Northern speech “so scharp, slyttyng and frotyng* and vnschape, þat we Southeron men may þat longage vnneþe* understonde” (*cutting and grating; *hardly; Trevisa in Sisam 1992: 150). Beyond its traditionally English roots, the developing language of

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London was in fact trilingual (the “trilingual nation” cf. Crystal 2004: 121 ff.), with much French and Latin included, either alone or in mixtures with English, depending on the purpose. A considerable amount of influence has been found by Laura Wright (1996) in business texts produced in London between c. 1270 and c. 1500, containing not only various kinds of documents but also letters, governmental, civic, legal, or private, and written in mixtures of either AngloNorman and English or Latin and English, as in the case of the business archive of London Bridge, covering the late medieval and Early Modern period (cf. p. 1). Consequently, Wright argues, the common practice of referring the origins of standard English to the fifteenth century Chancery English30 of Westminster alone and to exclude mixed-language texts like those, would mean to “ignore the greater part of the written data that survive from the period” and to “impose modern views of language purity upon a culture which demonstrably did not regard functional bilingualism [or, rather, multilingualism] as unusual” (ibid. 3). With the full resurrection of an English central power in the second half of the fourteenth century, Southern English was constantly gaining prestige as the language of the Court, of Parliament (first opened in English in 1362) and political administration as well as of literature and education. As French and Latin were officially replaced by English and documents throughout the country began to be written in the London dialect, after rules determined by the prestigious speech of London aristocracy, Royal officials and clerks were henceforward carrying the language of the Court to all parts of the country, along the major roads leading in and out of London (cf. Crystal 1995: 54; see Plate 1), the centre of political power and cultural attraction. Thus, while prestigious London speech was influenced by features of adjoining areas, it was at the same time, gaining ground on its way from the Capital to the North, spreading and consolidating Southern prestige forms among the learned part of the population and creating a notion in the minds of the people of the existence of a “superior” form of English for higher social conduct. The fact that the English of the Court also became that of the Bible and the Church was adding to its social and cultural prestige, and soon any written work of quality and importance was done in the southern-based and widely standardized form of the language. Even local literature in the provinces was no longer considered good poetry, so that traditional writing suffered considerably after 1450 and the literary language had become largely standardized by the end of the fifteenth century, after works like Langland’s Piers Plowman (1362), Laʒamon’s Brut (1205) and Sir Gawayn and the Green Knight (written by an anonymous author between 1370 and 1400)

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had still originated in West-Midland dialects (cf. Burrow/Turville-Petre 1992: 7; Barber 1993: 145; see Illustration 2). Since early modern time, the use of dialect in literature became increasingly confined to certain stereotypical genres where it continued to be accepted in its traditional form and meaning. Thus, in connection with Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender of 1579, Alexander Gil in 1619 justified the use of Northern dialect by poets “for the purpose of rhythm and attractiveness”, qualifying it as “the most delightful”, “the most ancient”, and “the purest” (cf. Görlach 1985: 31). Outside the popular genre, however, Spenser’s variable style with its traditionally regional word forms beside unaccustomed neologisms was rejected by Ben Jonson (1573–1637), judging that “Spenser writ no language” (cf. Schirmer 1937: 214). For two centuries, the literary focus had been shifting from the northern and western provinces to the London of Chaucer and Shakespeare and their literary contemporaries, and the prospering cultural atmosphere of the Capital was motivating the consolidation and spread of a London-based literary language. In the mind of Thomas Nashe, writing about 1592, it was the merit of the poets to have “cleansed” the language from “barbarisme” and to have even “made the vulgar sort here in London (which is the fountaine whose riuers flowe round about England) to aspire to a richer puritie of speach” than was found in “any Nation vnder heauen” (cf. Nashe in McKerrow ed. 1966 Vol. I: 193). In spite of the growing attraction of the Capital and the rising prestige of its language, however, there was general insecurity about adequate educated usage, particularly in the written language, after the centuries-long hegemony of French had been broken together with the imposed language hierarchy. Being aware of the great diversity of English dialects in late fourteenth century England, Geoffrey Chaucer expressed his hope that nobody might “myswrite”, “mysmeter” (i. e. mispronounce) or misunderstand his language in the romance of Troilus and Criseyde (written between 1382 and 1386/87), surrendering the “litel bok” to its user with the words: “And for ther is so gret diversite In Englissh and in writyng of oure tonge, So prey I God that non myswrite the, Ne the mysmetre for defaute of tonge; And red wherso thow be, or elles songe, That thou be understonde, God I biseche!” (Book V, ll. 1793–98; from Burgess 1988: 584).

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A hundred years later, dialect differentiation still presented a serious practical problem for William Caxton with regard to the acceptance and currency of his printed books, and it was with good reason that the language he chose was the highly normalized Chancery English of Westminster, widespread and authoritative enough to become a model widely accepted and followed. The introduction of his printing press in 1476 spread the emerging written standard throughout the country, marking the educated and respectable off from the illiterate rest of the local population. In this sense, George Puttenham’s advice to poets in The Arte of English Poesie of 1589 (see Illustration 3) was significant not only of the new attitude to literary writing31 but also of the social determination of the emerging “standard” and its relation to popular speech. In Chapter IIII of The Third Booke, of Ornament, his early conception of a particular language of “the better brought vp sort, … men ciuill and graciously behauoured and bred”, in contrast to those who “doe abuse good speaches by strange accents or ill shapen soundes, and false ortographie” (cf. ibid. 120), was nourishing the idea of the superiority of a “correct” educated language over “corrupted” regional dialects. The language of poets was to be the one “spoken in the kings Court, or in the good townes and Cities within the land”, avoiding the speech of “the marches and frontiers”, of “port townes”, of “poore rusticall or vinciuill people”, of “a craftes man or carter, or other of the inferiour sort”, as well as that of “Vniuersities where Schollers vse much peeuish affectation of words out of the primitiue languages” (cf. ibid.). Although Puttenham considered Northern speech “the purer English Saxon at this day”, it was for him “not so Courtly nor so currant as our Southerne English is, no more is the far Westerne mās speach: ye shall therefore take the vsuall speach of the Court, and that of London and the shires lying about London within IX. miles, and not much aboue” (Ibid. 121).

2.1.2

Emergence of a “standard” language

The pressure to conform to Southern English was accompanied by a series of reflections on the state of the language and on the traditionally overwhelming cultural and educational predominance of Latin and French. One of the most ardent and patriotic defenders of English was Richard Mulcaster (1530?– 1611), Head Master of the Merchant Taylors’ School of London and author of The Elementarie (1582; see Illustration 4), for whom, in contrast to the insecurity and irritation about English usage in Chaucer's time (see above 2.1.1.), the English tongue was “of good account, both in speche, and pen”, being

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justified by “the authoritie of the peple which speak it, the matter & argument, wherein the speche dealeth, the manifold vse for which the speche serueth”, and thereby entitled to “direct her own right” (cf. 1582: 85, 88 f.). And, as “our best vnderstáding is in our naturall túg”, he asked in the Peroration to his “Elementarie” “But why not all in English, a tung of it self both depe in conceit, & frank in deliuerie? I do not think that anie language, be it whatsoever, is better able to vtter all arguméts, either with more pith, or greater planesse, then our English tung is” (ibid. 274). His strong personal affiliation to the English language, “bearing the joyfull title of our libertie and fredom” as against the “thraldom and bondage” imposed by Latin, is speaking from the words: “I loue Rome, but London better, I fauor Italie, but England more, I honor the Latin, but I worship the English” (ibid. 269). In the years to follow, however, the uprising national standard language did not reach further down the social scale but remained with the traditionally aristocratic, the newly privileged and the economically successful, enjoying the advantages of high culture and education. Stimulated by the emergence of a rich and influential upper middle class in London, by the cultural atmosphere of the Elizabethan age with its poetry, drama and learning, and not least by the growth of England into a world power, confidence was growing in the country and its language, particularly in that of its centre, London. Together with the rise of Early Modern English since the beginning of the sixteenth century, prestigious speech had been deliberately dissociating itself from regional dialect, claiming its “general” validity together with its “non-regional” character, and contrasts to dialectal speech became socially highly significant. While the traditional dialect of Londoners – then called Cokeneyen meaning cock’s eggs32 – in “a dialect’s refusal to be influenced by the standard” (Smith 1969: 8) became a lower-class urban vernacular in opposition to the refining language of the educated classes, upper-class London speech was increasingly diverging from the popular city dialect, thus paving the way for what was later called “Standard English” and for an exceptional pronunciation characterized as “received” from the eighteenth century onwards (see 2.5). The “standard” version of Modern English was originating in a social climate of exclusive status and education and most probably under an early influence of the old public schools of the South, particularly so after boys of non-aristocratic background began to be excluded since the later seventeenth century (cf. Mugglestone 1995: 260 ff.)33 and the language of the alumni increasingly became a variant of the later standard South Eastern language as

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spoken by the local gentry. Henceforward, the aristocratic branch was growing as the language of an emerging elíte, assimilating a great number of French and Latin words as signs of social distinction and thus nourishing the gap between “learned” English and “rude” English (cf. Barber 1993: 177 ff., 233). Lower-class speech was to be stigmatized for centuries by distinctions such as “barbarism” (for use of words), “cacophony” (for pronunciation), “ungrammatical”, and “vulgarism” (for colloquialism) to criticize non-refined usage (cf. Bailey 1992: 281). Later, the “vulgar” or “plebeian” status of localisms was particularly sharply castigated for its “lack of elegance” and its “ridicule” by Thomas Sheridan in his 1780 (pronunciation) Dictionary called A General Dictionary of the English Language (cf. Mugglestone 1995: 34, 46 f.). After the speech of the London Court had been unquestionably been accepted as “standard”, the weight was shifting from the genteel to the learned and polite of London whose speech became increasingly recommended since the middle of the eighteenth century (cf. Romaine 1998: 386). During the nineteenth century, dialect forms were considered by linguists to be deviations from the “standard”, consisting in “a harshness and a vulgarity of utterance” deriving from provincial habits (cf. Smart 1836; xi) and in “offences against the correctness of speech, as ungrammatical forms, mispronunciations, blunders of application, slang words, vulgarities” (cf. Whitney 1875:155). In an anonymous publication of 1836, entitled Observations Respectfully Addressed to the Nobility and Gentry on an Existing Importance of the Art in Study of Oratory, linguistic criticism was also directed against the persisting regional speech of country gentlemen (see 3.2.1), as a “residence of any period in the country, [would] often vitiate the enunciation”, causing a “vulgarity of tone … which [was] extremely difficult to eradicate” (quoted in Mugglestone 1995: 67). In result, the general condemnation of dialectal speech was leading to Whitney’s assumption that such persons spoke “a DIALECT of English, rather than English itself” (cf. 1877:3) and to his distinction between “good” and “bad” English, declaring that “By good English we mean those words, and those meanings of them, and those ways of putting them together, which are used by the best speakers, the people of best education; everything which such people do not use, or use in another way, is bad English” (ibid.). As dialects were doomed to continue as “a language that did not succeed” (Haugen 1972: 100), the aristocratic speech of the London area – that means of the Court and the London elíte and, increasingly so, of the public schools – became the necessary model to be followed on the way to social advancement,

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and the strongly negative associations of Cockney speech were even showing in the condemnation of “Cockneyisms” allegedly discovered in the lines of John Keats’ poetry (cf. Mugglestone 1995: 101). In his Plea for the Queen’s English: Stray Notes on Speaking and Spelling, which ran into 10,000 copies in its second edition of 1864, the then Dean of Canterbury Henry Alford was castigating “offensive vulgarisms”, such as “the sound of the u in certain words as if it were oo: calling ‘duty’, ‘dooty’, ‘Tuesday, Toosday’” (quoted in Crowley 1989: 153), in order to illustrate the matter for the uninformed. However, the Dean went clearly beyond the limits of a linguistic manual in his evaluation of the alleged “deficiencies”, stating that the speech of those exposing “this unfortunate habit” was linked not only with “low breading and inferior education” but also with being “below the mark in intelligence, selfrespect and energy” (ibid.). There were a host of further manuals on social etiquette, vast numbers of textbooks on linguistic manners, including grammars, dictionaries and works on special sounds (e. g. Mind your H’s, Take care of your R’s, etc., cf. Mugglestone 1995: 84, 312), in result of which hypercorrections and spelling pronunciations began to mark the (lower) middle classes even more clearly than their local pronunciations might have done. With increasing literacy, traditional dialects of the North became regarded as an inferior form of speech used only by country folk, labourers and servants, and later by those who worked in the mines and mills – in short, by “people without a proper education” (Kellett 1991: 14). In Tony Crowley’s words, “the process of imposing one spoken form as a ‘standard’ and thus devaluing others was under way” (1989: 127) when, in an account of 1883, dialect speakers, “from a sort of false shame”, were reported to substitute the “English equivalent” when asked to repeat a word to “educated persons” (quoted ibid. 159). As, through widespread industrialization and the general introduction of schooling in 1870, society had become more mobile and standardized speech even more desirable, the number of original dialect speakers was steadily diminishing. The deterioration of traditional dialects went on with such speed and intensity that, in his Short History of English, first published in 1914, H. C. Wyld made an urgent plea for “many monographs upon Present-day Spoken English; on the one hand of the rapidly disappearing Regional Dialects, and on the other of the ever increasing number of types of Modified Standard, or Class Dialects”, with the latter study to be carried out “both in respect of certain well-marked social boundaries, and also within these, with a view to geographical diffusion, and possible new differentiation” (cf.

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2nd enlarged edn. 1921: 237). His plea for the preservation of popular speech is to be seen against the background of rising academic interest in dialect research towards the turn of the century, when country dialects were generally considered worth studying as remnants of an ancient tradition34.

2.1.3

A “standard” for pronunciation

In connection with a standard language, prestigious modes of articulation had been emerging in that, as A. C. Gimson put it, “one regional accent began to acquire social prestige” (1980: 88). The traditional prestige throughout the country of London- and South Eastern-based speech gave rise to early notions of a geographically neutral standard in pronunciation, from Thomas Sheridan’s General Dictionary of the English Language of 1780 over John Walker’s Critical Pronouncing Dictionary of 1791 and B. H. Smart’s Walker Remodelled of 1836 to A. J. Ellis’ comprehensive work On Early English Pronunciation, written between 1869 and 1889. Referring to the pronunciation of English speech sounds, W. Johnston stated in 1764 that “the standard of these sounds … [was] that pronunciation of them, in most general use, amongst people of elegance and taste of the English nation, and especially of London” (quoted in Romaine 1998: 386), while W. Kenrick in 1773 saw in a standard pronunciation “the actual practice of the best speakers”, being “men of letters” and “polite speakers in the Metropolis” (cf. ibid.). For Thomas Sheridan, in his Course of Lectures on Elocution of 1762, proper speech had to exhibit “just pronunciation, and purity of phrase in discourse” and to “avoid provincial dialects, accents, and phraseology” (cf. ibid. 204). While the latter seemed to “prevail more or less thro’ all the counties of Great Britain” (cf. ibid.), the aim was to be to “destroy these odious distinctions between subjects of the same King, and members of the same community” and not to “proclaim the place of a man’s birth” by “difference of pronunciation, and dialects” (cf. ibid. 206). In connection with the growth of the Empire, the validity of an allegedly non-regional accent was deliberately extended beyond the territory of England to the whole nation and the Commonwealth, connecting speakers “born and bred in different Countries and Counties” who, “as subjects of one King, [had] one common tongue” (Sheridan 1761: 36). Setting out to “correct some of the more glaring errors of [his] countrymen, John Walker, in the Preface to his Critical Pronouncing Dictionary of 1791, strongly advocated a non-regional peronunciation, being “free from all the vices of the vulgar” and unspoilt by the dialect of the county in which the speaker lives (cf. ibid. XIV). He saw his

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ideal in the educated speech of London, which he considered “not only the best by Courtesy, and because it happen[ed] to be the pronunciation of the Capital, but best by a better title; that of being more generally received” (ibid. XIII; see below Received Pronunciation 2.2.1), while regarding Cockney “a thousand times more offensive and disgusting than other English accents” (ibid. IX). In his Walker Remodelled of 1836, B. H. Smart saw “all marks of a particular place of birth and residence” lost in a “common standard dialect” of “the well-bred and well-informed, wherever they [might] be found” (cf. p. xl) and representing “the elements of English pronunciation according to the usage of the well-educated in the English metropolis” (ibid. xi).35 In spite of all endeavours to prevent the intrusion of popular features on the standard language, however, criteria of acceptability were nonetheless influenced by what H. C. Wyld later called “the new men” who, since the time of Elizabeth, had not only “learned the speech of the class they entered, but … put, and left, their own characteristic marks upon it” (1927: 150). In heated debates on the “correctness” of pronunciation, variation was strongly rejected in the desire to strengthen and spread the emerging prestige accent. The linguistic battle over the pronunciations of “vulgar” and “inaccurate” (Cockney) [ɑ:] versus “elegant” and “accurate” [æ] in words like father was finally won by “vulgar” [ɑ:] (cf. ibid. 90 ff.), and there were further cases of popularinfluenced allophonic variation at the beginning of the century, such as deletion of /t/ and /d/ in just and exactly, assimilation of place in does she [ˈdʌʃʃɪ], monophthongization of /aɪə/ and /aʊɘ/ in fire [fa:] and tower [ta:], homophony of /ɔɘ/ and /ʊɘ/ in the common /ɔ:/ of sore, saw, sure, and linking and intrusive r in far• away and India• r• office (cf. Leitner 1982: 99 f.), some of which have remained matters of controversy and change up to the present day. In this situation, “such a phrase as ‘standard English pronunciation’ express[ed] only an abstraction” in the view of Henry Sweet (1890: 3), who considered it “absurd to set up a standard of how English people ought to speak” (ibid.), thus rejecting claims on the absolute uniformity of educated speech, as they had been made for centuries in the prescriptive tradition, in favour of individual variation in the language. Though following Sweet’s broader signification and asserting that, for the time being, there was “no standard of pronunciation”, Alexander Ellis nevertheless considered it “possible to erect a standard of pronunciation which should be acknowledged and followed throughout the countries where English [was] spoken as a native tongue”, finishing with the words “… in fact that standard already exists, and is the norm unconsciously

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followed by persons who, by rank or education, have most right to establish the custom of speech” (On Early English Pronunciation 1869 pt. 2: 630). He recognized “a received pronunciation all over the country, not widely differing in any particular locality and exhibiting a certain degree of variety”36, which he socially defined as “the educated pronunciation of the metropolis, of the court, the pulpit and the bar” (ibid. pt. 1: 23). In a centuries-long development a prestigious accent had grown, centred around the Court and furthered by the prestige of the Capital.

2.2

The consolidation of RP

2.2.1

Towards non-regional prestige

When the English prestige accent has been usually traced back for little more than a hundred years, the reason may be looked for in the nationwide consolidation and standardization of the “refined” variant in the nineteenth century, in connection with decisive changes in the social pattern of England, including a re-organization of the upper levels of society in the wake of the industrial revolution. It was the time of the fusion of the long-established aristocracy with the “new men” (Wyld 1927: 150; see 2.1.3) from a well-moneyed upper middle class, demanding their full share not only in financial wealth but also in social respectability and political power. Money alone did not guarantee success in the ranks of the well-bred and the well-educated: On the way to an extraordinary social position, linguistic etiquette was indispensable to the appearance of a gentleman in order to enable him to avoid “low expressions, vulgar pronunciations and continual blunders in grammar” (from Vulgarities of English Corrected 1826, quoted in Mugglestone 1995: 68), and there was a strong tendency among the upper middle class to adopt aristocratic manners, including the distinctive accent. More outward-looking reasons for the growth of a prestigious pronunciation lay in the boom of the Empire which, according to George Bernard Shaw’s Preface to Pygmalion (1914), caused Henry Sweet to submit a phonetic article for publication, entitled “On the imperial importance of a subject”, against the background of the Imperial Institute rising in South Kensington as a visible sign of a successful imperial policy (cf. Shaw 1949: 6; 1st publ. 1916). According to McArthur (1992: 851), the possession of the “patrician” or “proconsular” accent was later a criterion for the selection of officers during the First World War and of recruits for official services

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representing Great Britain worldwide. In his words, “The heydey of Empire … was also the high point of RP” (ibid.), beginning with the climax of British colonial power around the turn of the century (see Illustration 5) and ending with the Second World War. Dominating the education of the English gentry, the great public schools of Eton, Harrow, Winchester and Rugby were continuing to contribute to a uniform style of speech among the new “imperial élite” of the country (cf. Spencer 1954: 13 f.). Increasingly insulated from locality and social interference, they were providing their alumni with the deeply rooted social characteristics of English aristocracy, including norms of general social conduct, as well as traditional upper-class speech behaviour, particularly for sons of the middle classes. The public schools were not the one and only source of the distinguished accent, but it was quite surely by their influence that the variant was, in Gimson’s words, “finally fixed as the speech of the ruling class” (1980: 89), with the “non-regional” character of South Eastern-based nineteenth century public school English (cf. Barber 1993: 232 f.) adding to its exclusive prestige. A further education at one of the two old universities of Oxford (since 1167) and Cambridge (since 1209) served to form a “homogenous speech community” (cf. Spencer 1958: 22 f.) deriving from London and country society and the upper middle class of London, and as the public schools, the old universities and the members of the ruling upper middle class enjoyed great prestige, their accent became associated with that prestige. Thus, in the Introduction to his first English Pronouncing Dictionary of 1917, Daniel Jones chose an accent which he termed Public School Pronunciation (p. VIII; see below), and a few years later Wyld proposed the term of Public School English (1920: 3) for prestigious speech, on grounds of its uniform associations with the great public schools. Besides, however, Jones drew attention to the fact that Public School Pronunciation, being largely a matter of public boarding schools, was “not as a rule used by those who ha[d] been educated at day schools in Scotland, Ireland or the North of England, and it [was] not used by a considerable proportion of those educated at day schools in the South of England” (1917: VIII). Just as, in the determination of a standard, the idea of the “common” (meaning the “general”) had been linked with the “non-localized” by linguists as Sheridan and Smart (see 2.1.2), in Wyld’s early descriptions of 1907 and 1909 the standard was “tinged neither with the Northern, nor Midland, nor Southern peculiarities of speech”, but was simply “good English” or “general

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average English”, and as such “free from blatant Provincial or Class peculiarities” (quoted in Crowley 1989: 185 ff.). The latter being quite obviously lower-class peculiarities in the new and more ideology-loaded usage of the word, no longer meaning only social stratum but status associated with social affiliation (cf. ibid. 207 f.), both Henry Sweet and H. C. Wyld referred to a clearly upper (middle)-class Standard English in pronunciation as a “Class Dialect”. Attributing a nationwide validity to the “Standard” being “a class-dialect more than a local dialect: … the language of the educated all over Great Britain”, Sweet regarded those the “best” speakers “whose pronunciation, and language generally, least betray[ed] their locality” (1908: 7; comp. Whitney 2.1.2). In 1914, Wyld suggested as a term “Received Standard for the ‘best’ type of spoken English, usually known hitherto as Standard English” (p. 236), and a few years later he considered the prestigious non-localized accent “in its origin … the product of social conditions and … essentially a “Class Dialect” (1920: 2), established as a norm and promoted as a “standard” by “the new men and their families, who were winning a place in the great world and public affairs” (ibid. 285). He paraphrased his concept with “Good English, Wellbred English, Upper-class English, and … Standard English …” (ibid.). Out of the aristocratic London English of the King’s Court, a non-localizable Standard English had grown, with Received Standard being regarded by Wyld as the “best” form of its pronunciation – “that form which [had] the widest currency and [was] heard with practically no variation among speakers of the better class all over the country” (1927: 149). Following the general tendency, Daniel Jones referred to the accent he recommended as Standard Pronunciation in his first book entitled The Pronunciation of English of 1909 (p. 3). The book was, in his words, “primarily designed for the use of English students and teachers … whose aim [was] to correct cockneyisms or other undesirable pronunciations in their scholars” as well as for “lecturers, barristers, clergy, etc. … who desire[d] to read or speak in public” (p. VII), while his Phonetic Readings in English of 1912 were “designed primarily for foreigners desirous of acquiring the correct pronunciation of the English language” (p. III). In contrast to the traditional reliance on the non-regional character of the “standard” accent, Jones’s early definitions were declaredly based on its London or South English affiliation and repeatedly complemented by the traditional criteria, such as wide circulation among educated speakers (comp. Ellis 1869 p. 1, 23; see 2.1.3) and public school or university background. Relying on “the general usage of educated people in

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London and the neighbourhood”, however, he also referred to the accent as Standard Southern English Pronunciation (1909: V), thus being strongly opposed by Poet laureate Robert Bridges and his Society of Pure English (founded in 1911), who was waging a vain battle against Mr. Jones’s “Cockney form of English” with its “degraded pronunciation” and “corrupted vowels … still carefully pronounced in the North of the Island” (quoted in Gimson 1977: 153 f.). A few years later, in his Preface to An Outline of English Phonetics of 1914, Jones renewed his focus on the accent’s Southern affiliation and particular education, referring to it as “educated Southern English” (p. III). He again considered it “necessary to set up a standard of pronunciation” (ibid. 4) for foreign learners, which he now termed Standard Pronunciation – “the form which appear[ed] to be most generally used by Southern English persons who [had] been educated at the great English public boarding schools” (ibid.). The additional inclusion of “many from other parts of the country who [had] been educated at these schools” (ibid. footnote 1), however, marked the conception of a regionally relatively neutral accent on a Southern linguistic basis, which was to determine Jones’s future position and that of his pupil and successor A. C. Gimson (see 2.6.1). After, in Jones’ Outline of English Phonetics, English-speaking readers had been advised that it was “not the object of this book to set up this particular style of pronunciation as a standard” (1914: IV), it was in his English Pronouncing Dictionary of 191737 that he for the first time completely renounced the epithet of “standard” in his conception of the pronunciation recorded. Renaming the accent into Public School Pronunciation, he defined it as the pronunciation used “in the families of Southern English persons whose menfolk [had] been educated at the great public boarding schools” and also among “those who [did] not come from the South of England, but who [had] been educated at these schools” as well as by “persons of education in the South of England who [had] not been educated at these schools” and by “a majority of those members of London society who [had] had a University education” (p. VIII). He more decidedly than before expressed his opinion that nobody was obliged to follow the rules of the accent as a model of pronunciation, pointing to “the important fact … that great variations of pronunciation exist[ed] and [were] to be expected” (ibid. X), and he upheld this view in all subsequent editions of his Dictionary as well as in the Outline of English Phonetics (since 1932) and in The Pronunciation of English (since 1934; Viereck 1975: 48). Seeing himself in the phonetician’s role of “a kind of liv-

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ing phonograph” with the “proper function … to observe and record accurately” (1917: VIII f.), he declared that he had no intention to judge “good” or “bad” pronunciations and that he did not consider the pronunciation recorded “intrinsically superior to any other” (ibid.). In contrast to his predecessors from Sheridan to Ellis, and to a considerable number of his contemporaries and followers such as Chapman, Wyld (see 2.2.3) and many others, he did not consider pronunciation “reforms or standards” necessary nor did he think it desirable “to [set] up any form of pronunciation as a standard for the Englishspeaking world” (ibid. IX). When, according to Lewis (1985: 245), the accent described was increasingly called Received Pronunciation (RP) since the English Pronouncing Dictionary of 1926 and the Outline of English Phonetics of 1932, the new term was probably following an earlier application of the epithet by Alexander Ellis and H. C. Wyld38 (comp. also Walker 1791; see above 2.1.3). The label was, in Gimson’s words, kept up “for want of a better term” in all subsequent editions of EPD (cf. 4th edn. 1937: X; 11th edn. 1956, repr. 1960: XVI), while the above-cited social definition of the concept survived in slightly modernized versions up to the last edition revised by Jones himself and published in 1956 (cf. 11th ed. repr. 1960: XV; see 2.5.1).

2.2.2

Accent stereotyping by the BBC

Characteristically, no other speech style proved appropriate for the purposes of national broadcasting but Received Pronunciation, which underlines not only the traditional social prestige of the accent as well as its relatively high degree of consolidation before the advent of radio. With the foundation of the British Broadcasting Company on 14 November 1922 (since 1927 the British Broadcasting Corporation Ltd.), an institution came into being whose influence was to exceed all previous endeavours to standardize the language of the nation. Beyond British national services, worldwide activities were envisaged in the BBC’s Charter granted by the Crown, declaring that it was “in the interests of Our Peoples In Our United Kingdom and elsewhere within the Commonwealth that the Corporation should continue to provide broadcasting services” (quoted in Docherty 1991: 101). In the early years, the single stations were still intensively independent, and educated national accents of Ireland, Scotland and Wales as well as educated Northern English, in contrast to all other accents of England, were accepted alongside prestigious Southern speech. Serving audiences nationwide, the Corporation could soon provide transmissions for four million listeners or even more (cf. Mugglestone 1995:

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326). When a network for larger distances became possible in the midtwenties and a number of regional stations were dissolved (except five single stations for Ireland, Scotland, Wales, the Midlands and the West Country; cf. Leitner 1979: 26), the radio’s function as a public institution and a national medium became increasingly evident in its standardizing language policy, initiated and decisively influenced by the BBC’s founder and President, the later Sir John Reith. Speaking with a recognizably Scottish accent but educated at a public school, he was convinced of “the great advantage of a standard pronunciation”, and in a radio broadcast of 1924 he demanded to eradicate “the most appalling travesties of vowel pronunciation” and to spread in the news bulletins the “correct pronunciation of the English tongue” (quoted in Zimmermann 1982: 222). After instructive talks to announcers and members of the staff, an early memorandum went out from the organizer of programmes on 20 May 1925, containing Reith’s recommendation of “one” dialect (i. e. RP) which caused “less offence to the majority than others” as well as his idea of the radio’s linguistic mission, summed up in the words: “We are daily establishing in the minds of the public the idea of what correct speech should be. This is such an important responsibility” (quoted in Ferris 1977: 820). John Reith’s conviction of the superiority of RP was accompanied by his firm belief in upper- and upper middle-class “high culture” and “high morality”, which his staff was expected to embody and convey in the form of a “house style” (cf. ibid.), in order to make the presentation distinctively BBC and at the same time to fulfil the expectations of the leading cultural bodies of the Church, Parliament and the Oxbridge academic establishment. It was then that BBC English first originated as a disparaging term, used among early regional BBC staff for the privileged speakers with public-school accents (cf. McArthur 1992: 109). Between 1926 and 1939, sociolinguistic stereotyping on the BBC was enforced by the activities of the Advisory Committee on Spoken English (cf. McArthur 1992: 110 f.)39 whose main task it was, after Reith, to seek “a common denominator of educated speech” for the purpose of broadcasting a model language to all homes as an “opportunity of learning by example” (quoted in Mugglestone 1995: 226). Founded to establish a “standard” for the BBC, the Advisory Committee’s main objective was to cope with the contradiction between the traditional acceptance by the BBC of educated national and Northern English accents on the one hand and the increasing desire for conformity with RP on the other – in Leitner’s words, with “the systematic

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differences between the intended norm or target style and speech practice” (1982: 100). Being based on prestigious speech but also containing other and sometimes even popular forms of usage, pronunciation on the early BBC of the 1920s remained different from RP in tolerating certain British National (that means Scottish, Irish and Welsh) and Northern English features and thus making the “house style” of the BBC appear more traditional than exclusive. So the use of salient Northern [a] for Southern /ɑ:/ in bath was declared acceptable (cf. Lloyd James 1928: 10), and the pronunciation of word-final and preconsonantal /r/ in bird and far, given up in the South for more than a century, was recommended as part of most provincial dialects and, in Reith’s words, of the pronunciation of “the best educated and most refined people in Ireland and Scotland” (quoted in Leitner 1989: 20 ff.). As Southern announcers and newsreaders were unaccustomed to r-pronouncing in these positions, at least “an attempt should be made to give the latter [i.e. rhotic r] some sound value, however slight”, as a result of a corresponding decision made at the Committee’s first session in 1926 (ibid. 21). No regulations were made at this early stage with regard to linking and intrusive r, until Lloyd James, Chairman of the Committee and later Professor of Phonetics at London University, openly condemned the latter in a radio discussion of 1939. Following John Reith’s desire for “a uniformity of principle”, further agreements were reached on this first session, regarding the appeal to oppose tendencies to coalesce different phonemes like /ɔ:/, /ɔɘ/ and /ʊɘ/ to /ɔ:/ in Shaw, shore, and sure, to maintain pure vowel quality in diphthongs like /ɘʊ/ without lowering the first element to [aʊ] in composed, and to keep up the distinction between /w/ and /hw/ (i. e. /ʍ/) in witch and which, respectively (cf. Leitner 1982: 100 f.). In contrast to decisions like these, Daniel Jones, in his advisory work for the BBC since the late 1920s, rejected outdated conservatisms in the same way as eccentric novelties, among them artificial-sounding strong forms of context words such as of, was, or the, over-diphthongizations of /i:/ and /u:/ to [ɘɪ:] and [əʉ:], extensive nasality in morning [ɔ͂:] and exaggerated closeness and glides of vowels in land and hold (cf. Gimson 1977: 154). Favouring a style as natural and colloquial as possible, he was promoting other fashionable tendencies, such as monophthongization in day [ɛ:] and our [ɑ:] and extensive use of linking r on word boundaries, even tolerating intrusive r (ibid. 154 f.). In a time when regional dialect accent was still part of normal speech in the provinces, he expressed his scepticism about the Board’s aim to eradicate regional features in favour of standard forms, arguing: “There are countless

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other ways of pronouncing English in existence, some of them being used by large communities. Whether broadcasting will in the long run alter this state of things remains to be seen” (EPD 1937: X). The responsibility for the work of the Committee lay in the hands of its Honorary Secretary, Lloyd James, whose task it was to standardize the language on the BBC by composing recommendations and lists of words for the use of broadcasters and a wider public as well, to look after every single newsreader on a weekly tutorial basis, and to conduct measures of public education over Linguaphone records and radio broadcasts reflecting his individual phonetic theories and convictions (cf. Lidell 1979: 478). In contrast to his vague assertions to promote a regionally variable pronunciation in the tradition of early years by choosing what he called “the acoustic average of the social and local variants” he knew of, he was, in his own words, attempting “to equate a social standard, a standard of intelligibility, and an aesthetic standard” (quoted in Spencer 1958: 11 f.) in his theoretical justification of RP. Consequently, language on the BBC was soon no longer a “house style” accepting a certain amount of national and even social variation, but very substantially RP, with the mark of Lloyd James’ and the Committee’s linguistic tastes and favours. One of the Committee’s main tasks was to lay down firm rules for the pronunciation of single words (see Illustration 6) in heated debates on issues like [ˈski:ɪɧ] versus [ˈʃɪ:ɪN] for skiing, [ˈmɑ:dʒəri:n] versus [ˈmɑ:gəri:n] for margarine, and [zu:əˈlɒdʒɪkɫ] versus [zu:ˈlɒdʒɪkɫ] for zoological, the latter causing a frustrated member (Secretary of the Zoological Society) to threaten to resign in protest in case they were recommending the reduced version (cf. Ferris 1977: 821). On the basis of the Committee’s decisions, Lloyd James’ Broadcast English I with the subtitle of Recommendations to Announcers Regarding Certain Doubtful Words (1928)40 was composed, in the Reithian sense, for the use of broadcasters and for the benefit of a wider readership as well, containing lists of words difficult through their historical spelling, such as plough (plow) and rough (ruff) (i. e. [plaʊ] and [rʌf]), beside foreign words like Bach (Baak) and adieu (adéw) (i. e. [bɑ:k] and [əˈdju:]; cf. p. 10 ff.). Broadcasting regularly in the school programmes in the series The King’s English (i.e. RP) to 130 schools in the country in order to “unteach” the young generations stigmatized features, such as hypercorrections and intrusive r as in [ˈhɒksfəd] (Oxford) and the Shah• r• of Persia (cf. Leitner 1983: 62), he was trying to provide what former newsreader and Lloyd James pupil Alvar Lidell attested to have been “a model of perfect style and manner”

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(1979: 478). After the foundation of the BBC World Service in 193241, Linguaphone started to produce records with the Committee’s linguistic decisions also for the international market, under the title of Broadcast English Pronunciation recommended by the BBC Advisory Committee on Spoken English. Spoken by Lloyd James (cf. Leitner 1981: 250), thus substantially contributing to the spread of British English worldwide.

2.2.3

A “standard’s” criticism and defence

While, however, the results of the Committee’s endeavours were welcomed abroad as guidelines to “correct” English usage, the flood of descriptions, word lists and articulatory recommendations met with various forms of resistance among the British public, and language on the BBC became subject to controversial discussion and argument. As public criticism had, from the start, been encouraged by the Board and rapidly expanding, a Programme Correspondence Section had to be set up in 1924 to deal with thousands of letters every year (cf. Cain 1992: 22 f.). Objections particularly referred to modifications in the unstressed syllables of words such as palace, laudable and wireless orchestra, where either /ɪ/ or /ə/ was favoured while, in other cases, diverging dictionary entries were objects of discussions in which there was, in Lloyd James’ own words, “no end to argument” (James 1928: 19). Further criticism appeared in the columns of The Radio Times, founded in 1923 and soon the best-selling weekly periodical, and in the BBC weekly The Listener which appeared between 1929 and 1991. Complaints were pouring in over trendy fashions in the articulation of newsreaders of the thirties, among whom James recorded, beside the “democratic” shortening of /ɔ:/ to /ɒ/ in off, Southernisms as the raising of /æ/ to short open /e/ in hat and the lowering of final /ɪ/ in pity as well as new levelling tendencies, particularly in the triphthongs of words as fire [ɑ:] and power [ɑ:] (cf. Brook 1979: 165). One of the most prominent critics of broadcast English was H. C. Wyld who, in his tract on The Best English of 1934 (see Illustration 7), found fault with the fact that “the enterprise of the BBC” in Oxfordshire brought to the listeners’ hearing “the utterances of a large number of speakers, representing many varieties of style, voice and accent”, whereas there was, in his view, “not the slightest doubt that R. S. [i. e. Received Standard] [was] infinitely easier and pleasanter to hear and to follow, than a type of English strongly colloquial by provincial influence” (p. 606). On the other hand, there were protests on the standardizing efforts of the BBC and its de facto South English orientation, castigating

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broadcast speech as “that stilted voice” in the Daily Mirror or as “the latest tyranny” in the Yorkshire Post, both in 1926, and warning of the danger of BBC English threatening to become “a sort of criterion” in Northern Star in 1940 (cf. Leitner 1979: 1 ff.). In the course of this public debate, another depreciatory use of “BBC English” (see 2.2.2) was spread by the press on grounds of the Board’s increasingly RP-oriented language policy (cf. Leitner 1981: 250), and the series of causes in the mother tongue ended in 1931. It was the latter kind of argument which was obviously considered most serious by those responsible for language matters on the BBC, and which may have led Lloyd James to link his propagation of highest standards with deliberate assurances of a democratic and egalitarian approach to broadcasting – and this not only in the face of criticism from outside but also from the BBC’s own ranks. So, in his Broadcast English I of 1928, he deliberately underlined the position of the BBC not to “accept or dictate any standard of pronunciation other than the current usage of educated speakers”, assuring the staff that it was “not suggested that any special degree of authority attach[ed] to these recommendations” (p. 19). Avoiding an unequivocal justification of RP, he based the latter on the conception of a “narrow band” of educated variants having “more features in common with Southern English than with Northern English” and being “recognized as educated speech throughout the country”, in contrast to a “broad band” comprising “all districts and class variants”, in order to ensure that broadcasting might proceed “without fear of adverse intellectual criticism” (ibid.). The wider public was assured that there was “not … one standard pronunciation, one and only one way of spoken English”, but that there were “varieties that [were] acceptable throughout the communities, and others that [were] not” (ibid. 10). A year later, in his reissue of the BBC’s Recommendations of 1929, Robert Bridges followed the same strategy, declaring the Advisory Committee to be “a popular, and not an academic institution”, proceeding “by enquiry and discussion rather than by authority”, not without giving the reason for concessions like these to the public mind: “No success can be looked for without the goodwill of the public, whose goodwill can only be won by reasonable persuasion” (p. 335). Intended to be morally and culturally authoritative, the BBC of the mid-thirties was demanded by the Board to convey its public image through its increasingly “collective personality” as represented by all groups of professional broadcasters who, in tribute of their training, were to “sound all alike”, having “many voices but one mouth” (from a memorandum by the Announcement Editor of 1936, quoted in

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Kumar 1975: 77). Thus, in spite of all assurances not to attempt to establish a uniform spoken language on the BBC, RP was in fact the accent to be aimed at by national announcers, newsreaders and presenters in an impartial, impersonal and authoritatively formal presentation. When the BBC’s founder, John Reith, resigned in 1938, it was most decisively on grounds of increasing demands for organized audience research by colleagues, arguing for more relaxed forms of presentation in connection with a greater number of light programmes for the mass public (cf. Cain 1992: 39) and thus advocating an end to the policy of early years. Throughout the 1920s and into the thirties, the prevailing attitude among those responsible and influential in the field of general education remained what E. M. and J. Wright had described in 1913 as “the theory that a dialect is an arbitrary distortion of the mother tongue” (quoted in Crowley 1989: 139). As open signs of antagonism between the upper (middle) and the lower classes became the order of the day after the First World War and language began to be realized as a socially dividing factor, the Commissioners of the Newbolt Report42 on The Teaching of English in England (1921) set out to summon the native language as “a bond of union between the classes”, to be brought about by “an education fundamentally English” through which “the difference between educated and uneducated speech … would gradually disappear” (quoted in Giles, Middleton 1995: 153 f.).One of the Report’s Commissioners, George Sampson, provided additional argumentation in his English for the English, first published in 1921, considering the equal teaching of the educated language the only remedy against class antagonism, as “the one common basis of a common culture is a common tongue” (2nd ed. 1926: 39). Urging “the training of the pupils in the sounds of Standard English speech” and “to set the standard of speech for the Empire” (ibid. 45), he saw no special need to define standard English, but if an example was wanted – it was “the kind of English spoken by a simple unaffected young Englishman like the Prince of Wales” (ibid. 40 f.). For the time being, however, the Newbolt Report complained that the teachers’ struggle was “not with ignorance but with a perverted power”, i. e. with dialectal speech which seemed to be impossible to eradicate in favour of a standard (cf. Mugglestone 1995: 314). An ardent campaign for the superiority of a “standard” pronunciation was led by H. C. Wyld and R. W. Chapman in the early 1930s. For Chapman, in his Tract on Oxford English of 193243, the “fine flower of standard English” was “the speech not of a region, but of a class within that region”, being, “like 84

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the best of everything, very rare” (p. 560 f.). Having stated early in the century that there was nothing “in itself inferior, or reprehensible, or contemptible” about regional dialects (Wyld 1909, quoted in Crowley 1989: 182 f.), Wyld finally declared the Received Standard to be “intrinsically superior to every other type of English speech” in his 1934 tract The Best English with the subtitle A Claim for the Superiority of Received Standard English (see Illustation 7) – and this “not only because it [was] spoken by those often very properly called ‘the best people’”, but also because of its currency throughout the country, its “clarity”, “beauty” and “sonority”, perfectly represented by ah [ā] with its “solidity” and “dignity” which regional dialects were lacking, while the sound [æ] was “neither as sonorous nor as beautiful as [ā]” (p. 605 ff.). As regards the “best speakers”, they were those who had “perfect confidence in themselves, in their speech, as in their manners. For both bearing and utterance spring from a firm and gracious tradition” (ibid. 614). After pleading for the linguistic study and the preservation of modified standard or “class” dialects in his earlier time (cf. 1921: 237; see 2.1.3), he now considered the introduction of “provincial sounds” into what was intended to be the Received Standard to be “distressing and distracting”, since they were characteristic of the Modified Standards of “the frankly uncultivated and vulgar, and the over-refined and affected”, refining their pronunciation “to cover up some terrible natural defect” (1934: 613 f.) and thus creating “‘standard’ gone wrong” (ibid. 605). By the early 1930s, however, public language awareness caused linguists to begin to draw the borderlines of acceptable speech less rigorously than before, and to grant the educated language a certain amount of the variability in theory which it already achieved in practice. Though the New Oxford English Dictionary Supplement of 1933 was still keeping to the traditional conception of a “standard’s” way to be “the best form of speech”, its Standard English was, with reference to Henry Sweet, more neutrally defined as “that form of the English language which [was] spoken (with modifications, individual or local), by the generality of the cultured people in Great Britain” (quoted in Crowley 1989: 137 f.).

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2.3

Post-War variability

2.3.1

Traditional prestige

As increasing variability in post-War RP made it advisable to distinguish different variants within the accent, A. C. Gimson introduced the concept of “generation” into his phonetic description, applying the terms of conservative, general and advanced to the pronunciation of the older, the middle and the younger generation of RP speakers in the first edition of his Introduction to the Pronunciation of English (cf. 1962: 84 f.). The conservative branch was defined by Gimson as the pronunciation “used by the older generation and, traditionally, by certain professions or social groups” (1962: 84 f.) whose speech “reflected the traditional RP-forms current at the end of the late nineteenth century” (1964: 132), and related to the pronunciation of his teacher Daniel Jones (cf. 1977: 155), to his definitions in phonetic textbooks and to his notations in the earlier editions of the English Pronouncing Dictionary. According to the description of single sounds in his 1962 IPE, conservative articulations were retained, among others, in the diphthong /ɔə/ of words as before and door, in closer diphthongal glides as in goat [ou], and in fully pronounced triphthongs instead of /ɑ:/-homophones. Similarly, traditional /ɪ/ or /e/ were preferred over /ə/ in the unstressed syllables of problem and system [ɪm ~ em], and retracted /ʌ/ was surviving in an unrounded and centralized type of C [ɔ] in sun and flood. The fricative /ʍ/, though in decline, still maintained the opposition of wine [w] and whine [ʍ], thus overlapping with upperclass features (cf. ibid. 111 ff., 129 f., 212; see below Ross), while conservative long /ɔ:/ in cross was considered to have additional “social prestige value in Southern England” (Gimson ibid: 108; comp. marked RP being considered “middle-class” as well as “aristocratic” in Honey 1989: 89). The borders of upper-class conservatism, however, were difficult to draw and in Charles Barber’s words of 1964 (p. 30), there was “widespread confusion about what constitut[ed] U-usage (and indeed what constitut[ed] the upper classes)”. According to Alan Ross (1954: 36 ff.)44, U-characteristics were highly traditional, including conservative peculiarities such as voiceless [ʍ] in which (particularly among women) and long [ɔ:] in off (mainly among the older generation of speakers) beside typical southern country /ɑ:/monophthongization of the triphthongs /aɪə/ and /aʊə/, and word-initial Hdropping in hotel [ouˈtɛl]. Even the historical, eighteenth and nineteenth century reduced in’-endings as characteristic of the huntin’, fishin’, shootin’

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class45 (see below), were at that time still surviving among “a few very elderly U-speakers” (ibid. 39). Perhaps, however, it was the “tone of voice” that was even more socially distinctive than mere sounds – the whole pattern with its rhythm and intonation, its characteristic degrees of loudness and typical shades of voice quality which, after Spencer, made the upper layers of English society appear to be “labelled by intonation” (cf. Spencer 1958: 17). For those who were submitting to upper-class ideas and ideals and trying to maintain aristocratic ways of life in a time of weakening upper-class economic foundations, prestigious pronunciation had become of particular significance as an “aspect of social consciousness” and “a symbol of group integrity” (cf. Spencer 1958: 17; Tottie 1977: 250). Based on upper-class distinctive education and culture, behaviour and beliefs, traditional speech was considered “a citadelle to be defended as part of a way of life” (Spencer ibid. 23), and, in the view of Alan Ross, it was “solely by its language that the upper class [was] clearly marked off from the others” (1954: 20). In a period of strong democratic and cosmopolitan orientation and a quarter of a century after Ross, a high degree of upper-class social identity and language loyalty was still found in upper-class speakers, whose aristocratic ingroup characteristics were referred to as close-knit social networks resembling lower status networks, with their effects on social group identity, by Lesley Milroy in 1980 (p. 179). Although social borders had become more fluent and the uppermost layers of the middle classes now came to be included in the upper-class world, the traditional aristocratic ideology nevertheless seemed to have remained largely undemolished, at least so among the middle generation of the new “amalgam of landed, commercial, industrial and high professional elements, still deriving much of its ethos from an enduring aristocratic core” (Marwick 1994: 179). In 1982, Wells considered U- or upper-crust RP the variant to be spoken by the Duchess, the upper class army officer, the elderly Oxbridge don, and the school mistress at a private girls’ school – “all differing somewhat from one another as well as from the Duchess”, but unifying in their social conspicuousness and being “in the narrow sense, upper class” (pt. 2: 280). A similarly traditional, exclusive, but passing world was reflected in John Honey’s description of 1989, including the older generations of the Royal Family, the greatest of aristocracy, top civil servants, older diplomats, and senior officers in the armed forces (cf. p. 39). Consequently, Alan Cruttenden conceived a Refined RP as a type “commonly considered to be upper-class” and “mainly associated in some way with upper-class families and with pro-

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fessions which have traditionally recruited from such families” (1994: 80), thus being very close in definition to what Daniel Jones had conceived as Public School Pronunciation and later as Received Pronunciation in the first half of the century (see 2.2.1). Linguistically, the upper-class variant was for decades preserving most of its above-mentioned aristocratic features as described by Ross around the middle of the past century. A distinguished upper-class flavour continued to be underlined by the maintenance of the opposition of /ʍ/ – /w/ in which – witch, of the close glide in goat [ou] and of long /ɔ:/ in cross, Southern country articulations, such as very open centring diphthongs in near [ɪă], square [ɛă] and cure [ʊă] and extra open final vowel in city [ˈsɪtDã], which were still heard in the early nineties, in spite of the aversion and ridicule they had aroused over the years (cf. Brook 1979: 66; Wells 1982 pt.2: 280 ff.; Cruttenden 1994: 80). Upper-class H-dropping in unstressed positions such as in (h)istoric and (h)otel, functioning in a system different from that of the lower classes, was after Honey, surviving “in a very limited number of contexts among speakers of the hyperlect, including some members of the royal family” (1989: 94), so in “May God bless ‘er and all who sail in ‘er”, as heard from the Queen Mother in a launching speech, or in the words “And all the trumpets sounded for ‘im on the other side”, spoken as by the Prince of Wales at a Falklands Memorial Service in 1982 (cf. ibid. 45). After decades of decay, however, the stereotypical in’-endings were only heard occasionally and began to disappear during the eighties (cf. Honey ibid.: 94; Wells 1982 pt. 1: 262), since, in Milroy’s view, their social evaluation had changed from “characteristically upper-class” (ignoring lower-class usage) to “stigmatized non-standard”, thus proving the arbitrary character of these and other “socially sensitive linguistic variables” (cf. Milroy/Milroy 1985: 96). On the other hand, there were now extra open onsets in [ʊ] for /əʊ/ (contrasting traditional close [ou]) (cf. Cruttenden 1994: 80), and the characteristic U-RP opening glide [ɛæ] for /æ/ in that seemed to be frequently replaced by Southern [a], so far considered a provincialism (cf. Gimson 1962: 101, 1980: 109), in a time when “everyone from Princess Unne downwards embraced the Flat A” (cf. Brookes in The Sunday Times, 13/8/1978: 40; see 4.1.2). Characteristically, Princess Anne’s name continued to be pronounced “Enn” by her mother, and when Prince Andrew married, the Archbishop of Canterbury persisted in calling him “Endrew” (cf. Morrish 1999: 2). However, according to an investigation by Harrington and others (2000: 927) of the Queen’s pronunciation in the Christmas messages of the 88

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1950s and 1980s, her accent, too, showed a drift in the direction of common changes, particularly towards opener /æ/ and closer /ɔ:/, although all her adopted vowels were still clearly set apart from those of the broadcasters and of the younger members of the Royal Family. Having been criticised for their “quasi-Cockney” in the years around 1960 (cf. Gimson 1964: 132 f.) and brought in connection with fashionable Estuary English thirty years later (cf. Rosewarne 1994: 1; see 3.4.3), their accents have demonstrated the considerable amount of variation, even within the highest ranges of the most traditional and exclusive branch of RP. In the distinguished neighbourhood of Sloane Square in LondonKensington, a new post-War branch of deliberately traditional speech began to grow in the 1950s with Sloane Ranger46 – the exclusive “voice of the London upwardly mobile” (Crystal 1995: 365), represented by “a new generation of the socially privileged and those who [tried] to identify with them” (Honey 1989: 39). Soon, “Rangerland” began to extend over the City of London and the West End, over a number of South English Shires, and out into what had once been the Empire and beyond, as far as Hong Kong, Ceylon, and Vancouver so that, by 1980, “Sloane [was] where you [found] it” (cf. Barr/York 1982: 8). Loving aristocrats (pronounced with the stress on the first syllable!) and being obsessed by a nostalgic homesickness for an aristocratic past, they cherished and adored big eighteenth century houses, Old Country People, horses, the Army, Oxbridge, Eton, the Church Militant (i.e. the orthodox Church), the later Princess Diana – admired as “the 1980s Supersloane”, setting both fashion trends and modes of conduct (see Plate 2) – and, last but not least, Her Majesty the Queen, altogether living in the sure conviction that “Royalty [held] the whole thing together” (cf. ibd. 10 f., 18 ff.). Beside their general aversion to the English North, real Sloanes were inclined to hate most foreigners and any social newcomers threatening to invade their realms, and, even more so, trade unionists, politicians and intellectuals, among the latter the new kind of academics they considered “chippy”, “bolshie” and “stroppy” (cf. ibid. 6, 13, 15). Judging by its preferences and aversions, the Sloane Ranger phenomenon may well have been a reaction to the post-War wave of democratization of education, social relations and speech acceptability (see below 2.3.2; 3.2.1, 2), being, in the words of Barr and York, experienced by insiders as “comfortable and reassuring … after you’ve been in a shock, in analysis, into and out of all kinds of foreign rubbish” (p. 6). Consequently, Sloane language became intentionally oriented on what Alan Ross had called

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“upper class (abbreviated:U)” in 1954 (p. 54; see above 2.3.1) and further distinguished by Victorian circumlocutions as well as by a cherished range of set words, varied in their meaning by exaggeration, emphasis and repetition, such as in I was hysTERical, AbsolOOtly, and She’s rair-ly, rair-ly nice (cf. Barr/York 14 f.). What Rangers disliked most were Northern flattened As (ibid.15; open Northern [a] for /æ/ see below 2.4.1; 3.2.2) – even though those might likewise be heard in Southern regional accents and in fashionable Southern speech, including RP (see below 2.3.3; 2.4.1; 2.5.2) – together with the film stars who used them and with television in general, while it was Royalty alone that seemed to be forgiven in the person of Princess Anne (see above). Creating an ideology thoroughly upper middle-class (while despising anything “middle-class”) and cultivating a cherished set of aristocratic pretensions (with probably not too many real aristocrats being in their own ranks), declared Sloanes, in a kind of naively self-assured snobbery, were proud of preserving “the national speech, ‘BBC English’ as it used to be known before regional accents were let in” (Barr/York 15). As, however, their intendedly traditional and deliberately Southern-based speech shared a considerable number of features with London Cockney, it was not without reason that Cockney-speaking media starlet Janet Street-Porter was reportedly “jeered by a group of ‘Sloane Rangers’ for her accent” (Honey 1989: 118).

2.3.2

Democratic change

Apart from the traditionally prestigious ways of conservative and upper-class speech, there were developments in immediate post-War RP deriving from new democratic attitudes among the educated in the decades between the Wars, when a deliberately popular London-based variant had given its carriers a sense of belonging to a socially exceptional in-group of their time (cf. Wächtler 1978: 23 f.). In that period, the social attractiveness of the new uprising element had been one of the main forces in the strengthening of the young minority variant against older and well-established pronunciations until, by the early forties, the language of the educated had dissolved into a variety of accents heard from radio and TV commentators, politicians and academics who were increasingly setting the trends in educated speech (cf. Atkinson 1975: 70). Various London- and South East English-influenced changes, described by Daniel Jones as current from the 1920s onwards, were later quoted by Gimson, among them the lengthening of /æ/ to [æ:] in bad, the closing of /ɔ:/ to [oˬ:] in saw, the monophthongization of diphthongs and

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triphthongs including the fusion of traditional phonemes /ɔə/ and /ʊə/ into /ɔ:/ in more and poor, as well as the diphthongization of the short vowels in did [ɪə] and bad [æə] (1977: 133). Further popular London features were reported by Wells (1982 pt. 2: 294) and Brook (1979: 165) for the decades between the Wars, including an opener first element in the range of [ɜ:] [ęã] or [εã`] together with unrounded /ʊ/ in the traditional diphthong /ou/, beside completely levelled triphthongs as in five [ɑ:] and power [ɑ:]. The social significance of the post-War realization of the /ou/ phoneme was discussed by Kurt Wächtler, who saw in it the “pre-War connotation of a central [əʊ]”, then belonging to one London in-group of the young and spread by the BBC during the 1960s (cf. 1978: 25). In a “climate of changing values and weakening social constraints” (ibid.), he found a “correlation between the polarization of the phonetic variants and the polarization of their social meanings” (ibid.: 26), with [əʊ] standing for urbanity and modernity against the provinciality and conservativeness of [ou]. His analysis resulted in the assumption of a coalescence of “affected” or “advanced” [ɛʊ] or [εãu]-variants (after Ward 1929 and Gimson 1970) and a largely generalized [ou]-variant, as a “tentative compromise between two poles” (ibid. 25 f.). Cases like these of a final generalizing neutrality of socially diverging features may have led to the concept of a “classless” accent or, according to the 1959 Oxford English Dictionary, a “classless voice” (cf. Lewis 1985: 255), meaning an educated variant without obtrusively conspicuous features regarding region, class or generation and having emerged as a result of a “non-regional, socially relatively neutral development of RP” (ibid.; see 2.6.1) Disputable as popular London-based pronunciations of the twenties and thirties had been in their own time – being followed as the fashionable norm by some, and rejected as subjects of complaint by others – they were to prove the governing tendencies against the more traditional varieties in post-War RP. In connection with a left-wing orientation towards the non-middle-class, the non-British, the non-traditional and the non-authoritarian among the new intellectuals (cf. Shills 1955: 5 ff.), popular London tendencies in educated pronunciation were soon reaching beyond their social origins. In this situation, even Daniel Jones’s Southern English was suspiciously labelled “the speech of costermongers and servant girls” and of a “nauseating London simper” by his opponents (cf. Gimson 1977: 156), and Gimson, on a tape accompanying Viereck’s 1975 publication, proudly characterized himself as being “more or less a general RP speaker with strong London tendencies, Cockney tenden-

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cies”. Becoming associated with the educated middle generation, the new London-based features were widely accepted as part of what Gimson himself named general RP and described as the variant “most commonly in use and typified by the pronunciation adopted by the BBC” in his 1962 IPE (p. 85). Early characteristics included the closing of /ɔ:/ to [o:] among the younger generation of RP speakers in the South of England as well as a preference of short /ɒ/ to traditional (i. e. conservative and U-RP) long /ɔ:/ in words like off and gone which, in Gimson’s view, might be based not only on its greater democratic acceptability but also on its distance to popular London and Cockney long /ɔ:/ (cf. ibid. 108; further features cf. Gimson ibid. 102; 1964: 136; Barber 1964: 41). With regard to glides, there were considerable reductions and monophthongizations particularly in the triphthongs /aɪə/ and /aʊə/, resulting in the /ɑ:/-homophones of fire and tower (Gimson 1962: 125, 131) – a feature considered to be “one of the most striking sound changes affecting Southern British English in the twentieth century” (ibid. 131; cf. 125). The almost total elimination of /ʊə/ in favour of /ɔə/ or /ɔ:/ in sure was regarded as a “well-established” change (Gimson 1973: 117; cf. 1962: 139 f.; Hughes/Trudgill 1979: 27; Wells 1970: 232) which, in connection with the coalescense of the traditional diphthong /ɔə/ in shore with the monophthong /ɔ:/ in Shaw, was leading to the homophony of the three phonemes (Hughes/ Trudgill 1979: 27). Further, more central starting points were heard, leading over [eɪ] to [ɛɪ] and [e̢:(ə)] in /ei/, and the centralization to [ɜ:ʊ] and [ɜ:(ə)] of the first element in home was considered “likely to become general in a very short time” (Gimson ibid. 85; cf. 123, 128). Along with fashionable Southern articulations, further-reaching context forms became more widely accepted in colloquial general RP, though with a tendency to avoid markedly upper-class eccentricities as well as too obviously lower-class Cockney connotations. There was a new wave of traditionally Southern elision and compression, T-deletion and unstressed H-dropping, assimilation and coalescence47. Phonemes were deleted within words as university [ju:nɪˈvɜ:stɪ] and difficult [ˈdɪfkɫt] as well as on boundaries as in after a [ˈɑ:ftrə] while, father and [ˈfɑ:ðrən] son, what’s the matter? [ˈwɒsðə ˌmætə] and old man [ˈəʊl ̩mæn] (Gimson 1962: 230, 273 ff.; Barber 1964: 54), asked was “very frequently pronounced [ɑ:st], even in educated speech”, and “BBC announcers often pronounce[d] East Coast as [ˈi:s ˈkoust]” (Barber ibid.). H’s were dropped word-initial in the unstressed syllables of he gave him his breakfast [i ˈgeivim iz brekfəst] – a feature which was found to occur “even in

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the most highly educated and socially impeccable speakers, though they [might] not be conscious of it”, and was so widespread in rapid familiar speech that the h phoneme might eventually be “on its way out from the language” (ibid. 56). While context forms like these were admittedly increasing with pace in colloquial speech, they were considered necessary to be distinguished from “reduced forms in various types of regional and popular speech, which the educated speaker might characterize as vulgar”, in cases such as Waterloo [̩wɔ:ˈlu:], lovely [ˈlʌlɪ], cigarette [sɪˈgret] or recognize [ˈrekə%naɪz] (Gimson 1962: 230 ff.). As to assimilation and coalescence, their effects were held to be “normal in colloquial speech” by the early sixties (cf. Gimson 1962: 270), particularly in cases of lenis/fortis variation as in of [f] course or with [ɵ] thanks and of variation of place as in this [ʃ] shop, ten [ŋ] girls, while speakers were considered to be “usually unaware” of the changes in their speech (cf. ibid. 270 f.). In “very careful speech”, however, RP speakers would, after Gimson, avoid coalescence in nature or question and would “consciously avoid” assimilation on word boundaries, as in [ˈdəʊmp ˈmɪʃʃɔ: ̩treɪn] for don’t miss your train (ibid. 272) as well as nasality in he wouldn’t go [hɪ ˈwʊŋŋ(k) ˎgəʊ], you can have mine [ju kn h̩ æm ˋmaɪn] or good morning [̩gʊm ˋmɔ:nɪŋ] as occurred in very rapid speech and was often regarded by listeners as “a popular form unacceptable in RP” (ibid.). Even more disputable than the traditionally influential phenomena of elision and assimilation were the relatively recent features of Southern popular R-intrusion and Cockney-based T-glottalling. Intrusive r, having been an analogy to linking r in South Eastern non-rhotic speech since the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century48, had in Daniel Jones’s judgement of the late 1950s (cf. EPD repr. 1960: XXIV) become “quite common” among RP speakers, particularly so after word-final /ə/ as in idea ÿ rÿ of or Asia ÿ rÿ and Africa. According to Barber (1964: 59), it was “rapidly to be becoming universal” in this position, whereas after other vowels, as in Shah ÿ r ÿ of Persia or I saw ÿ rÿ it, it still seemed to be “generally disapproved” of (cf. Gimson 1962: 204). Admittedly, the controversial feature occurred “subconsciously … even among those who object[ed] most strongly” and many RP speakers had to make a “conscious effort to avoid using such forms” (ibid.), while attention continued to be focussed on intrusive r as an “undesirable speech habit” in the following editions of Gimson’s IPE (cf. 1970: 210; 1980: 208). Wells, too, considered the feature to be frequently stigmatized, particularly after /aʊ/ as in how ÿ rÿ are you, being a Cockney connotation of [ˈεãɘãr ˈɑ jə] (sic.; 1970: 242)

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and, though increasingly widened in its application, still to be “widely regarded as incorrect and slovenly … so that the speech-conscious [might] make some effort to avoid it” (ibid. 224). Being one of the most recent Londonbased novelties in RP and the most aggressively popular marker of the postWar young, the Cockney-like glottalling of word final /p/, /t/ and /k/49 found an even more hesitant acceptation in post-War RP. After having still been considered exclusively “Cockney” and “South Scotland” by Daniel Jones at the beginning of the twentieth century (cf. Wells pt. 1 1982: 261), glottal stop for /t/ was reported of some RP speakers in cases where a consonant followed, as in get[ʔ] down, foot[ʔ] ball, not[ʔ] now (cf. Gimson 1962: 164). It occurred “most frequently” before /m/ and /n/ as in batman [ˈbæʔmən] and button [bʌʔn], but was also “quite common” before /r/, /j/ and /w/ as in not[ʔ]right, not[ʔ]yet and not[ʔ]one, whereas in other positions such as Cockney-like little [lɪʔl] or butter [ˈbʌʔə] it continued to be regarded “substandard” (cf. Barber 1964: 61).

2.3.3

The young elite

Perhaps it was the combination of generalizing neutrality and traditional conservatism, accompanied by a wide resonance even among upwardly mobile sections of the lower strata (see 3.3.1), which made the “classless” variant of RP so unpopular among the young social elíte. As early as the 1930s, Daniel Jones had noticed that boys at public day schools did not lose their markedly regional pronunciations while at boarding schools they did (cf. Gimson 1977: X), and, in the decades to follow, speech at the minor public schools became increasingly associated with the Home Counties and even with the Shires in the North of England, on grounds of the direct popular influence. In a time when upper-class children, instead of being educated by their governesses, had to attend infant school and afterwards preparatory school in the shires before attending public school, and when, from the 1940s onwards, comparatively large numbers of alumni taken over from primary state schools (25 percent in 1971; cf. Bourke 1979: 114) were exhibiting more or less easily noticeable regional traits in their speech, even the boys of Eton began to share phonetic features with their “less favoured Cockney contemporaries” (cf. Wächtler 1978: 25). Following fashionable trends in youth culture, a considerable number of public school alumni were displaying South East English regionalisms, London Cockney and Liverpool Scouse50, beside wilful accelerations, refinements and spelling pronunciations, glottalizations and strong 94

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levelling tendencies which, according to Eustace (1967), were to be looked for in the speech of the middle classes – “a vast but ill-documented dialect with which they had increased contact” (p. 305). Although later, at Oxford and Cambridge, the ex-public school boys were largely keeping apart from the other students, they nevertheless got in contact with the non-aristocratic speech habits of the fifty-five percent so far educated at state schools (cf. Bourke 1979: 110), and through them with what Stanley Ellis (1972) described as “the new acceptance of regional speech and the way in which it [was] becoming an ‘in’ thing along with other forms of revolt against a traditional Establishment attitude” (1972: 878). The most fundamental change, in comparison to the RP of Daniel Jones’ later time, was a general shift to a more relaxed and easy-going style of speech, including glottalizations of consonants, various assimilated forms, spelling pronunciations and vulgarisms, in order to escape uniformity and routine. In 1967, S. S. Eustace presented an analysis of the phonetic characteristics in the speech of five seventeen-year-old Eton boys born between 1949 and 1951 (cf. p. 304 f.), whose vocalized [ɫ] in nail [ne:u] or railway [ˈreowe], glottal stops for the plosives /p/, /t/, /k/ in combination with elision as in isn’t it [ˈɪnɪʔ] or with nazalization in can’t one [ˈkãʔwan], and assimilation (velarization) of /n/ in fifteen guinees [ˈfɪfti:ŋˈgɪnɪz] were all of Cockney origin. Further, there were changes in the realization of traditional RP vowels, such as a marked tendency, particularly in girls, towards Southern-based lowered [ɑ], being most frequent before [l] in Algeria, as well as Southern fronting, diphthongization and unrounding of to [ʉ:] or [ʉu] in soon, and unrounding and levelling of glides such as in wild [ɑ:] and flowing [ɛ:]. Spelling pronunciations and vulgarisms, such as [ɪkˈsæmənd] for examined and [ɵɪˈetə] for theatre were completing the picture. Sharing, however, only a “very limited set of regional features with metropolitan popular accents” (Lewis 1985: 250), young exclusive speech remained without stigmatized H-dropping or substitution of /f/ for /ɵ/, while displaying “conspicuously prestigious RP variants”, with as open diphthongal onsets as in [ëʊ] for /əʊ/ and extreme levelling of glides as in [a:] for /aɪə/ (ibid.). The traditional influence of the Home Counties had made the fashionable accent of the young a mixture of traditional upper-class speech with a selective set of South English and London regionalisms, setting its speakers off from less exclusive social backgrounds as well as from the more traditional speech habits of the older generations. Reinforcing the London and South East English element, the young social elíte found their

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own ways of preserving the exclusiveness of the accent, and, in spite of all fashionable innovation, there remained a considerable homogeneity between young RP and the more established variants, “except perhaps for the delicate shades which separate[d] Cambridge and Oxford from each other and from the rest” (Halliday 1968: 21, 1st publ. 1964). On the basis of young exclusive speech, Gimson conceived an advanced RP as “used by young speakers of exclusive social groups – mostly of the upper classes, but also, for prestige value, in certain professional circles” (1962: 85), which in his view might become “the general RP system of the near future” (1964: 133). He repeatedly pointed to the fact that the variant was preserving characteristic traits of post-War public school speech, which was tending to be considered “the result of affectation or vulgarity” (ibid. 132) by carefully conservative speakers, and whose most “exaggerated” forms might also be judged “affected” by others (cf. 1962: 85). Consequently, “advanced” and “affected” were alternating in his phonetic descriptions of a centralized [ëʊ] “of an advanced kind … usually characterized as an affectation”, and of monophthongal /ɑ:/ for both /aɪə/ and /aʊə/, being “criticized as an affectation and also as a Cockney vulgarism” (ibid. 128, 134)51. Certain advanced features, however, were diverging from Southern U-RP and London Cockney as well, such as closer /ɔ:/ approaching C [o] in door, in contrast to popular London and conservative [ɔə] and [ɔ:wə], respectively (cf. ibid. 110), and lowered unrounded [ęã] for /ɪ/, contrasting conservative and popular Southern closer [i:]-like forms, particularly in final open syllables as in city (ibid. 97). The variant also contained diphthongizations in did [ɪə], head [eə] and bad [æə], which were without equivalents in popular London (cf. Barber 1964: 133), and there were Southern dialectal pronunciations in fashionably exclusive speech which were not by all regarded as “standard”, among them strongly monophthongized [ɑ:] for /aɪa/ in fire and diphthongal [əʊ] instead of /ɒ/ in solve, as exhibited by speakers ranging from middle to professional class (cf. Barber 1964: 47). In the years to follow, advanced open onsets and levelling tendencies in [ëʊ] for /əʊ/, [ę:1] for /eɪ/, and [a:(ə)] and [ɑ:(ə)] for [aɪ] and [aʊ], respectively, as well as considerable closing of /ɔ:/ to [oˬ:] in saw and fronting of /ʌ/ to [ä] or [ə] in luck (cf. Germer 1967: 16; Barnickel 1982: 41 ff.) were all very near to London Cockney or South East English country dialects, and even arresting final r was heard in your [jə(r)] “at the extreme top and broad base of the social scale” (Wells 1970: 245). The influence of the largely Southern-based advanced branch on the further development of RP seemed

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unquestioned and, in Gimson’s view, might “well indicate the way in which the RP system [was] developing and be adopted in the future as general RP” (Gimson 1962: 85).

2.4

Accent change and social relevance

2.4.1

Exclusive fashions or popular influence

Both young exclusive fashions and popular London influence were showing early in otherwise general RP, and while the most extreme eccentricities were dying out and even the most eccentric speakers were tending to conform to more moderate speech forms with advancing age, some of their trendy pronunciations were surviving in the speech of the middle generations. Thus, by the early sixties, the characteristically advanced lowered and lengthened vowel in man [ä∙] had become widespread beyond its sphere of origin, particularly in young RP-speaking women and children, and threatening to approximate so closely to Cardinal [a] that a confusion might result with phoneme /ʌ/ (cf. Gimson 1962: 100; Barber 1964: 42). In familiar speech, RP speakers said [ˈʃæu wi:] for shall we and [ðəmˈseuvz] for themselves (cf. Barber 1964: 48), and popular London realizations of syllabic [ɫ] as [ö], especially in words such as people and table, were not even recognized as unusual by RP speakers (cf. Gimson 1962: 203). What became generally accepted in the RP of early postWar years were the (historical) advanced closing of /ɔ:/ to [oˬ:] in saw (cf. Barber ibid.; Gimson 1980: 118) and the (likewise historical) diphthongization of educated Southern English close vowels in see [ɪi] and two [ʊu], especially in final positions, with the former soon considered to be “common amongst RP speakers, being more usual than a pure vowel” (Gimson 1962: 95, cf. 114; cf. Barber ibid. 44). Far-reaching diphthong shifts, however, as in fleece [əɪ], goose [əʊ], face [aɪ ~ ʌɪ] and price [ɑɪ ~ ɒɪ]], continued to be confined to Liverpool, Birmingham Cockney, popular London and Southern Near-RP accents (cf. Gimson IPE 1962: 95; 1980: 102; Wells pt. 1 1982: 257, 299; Near-RP see 3.1.3) and thus held to be largely “non-standard” in character well into the nineties (cf. Barber 1993: 269 f.) Opinions were different among linguists with regard to a more general acceptability of the various advanced opening and levelling tendencies in diphthongs and triphthongs gaining ground in RP. So, on the one hand, the [ɑ:]monophthong in our was judged “usual” in RP by Jones in his later time (i.e.

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in the 1950s; cf. Gimson 1977: 154), and the levelling of the traditional triphthongs /aɪə/ and /aʊə/ in tired [a] and towered [a] was considered even “commoner in RP proper than in educated regional speech” by Barber in 1964 (p. 46) and a few years later considered “perhaps commoner among younger speakers” by Wells (1970: 232) who regarded them as “additional centring diphthongs” in young speech. On the other hand, Gimson still labelled the final /ɑ:/-homophone of /aɪ(ə)/ and /aʊ(ə)/ and most other levelling tendencies in diphthongs “advanced” and regarded extreme opening tendencies of [aɪ] or [æɪ] for /eɪ/ in fate as “unacceptable for social reasons” in his 1980 IPE (cf. p. 129 ff.). As to fashionable tendencies in the traditional phoneme /ou/, however, he considered the originally “advanced” and “affected” London-based variant of [ëʊ] in home, with increasing centralization and a strong tendency towards monophthongization to [ə:ʊ] or [ə:(ə)], “likely to become general in a very short time” in his 1962 IPE (p. 85) and later confirmed its final consolidation (cf. 1984: 134). Wächtler, again, saw “little evidence” among the young generation of a fusion of [əʊ] and [ə:] ([sic.]; cf. 1978: 27), and also for Wells the opener first element in the range of [ë] or [ɜã], deriving from fashionable young RP of the time between the Wars (see 1.3.2), had ceased to be fashionable among the post-War young (cf. 1982 pt. 1: 294). The discussion was reflecting the state of affairs, in which different kinds of diphthongal onsets and more or less far-reaching stages of levelling were current beside fully pronounced forms in a coexistence of unresolved features, as “[at] any given moment, …, we must expect several pronunciations to be current, representing at least the older, traditional, forms and the new tendencies” (Gimson 1980: 73). However influential exclusive fashions may have been, it may be assumed that direct popular impact has contributed even more decisively to the spread of characteristically London and South English features in RP. As prestigious speakers had to share their social life and language with growing numbers who, to varying degrees, were preserving regional affiliations in their speech, the penetration of traditionally educated spheres by locally accented speakers will have been responsible for an increasing amount of formerly regional features in otherwise prestigious speech. The new image of successful young Cockneys, gaining the prestige that often goes with wealth, will have made light Cockney and other popular London forms increasingly acceptable and even desirable among young educated speakers in London and the South East, including those from RP-speaking homes. On grounds of popular London

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influence, variation between traditional RP final /ɪ/ and popular London close /i:/ in city52 was working in favour of the latter, in contrast to advanced final [ë]. So Gimson’s 1980 IPE saw open /ɪ/ “increasingly replaced in the speech of the younger generations by a short variety of /i:/” (p. 105), and in Wells’ description, happy tensing then “began to be heard from speakers who on all other grounds would be regarded as speaking RP” (1982 pt. 2: 299), until Cruttenden in 1994 considered /ɪ/ to be “increasingly replaced by a short variety of /i:/ by many speakers” (p. 99). About the same time, the characteristic Cockney vocalizations of /ɫ/ to variants of [ɤ], [o] or [ʊ], as in milk [mɪŏk] and middle [ˈmɪdo], were more generally “beginning to seep into RP” and expected to become “entirely standard in England” in the course of the new century (cf. Wells 1982 pt. 1: 258 f.). Within words and on boundaries, the use of mainly Southern-based popular context forms in cases of assimilation in ten minutes [ˈtemˈmɪnɪts], of compression in to arrive [twəˈraɪv], and of syllabic consonants compensating for elided vowels in satellite [ˈsætlˌaɪt] or correct [krˌekt] (cf. Wells 1982 pt. 2: 286) as well as of R-intrusion, T-glottalling and Yod-dropping (see 2.4.1 and 2.4.2) were varying with style and situation. Well into the 1990s, the acceptability of certain London-based fashions remained controversial among linguists. The restrictions, Gimson had put on the use of elision and assimilation in post-War RP in his 1962 IPE (see above 2.3.2) and upheld in the subsequent editions up to 1980 (cf. pp. 235, 291 f.), were further maintained in the updated versions edited by Ramsaran in 1989 (cf. pp. 237, 297 ff.) and by Cruttenden in 1994 (cf. p. 258 ff.). After Ramsaran, “unassimilated forms occur[red] more often than assimilated forms which tend[ed] to increase in the more casual style of speech” (IPE 1989: 309), and coalescence in cases as Tuesday, tune, or Don’t you was still as variable as it had been in the early decades of the century (cf. 1991: 187)53. While, in Wells’ description, traditional pronunciations had begun to face “strong popular competition” by Yod-coalescence, and the feature seemed to be “wellestablished” in casual RP even on the boundaries of what you [ˈwDtʃu] want and would you [ˈwʊdʒu] mind (cf. 1994 (1): 3)54, he still considered it to be “avoided in careful or mannered style and sometimes looked on as a Cockneyism”, being “on the whole perceived as non-RP” (ibid.). According to Trudgill and Hannah (1985), R-intrusion continued to be confined to its post-War applications and generally regarded as “somewhat conspicuous”, “socially stigmatized” or simply “incorrect”, though speech without it was beginning to sound “stilted” and “foreign” (cf. p. 15). Whereas Wells saw intrusive r

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strengthened in positions after /ɑ:/ and /ɔ:/, as in put a comma ÿ rÿ in and I saw ÿ rÿ it happen, and extended to cases within words as withdraw[r]al or saw[r]ing (1994 (1): 3), Cruttenden considered it often to be avoided in these positions (cf. 1994: 264). Although the feature did not seem to be stigmatized as strongly as before (cf. “until recently stigmatized as vulgar”; Barber 1993: 271), the contradiction remained between its wide use and its critical evaluation so that Wells stated in the mid-nineties: “In spite of its prevalence in RP … intrusive r does remain to some extent the object of overt stigmatization” (1994 (1): 3). In spite of considerable resilience in the general acceptability of popular articulations, however, middle-class RP was moving “downmarket” by taking on stigmatized features from popular London speech. In the early eighties, Wells pointed to certain stages of glottalling of /p/, /t/ and /k/ in stop talking, quite good and look down etc., which he considered to “fall within current mainstream RP” (1982 pt. 1: 261), and also to replacements by the glottal stop in “non-standard” applications as stop[ʔ] eating, quite[ʔ] easy and looking up[ʔ] in younger RP speakers (cf. ibid. 260 f.) – a process which he later called “The Cockneyfication of RP” in the headline to his article of 1994. In 1991, Ramsaran considered /ʔ/ for [t] as full replacement, “increasingly common” in cases as what now [wɒʔ naʊ] and not long [nɒʔ lɒŋ] (p. 187), and in Honey’s particular diction, “popular London threaten[ed] the purity of several RP vowels” through T-glottalling in final positions as in there’s a lo’ of i’ abou’, which was “commonly heard among RP speakers in the South of England”, among them even Prince Edward, the late Princess of Wales, and the Duchess of York (cf. ibid.). By the mid-nineties, after Wells, glottal stops for /t/ had become widely accepted within words before consonants, as in at[ʔ]mosphere, part[ʔ]ly and Gat[ʔ]wick as well as on boundaries, where it was meanwhile “very firmly established in casual RP” in cases as it’s quite good [ɪʔs kwaɪʔ gʊd] and increasingly heard before other consonants (cf. 1994 (1): 2). In younger speakers, an additional replacement between vowels was found to be consolidating in cases as pick it [ʔ] up, supplemented by the tendency of glottal stop to be used in absolutely final positions as in Let’s start [ʔ], while the glottal stop even became a rival to assimilation in cases where /t/ was involved so that what you began to be realized either as [ˈwɒtʃu] or as [ˈwɒʔju] (cf. ibid. 2 f.). In an increasing number of positions, T-glottalling was considered to become a regular feature of RP, on grounds of the influence of Cockney and other working-class accents, so that “… What started as a vulgarism [was] becoming respectable” (ibid. 2). Correspondingly, Paul

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Kerswill considered T-replacement in let[ʔ]me and get[ʔ]over to be “normal” and “frequently heard” in RP (cf. 2001: 3). Firmly excluded from RP, however, remained the intervocal glottal stop as in Cockney city, just as H-dropping was resisted in hammer and G-dropping in reading, and it was, after Wells, the exclusion of popular pronunciations like these from RP that served to secure the continued existence of the accent (cf. 1994 (1): 1 f.). What was most particular about recent tendencies in RP was that, for the first time since the later Middle Ages, speech forms other than those of London and the South East began to affect its traditional pattern. The use of the schwa-vowel /ə/ in the weak syllables of words as waitre[ə]ss and be[ə]lieve and in a growing number of endings, particularly in those on -ity and -ate, as in capacity and deliberate, was considered “firmly established” by Gimson in his 1977 EPD (p. XVI) and regarded as “the most striking change involved in this more permissive attitude to RP” (1979: 155)55. In the early nineties, Wells judged /ə/ “the principal variant” in these positions seeking its sources in “provincial England”, particularly the North and East, and also in North American, Australian and Irish influence (cf. 1994 (1): 2). After Lewis, the schwa vowel was found “along with socially inconspicuous and otherwise regionally neutral speech” (1985: 250), contrasting with the traditional Southern-based concept in that it did “not reveal anything of the local affinities of the speech of those who exhibited it except to fairly strongly contra-indicate the London area” (ibid.). Following his idea of a new non-metropolitan neutrality in RP, the source for the above-mentioned opening and merging of /æ/ with /ʌ/ might be sought less in Southern advanced influence or in a reaction against a closer Cockney type (cf. Wells 1994 (1): 1) than in the influence of the wide dialectal use of an opener variant in the North, the Midlands, Wales and parts of the South. Northern regional influence, in particular, may have been responsible for the wide spread of the fashion when, as early as 1966, Clive Upton found modern RP to coincide with the Leeds accent in the case of the TRAP vowel /æ/, being “different from older and now posher-sounding RP” (2002: 70). Similarly, the fashionable Southern-based glides in the range of [ɪi] for /i:/ (cf. Gimson IPE 1980: 102) may have been backed up by their dominance in the popular speech of the North West, including the area of Liverpool, beside their occurrence in parts of the South (dialectal distributions cf. Wells 1970: 246; Leith 1983: 133), in a time when the substitution of characteristic short Northern [a] for /ɑ:/ in plant and of Western [a(:)] for /ɑ:/ in drama might be considered an “acceptable regional marker in contemporary

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RP” (cf. Leitner 1982: 105). In connection with the new phenomenon of nonSouthern variation in RP, Regional RP variants reflecting “regional rather than class variation” were suggested by Alan Cruttenden in his 1994 edition of IPE (p. 80). Being “basically RP except for the presence of a few regional characteristics which [went] unnoticed even by other speakers of RP” (Cruttenden ibid.) and thus accepting almost any English regionalism in the range of strongly vocalized /ɫ/ in Southern ball [bɔʊ] and the Northern vowel in bath [æ], Cruttenden’s Regional RP may be considered a localizable conception of what Wells called Near-RP (see 3.3.3).

2.4.2

New acceptability

Within two or three decades of post-War development, the range of RP had widened socially and linguistically so that the accent could no longer be considered the relatively uniform marker of aristocratic speech nor the relatively homogeneous and easily identifiable indicator of upper (middle)-class affiliation it had been in the first half of the century. A decade after, in 1958, Spencer had first seen a “blurring” of the “phonetic distinctiveness” of RP (1958: p. 23), popular influence had modified the sound pattern of RP to a degree that, in Gimson’s view, “the exclusive purity of the former, classic RP [had] been diluted in the sense that some features of regional forms of speech [were] ‘received’ in a way that would not have been the case half a century ago” (1970: 18). At that time, his statement particularly referred to the weakening of /ɪ/ to /ə/ in weakly accented syllables, to a Cockney-like diphthongization of /i:/ and /u:/ leading to a confusion of London (Cockney-based) [səʊp] (= soup) with RP [səʊp] (= soap) as well as to an extensive centralization, lengthening and resulting monophthongization of the traditional diphthong /ou/ over [əʊ] to [ɜ:] in goal, which he then considered “the most striking of the changes” in post-War RP (ibid. 18 ff.). He saw tendencies like these accompanied by a levelling of /ʊə/ to /ɔ:/, resulting in its “almost total elimination” in words as sure, poor, tour, etc. (1981(2): 66; cf. “a phoneme … obviously in danger of disappearance”, 1981(1): 255), by reduced forms and indistinct pronunciations, and by changing stress patterns of polysyllabic words as con’troversy and pri’marily, with the stress shifting from the first to the second syllable on grounds of English regional influence (1981(2): 66). Consequently, by about 1980, dictionaries were considered to have become “archaic” and in need of comprehensive revision, regarding changes in sounds and accentual patterns (cf. Brook 1979: 161; Gimson 1981(1): 255 ff.). In his

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Introduction to the 14th edition of the English Pronouncing Dictionary published 1977, Gimson saw the main reasons for the new articulatory variability of RP in its application by a “much greater number of speakers, in more extensive layers of society”, using “RP or a style of pronunciation closely approximating to it” (p. X). Together with the less rigid structure of post-War society, encouraging social mobility and exposing large proportions of the population to the language of broadcasting, he realized “a certain dilution of the original concept of RP, a number of local variants formerly excluded by the definition having … to be admitted as of common and acceptable usage” (ibid.). As, in his view, decisive changes in the social validity of the accent had led to an “enlargement of the RP-area on the cone” (1979: 154), widening its articulatory range and obscuring the relationship between language and social class, it seemed to him “no longer possible to make a precise correlation of a ‘received’ standard of pronunciation with any section of society, and particularly not for those below thirty” (1982: 52; cf. IPE 1980: 302). It goes without saying that the kind and degree of acceptability of popular pronunciations varied considerably with social status and generation, and that there was a particularly high degree of popular accent tolerance among those of the younger generation who were rejecting RP because of its association with the traditional Establishment, and for whom “a real or assumed regional or popular accent [had] a greater (and less committed) prestige” (Gimson IPE 1970: 86). In 1978, BBC presenter Paul Vaughan described the new language tendencies among the young social elíte with the words: “young people who have had a private education tend no longer to advertise the fact in their speech aiming at an accent as classless as a flat cap … Now, evidently, the migration is in the other direction” (quoted in Zimmermann 1982: 429). After Abercrombie had stressed the close connection between public school and RP in the 1950s (cf. “The public schools are a unique institution, and RP is a unique accent”; 1956: 49), and Jones had still defined the social range of RP with “the families of Southern English people who had been educated at public schools” in his last edition of EPD in 1960 (p. XV), a specification of RP in terms of a public boarding-school education was considered “no longer valid” by Gimson in his 1977 EPD, as the new generation were tending to abandon their accents in favour of newly prestigious ones, not only of those of Liverpool and popular London, but also of Cockney and “Mid-Atlantic”56 (cf. p. XI). In the same way as, in his view, the public schools did “no longer provide a stable source for an exclusive form of speech” (1979: 153), the “old

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comfortable correlation between accent and authenticity of the news” had ceased to exist (1970: 18), and the pronunciation of BBC announcers could “no longer always be relied upon” to provide a model of RP (ibid. 20). While, after Hughes and Trudgill (1979), young RP-speakers, particularly in the London area, “deliberately adopt[ed] forms of regional pronunciation” (cf. p. 7), in accordance with a general preference for the popular and the democratic, while the anti-traditional tendency in young RP might, after Lewis, as well be anti-Southern, contra-indicating the London area (cf. 1989: 250). In short, in Gimson’s words, anything would do “provided it [was] not RP” (1982: 59). Being regarded as a threat to English culture and way of life, American influence on the language was from the start feared and hated by the older generation of upper (middle)-class background in general and by school teachers in particular, in what Mittins considered an “emotionally-loaded pejorative expression of tribalism” (1970: 115; cf. Trudgill 1990: 12). During the 1960s, English regionalisms like [ˈledßə] (sic) for letter were “stigmatized as ‘careless’ or ‘vulgar’ or even as ‘American’ which for some people seem[ed] to mean the same thing” (Barber 1964: 57), and, in Quirk’s words, the English were tending to blame their “favourite whipping-boy across the Atlantic” for their linguistic ills (cf. 1972: 41). At that time, Americanisms in young speech were frequently discarded by linguists as “superficial and transient, the demonstrative behaviour of unstable adolescents” (Trim 1961: 33; cf. Barber 1964: 20; cf. Gimson 1970: 19). In 1989, however, Honey reported “favourable reception in Britain of the American accent” (p. 72), being a variant outside the social-class hierarchy, hardly definable after criteria of educatedness and glamorized by cinema and television – factors which have been largely responsible for the fact that North American influence remained strong among the young of all social classes (see 3.3.2). Besides, influence from across the Atlantic may have even reinforced the spread of certain English regional features also in RP, such as Cockney Yod-dropping in suite [su:t] and resume [rɪˈzu:m] as well as English Southern-based happy tensing of final /ɪ/ to [i(:)], as common in the North and West of the USA since the 1920s (cf. Wells 1982 pt. 1: 257 f.).57 After J-deletion had been viewed by Gimson as “an alternative pronunciation”, commoner in general and advanced RP, in the early editions of his IPE (cf. 1962: 209; 1970: 214 f.), he later considered it “increasingly common” in a number of words such as absolutely and assume, occurring “predominantly” in the prefix super- and “almost always” in the Americansounding exclamation Super! [ˈsu:pə] (cf. 1980: 213). Ramsaran’s criterion of

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pure /u:/ being “increasingly common” after /l/ and /s/, as against positions after /ɵ/ and /z/ (cf. 1989: 214) was confirmed by Cruttenden (1994), who added increasing use of /u:/ following /n/ in accented syllables in words as neutral and news (cf. p. 192), so that a process which had been going on for centuries58 might indeed have been spurred by what Wells had still considered “largely an American peculiarity” in 1982 (pt. 1: 247). By the early nineties, further American influence was spreading to RP with tapped [ɾ] as a realization of intervocalic /t/, which was included by Ramsaran in her conception of “the current version of RP” (cf. 1991: 179; see 2.5.2 and 2.6.1). However, features like these were not generally regarded a sign of possible convergence of both standards, and Trudgill even saw pronunciation characteristics further diverging on grounds of different changes taking place on both sides of the Atlantic, including American further raising and diphthongization of /æ/ in man (mee-an [sic].) and absence of T-glottalling in better in popular speech (cf. 1990: 10). Nevertheless, a number of Americanisms will have contributed to ongoing language change in England, in a time when strong overtones of privilege and exclusiveness needed to be associated with RP no longer (cf. Lewis 1985: 255) and new fashions of uprising generations brought less exclusiveness, more freedom of choice, and a wider range of validity for the accent. The key to the accent’s survival lay not only in its traditional prestige and resilience but also in its adaptability to the fashions of the time, which had widened its range socially and linguistically and thus made it acceptable for new tastes and loyalties among the younger generations of its speakers.

2.5

RP: conceptions of a “standard”

2.5.1

What kind of “standard”?

Recent “standard” conceptions of the English language have often been restricted to the relatively clearly fixed and thus less controversial fields of grammar and lexis, but the issue of RP as a possible “standard” of pronunciation has nevertheless been discussed from different angles and with different results. After a decade of post-War development, the perplexing variability in what had been a largely homogenous accent around the turn of the century led Daniel Jones to renew his rejection of a pronunciation standard (see 2.2.1) and to renounce any idea of a standard conception for pronunciation in his 1956 edition of The Pronunciation of English: “It can no longer be said that any

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standard exists, nor do I think it desirable to attempt to establish one. It is useful that descriptions of existing pronunciations should be recorded, but I no longer feel disposed to recommend any particular pronunciation … or to condemn others” (p. V). In the Preface to his last, completely revised edition of EPD of the same year, he again assured the reader that in it “no attempt [was] made to decide how people ought to pronounce”, and that RP meant “merely ‘widely understood pronunciation’” and he did “not hold it up as a standard which everyone [was] recommended to adopt” (cf. repr. 1960: XV f.). Nevertheless, he saw general advantages of the accent in its wide intelligibility the world over (cf. ibid. XVI), and its resulting usefulness in more effective and wider communication was later again underlined by Gimson, Quirk and others. Being the pupil and successor of Daniel Jones, A. C. Gimson was much less reticent than his teacher had been with regard to the “standard” role of RP. Although increasing variability in post-War RP made it necessary to apply the additional labels of conservative, general and advanced to its three emerging branches (cf. IPE 1962: 84 f.; see 2.3.1), he underlined the accent’s great prestige as an “unofficial standard” and an “implicitly accepted social standard of pronunciation” (1962: 81, 83), and regarded it “for social reasons … a model worthy of imitation” (1964: 133). Quirk, in his conception of a normal English, also recognized an image most people had of a “normal or standard English in pronunciation”, being “very commonly in Great Britain … Received Pronunciation, often associated with the public schools, Oxford, and the BBC” (1968: 87), and Giles still considered RP “an abbreviated form of Received Pronunciation or Standard English” in 1970 (footnote p. 212). Abercrombie who, on all other occasions, denied the existence of a pronunciation “standard” (see 1.5.1), once called RP a “standard accent for England”, though declaredly in a social and not in an educational or linguistic sense in 1956 (cf. p. 50). Similarly, the use of RP by BBC newsreaders as well as its wide availability in phonetic textbooks, in connection with its predominant role in teaching at home and abroad, were considered by Trim and Warburg to mark an accent, “accepted, tacitly, as a standard form of speech” (1959: 95) and thus to function as a “de facto standard in England”, more widely employed and exerting a greater attraction than ever before (cf. 1961: 34). Increasing articulatory variability in the educated language, however, was leading to a number of new interpretations of its possible “standard” function and to alternative new terms59 and conceptions of the traditional prestige accent and its new variants. Charles Barber who in 1964 traditionally ascribed 106

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what he called Received Standard (RS) to “no local place” and defined it as “the language of the English gentry”, as propagated within their families and boarding schools (cf. p. 22), suggested a less socially and more regionallybased definition of the concept. Since there was “an increasing body of speakers who [had] not been to public school but who regard[ed] themselves as speakers of ‘R. S.’” (ibid. 28), he referred to a then widespread understanding of a pronunciation standard with no necessary public school background, but with a strong South-Eastern regional element until then considered “substandard”, being “the speech of the educated classed of the South-East of England” and not exclusively the speech of the gentry (cf. ibid.). Ignoring the changing “phonetic substance” and concentrating on the more stable “phonemic system” of RP in a concept of wider socioregional validity, J. L. M. Trim (1961: 34) proposed the term English Standard Pronunciation for a nonaristocratic educated standard developing on the traditional basis of the prestige accent, while reserving the term RP for the “distinctively Public School accent”. E.S.P. was conceived as the “typical speech of intellectual middleclass city-dwellers” (ibid. 36), and therefore considered not only the standard pronunciation for England, but also the standard for English as a foreign language. Later, in 1978, John Munby again suggested two similarly different variants of RP, distinguishing between an accent as “upper-class social marker” and a “middle-class and usually tertiary education” variant (quoted in Leitner 1981: 243). Basing his conception on similar premises, J. W. Lewis (1985) divided RP into two main streams, a prestigiously Southern “Metropolitan subvariety of RP” and a socioregionally neutral “Non-Metropolitan variety of RP” (p. 250), which he termed Conspicuous GB and (ordinary) General British (GB), respectively (ibid. 255).With its socially “inconspicuous” features and wider social currency, the latter meant a “non-regional socially relatively neutral development of RP” (ibid.), descending from what had been termed a “classless voice” in the Oxford Dictionary New Supplement of 1959 and meaning “neither markedly upper-class nor the reverse”, but, “in effect … either middle or upper class” (ibid.). With its roots in the South East of England, Ordinary General British was considered to be valid for the whole country, in deliberate analogy to General American as based on the pronunciation of the Middle West60, and to exercise a standard function as one of “the two great common denominators” among the World’s Englishes (cf. ibid. 251). The term of RP, however, was largely maintained in the description, alternating with General British – “this non-regional socially relatively neutral devel-

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opment of RP” (ibid.) – and the two main variants of GB were finally equated with Gimson’s (general) “classic RP” and with his (revised or wider-based) “RP with regional features” (cf. ibid. 255; see below).

2.5.2

RP: the changing concept

Even though, in Gimson’s view, the accent was facing continuing dilution of its traditional pattern and might finally “lose its historic identity” (IPE 1970: 86; see 2.4.2), he later referred to it as “our concept of a spoken standard” (1977: 156). So when, towards the end of the seventies, “the period of total permissiveness” in RP had passed and there was “some reversion to an acceptable uniformity” (1977: 156; cf. 1979: 150), he considered it important to re-examine its concept and to undertake fundamental revisions of its linguistic description and social determination. The main problems in the revision of the traditional concept were seen in the dilution of the “exclusive purity of the former, classic RP” (1970: 18) and in the way “this new (diluted) standard was to be defined” (1979: 154). Bearing relevance to “an interaction between the traditional standard and certain regional forms”, Gimson thought it necessary to “dissociate the definition of a standard from the speech of an easily identifiable and separate ruling class” and thus to make the description of the accent “more realistically typical of a larger section of the population” (1977: 156 f.). In his thoroughly revised fourteenth edition of the English Pronouncing Dictionary (1977), he consciously tried to avoid using social criteria to define the model, in order to make the recorded speech style “applicable to a wider sample of contemporary speakers, specially those of the middle generations”, as it seemed “no longer appropriate, at the end of the twentieth century, to define RP speakers in the strict social terms used by Daniel Jones in 1917” (Preface VII). Evidence for what Gimson now called a revised standard was gathered from twenty middle-class subjects of professional and managerial background, belonging to the middle generation with younger ages predominating and coming from the South East of England, particularly from the London region. Speakers were chosen after the criteria of an /æ/-/ɑ:/-opposition in grass, the /ɒ/-/ɔ:/-opposition in knotty – naughty, the absence of post-vocalic /r/ in form, the occurrence of /ʊ/ and /u:/ in book and food, and the vowel in home [əʊ] being diphthongal with a central first element (1979: 155 f.). Criteria mentioned in the Introduction to the 1977 EPD were further including nasal /ŋ/ in singer and certain phonetic limits in sound quality, such as differ-

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ent realizations of similar oppositions in RP and Cockney, held to be “sufficiently divergent” to mark the distinctions (p. XI f.). Similar to the definition of general RP (cf. 1962: 85; see 2.3.2), the revised variant was based on the language of BBC newsreaders, being “acceptable” and “intelligible” and containing no strongly regional forms, and it was “this more relaxed but acceptable type of pronunciation which [could] form a basis for the definition of a revised standard” (1979: 154). In addition to immediate post-War novelties in general RP, the variant contained the widespread replacement of /ɪ/ by /ə/ in weakly accented syllables – in Gimson’s view “the most striking change involved in this more permissive attitude to RP” (1979: 155) – as well as happy tensing of final /ɪ/ to /i(:)/, the elimination of /ʊə/ in tour [ɔ:], and the acceptance of assimilation in issue [ˈɪʃu:] and of Yod-dropping in illusion [ɪˈlu:ʒn] (ibid. 155 f.). As indicated by the above-mentioned choice of informants, the social background of the accent was conceived more characteristically middle-class and less aristocratic than before, with “a good deal of latitude … in the relevance of phonemes”, and with a “wide intelligibility” and a “wide social acceptability” being its declared goals (cf. ibid. 156). In spite of the articulatory “dilution” and the changes in the social validity of the accent, Gimson decided not to dismiss the concept nor the “hallowed label attached to it”, since “the revised model was a clear descendant of the original RP” (ibid. 155), a highly traditional and prestigious speech form, and thus the most genuine offspring of Daniel Jones’ English. After the definition of a revised standard, linguistic borders were open to what Gimson then called wider-based RP, with the “admission into the permitted speech forms of certain variants until recently regarded as regional”, as it was “now realistic to allow considerable dilution in the original concept of the RP speaker”, in a pronunciation still regarded as “standard” or “received” (cf. IPE 1980: 302), although “dissimilation and enlargement” through a wider social currency had admittedly made RP “more of a fiction than a reality since it be[came] increasingly difficult to define” (1981: 66). Further, a High Acceptability RP was proposed in his 1980 IPE as a “production performance target” for the foreign learner, being based on the “educated speaker of the South East of England”, which meant roughly on the middle generation of general RP speakers, and containing no “unhabitual speech forms”, such as Americanisms, slang or non-standard grammar (cf. p. 307 ff.). A more permissive conception of a native variant of High Acceptability RP, however, was outlined in 1984, in which “‘received’ must be taken to mean ‘of widespread

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intelligibility and general acceptability’” (1984: 53). Beside the abovementioned characteristics of the revised standard, the new concept included the levelling of [əʊ] to [ɜ:] in grows (in the 1980 IPE still blamed for its danger of confusion between the two phonemes; cf. p. 135), far-reaching monophthongization of the triphthongs /aɪə/ and /aʊə/ over [ɑ:ə] to [ɑ:] (the latter still considered “advanced” in 1980, p. 140), as well as a lengthening of /æ/ before lax consonants and its lowering as “common among the young” (still confined to the temporary use by children in 1980, p. 109). The concept of High Acceptability RP was deliberately defined “without reference to social class or type of education” (i. e. public school education; cf. 1984: 48), which could “no longer be used as defining factors in any description of the standard” (ibid. 46). However, Gimson stated with satisfaction that the British were “fortunate in having a notion of a standard pronunciation which [had] come into being over the last four centuries: ‘Received Pronunciation’ (RP)” (1981: 66), and his 1982 contribution with the title of “A Standard Pronunciation of English” was again devoted to RP. “Great prestige is still attached to this implicitly accepted social standard of pronunciation” had been the carrying words in his outline of the current situation of RP in 1962 (IPE p. 83), and he upheld this view in the following editions up to the last one in 1980 (p. 89). Although the beginning of the statement might be modified by others (cf. “Prestige still seems to be attached …”, Giles/Powesland 1975: 26; “Some prestige is still attached …”, Cruttenden 1994: 78), its final words were always left unchanged. The widening social range of educated pronunciation led J. C. Wells to develop a conception of RP and its bordering accents in which the “speech stratification” was correlating with the “social stratification” (1982 pt. 1: 10), and to define the social range of RP as “characteristic of the upper class and (to an extent) of the upper middle class” (ibid.). Within his stratification of U(upper-crust see 2.3.1), mainstream, adoptive and Near-RP (the latter two see 3.1.2 and 3.1.3), the mainstream branch with its (upper) middle-class background had the widest social prestige, representing “the central tendency” (1982 pt. 2: 279). Roughly corresponding to Gimson’s above-mentioned revised or High Acceptability RP, it contained trendy post-War phenomena, with /æ/ lowered to [a] and a lengthening of the vowel particularly in adjectives such as bad, closely rounded /ɔ:/ in report, and the substitution of /ʊə/ by /ɔ:/ in tour. Though a closer quality of the final vowel in happy /i:/ or its neutralization in city [ˈsɪti] or coffee [ˈkɒfi] (ibid. 287 ff.) was more readily attributed

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to adoptive, Near- or non-RP, it was also ascribed to speakers “who on all other grounds would be considered as speaking RP” (ibid. 299). The conception of the variant implied, among others, a wider articulatory tolerance in the acceptance of context forms, such as unstressed H-dropping as in tell him [ˈtelɪm], intrusive r, and various kinds of assimilation and elision (cf. ibid. 286). However, in spite of considerable articulatory permissiveness in the phonetic description, Gimson’s liberal notion of an RP with slightly regional features as a widely accepted neutral standard for educated pronunciation (see above) was replaced by a more rigorous conception of the accent as “a model of how one ought to speak” and as the “most desirable accent for a person in a high-status profession to have” (1982 pt. 1: 34). Built on these premises, Wells’ 1990 Pronunciation Dictionary presented a “modernized version of the type known as Received Pronunciation, or RP” (p. XII), responding to recent change and diversity through a “broader” definition of the accent and the inclusion of “a number of pronunciations that diverge from traditional, ‘classical’ RP” (ibid.). An absolute novelty was the inclusion of a certain range of non-Southern educated regional pronunciations, as e. g. one [wɒn] beside [wʌn] for one and [læst] beside [lɑ:st] for last, though with the significant explanations “The general form is wʌn; wɒn is a localised northern form” and “The RP form is lɑ:st. In England læst is a localised northern form” (ibid.). Many other educated regional forms, as e. g. Southern [mɪok] with vocal /l/ for milk, Midland [sɪŋgə] with sounded /g/ for singer, and Northern /r/ wordfinal or pre-consonantal as in cart (though included as the American equivalent) were “not mentioned explicitly” (ibid. XIII). The general position was made clear with the words: “In England and Wales RP is widely regarded as a model for correct pronunciation, particularly for educated formal speech” (ibid. XII; cf. 1982: 34). Similar in content but less absolute in diction, RP displayed itself as “a kind of standard” in Susan Ramsaran’s description of 1991 (p. 183), not deliberately imposed or consciously adopted as a “norm” or “target”, but “a standard in the sense that it [was] regionally neutral and [did] undeniably influence modified accents of many British regions” (ibid.). Following Gimson’s above-mentioned conception, a far-reaching social neutrality of RP was claimed in that it was considered “impossible actually to identify the accent … in social terms” (ibid. 178). Phonetically, it was described as “a non-rhotic accent” which, among others, was fully exploiting the contrast between /ʌ/ and /ʊ/ and /u:/, and realizing /aʊ/ with a central to back first element (cf. ibid.

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180). Recent articulatory diversity was suggested in the description of “a fairly close, though almost invariably short front vowel” in very [i(∙)], being considered “a strong current tendency” (ibid. 186), of corresponding tensing of /ʊ/ (or centralization to /ə/) in excecutive, of increasingly open and retracted /æ/ near to [a], and of changes in the realization of diphthongs. With regard to context forms, substitution of preconsonantal /ʔ/ for /t/ in phrases as what now [wɒʔ naʊ] was noted beside coalescence within words as congratulate [kənˈgrætʃʊleɪt]) and on boundaries as in don’t you [ˈdəʊntʃu:] (cf. ibid. 186 f.). Prosodically, a recent fronting of stresses in adjectives as applicable [ˈæplɪkəbl] and a spreading of level pre-nuclear patterns in informal speech were included in the description (cf. ibid. 188 f.). English regional-based as well as intruding American fashions were considered to spread all over the country by broadcasting (cf. ibid. 183), and the question was raised whether a combination of the inherited phoneme system of RP with certain English regional and American-based Near-RP features, such as Northern English fully open and retracted realizations of /æ/, Southern word final unstressed /i:/, North American intervocal tapped [ɾ], and Southern English preconsonantal /ʔ/ for /t/, might mark the emergence of “some new ‘syncreticized’ accent”, or whether the new non-regional amalgam might rather be described as “the current version of RP” (ibid. 179). Though certain forms were still regarded by observers as of “doubtful acceptability” and judged “ignorant”, “substandard”, “incorrect”, “careless” or “markedly regional” (ibid. 189), the realized variability of current RP was nevertheless reflected in the phonetic transcription of the 1993 Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary where, according to the Preface written by A. P. Cowie, Ramsaran provided “as a new feature, a full treatment of variant pronunciations” (p. VII). And although, on grounds of its great diversity and problematic definability, the accent was again considered “somewhat fictional” and “not a normative standard” by Ramsaran (1991: 189; cf. Gimson 1981: 66), its strength was seen in its wide prestige as a model of pronunciation as, in Ramsaran’s words, “it is towards RP that regional accents tend when they undergo modification” (1991 ibid.; cf. Honey 1989: 76; McArthur 1992: 851; standardization processes, see 2.4.2).

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2.6

A “standard’s” functions revisited

2.6.1

Regional neutrality

Common to most post-War descriptions of RP and RP-like conceptions was a renewed emphasis on the traditional claim to the accent’s “non-regional” character, though now from different angles and diverging points of view. Other than in the period of the accent’s growth and consolidation (see 2.5 and 2.2.1), arguments in favour were brought forward either in order to contrast its regional neutrality with its social determination or to underline its nationwide validity as a “standard” pronunciation. As a non-localized accent, RP was considered “a significant marker of social class in all parts of England” (Trim 1961: 30; cf. Abercrombie 1956: 47 ff.), being “normally associated with a higher level of education or a higher social status, or both” (Strevens 1964: 26), or traditionally described as “upper-class” (cf. Barber 1964: 22). The conception of RP as an accent of regional neutrality and upper-class provenance was persisting throughout the 1970s, in descriptions where “RP speakers [did] not betray their geographic origins but only their social status” (Trudgill 1975: 20) and where the accent was defined as “a regionally neutral class accent” (O’Donnell/Todd 1980: 41). After considering RP an accent “not specifically Southern English but used for socioeconomic reasons more in the South East than elsewhere in England” (1970: 248) and calling it Southern British Standard in 1971 (cf. rev. in 1982 (1): 117), Wells, too, underlined its geographical non-localizability, stating that “upper-class accents exhibit no regional variation in England” (1982 pt. 1: 14). In a letter of 19 November 1993, he was again stressing the fact that, throughout his lifetime”, one of the key characteristics of RP [had] always been its non-localizability (within England)”, as the speech of the land-owning upper class. At least since Daniel Jones’s early definitions of a prestigious pronunciation (see 2.2.1), however, the traditional “non-regional” image of the modern prestige accent had been challenged by its persisting dependence on the South East. After Gimson had ascribed a certain regional neutrality to a pronunciation “exerting least prejudice of a regional kind” (1970: 85), his 1977 EPD was declaredly based on an accent “retaining its underlying South Eastern English characteristics” (Preface VII). Up to his own last edition of IPE, he described RP as basically educated Southern British English, arguing that “the essential regional base of the pronunciation regarded as ‘standard’ or ‘received’ remain[ed] the educated speech of the South East of England” (1980: 302).

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During the past two decades, the widening social and articulatory range of RP gave rise to new interpretations of its regional “neutrality”. Lewis saw new streams emerging within this “least regional accent of Great Britain”, which were “not regionally neutral” but associated with “very broad” regions (cf. 1985: 244, 250). In this connection, he referred to a limited set of London Cockneyisms in socially conspicuous RP and to mildly regional features in regionally neutral and socially inconspicuous speakers, as exemplified by BBC reporters and interviewers and an increasing number of newsreaders, forming “a possible third division”, in addition to his two proposed variants of General British (see 2.5.1), of a “non-regional socially relatively neutral development of RP” (ibid. 255). Pointing to the historical acceptance in RP of features not shared by the accents of the Home Counties and hence not South English in character, such as non-rhotic speech (in contrast to popular rhotic speech in Kent and Sussex), and H-pronouncing (contrasting H-dropping in London and much of Essex), Ramsaran (1991) saw the recent penetration of RP by English regional and North American characteristics (cf. p. 179; see 2.5.2) become accepted in a kind of “non-regional standard which [was] evolving to display these features” (ibid. 183). Thus, including nonprestigious (i. e. “localisable”) features beside prestigiously Southern (i. e. “non-localisable”) ones, a new “standard” pronunciation was considered to grow on the prestige of the Capital, furthered by wider communication and the influence of the media. Nevertheless, the traditional idea of the regional neutrality of RP was again underlined with the words: “However, though it has its origins in a specific region, it may still be described as ‘non-localised’ in that it may be encountered as the native accent of people who come from all over Britain” (ibid. 179). The recent state-of-affairs in the socioregional classification of RP is impressively reflected in Crystal’s description of 1995, pointing to its widened (though still distinctively upper-class) social and educational background and to its considerable (though clearly South-Eastern-based) nonlocalizability, and suggesting that RP was, after all, “best described as an ‘educated’ accent” (cf. p. 365).61 About a decade later, however, Kerswill took up the idea of regional neutrality again, pointing to the “new” features in RP, “which (were) spreading throughout Britain and (were) therefore nonregional” (2007: 50). However resilient the notion of a non-regional prestige accent as a “standard” pronunciation for England might have been, opinions among its defenders were diverging with regard to its particular role as a generally British

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standard of English. There were many who saw the validity of the accent as a standard of pronunciation for England alone, excluding the rest of (Great) Britain and the wider British English-speaking world. Abercrombie who, in his early work, considered RP a socially-determined “standard accent for England” (1956: 50, see 1.5.1), denied its relevance for all the British Isles and for the whole English speaking world (cf. ibid.), just as Quirk regarded “a normal or standard English in pronunciation” (i. e. RP; see above 2.5.1) a standard “almost only in England” (1968: 87). Wells, in his early work, later called RP the “Southern British Standard …, inasmuch as it [was] generally taken as a standard throughout southern Britain (i. e. in England and perhaps Wales, but not in Scotland)” (quoted in Wells 1982 pt. 1: 117), where it was “generally seen as a foreign (English) accent” (ibid. 15). Both Lesley Milroy and J. L. M. Trim particularly underlined the cultural (and hence sociolinguistic) autonomy of Scotland, Wales and Ireland, where there were “a range of educated accents” (Milroy 1980: 105) beside RP which was “felt to be intrusive, the mark of expatriate sassenachs” (Trim 1961: 32). However, in the same way as Gimson entitled his 1970 article on recent change in RP “British English pronunciation”, thereby extending the accent’s validity as a standard of pronunciation over the whole island, Lewis considered his term of General British justified by the wide geographical distribution of a variant which, he argued, was “heard more widely in England, Scotland and Wales than any other variety of British pronunciation” (1985: 255). In the same sense, Weiner definitely called RP “a neutral national standard” in 1986 (p. 227), whereas Trudgill and Hannah again saw the accent “associated with England and English English” (1985: 2), rejecting any “standard” function of RP at home or abroad. Argumentation was going similarly diverse ways with regard to RP as a further-reaching international standard of English. Criticism of the idea of an international relevance of RP was strongest in the 1950s and 1960s. Abercrombie pointed to an increasing hostility to RP, particularly outside Europe (1957: 54 f.), and Strevens saw the prestige of RP begin to diminish, in connection with the increasing world-wide influence of the USA and the emergence of new standards in Africa, and recognized the acceptance of the accent as a model “in fewer and fewer places”, even losing ground in Canada and Australia (cf. 1964: 26). While noticing the established role of American English in the English-speaking world (cf. 1972: 74; see 3.5.1), Quirk underlined the traditional variant’s “great prestige throughout the world” (1968: 87),

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particularly in English language teaching, just as Trudgill and Hannah later considered it prestigious in the British Isles and the Commonwealth (cf. 1985: 2). There were others, however, who considered RP a standard of pronunciation not only for Britain but for the whole English-speaking world, with even “a wider currency on a world scale than General American” (Trim 1961: 37) and functioning as a “standard for international communication”, particularly for Commonwealth countries as Australia, New Zealand and (to a lessening degree) Canada (cf. Leitner 1982: 91, 95). Characteristically, in Dear’s Oxford English (1986) which, according to the Publisher’s Foreword, was compiled with the aim “to reflect the diversity of the English language, its international influence and its flexibility” (p. V), Weiner’s chapter on “Pronunciation” was exclusively devoted to the description of RP (cf. ibid. 227 ff.). Towards the end of the 1980s, the international and technological realities of the modern world were leading Honey to claim the necessity of an “increasing standardization of English pronunciation” by evening out differences in RP and bringing regional speech closer to its model (cf. 1989: 171 f.). Last but not least, RP was most probably involved when the Prince of Wales, complaining to the British Council on the “corruptive” influence of American English, was calling for action with the words: “We must act now to insure that English – and that, to my way of thinking, means English English – maintains its position as the world language well into the next century” (quoted in Algeo 1998: 177).

2.6.2

RP and the BBC

Opinions among linguists varied as to the consistent use of RP by BBC announcers and newsreaders and the resulting idea of a close connection between “BBC English” and RP. Having originated in the 1920s as a disparaging term among early regional BBC staff for speakers with public school accents (cf. McArthur 1992: 109) and reinvented by the press in a depreciatory use in the 1930s on grounds of the Board’s increasingly RP-oriented policy (cf. Leitner 1981: 250), the label later became positively generalized and extended to the speech of BBC newsreaders and presenters, more or less directly referring to RP. The dominance of RP on the radio was unquestioned when Abercrombie, in 1951, found it traditionally represented in the News on the BBC, suggesting: “But in case anyone is doubtful about identifying it, you hear it every time you listen to the news” (p. 385). In his 1962 IPE, Gimson still stated with surety that the BBC had “adopted this form of pronunciation [i. e. RP] for its announcers” (p. 83), and in the years to follow, RP was repeatedly

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considered to be “associated with the BBC” (Strevens 1964: 26; cf. Hughes/Trudgill 1985: 2) or even “synonymous with BBC English” (Giles 1970: 212). Since the middle of the sixties, however, different judgements were indicating more liberal language attitudes, coinciding in time with the effects of the post-War revolution in broadcasting (see 4.1.1). After, in the early sixties, Barber (1964: 38) had still realized no “markedly [!] regional characteristics” in the speech of announcers (a term then used for both announcers and newsreaders), Gimson changed his 1962 definition of general RP (see 2.3.2) into “The BBC formerly recommended this form of pronunciation for its announcers” for the 1970 edition of IPE (p. 85), recognizing a “recently more permissive attitude of the Board to its newsreaders”, allowing for “markedly non-RP or non-British accents” (ibid. 86). The idea of a loosening of language habits on the BBC became more explicit with the confirmation that “the BBC – in Britain – [had] in the last few years relaxed its control over its announcers who, far from always being representatives of RP, [might] bring to the microphone the speech of distant parts of the Commonwealth” (Gimson 1970: 18). About the same time, Quirk reported of “many newsreaders and commentators” being Australians, New Zealanders, South Africans, Canadians, Yorkshiremen or Cockneys, “all freely and naturally using their native accents, while RP [had] taken its rightful place as just one of the acceptable ways of speaking English” (1972: 72 f.). According to the Preface to the 1971 BBC Pronouncing Dictionary of British Names, domestic radio had in fact extended its range by taking in several Commonwealth announcers (see above Gimson IPE 1970: 86) – in contrast to London TV where announcements were as before made by RP speakers, and to the BBC’s European and World Service where Southern English seemed to remain the acceptable norm for all announcers, both in news bulletins and in programmes (cf. Leitner 1981: 252). The diminishing role of RP in the BBC News was confirmed by Trudgill who considered the accent as “until recently required of all BBC announcers” in 1974 (p. 19) and perceived on the BBC “slightly regional accents … unthinkable before the War” (1975: 70; cf. Wells “until the early 1970s, this was the accent demanded in its announcers by the BBC”; 1982: 117), while Quirk pointed to considerable changes in the presentation of news bulletins, in comparison to “the early days when announcers sat reading the news unseen, in dinner jackets and Oxford accents” (1980: 8). The new situation in the BBC’s English was conveniently summarized in an article in The Observer of September 1978: “Things have loosened. A trace of Wessex, even

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a drag of Irish, will do wonders for a broadcaster. The accents of Eton and the Brigade of the Guards are now a little dead. And the old accents of the BBC … now sound like quaint resurrections” (quoted in Gimson 1979: 153). In the course of the 1970s, however, the loosening of standards on domestic radio – regardless how far it ever went in newsreading – was losing speed and intensity (see 4.4.1), and Gimson repeatedly pointed to a “less permissive attitude of the BBC to its newsreaders” (1979: 150; cf. 1984: 46). He soon no longer recognized strongly regional forms in the pronunciation of newsreading which, though being “outside pre-War limits” (1979: 154), had “obviously returned to more traditional lines and did not divert markedly from an RP norm” (1980: 325). After O’Donnell and Todd, “the voice of authority on the radio still prefer[red] RP” (1980: 91), and Gough (1982: 247 f.) saw many among the young recruits of the BBC who used RP “happily enough”, though, of course, different from the generation of their parents and grandparents, thus reflecting “the general situation in the RP of the younger generations” (cf. Gough 1982: 248). In Leitner’s description, it was the Board’s practice to select speakers on the basis of their communicative competence, which meant a persisting concentration of recruits from RP-speaking backgrounds in the most responsible functions of news broadcasts, whose relatively traditional style of presentation gave the impression of an unbroken dominance of RP (cf. 1983: 66 f.). By the mid-eighties, Lewis heard “no very markedly” non-RP or non-British accents from the principal newsreaders on the BBC who, in his view, had always made “considerable concessions” to prestigious speech, as was “only natural in the situation” (cf. 1985: 252 f.). It was on these grounds that he considered the term of “BBC English” to be “one of the currently commonest expressions for RP” (1985: 252). Judging from the opinions of linguists, the connection between RP and the BBC was determined by a mutual relationship in which one was lending its authority to the other. After Daniel Jones had doubted the radio’s influence in the face of “countless other ways of pronunciation” (EPD 1937: X; comp. New OED Suppl. 1933; see 2.2.2), Gimson considered it influential with regard to a wide public acceptance of RP in 1962 (cf. p. 183). And when, two or three decades later, RP was still regarded as “the most widely understood of all accents” (Hughes/Trudgill 1979: 3), most commonly described and traditionally taught to foreigners (cf. Gimson 1970: 18; 1980: 84; O’Donnell/Todd 1980: 91), this was largely considered the result of its persisting use by BBC newsreaders. Even though Gimson had realized a diminishing role of RP in BBC broadcasting in the

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1960s and early seventies (see above), he made this kind of pronunciation the basis for his definition of a “revised standard” in his 1977 EPD (see 1.5.1). He continued to rely on the codifying influence of broadcast speech on RP up to his last edition of IPE in 1980, still considering the accent to be “often identified in the public mind with BBC English” (p. 89) and characterizing its general variant as “typified by the pronunciation adopted by the BBC” (ibid. 91). When, in Lewis’ words, “the myth of the BBC die[d] hard” (1985: 252), this was largely due to its traditional image, being supported by the persistent use of prestigious speech in matters of particular importance and reliability like the straight news (see 4.2.1 and 4.2.2). Although traditional language habits had been loosening on the radio and some fashionably popular pronunciations in the news and announcements on the BBC were beginning to exceed the limits of what might be safely called RP (see 4.5 and especially 4.5.1 and 4.5.2), the traditional links between RP and the BBC remained astonishingly persistent until the end of the past century and beyond. The prestige accent was still widely equated with BBC English – be it in Wells’ term of BBC pronunciation as “the alternative name” for RP in his Introduction to the 1990 Pronunciation Dictionary (cf. p. XII), or in McArthur’s reference to a BBC accent as “informal” synonym (cf. 1992: 109). Also in McArthur’s description, “RP and near-RP accents continue[d] to dominate BBC newsreading and presentation”, while “the limited number of RP speakers available for training as broadcasters” might, among other factors, be responsible for the decreasing exclusiveness of socially distinguished accents in announcements and continuity on BBC radio and television (cf. ibid.). On the BBC World Service, however, the teaching programmes of “the largest classroom of the world”, supported by the BBC English magazine, proceeded to teach “standard BrE with RP as the pronunciation model”, though increasingly exposing its learners to varieties of English through its audio and video material (cf. ibid. 111 f.). About the same time, Bradac and Giles still regarded RP as “the accent exhibited by most newscasters in London” (1991:3), and Crystal considered the most widely used variety of RP to be that “generally heard on the BBC” (1995: 365). Being one of the most ardent defenders of RP in general and of its leading role on the radio in particular, Honey again underlined the “aura of authority” about the news broadcasts, “conveniently read by RP speakers, confirming the widely accepted assumption that the authority of a message [was] enhanced by its being spoken in RP” (1989: 123), still calling RP “the standard ‘BBC’ accent” in 1997 (p. 167). Around the turn of

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the century, Katie Wales considered RP to be still widely “associated” with the BBC (cf. 2000: 10; see 1.5.1), while Kerswill regarded the term of RP and BBC English as “synonymous” (cf. 2001: 2). Morrish, however, saw the role of prestigious speech on the BBC in his own way, describing the last four decades of RP on the BBC with the words: “Auntie BBC spoke RP as late as the 1960s, especially on its children’s programmes. But most RP speakers have adopted a compromise form called ‘mainstream’ or ‘modified’ RP, and it is that which the BBC reserves for news and funerals” (1999: 2). What he meant by “news” was quite surely the diminishing section of straight newsreading, within the overwhelmingly relaxed news or current affairs bulletins (see4.2 and 4.2.2, respectively). One of the most revealing reflections of tradition and change in the relationship between prestigious speech and the BBC was the reliance of dictionaries on the identity of BBC English with RP or Oxford English, respectively. Just as Lewis had based the representation of his RP-like General British “as far as possible on a systematic collection of data on the pronunciation of … the BBC and ITV national newsreaders and the newsreaders of the BBC World Service’” in his Concise Pronouncing Dictionary of 1972 (quoted in Lewis 1985: 252), Wells later acknowledged the persisting relevance of BBC English for the sound pattern of RP in his 1990 Pronunciation Dictionary, defining the accent as what was “used by BBC newsreaders” (1990: XII), and applying to it the “alternative name BBC pronunciation” (ibid.). The Dictionary of English Language and Culture of 1992 defined BBC English as “a standard form of English pronunciation, aimed at by many speakers of the language in Britain and other parts of the world, used not only within the BBC but also in teaching English in many parts of the world – see also Oxford English, Received Pronunciation” (p. 90). And while Oxford English was considered “one of the names for the form of the English language which [was] thought of by many people as the desirable standard – see also BBC ENGLISH, RP” (ibid. 946), RP was again characterized as being “thought of as a standard form and … often used by the BBC, especially by Newsreaders – see also BBC ENGLISH, OXFORD ENGLISH” (ibid. 1151). Unexpected change in the presentation of the so far inseparable trinity of RP, Oxford and the BBC, however, set in very recently, when Roach and Hartmann, in their 1997 edition of the English Pronouncing Dictionary, applied the term BBC English to a wider-based conception of what used to be called RP, since “[the] time [had] come to abandon the archaic name Received Pronunciation” (p. V).

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A few years later, the traditional link between RP and BBC English was verbally neutralized by an entry in The New Oxford Dictionary of 2001, where the latter was described as “a form of standard spoken English associated with BBC announcers” (p. 148), while Oxford English stayed without notation. In the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of 2000 as well as in Collins English Dictionary for Advanced Learners of 2001, both BBC English and Oxford English remained unmentioned in connection with RP and were left without notation, just as the term of Standard English was excluded from the list of items in recent dictionaries (see 3.5.1). And while the Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of 2003 defined BBC English as “the standard way in which middle-class speakers of Southern British English pronounce words” (ibid. 1040), the Concise Oxford Dictionary of 2004 again left both terms unmentioned. The 2005 Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary went a step further, acknowledging recent changes in the language policy of the BBC (see 4.3) through The language of radio: its influence and feedback) and assigning the concept of BBC English to the past as “a form of English pronunciation that was traditionally associated with that used by BBC news readers” (Oxford Advanced Learner’s Compass). So, beside persisting claims in the columns of leading dictionaries to RP as “standard” of pronunciation (see 1.5.1; for reference to standard English see 3.5.1), there are now first signs of insecurity about the current relevance of so-far largely unquestioned conceptions and their mutual relationships in the educated pronunciation in England and Great Britain as a whole.

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Chapter Three Reactions to the Traditional Language Hierarchy 3.1

Standardizing processes

3.1.1

Speech habits and social ambitions

In the fluid post-War society, characterized by a continuing erosion of social boundaries and growing opportunities for many, the confrontation of the newcomers-to-status with the traditionally educated world made prestigious speech either a magnet or an obstacle, depending on the social background, convictions and aspirations of the individual speaker. When, after the “deproletarisation” of the sixties (cf. Crompton 1994: 102 f.), the members of the growing lower middle class were reaching out for new opportunities and chances in middle-class life, they were confronted not only with unaccustomed language attitudes but also with the direct pressure of new occupational demands. The relevance of an applicant’s speech habits was reported to be frequently denied by employers (cf. Shy 1973: 307; Trudgill 1975: 56), but occupational chances were in fact strongly based on language judgements, and demands on “well-spokenness”, “clarity of articulation” and absence of “unattractive accents” in those applying for middle-class jobs were largely upheld in the decades to follow (cf. Honey 1989: 152). In a time when playwright Alan Ayckbourn’s “Half the country is middle class; the other half is trying to be” (cf. Herbst/Roe 1983: 41) was daily practice for many, occupational pressures beside social aspirations and feelings of linguistic inferiority were the spurs to acquire more “respectable” speech forms through upward convergence, as “used by those members of the subordinate group who consider[ed] it desirable and possible to make social gains in the larger society” (Fasold 1984: 191). It was in this sense that Quirk (1968: 69 f.) distinguished between the “assured”, the “indifferent” and the “anxious”, referring to upper-, lowerand middle-class attitudes to language use, with the middle class being most sensitive to the social effects of linguistic tensions. Whereas the “Oxford accent” was about to lose its dominant position even in its traditional domain of

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higher education (see 3.2.2), it retained much of its attractiveness for the upwardly mobile who upheld its image as a highly desirable social value worth being aspired and preserved, and it was not without reason that Honey was pointing to long-established attitudes having” a resilience which one would do well to recognize” (1989: 165). Perspectivity-mindedness and linguistic snobbery, however, did not remain limited to the lower middle class: also among the so-far relatively homogeneous working class new occupational prospects as well as higher living standards and resulting social differentiation gave rise to personal ambitions and a reaching out for middle-class values. Among the new group of “propertyowning workers” – sixteen percent of workers considered themselves middleclass in 1972, and the percentage rose to twenty-three percent in 1986 (cf. Honey 1989: 82) – the reduction of material inadequacies, together with the ownership of a house, a car and a cheque-book, was considered to create a certain willingness to respect and adopt the speech habits of the higher social class (cf. Klein 1965: 423 ff.; Royle 1994: 14). Social expectations were further promoted by new measures in education, including the spread of comprehensive schools since the mid-sixties (see 1.2.3; footnote 15), with eighty percent of pupils attending in the late seventies and up to ninety percent by 1986 (cf. Bourke 1979: 79 and Honey 1989: 86, respectively), and with the opening of grammar schools to lower and middle working-class children. In result, every third school leaver or holder of a vocational certificate started a course, either for further qualification or for a degree at one of the newly founded institutions of tertiary education, including universities, technical colleges and colleges of education as well as the Open University, founded in 1971 (cf. Lawton 1968: 3; Morgan/Morgan 1980: 98 et al.). While many continued to consider mildly local speech normal in personal interaction with relatives or friends, a move in the direction of more prestigious articulations was increasingly held to be essential in education and occupation, and often found among strangers in public life – a phenomenon recently referred to by Widdowson as “a kind of multiple accommodation to other people’s speech as [is felt] appropriate” (personal information 2003). A correspondingly standardized pronunciation variant, preserving certain local characteristics and used by speakers of regional dialects to communicate with outsiders, was conceived by Wells and termed general English, being defined as “a range of forms of English which includes Standard English but is wider than it” (1982 pt. 1: 2 ff.). For many of lower- or lower middle-class background, however,

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code switching and upward convergence might take the form of an enforced bilingualism in a kind of “double life”, with its paralyzing effects on social interaction, personal opportunities and a free development of the speaker’s personality. As Peter Wright put it in 1974, “the wholly educated can sound as they please, and the uneducated can sound natural. Only many of the workpeople in the middle have virtually lost the power of accurate expression” (p. 156).

3.1.2

Upward convergence

With increasing education and social standing, there was a rising awareness of the advantages of standard speech, resulting in a more regular use of prestigious speech forms everywhere in England. Educational measures and the possibility for nearly everyone to pick up standard forms on radio and television were considered to increase the range of lasting modifications towards prestigious speech, and standardizing effects through mere linguistic contact with RP-speakers were suggested, even among those who were unwilling to modify their accents to RP (cf. Hughes/Trudgill 1979: 7 f.). Under the influence of the post-War social and cultural conditions, many among the younger vernacular-speaking generations were moving their speech in the direction of what Gimson called a modified regional pronunciation (cf. 1962: 84) by adopting “certain characteristics of RP “, with Northern [a] becoming [ɑ:] in ask, and with [ʊ] tending to be modified to [ʌ] in cup and [æ] to [ɑ:] in dance, particularly in the formal style of younger speakers as well as in the southern regions of the transition zone and in Northern accented speakers coming to live in the South (cf. Gimson ibid.; Wells 1970: 244; Trudgill 1983: 48). Additional change was proceeding on a regional basis, such as the gradual loss of the traditional distinction between [u:] in nose and [ʌʊ] in knows in favour of /əʊ/, the replacement of [a] by [ɒ] in top, and the change of pure [u:] to [ju:] in suit in Norwich (cf. Leitner 1983: 111; Trudgill 1986: 35, 42). Beside complete modifications, the interaction between local dialect and RP resulted in “intermediate” forms in careful regional pronunciation, as in the “corrected” varieties of home in popular London [hʌʊm] and in Norwich [hʊm] or [hu:m] for strongly vernacular [æʊm] and [ʊm], respectively (cf. Milroy 1980: 181 f.), as well as in mixed forms as fudged [ɤã] for /ʌ / in the transition zone between North and South (cf. Trudgill 1986: 60). In the London region, however, popular forms were most readily moved towards RP, among them Southern regional long final [i:] being shortened in ready (in contrast to simul-

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taneous Southern-based lengthening in RP, see 2.4.2), and, Cockney [f] being substituted for [ɵ] in think, so that mixtures of regional and RP became characteristic of lower middle-class urban districts (cf. Gimson 1962: 84 f.; Leitner 1981: 248). Generally speaking, the effect of various standardizing influences was to remove extreme forms of dialect and to increase the number of modified standard speakers, though without necessarily increasing the number of standard English speakers (cf. Brook 1979: 163). There was a large possible variability in the kind of approximation and the degree of closeness to RP (see 3.1.3 and 3.2.1), depending on a speaker’s distance from London, on the articulatory characteristics of his dialect, his social background and education, the intensity of his social ambitions and, not least, on his individual accent attitudes and possible determination to resist a radical shift towards RP. However, the interaction between the “standard” and regional forms was considered to lessen regional variation on socially intermediate levels in result of a “considerable gravitational pull” which continued to be ascribed to RP throughout the UK (McArthur 1992: 851; cf. Wells 1970: 231). Characteristic processes of recent vernacular change under the influence of Southern-based standardization have become evident, among others, in the Sheffield urban variety and in the dialect of the region, where the original pattern began to differ considerably with social class, sex and generation. While the traditional dialect was still rather frequently heard from male speakers in the later 1990s, it was constantly losing ground among the young generation, particularly so among young women. The largest range of local features was still exhibited by male speakers, with [ɔ:] in coat and goat, omission of [h] in [azɪ] for has he, and with traditional vowel realizations in older speakers’ [ri:t] or [rɛɪt] for right, [gʊ] for go and an occasional [dʊənt] for don’t (cf. Stoddart et al. 1999: 72 ff.; Widdowson 1999: 12). Intermediate forms in middle-aged male speakers, however, were approaching the RP goat vowel with [ɒʊ], [ɔʊ] or [oʊ] and with the Southern diphthong of [ɑɪ] in right. Close approximations to the Southern standard with [əʊ] for [ɔ:] in goat and [aɪ] for [ɔɪ] in right were becoming normal among younger females and gaining ground in all age groups, and the change of [i:] over [ɛɪ] towards /ɑɪ/ in write in most younger males and further to [aɪ] in many females was taking place, in belated completion in the Early Modern English Great Vowel Shift (cf. Widdowson ibid. 12 ff.). Besides, lexical variants suffered quite radical alteration by standardization, being eroded in a way that only five of a sample of twenty-five variant words survived in the larger part of the older population

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between the 1970s and 90s, while, in the same period, a number of new variants were emerging which had not been included in the Survey of English Dialects of 1971 (cf. ibid. 1999: 14 ff.; for detailed lexical evidence cf. Upton and Widdowson 1999). It goes without saying that moves towards the standard southern model were strongest in the young on grounds of increasing education and media influence, through which localisms were so efficiently challenged that even the most salient Northern [a] came to be replaced by standard [ɑ:] in bath, traditional [a:] was diphthongized to /aʊ/ in down, and occasional word-final [ɪŋ] might be heard in everything for dialectal [ɪn] or [ɪnk]. When especially younger males in the Sheffield region were beginning to exhibit Cockney glottalization of final plosives in shop, get, back, and also on junctions as in [ɔntʔþ bus] (on the bus) and tending to substitute /v/ for /ð/ in brother and /f/ for /ɵ/ in mouth (in contrast to standardizing developments in the London region itself, see above), new features like these may be ascribed to the country-wide influence of the Estuary accent (cf. Widdowson 1999: 13; see 3.4). Dialect mixing became obvious in cases were Southern-based novelties were linked in sequence with traditional features, as in the combination of Northern [ɺ] for /t/ before a following vowel, local [ɛ] for /i:/, and originally Southern glottal stop in [gɛɺ ɪtþʔ ɛtʔþ n`] for get it eaten (ibid.). What remained locally distinctive were omission of initial /h/ in cases such as has he [azɪ], and the characteristic Northern vowels in nut [ʊ] and (unstressed) but [ə: ~ ɛ:] as well as in one [ɒ] and in about [a:], where the local features continued to be the vernacular forms for all age groups, male and female alike (cf. ibid. 12 f.). By the end of the century, local teenagers were found to use a “lively and innovative mixture of slang and dialect expressions” (ibid. 16), and many had become “bidialectal”, i. e. “fully able to use local varieties of language in informal situations and to adopt standard forms when appropriate” (ibid. 18). Nevertheless, it may be assumed that traditional city dialects like the one of Sheffield will probably be maintained with “a wider regional flavour”, keeping “a distinctiveness with which local people can readily identify” (ibid.) As, according to Labov, “the shape of linguistic behavior changes rapidly as the speaker’s social position changes” (1968: 240), a considerable number of the newly educated of non-RP-speaking background were ready and able in their future careers to approximate their local speech to the model of the traditionally educated. In connection with educational and professional demands, a strong lower middle-class social commitment was leading to intensive modifi-

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cations of regional speech in the direction of what Wells called adoptive RP (1982 pt. 2: 283). In their attempts at prestigious speech, its speakers were often displaying a snobbishly affected quasi-RP, lacking control of the more subtle traits of informal speech, such as linking and intrusive r in [ˈmɔ:ən(d) ˈmɔ:] (more and more), assimilation, elision and liaison, omission of unstressed /h/ in context forms as in [ˈsi:ɪŋ hɪm du:ɪt] (seeing him do it) as well as combined release of plosives in clusters as in [ˈætləs] (atlas) and [ˈdɒktə] (doctor) (ibid. 284 f.). Linguistic adaptation might be carried to extremes62, with hypercorrections in [ˈtʃɪkɪŋ] and [ˈga:dɪŋ] for chicken and garden, outdated /ʍ/ in where, final /e/ in happy and raised front vowels as C[e] for /e/ and C[ɛ] for /æ/ (ibid. pt. 1: 255; cf. Gimson 1980: 109), all betraying lower middle-class “refayned” speech with its linguistic insecurity and lack of social self-confidence and described by Wells, as “a generally unsuccessful attempt to sound as if one belonged to a higher social class than one really does”, though being “perhaps not so often encountered as it used to be” (1982 pt. 2: 302 f.). In the desire for articulatory refinement, local women proved particularly status-conscious, choosing prestigious differentiations between front and back vowels as well as the characteristically large voice range of RP intonation, while local men tended to stick to regional characteristics with their covert prestige of toughness and virility (cf. Aitchison 1981: 88; Cheshire 1982: 162 ff.; Milroy 1982: 147 ff., et al.)63. The final aim of achieving an upper-class accent, however, was in fact seldom reached, as it seemed almost impossible to be acquired without an appropriate social background and public school in later life (cf. Abercrombie 1956: 48 f.; Halliday 1968: 18). It was only under particularly favourable circumstances of education and social environment that adoptive RP might merge into “mainstream” (cf. Wells 1.5.2), or, in exceptional cases, end up close to Gimson’s advanced RP (see 2.3.3) in extremely successful lower middles, such as Margaret Thatcher with her expressively exclusive versions of last thing [‘la:s`ɵɪŋ] and be sure [bi∙ʃɔ:] in radio broadcasts of the 1980s (Mrs.Thatcher’s accent cf. Honey 1989: 136 ff.). Including prestigious pronunciations in otherwise regionally-based speech, post-War modifications were not only reaching far down the social scale, but also closely approximating to RP on its upper levels, towards the apex of the “cone”.

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3.1.3

Near-RP accents

Social contacts were affecting the traditional speech hierarchy most obviously and intensively in the fields of secondary and higher education and the professions, traditionally the domain of the upper and upper middle classes. While, after the end of the War, the revolutionary enthusiasm of intellectuals in the 1930s had, after Shills (1955), given way to a fundamental reconciliation with the Establishment and its values and even the public schools had “crept back into the hearts of the English intellectuals” (p. 7), immediate post-War measures in education had, at the same time, brought quick and decisive changes in the social structure of schools, colleges, and professional circles. By 1961, most members of the professional class were no longer held to be original RP speakers (cf. Trim 1961: 31), and, in the following decades, only a minority of students were considered to come from traditionally RP-speaking environments (cf. Gimson 1979: 153), with numbers further declining from forty-seven percent of professional and managerial background, as given in the Robbins Report of 1961/2 (cf. Mountford 1966: 97), to forty-four percent quoted by Cook in 1976 (p. 3). In result of democratic reforms in the educational system, eighty percent of grammar school pupils were receiving a scholarship in the early sixties (cf. Barber 1964: 25), and, since the late seventies, grammar schools or state-financed direct grant schools with public school status took twenty-five percent of pupils from primary schools for the preparation of an academic career at any university in the country. As even Oxford and Cambridge were taking fifty-five percent of their students from state schools, highest professional or academic careers became open to additional numbers of people of lower middle- and also of working-class backgrounds, getting into occupations and professions until then governed by the traditionally educated alone (cf. Bourke 1979: 110). Named “middle-class intellectuals” by some (cf. Trim 1961: 31) and “working-class intellectuals” by others (cf. Barber 1964: 26), the new academics were considered a highly mobile and therefore a largely “homogenous group of increasing numbers and importance” (Trim ibid.), whose modified speech with dialect background was upgraded through its wide use and no longer stigmatized as uneducated working-class speech. As the new civic universities of the North proved the possibility of achieving academic education and professional distinction with a regional, non-RP pronunciation and there was no longer the same pressure as before to modify non-Southern accents, the majority of the newly educated were developing “an increasing

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reluctance to eradicate local dialect completely” (ibid. 32), assimilating their pronunciation to RP only to an extent which they felt to be “appropriate to their status without rejecting their dialectal background” (ibid.). Among them were politicians as well as television and broadcasting presenters, including the former Labour Minister Denis Healey who, beside fashionable RPfeatures, retained his Bradford [ɒ] in one and soft Northern [s] in because, Russell Harty, successful TV interviewer and presenter in the 1980s, exhibiting a compromise between Northern and Southern pronunciation of /ʌ/ in but, and broadcasting performer Brian Redhead whose regional features were considered by friends, colleagues and critics “aggressively Northern”, according to his profile in the Sunday Times in 1987 (cf. Honey 1989: 81 f.; cf. an earlier article by Brookes in The Sunday Times 13/8/78: 40). However, the remaining “tiny traces” of an original accent made this kind of educated speech, in Honey’s view, more serviceable to the speakers than RP, allowing them “to share much of the prestige of the acrolect (RP) and … its associations with educatedness” and, at the same time, “to retain just enough traces of the accent of their region of birth or upbringing to serve as a badge of their pride in those local origins” (ibid. 80; regional accent loyalty see 3.2.1). Educated Near-RP accents were conceived by Trudgill as “accents which have many of the features of RP but incorporate also a number of non-RPfeatures” (1979: 19), and defined by Wells as “a group of accent types which are clearly educated and situated well away from the lower end of the socioeconomic scale, while differing to some noticeable degree from what we recognize as RP” (1982 pt. 2: 301)64. Though situated outside the borders of RP, mildly regional Near-RP accents were, after Wells, generally accepted as “educated”, “well-spoken” and “middle-class” (ibid. 297), in the same way as their carriers were tolerated in the world of the well-born and successful. In the late seventies and early eighties, regional remains as short [a] in bath and bad, raised [ɔ] in one, and monophthongal [ɛ:] in care signalled a Northern background as “Near-RP Northernisms” (ibid. 293; cf. Leitner 1981: 248), while “Near-RP Londonisms”, overlapping with the above-mentioned modified accents of the London region, included Southern vocalized /l/ as in hill [hɪʊ] beside closer final [i(:)] in many and fronted [ʉ:] in cool, beside a high frequency of glottal stops, e. g. in get up [geʔ ˈup] as typical of popular London (cf. Wells ibid.; Trudgill/ Hannah 1985: 12). Further Near-RP features might consist in final or medial /g/ of Northwest Midland origin in tongue and singer, characteristic Northern [æ] in laugh and [a] in plant, final /r/ in near,

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and the widespread use of /ə/ in the weakly accented syllables -ed and -es as in wanted and horses, coming from many English dialect areas except the South East, as well as hypercorrections as in the full pronunciation of the final syllable of Birmingham [hæm], also being characteristic of adoptive RP (cf. Gimson 1979: 155 f.; Wells ibid. ff.; Lewis 1985: 250, et al.; see 3.1.2). As borders were fluent between Near-RP accents and traditionally prestigious speech, a realistic appreciation of the percentage of RP speakers in England had become increasingly difficult and largely questionable altogether, depending on how tolerant the judgement had been. For, in the same way as the prestige accent was socially no longer the “exclusive property of a particular social stratum” (Gimson 1980: 89), it had also lost some of its linguistic exclusiveness, becoming assimilated to a degree by those who were socially arriving and in their speech advancing the tip of the “cone” – the range where, after Trudgill (1983: 56), upward convergence ends up in the mixing of accents near the upper end of the scale, thus providing the basis for further linguistic development on grounds of new social relations. More recently, sociolinguistic convergence was fostered by country-wide communication, technological developments and resulting occupational demands, making Near-RP the accent of speakers of increasingly different social and educational backgrounds. As Morrish put it in 1999, “Working people are speaking a ‘nearRP’ … the old regional dialects were fine for working the same fields as your grandparents, but less effective in a computerised call centre” (p. 2).

3.2

Educated accent prestige

3.2.1

From common roots to regional standards

At all times, there had been a certain amount of socially highly prestigious speakers with easily recognizable regional accents in their educated speech, be it in form of dialect features in the pronunciation of persons of traditional country stock, of prestigious non-aristocratic people in the provinces, or of highly educated speakers of wider social backgrounds. One of those of country descent who retained the dialects of their regions was the accomplished historian, traveller, courtier and favourite of Queen Elizabeth I., Sir Walter Raleigh (1552-1618), who kept his West Country accent throughout his life (cf. Barber 1964: 23; further reference cf. Wyld 1920: 166 f.). According to an article in The Daily Telegraph, the writer Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966) still

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“noted with interest the regional variations in the distinctively upper-class voices of Lords Westmoreland, Salisbury and Curzon”, and even nowadays feelings of uneasiness may be conceded “at the idea of anyone so important as the Thane of Glamis and Cawdor having a ‘northern’ [English] accent (as opposed to a Scottish one)” (Johnson, ibid. 20/11/02: 25). Regarding less aristocratic circles, it may be taken for granted that, before RP was invented as a concept in the late nineteenth century, regional MPs spoke with their “normal” regional accents if they had not been to public school, just as, in the more distant past, all MPs spoke with whatever accent was normal in their part of the country. Daniel Jones, in his 1917 EPD, drew attention to the fact that Public School Pronunciation, being largely a matter of public boarding schools, was “not as a rule used by those who have been educated at day schools in Scotland, Ireland or the North of England, and it [was] not used by a considerable proportion of those educated at day schools in the South of England” (p. VIII). So, in the 1930s and 1940s, there were again numbers of politicians speaking with regional accents, among them Secretaries of State, Cabinet ministers and even a Minister of Education (cf. Honey 1989: 95), not to forget persons of high local prestige in areas other than the South East who, about the same time, spoke with “well-modulated” accents (cf. Johnson, The Daily Telegraph 20/11/02: 25). It was on these grounds that Gimson applied the label educated regional to “highly educated” speech, as against popular regional proposed for “less educated” speech (cf. 1962: 84). What was new and important in the post-War educated language, however, was that non-RP speakers had begun to set the standards. Beside those who were more or less readily yielding their local accents to the influence of RP, there were increasing numbers unwilling to sacrifice their regional affiliations for the sake of a new social prestige, and determined to preserve characteristic accent features as bodies of regional identity and social belonging (see 3.1.3). In 1964, Barber saw the new acceptance of various kinds of accent accompanied by an increased reluctance among regional speakers “to accept as a norm what had been considered the standard form” (p. 16), and soon, after Trudgill, most people had “no desire at all” to alter their dialect away from that of their family and friends (cf. 1975: 66). Changing one’s accent in the North would mean “letting the side down”, as it was “part of one’s social identity as a ‘northerner’ to have a short a in glass and path, and to change the pronunciation would be to attempt to change the identity” (ibid. 17), and, more recently, Wales again underlined the fact that “under strong pressure to change your

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accent you may feel a traitor to your past and roots” (2000: 12). Against this background, all dialects were claimed to be “equally good” (Trudgill 1975: 27) and “socially acceptable at some level” (Macaulay 1977: 18) by sociolinguists, and public interest was increasing in “good old dialect”, “vigorous” and “down-to-earth”, as against the “drab conformity” of standard speech (cf. Zimmermann 1981: 428). In Scotland, the passionate poems by the “great folk hero” Robert Burns (1759-1796) were cherished as part of a valuable tradition (cf. Cowley 1965: 12), and so were Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights65 and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, G. B. Priestley’s The Good Companions and other works, all preserving in their dialect parts traditional Northern speech, against which, in Priestley’s own words, standard English was “like standard anything else – poor tasteless stuff” (quoted in Halliday 1968: 168). Dialect societies have been intensively contributing to the preservation of local heritage not least through the publication of traditional collections and modern anthologies of popular verse and prose. Since 1897, it has been the merit of the Yorkshire Dialect Society to preserve Yorkshire lore and language through the regular publication of its Transactions and Bulletins and the organization of public events in the three Ridings (see Illustration 8). Special dialect research in speech and writing has been promoted, beside publications of traditional verse and prose, reaching from samples from historical almanacs (also spelt almanacks or olmenacks in the mid-nineteenth century; see Plate 3) and historical dialect verse to modern dialect poetry (cf. England 1983; Cowley 1963, 1965). Drawing on the common roots of a strong cultural tradition and sanctioned by a century-long use of the written language, the cultural prestige of Yorkshire dialect has remained largely unchallenged for centuries, in the face of both the historical discrimination against Northern speech and the more recent hazards of a highly standardizing time. Growing accent tolerance was affecting educated pronunciation on all levels, from the articulation of single sounds and context forms to the stress patterns of words, and, evening out differences, made the language “more mixed” (cf. Barber 1964: 16). When Barber connected his conception of dialect mixing in the great urban centres (see 1.1.2) with “a tendency for popular pronunciations of miscellaneous words to filter upwards into RP or at least into educated regional speech” (ibid. 65; cf. Wells 1970: 248), he referred to fully pronounced endings in Monday [ˈmʌndei] or necklace [ˈnekleis], to changes of stress in decade [diˈkeid] (though still rare in RP as against the more usual [ˈdekeɪd]; cf. Wells 1990: 190), and to the spelling pronunciation

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of [ˈweɪstkəʊt] as applied by the young generation of RP-speakers, in contrast to traditional [ˈweskɪt] in the pronunciation of their parents (cf. Barber ibid. 65 ff.). As non-standard varieties may, to a certain extent, become “publicly legitimized” through increasing pressure from low-status groups (cf. Milroy and Milroy 1985: 114), even highly stigmatized H-dropping was not confined to the working class but occurred in considerable proportions of middle-class speakers in London and Norwich as well66 (cf. Hughes/Trudgill 1982: 7; Hdropping in RP cf. Wells 1982 pt. 2: 286). John Bourke considered particular Northern articulations as [kʊp] (cup), [nɔ:] (no), [glæs] (glass) and [mɜ:rdər] (murder) to have become “perfectly acceptable” as “received usage” (Bourke 1979: 51), and though, after Wells, many educated speakers in the North would “not be caught dead doing something so vulgar as to pronounce STRUT words with [ʊ]”, a lengthening of the “most salient” short [a] in BATH words would mean “a denial of their identity as northerners” (1982 pt. 2: 354). In the same way as the educated accents of the North, the West, the Midlands and the South became increasingly regarded as local standards (cf. Abercrombie 1956: 52; Barber 1964: 27; Trudgill 1974: 18 f.), each of the local standards of Northern areas as Yorkshire and Lancashire became more strongly felt than before by its speakers as “(at least) the equal of Received Standard” (Barber ibid.). So, although Geordie (Tyneside), Scouse (Liverpool), Brummie (Birmingham) and Mancunian (Manchester) had, like London Cockney, always been negatively evaluated in surveys of attitudes (see 1.4.2), the Northern industrial cities had, by the turn of the century, become “the loci of single regional standards” (Wales 2000: 15). The “most populous and influential” Southern Regional Standard – in Barber’s description South Eastern educated speech and the possible basis for a new national Received Standard (cf. 1964: 28; see 3.5.1) – contained particular southern vowel features still considered dialectal, such as Cockney-like dark [ɑɪ] in tried, strongly diphthongized [Uu~əʊ] and [ɪi] in who and see, South Eastern [ou] for /ɔ/ in solve, Yod-dropping to [u:] in suit [su:t], and vocalized [u] or [ɔ] in milk [miuk], which were “beginning to affect educated speech” (ibid. 42 ff.). Variation in the realization of consonants was, among others, considered to be characterized by word-final weakening, dropping and devoicing of consonants, as in no(t) bad, as(k)ed and fee[d̥] in rapid familiar speech, as well as by intrusive r and glottallization of /t/ in certain positions, as in the idea ÿ rÿ of and not[ʔ] yet (cf. 53 ff.), all that in combina-tion with changing stress patterns (cf. ibid. 65). Due to its strongly “Cockney” features, 134

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the speech of educated Londoners had been considered distinct from RP at least since the 1950s and therefore described by Abercrombie as “standard English in a Cockney accent” (1956: 50). When, about twenty-five years later, Wells (1982 pt. 2) conceived a “London (or, more generally, south-eastern) Regional Standard” (p. 303), he rather referred its regionalism to popular London, the heterogeneous working-class accent which, though its speakers did not qualify as “true Cockneys” born in the East End, shared the general characteristics with Cockney (cf. p. 302 f.). Being labelled London Regional Standard, the accent took from regional speech the GOOSE vowel in two [ʉ:], the GOAT vowel in go [ɜʊ] and T-glottalling in pre-vocalic environments as in that is [ðæʔ ˈɪz] – thus equalling Barber’s above-mentioned Southern Regional Standard (for recent years see 3.3.1) – as well as final close [i] in happy and less smoothing in fire and power, as compared to post-War RP (Wells 1982 pt. 2: 203; post-War RP features see 2.3.1, Advanced fashions or popular influence and New acceptability). Both working-class popular London and the educated London Regional Standard were conceived not as discrete entities, but as parts of “a continuum stretching from broad Cockney … to RP”, with the London Regional Standard being “closer to RP than popular London” (Wells ibid.). Insofar, the concept somehow anticipated what Rosewarne, two years later, labelled Estuary English – the variant situated “in the middle ground”, between Cockney and RP (cf. Rosewarne 1984: 29; see 2.4.1). Only recently, Katie Wales emphasized the attraction and influence of a London or South-eastern ‘regional standard’, with Estuary and popular London English ranging in a continuum between RP on the one end and Cockney on the other, underlining the permanent role of Southern English as the “perceived linguistic ‘centre of gravity’” (2006: 171).

3.2.2

The academic revolt and its consequences

Reduced prestige of RP and more tolerance for regional accents were first and foremost spreading among the young and the mobile, in close connection with the fashionably popular dress and behaviour of the time, the rise of pop music, and relaxed pastime activities. Questioning the generally accepted norms of educated speech and social conduct of previous generations together with the values of their fathers, the post-War young were showing a rising pride in local language and culture, considering RP “the outmoded voice of the Establishment” (Gimson 1977: 156; cf. Gough 1982: 247). Among the academic youth, in particular, post-War changes towards a more fluent society and re-

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sulting language contacts made the barrier between popular speech and Oxford English more obviously felt than before. Differences in prestige between the traditionally aristocratic “Oxford-Cambridge-London triangle” and the newer universities, with students and also staff mainly of lower middle and upper working-class origin, were particularly felt by the young and ambitious (cf. Shils 1955: 12 ff.). Together with the traditional academic social value system, the upper (middle)-class RP accent was considered a form of discrimination no longer reflecting social reality by many of the young from lower middle- and working-class homes, particularly those studying at the modern universities, colleges and polytechnics. It was in this sense that Abercrombie (1951) saw RP no longer as the accent of the educated but as a marker of social standing, marking no longer the degree but the kind of education and being “an anachronism in present-day democratic society” (p. 386). In further sociolinguistic descriptions, hostility to RP appeared as a product of education and social change, leading the “angry young men” of lower-class background to resent Received Standard as the language of the Establishment, questioning the justification of binding articulatory norms for educated speech and refusing to abandon their local accents in favour of traditional prestige norms (cf. Barber 1964: 26; Trudgill 1974: 80 ff., et al.), so that Stanley Ellis saw regional speech becoming “an ‘in’ thing along with other forms of revolt against a traditional Establishment attitude” (1972: 878). As an absolute novelty in academic life, the vast majority of students were following in their language attitudes those of working-class background (after Atkinson about one third in 1964; cf. 1975: 69), deeply despising “posh” together with the Establishment and the social system and deliberately adopting regional pronunciation. Student teachers, engineering, natural science and medical students were most open-minded to liberal ideas, many of them deriving from lower social strata themselves and preparing for jobs closer to the working class than those in the traditional professions of the Law, the Church and the Arts. It was the time of great activities in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, of campaigns against the Vietnam War, and of close contacts and solidarity with the Trade Unions in the students’ unrest of the sixties. The National Union of Students with 800,000 members in 1979, among them the teacher student unions in particular, were orientated towards the broad Left, governed by the Labour and the Communist Party and joining forces with the Labour movement and the Trade Unions in the militant struggles of the early seventies. Victories in the mines and the Upper Clide shipyards were support-

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ed and paralleled by students’ “alternative seminars”, by strikes and work-ins on “liberated campuses” as well as by militant action organized by radical groups under the influence of the anti-Vietnam campaigns and the South American socialist idol of Che Guevara (cf. Cook 1976: 7, 19 ff.). It seems as if motivations for non-standard usage were varying to extremes: While, in Quirk’s view, the offensive language of the student revolt threatened to come close to the brutal language of radicals and to “blur the distinction between the extremes of liberalism and neo-Nazism” (1980: 13), he also referred to new democratic values, proclaimed with respect for the “formerly outlawed” and with sympathy for the “underdog” in the hardships of life, and related to the native, the casual and the personal in language as opposed to the “dominating” air of RP (cf. Quirk 1972 (2): 75; 1980: 4). In the course of extended education, there were increasing numbers who claimed adaptation to prestigious speech “treachery to one’s origins and real identity’” (Honey 1989: 153), and this not only at the newer universities, colleges and polytechnics. Even at Oxbridge, students began to display regional affiliations in their speech, and those who were RP speakers from home were deliberately adopting regional features, fearing “sneers at careful pronunciation” (cf. Quirk 1980: 12). Though, since the later seventies, the post-War youth rebellion was crumbling under the influence of the economic crisis and a less provocative political climate under a left-wing government, the effects of this most influential time were working into the future. The former discrimination of regional speech had become a challenge to claim its superiority in realms which had been traditionally governed by RP. The sociolinguistic effects of immediate post-War educational measures and resulting changes in the educated language were showing early among the new intelligentsia, who, from the 1950s onwards, were not only indifferent about prestigious pronunciation but “positively hostile to it” in their general resentment at the Establishment (cf. Barber 1964: 26; reaffirmed by Widdowson, pers. inform. 2003) and, being far from practising the sounds of RP, were deliberately refusing to do so. Consequently, according to Brook (1979 [1973]), there was “an increase in the number of professional men who did not speak standard English and a reduction in the number of people who went out of their way to acquire it” (p. 163). Many schoolteachers coming from working-class backgrounds had marked regional dialects which they did not want to abandon or modify (cf. Barnickel 1982: 221), and even at public schools young teachers were quite openly rejecting RP (cf. Honey 1989:

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156 ff.). As RP speakers had become more and more rare among the staffs of universities, even among those who had been educated at public schools and Oxbridge, there were lecturers even at Oxford displaying regionalisms in their speech and “proud of it” (Germer 1966: 11), and, a decade later, it might be difficult to find lecturers with little or no regional accent, “whether Scott, Cockney or Geordie” (Atkinson 1975: 69 f.). As language attitudes had come to be “envolving one’s social convictions” (Tottie 1977: 205), the idea of regional affiliation was often stepping back behind a strong feeling of identity with the purely social background, and there were growing numbers among the professional classes, deliberately refusing to give up their local accents in favour of a career “on grounds of local patriotism or democratic egalitarianism” (Wells 1982 pt. 1: 34). For them, speaking with a regional accent meant to separate “the newcomer-to-status from the aristocrat, born with a silver Eton and Oxford in his mouth” (Robinson 1973: 439), and thus to demonstrate one’s affiliation to “the spoken language of the great majority of the ordinary British people” (Gough 1982: 247; cf. Trudgill 1974: 80 ff.). In continuation of post-War tendencies, the language of the academic middle generations of the 1990s was determined by criteria of acceptability and appropriateness to the situation. Though inconspicuous RP proved persistent in speakers of different age groups and was occasionally approached by otherwise regionally accented speakers in more formal situations, the language of personal interaction and relaxed scholarly debate in various subjects of the arts was more generally governed by non-RP features, in realms where RP would still have been obligatory thirty or forty years ago. There were North Western traits in an art historian’s It seems to me [əɨ:] and in some [ʊ] way [ɛ∙I], and purely Northern ones in a museum head preservator’s done [ʊ] by hand [a], drafts[a]man and go back [a] (both 1995) and in a historian’s cultural [ʊ] conquest and under[ʊ]standing [a]. Historical maps were presented in a language containing strongly assimilated forms like [ˈtekʃtʊəɫ] (textual) beside Northern and Western features as close [eàià] in papers and open [aɪ] in way, open [a] in planning and a retracted vowel in one [ɔ] third and much [ɔ] later, matched by a question from the audience, asking after the respective library [ˈlɔɪbəri] (1996). A sociolinguist from Yorkshire was dealing with multiplex [ʊ] networks, lack [a] of attitudes [a], and the subject [ʊ] matter [ˈmatər] of his study [ʊ] (1997). In relatively relaxed situations, i.e. in the opening of a lecture, a panel discussion, a workshop or on a business meeting, non-RP was the usual way, just as relaxed kinds of dress and behaviour, a nice

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smile and an encouraging joke. In a panel discussion of 1995, popular traits in the speech of participants and contributors included features as right [rɔɪt] and of course [kɒrs] beside strong assimilation as in question [ˈkweʃtʃn], and at a business meeting the popular element was even stronger in cases as a couple [ʊ] of, one [ɔ] of the effects [eˈfeʔs], these things [ˈði:s`ɪŋz] (1996). Popular yeah [jea] for yes was fully accepted, and here and elsewhere sounded syllabic /r/ in papers [ˈpeipr`z] seemed to be something like an academic in-group marker (1995). The occurrence of regional accents and relaxed features in academic speech can be taken as an index of new educated language habits and attitudes in which, in the recent words of Katie Wales, “standard English grammar and vocabulary with a regional accent are quite the ‘norm’ in Britain today” (2000: 10). Following Labov, innovation in educated language had been initiated by “those centrally in the hierarchy” (cf. Labov 1980: 254), i. e. from interior groups of upper working-class and related lower middle-class backgrounds, where, according to Guy (1988: 58 ff.), local dialect was favourably evaluated as a marker of social group solidarity and local identity. With the loosening of traditional constraints in educated speech, regional features also seemed desirable to those who were RP speakers from home and wished to be free from linguistic decorum of the traditional kind. Along with a growing prestige of traditional lore and culture, slight regional accents became increasingly acceptable on the stage, in theatre, television and films (cf. Honey 1989: 157) until, by the end of the century, nobody was proud to speak “posh” even at the Royal Shakespeare Company (Morrish 1999: 1). Instead, young actors wanted “to come from their root sound and to take their own natural accent, be it Geordie or Brum, as their starting point”, in a time when “Shakespeare no longer [had] to speak Received Pronunciation (RP) – and hardly anyone else want[ed] to do so either” (ibid.). A certain set of fashionable regionally-based features, original or adopted, might be deliberately exploited to attribute to the language individual expression against a deliberately uncommitted social background. In 1994, a literary specialist was referring to Stratford [ä] and stage action [ä], employing Southern close [oˬ:] in audience and lowered [ʉ:] in do, while his trendy Midland-based [ɤã] in London and introduction was alternating with an even stronger raised [U] in cultural. His glides varied in their open Southern onsets in play [æɪ] and way [äɪ] and in the degree of their monophthongization in King Lear, pronounced as [lɛãə], [lɜ:ə] or [lɜ:], though not a single time as [lɪə]. Similar trendy inconsistencies were to be heard in another literary presentation of the same year, exhibiting all

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recent variants of the phoneme /ʊə/ with touring [ɔ:], tourists [ɯ:], tourism [ɯ:], beside the traditional glide in tour [ʊə]. An Oxford graduate student was regularly using post-vocal sounded r in cases as the church and referred in her otherwise RP-like presentation (2000). Last but not least, even the BBC, which from its early years had played a decisive role in the strengthening of prestigious speech, was in post-War decades adjusting its style to the new situation, with local radio stations spreading all over England and regional accents being admitted to almost all kinds of national programmes, except the straight news (see 4.4, 4.5, and 4.2). Sociolinguistic contact had left its marks on the educated language, since Wyld had claimed “an enormous proportion … of highly educated persons” living in London, to be speakers of Received Standard (1914: 105; quoted in Lewis 1985: 246), and Jones had attributed the “standard” to “a majority of those members of London society who ha[d] had a University education” in his 1917 IPE (p. VIII; see 2.2.1). In immediate post-War years, educated RP speakers were considered to be “outnumbered … by the undoubtedly educated who would not talk RP” (Abercrombie 1951: 386; cf. 1956: 49) until, in the mid-eighties, Lewis estimated a quota of between eighty and ninety percent of educated speakers exhibiting “fairly recognizable” regional accents (cf. 1985: 244), among them “a very clear majority of the most highly educated inhabitants of Great Britain” who had “markedly regionally affiliated speech” (ibid.), including those in highest positions in government and industry, science and the arts, sport and entertainment (cf. ibid. 249; Brook 1979: 163; Hughes/ Trudgill 1979: 7). As educated pronunciation no longer meant RP and there was less reason to disguise one’s accent (cf. Atkinson 1975: 69), mild regionalisms were applied in spheres and situations which would have formerly demanded RP. By the mid-eighties, the new acceptability of mild regionalisms in educated pronunciation went so far that, after Lewis (1985: 247), there were only an insignificant minority of educated British people who would consider regional accent a “stigma” distorting an accepted norm, and those who still held such “irrational and extreme views” could not be taken seriously. In line with the new educated language attitudes, Trudgill wrote in 1990: “Nearly all of us have regional features in the way we speak English, and are happy that this should be so” (p. 1).

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3.3

Recent fashions and tendencies

3.3.1

Young accent loyalty

When, by the early eighties, the traditional speech hierarchy had been undermined by a new acceptance of mildly regional accents in educated speech, it seemed as if the waves of linguistic rebellion were dying down, particularly among the very young. Being much less receptive to deviations from traditional norms, they were following in their speech the trends of the time, most often without worrying over language norms and standards. As, in Lewis’s view of 1985, “people’s consciousness of these sharp divisions … [was] very much weakening in British society as a whole” (p. 247) and old sanctions against speech with slightly non-RP features had largely evaporated, he considered Abercrombie’s “accent bar” (see above 1.1.2), if ever valid, to have become an “outmoded concept” (cf. ibid. 249). The new situation led him to claim “a generation gap in accent evaluation”, characterized by a “reduced sensitivity to accent values” (ibid. 253) which, however, only applied to mild regionalisms and informal variants but not to obtrusively upper-class mannerisms associated with the wealthy and the fashionable, and insofar meant a continuation of the democratic tendencies of post-War decades. Regional affiliation might be even further emphasized by shifts towards the vernacular67, in order to separate oneself from more “standard” (i. e. higher-status) speakers. Although, in Honey’s description (cf. 1989: 84), traditional upperclass values and mechanisms seemed to reappear at the major public schools during the eighties and there were even instances of shaming boys with recognizable non-standard accents, ex-public school boys would play down their educational origins and strangle their too posh voices, in order to avoid public aversion to a “superior tone of voice” and thus to conform to social and occupational demands. At Cambridge, public school products were becoming “embarrassed and apologetic” about their backgrounds, in an atmosphere where Eton accents were judged “decidedly uncool” and comprehensive school background was “hip”, while, at the same time, “Mock Cockney” seemed “obligatory” at Oxford, particularly among those of privileged social background, to gain “street cred” [i. e. credibility] points from their more influential lower-class fellow students (cf. ibid.). So, increasingly, the standards in young educated speech were set by those who were favouring a language markedly anti-traditional, that means anti-aristocratic and antibourgeois.

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The younger the speakers, the more anti-traditional was their language, showing considerable similarities between the sexes and between different social backgrounds and deliberately exhibiting the stigmatized features used by their role models like pop stars and professional footballers, often deriving from working-class backgrounds (cf. Barber 1993: 265). Investigations by Hazlerud and Stenström (1994) of teenage speech, including thirteen to seventeen-year-old boys and girls coming from five school districts in London and thus representing the entire social scale, recorded simplification of pronunciation characteristics by swallowed syllables, Cockney glottal stops for /p/, /t/, /k/, and American-influenced reduced forms as dunno (don’t know), gonna (going to), wanna (want to), cos (because) and innit (isn’t it), in a language where high speed was inevitably leading to low intelligibility for outsiders (p. 68 f.). In leading dictionaries of the 1980s, cos was characterized as “very informal” (Collins 1987), as a “nonstandard variant” (Longman 1988), or as a “colloquial and dialectal shortening” (Oxford English Dictionary 1989), and Quirk likewise considered it a “nonstandard, casual pronunciation of because” (cf. Stenström 1995: 190). As to the highly extended use of innit, the tag was found to be generalized in person, gender and number, and could follow any verb as distinct from its normal percursor be, in examples such as They’re at home innit, or He gets upset quick innit (cf. ibid.: 195 ff.; confirmed by Widdowson in personal information 2003)68. Corresponding to phonological reductions and modes of lexical application, there was reduced syntax with subjects left out, verbs elided and reflections cancelled as in “just couldn’t resist it” or “what she say”, while ample use was made of screams, shouts and vocalizations like eeeh, ouch, and wooooo (cf. Stenström ibid.). Taboo and swear words as important symbols of vernacular identity were used in abundance, according to a survey of the London teenage vernacular presented by Stenström, Andersen and Hasund in the year 2002. With respect to gender, boys dominated with regard to the frequency and strength of swearing in the conversations investigated, while girls seemed to be more aware of communication strategies regarded as appropriate for their respective social backgrounds (cf. p. 83, 105; Hasund/Stenström 1996: 130; for ethnicity cf. Stenström et al. 2002: 200 ff.). Summarizing the most obvious characteristics of young speech, Alex Spillius of The Independent on Sunday said of London teenage talk in 1996: “It appears that a yawning linguistic gap is opening up to separate a younger generation – brought up on a mixture of US television,

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films and music, Australian soap operas and rave culture – from the rest of the population” (quoted in Stenström et al. 2002: IX). Prosodically, the young and trendy effect of high speed (for young RP cf. Giles et al. 1991: 209 ff.) was heightened by monotony of rhythm and tone, as in a pop singer’s level intonation and mechanical-sounding stress pattern of I ˈll ˈnever for ˈget the ˈway you ˈfeel right ˈnow, ˈnever ˈstop ˈdreaming of ˈyou ˈevery ˈnight in my ˋlife, in an interview on Radio Capital London (9/12/95). The confusion which fashionable prosody like that might cause in the hearer was ridiculed in a cartoon in The Guardian, where a frightened air pilot, giving his excited exclamation the usual prominence in ˈLook ˋout, ˈit’s ˈa ˋmountain..!, is criticized by his companion with “Honestly Bob, your diction would have so much more finesse if you didn’t stress every word!” (Frayn 14/9/94: 10/11, see Illustation 9). Besides, rising intonation even on statements was increasingly noticed in young speech and ascribed to Australian influence (see 3.3.2). Above all, however, unsophistication was deliberately simulated through hesitation phenomena as [ʔə] and [ʔɜ:], but also through repetitions, simplifications and disruptions on the syntactic level, as in the loosely bound sequence of talk from a Young Artist’s Forum on BBC Radio 3 (3/12/95), demonstrating fashionably monotonous intonation patterns, indistinct articulation, incoherent syntax and trendy hesitation phenomena in And so I ˈthink you ˈhave to deˌfine it – for yourˈself you ˌhave to – ˈwork out ˈwhich e ˈinstruments you ˌwant e and e … At all times, innovation in young speech was determined by the non-prestigious and the formerly stigmatized, but at no time had young educated speech been moving so deliberately “down-market” as in the last decades of the twentieth century.

3.3.2

Outward-looking tendencies

With regard to special developments in English regional dialects, outwardlooking attitudes among the young were leading to tensions between traditional accent loyalty and an cosmopolitan modernity, resulting in specific kinds of standardizing processes. Broad local variants began to be avoided and non-local ones adopted by “modern” Northerners dispelling the “cloth cap” image, though without violating local norms and deliberately avoiding an imitation of RP with its connotations of “conformity” and “snobbishness” (cf. Foulkes/Docherty 1999: 13). So the increasingly fashionable Northern and Midland-based realizations of the vowels in government [ʌã] and results [ɤã] were preferred to broadly dialectal [ʊ], and, by the turn of the century, there

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were many educated Northerners saying [ɑ:] in bath and moving in the direction of Southern /ʌ/ in but, just as there were educated Southerners who would fudge their vowel in turn [ɤã] and say crash [a] and chance [æ] (cf. Wales 2000: 15). In contrast to young people in the South, however, working-class Northern teenagers continued to adhere more strongly to local forms (cf. Williams/Kerswill 1999: 160), focusing on community norms of the traditional or the broad vernacular, together with an additional outward-looking tendency to adopt the likewise stigmatized covert prestige forms of London Cockney (see above 1.1.1) and Estuary English (see below 3.4.1,3 ), such as H-dropping, Tglottaling and TH-fronting (special implications cf. Wales 2006: 175 ff.; young speech in Sheffield see above 3.1.2). Prosodic regionalisms were further permeating educated speech, with first-syllable stress in verbs as ‘increase and ‘protest and in nouns as ‘dispute and ‘research, and secondsyllable stress in words as con’troversy and for’midable (Barber 1993: 272; cf. 1964: 65)69. After Newbrook (1999: 105), cosmopolitan tendencies like these made “less regional non-RP accents” the new targets, replacing RP in local standardization processes on grounds of their new covert prestige, as “we can no longer assume that speakers of non-standard varieties automatically orient themselves towards the standard: variation and ongoing change may potentially be influenced by a range of external varieties” (Foulkes/Doherty 1999: 12). On a wider geographical level, cosmopolitan influence was gaining ground with the fashionable prestige of American pronunciations, as part of the general preference among the young for the common touch of Liverpool, Tyneside, Cockney and Mid-Atlantic, promoted by the show business and the mass media (cf. Barber 1964: 20 f.). It was from films, advertising and the press that Ben Forster in 1968 expected a possible “noticeable change in the vocabulary, pronunciation and grammar of the English language even in the course of a single generation” (p. 15). Judging from his description, American idiom, being “striking, forceful and irresistibly practical” (p. 71), was easily accepted and adopted by the mass of people without worrying over its origins, and American pronunciation, “associated with ideas of romance, adventure and big money” in clichés nourished by television and cinema, became attractive to the young (cf. ibid. 236). Influence from across the Atlantic was seen in a return of traditional /t/ in often and of /u:/ in super, in restored full phonetic value in nylon and lemon, coinciding with the English popular tendency towards spelling pronunciation as well as in a trendy lengthening of the indefinite article a to [eɪ] (ibid. 237). According to Trudgill (1983), fashionable

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accents in the pop music of the fifties were characterized by an American alveolar flap [d] ([t̮ ]) instead of British popular glottal stop in better, raised [æ] in dance, sounded r in more, a centralized vowel in love [ə∙], and fully open [ɑ] in top after the mainly Afro-American model (cf. p. 141 f.), later alternating with Liverpool Scouse and the Beatles and, increasingly so, with low-prestige South of England accents and working-class Londonisms. As before, however, American pronunciations continued to be included, and their similarity to English regional accents allowed, in Trudgill’s description, for an exceptional side-by-side of features of different origins: when clear [a] in American can’t [ka:nt] and in Northern English high [a∙], both historically deriving from the North and North West of England, went together with a characteristic Southern English open diphthong in face [fæɪs], a combination like this was not be encountered in any other English accent but in that of the punk rock of the seventies (cf. ibid. 157). In the following years, radio and television continued to be considered a main source of influence in a development which, through the model of a speech “more and more liberated by audio and video” (Bolinger 1980: 51), brought British and American English closer together. Linking ideologies of democratic accent loyalty with cosmopolitan tendencies in the spirit of the time, young speech continued to favour language features from across the Atlantic throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Americansounding r, in particular, was deliberately acquired by students of speech, radio announcers and actors as a desirable non-prestigious feature (cf. Honey 1989: 99). It may be assumed that American pronunciations may have reinforced English regionally-based tendencies in young speech, when widespread (Northern, Western and Midland) [ɛ] or [æ] became generally heard in chance and Northern and Midland [ʌã] or [ɤã] were gaining ground in government and results70, the latter even in BBC News broadcasts (see 4.2 and 4.4). Moreover, American influence may have finally made East Anglian and Cockney Yoddropping in [su:t] (suit) the winner over [sju:t],71 and Cockney [‘i:ðə] preferred in either by about one third of the youngest age group (cf. Wells 1994: 1; Pronunciation Dictionary 1990: 689, 237). It may have been responsible for the fronting of stresses in ‘cigarette and ‘magazine (cf. Barber 1993: 272; Wells 1994 (1): 4). Even though American T-glottalling or -dropping, as heard from a former CIA chief branding that [ʔ] kind of lavish lifestyle (Capital Radio London 3/5/95), or from the former President Bill Clinton pronouncing his name as Clinˈn, has been considered of no special influence on the fash-

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ionable Cockney pronunciation in England (cf. Honey 1997: 248 f.), features like these will nevertheless have supported and strengthened the respective anti-traditional pronunciations among the young. Initiated by post-War trends in youth culture, promoted by the media, and furthered by recent cosmopolitan attitudes, Americanisms were for the first time influencing young speech in England on a relatively large scale, irrespective of social backgrounds and levels of education (for young RP see 2.4.2). In addition to American impact, Australian features have affected the speech of young people everywhere in the country as well as the fashionable variant of Estuary English, mainly through the influence of Australian television coming in over the BBC for at least twenty years (native speaker informant; for Estuary English see 3.4.1). The particular attraction of the respective programmes for young people may lie not only in their deliberately popular character and their cosmopolitan flavour, but also in the similarity of their language features to the above-mentioned trendy Americanisms and to fashionable Cockneyisms72 of the English young. So the most outstanding pronunciation characteristics in “Neighbours” (BBC 1, 22 July 2003) were strongly Cockney-sounding vowels and glides in I see [ɛ∙ɪ], why [ɔɪ] and every day [aɪ] as well as H-dropping in ‘anging around, beside American-sounding voiced /t/ and sounded /r/ as combined in party [ˈpa:rt̮ i], and widely popular Tglottalling and deletion in cases as next [neks] week, a bit late [ə ˈbɪʔ ˈlaɪʔ] or, together with elision, in put it in the corner [ˈpʊʔɪʔ ɪnɵ ˈkɔ:nə]. Similar features appeared in “Crocodile Hunter” (Discovery Channel, 19,7,03), presented by Steve Irwin, a young Australian jobbing and studying in England, particularly London, for a year, and exhibiting “Cockney” glides in time [ɔɪ] and here we go [a∙ʊ] beside “American” consonants in water [t̮ r]. At least over the past twenty years, a pronunciation like this has tended to be accompanied by a raised rather than a lowered tone even on statements – a phenomenon which, in the opinion of native speakers, has been an important influence (cf. Spillius in The Independent on Sunday, quoted in Stenström et al. 2002: IX).

3.3.3

Fashionably Southern

Beyond anything else, however, it was again popular South Eastern speech that was exerting the most decisive influence on the educated language of the new generation. Crossing geographical and social boundaries, London working-class speech proved to be what Wells called “the most influential source of phonological innovation in England” (1982 pt. 2: 301). By the early eighties, Southern-

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based R-intrusion as a general British innovation occurred in characteristically educated versions, such as put a comma ÿ rÿ in, the dilemma ÿ rÿ appears or visa ÿ rÿ application (Wells 1982: 223), until it was “so usual that speech without it seem[ed] artificial” (personal information Trudgill 1988) and was regarded as “stilted” or even “foreign” everywhere in the country (cf. Trudgill/Hannah 1985: 15). Characteristic Cockney T-glottalling and H-dropping, on their way to the North, did not remain restricted to rural areas and urban vernaculars, but became also used by young and educated middle-class speakers, in order to identify with popular habits and attitudes (cf. Leith 1983: 138; Wales 2000: 15). In the nineties, Barber’s conception of the “educated speech of South Eastern England” (cf. 1993: 270 ff.) contained a considerably larger range of influential popular Southern features than before (comp. his “Southern Regional Standard” of 1964; see 3.2.1), among them diphthongized long vowels in see [ɪi] and too [ʊu], an increasing reduction of [ju:] to [u:] in suit and lute (still considered less “common” and “most advanced” in 1964: 44), and intrusive r as “widespread in educated speech after any vowel” (still largely confined to words ending on [ɪə] as in idea of [aɪˈdɪər ÿ əv] in 1964: 44, 60) beside regionally-based features also accepted in RP, such as closer /ɔ:/ and final /i:/ for /ɪ/ (see 2.4.2). When on their way to the North, South Eastern popular features like these were accompanied by popular London and Cockney characteristics (see 1.1.1), their influence was reaching all social groups and levels of education. Being spurred and intensified by the geographical mobility of families from the London area coming to live in country towns further up north, where their popular London speech was carrying the prestige of the capital. Even in Honey’s decidedly middle-class view, the impact of London’s industries, activities and media on popular taste was setting “fashions which were imitated the length and breadth of the land, and indeed throughout the world” (1989: 91). So, within a few decades, popular London and original Cockney features were spreading from East London northwards and westwards over dialect boundaries to various English country towns, with the “new city” of Milton Keynes in Buckinghamshire being the most outstanding example of recent Cockney-based characteristics in geographical dialect levelling and in the nationwide fashion of Estuary English (see 1.1.2 and 3.4.2). It was the unique combination of great covert prestige with traditional stigmatization in the image of the Cockney accent that proceeded to promote London working-class pronunciations beyond their geographical and social borders. When post-War Southern-based trendy fashions, like an extra open

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onset in /əʊ/ ([ɛʊ]) and levelling of /ʊə/ to [ɔ:], had come to be considered “affected” or “old-fashioned” and came to be replaced by a more moderate diphthong [ɜʊ] in home and by neutralized [ɯ:] or [ɯ:] in sure among younger speakers during the 1980s (pers. inform. Bailey 1990), a new set of popular Southern features was added to the repertoire. There were prominent diphthong shifts in BBC [ˈbəɨ: ˌbəɨ: ˈsəɨ:] and group [grəU:p] and extra open onsets or levelling of glides in play [aɪ] and players [ɛ:] beside a renewed fronting of /ʌ/ to [ɐ] in cut and of /ʊ/ to [ɪ] in cook (BBC broadcasts; personal information Bailey). Post-War trendy open /æ/ ([ä]) began to be considered old-fashioned (cf. Peter Brookes: “I suppose they all grew up in the Sixties …”; The Sunday Times 13/8/78: 40), and a recent closing to Cockney-like [ȩ] in and became increasingly heard among the very young (native speaker informant 1996; mentioned as a closer popular London variant by Wells in 1970: 246). Most recently, another Cockney-influenced fronting in the vowels of goose [y] and coke (coming close to cake) was reported (cf. Kerswill 2001: 4), taking up a post-War fashion and even exceeding the advanced open glides of the fifties and sixties (see 2.3.3 and 2.4.1). The most spectacular change, however, consisted in the spread of the highly stigmatized Cockney glottal stop which, after Honey (1997: 167), had “reached epidemic proportions”, with word-final T-glottalling being heard from professional people such as school teachers and university professionals of the younger age-group. By the end of the century, the status of glottal stop had, after Mathisen (1999), changed “from a local vernacular form to a general non-localized innovation in British English speech” and become “a prestige/standard form” (p. 114), associated with metropolitan life and trendy fashions (cf. Mees/Collins 1999: 201). As Wells had predicted in 1970, “the specifically Cockney features appear[ed] to increase generation by generation at the expense of RP-influenced features” (p. 248), and this not only in London but in the whole of the South East and, increasingly so, in the speech of the young and the mobile, the fashionable and the influential everywhere in England.

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3.4

Estuary English

3.4.1

The concept and its conception

The countrywide spread of London-based features, particularly of glottal stop and T-deletion, has been ascribed to the new prestige of Estuary English, originally being the trendy usage of the younger generations in the South East, based on the area of the Thames valley north and south of London (cf. Mugglestone 1995: 96) and thus combining traditional South Eastern with fashionable London and RP characteristics, in a “mixture of Received Pronunciation with Sarf London” (Forbes, The Express 5/6/98: 10). Coining the term together with his article in The Times Educational Supplement of 19 October 1984, David Rosewarne described “the banks of the Thames and its Estuary” as “the heartland” of the new variant which, beyond its original borders, seemed to be “the most influential accent in the south-east of England” (p. 29). He defined his concept as “a variety of modified regional speech” and “a mixture of nonregional and local south-eastern pronunciation and intonation”, within “a continuum with RP and London speech at either end” in which speakers of Estuary English were grouped “in the middle ground” (ibid.). The latter idea was taken up again in the confirmation of the role of Estuary English as a “sociolinguistic and geographical continuum between RP and Cockney” by Foulkes and Docherty (1999: 11), who considered the neutral position of the accent, representing “neither standard nor extreme non-standard poles” (ibid.), a reason for its further spread (cf. “mainstream Estuary speakers”, Coggle 1993: 68). Rosewarne’s early qualification of the variant as “modified regional speech”, was later re-interpreted into “a type of Regional RP … heavily influenced by Cockney” (Cruttenden 1994: 86; Regional RP see2.4.1), into “a levelled variety … localized to the South East” (Watt/Milroy 1999: 43), or simply into “London English”, though the variant was obviously reaching much further than the Greater London area (cf. Wells 1994 (3): 1). In 2001, Kerswill again regarded the approach of speakers to Estuary English as a process of accommodation either upwards or downwards to the “middle ground”, with “both the higher and lower groups converging on this variety” (p. 6; social distribution see below 3.4.2). A few years later, however, with “Estuary” spanning a wide range of accents from near-Cockney … to nearRP”, he found it “difficult to call it a ‘variety’” (2007: 50), after all. When, in the early nineties, the question was asked whether Estuary English might be regarded as an accent or a dialect, “a good deal of confusion

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about this” was criticized by Maidment (1994: 5), referring to the inclusion of non-articulatory features in Paul Coggle’s book of 1993 and to an alleged lack of theoretical distinction between pronunciation, vocabulary and syntax in Rosewarne’s descriptions of 1984 and 1994. Coggle (ibid. 34 f.) had mentioned certain grammatical features of Cockney and American English penetrating into the dialect, among them generalization of third person singular (We was away), a widened use of ain’t in place of am not, is not, have not, etc. (I ain’t well, She ain’t it), double negation (I ain’t got no money), and an extensive use of question tags (I’ve got problems, ain’t I). He had further mentioned lexical items as hopefully, Right (for British English Correct or Certainly), and the widespread greeting Hi as some among the host of Americanisms intruding on British English through the cosmopolitan openness of the London-centred variant (cf. ibid. 59 ff.). Particular features of vocabulary had also been listed by Rosewarne (1994: 6), such as frequent use of basically, Cheers for Thank you and also for Good-bye, There you go for Here you are, beside further Americanisms such as Excuse me for Sorry, Busy for Engaged, and Who is this for Who is speaking in connection with the telephone. One year later, David Crystal explicitly considered the variety “distinctive as a dialect, not just as an accent” (1995: 327), again regarding certain grammatical features as characteristic of Estuary English, among them the most probably American-influenced omission of -ly adverbial endings as in your’re turning it too slow, non-standard prepositional uses, and even the Cockney generalization of third person singular as in I gets out of the car as well as frequent confrontational question tags and an occasional innit for isn’t it in jocular speech, with a possible move towards final standardization (ibid.). However, in spite of a considerable amount of lexicological and grammatical evidence, the linguistic identity of the variant continued to be discussed largely as a concept of pronunciation by Wells, who conceived it as a phonetic variant being “associated with standard grammar and usage” (1997: 1). Claims about distinct phonetic and phonological features of the accent were viewed with scepticism and the boundaries between Cockney and RP regarded as “extremely fuzzy” by J. A. Maidment (1994: 5), on grounds of style shifting and resulting overlaps of Cockney-like realizations which made the only features that were supposedly unique to the variant seem “very dubious”, while the rest were found “in Cockney, or RP, or in some cases both” (cf. ibid.). The different patterns of exhibition and avoidance of H-dropping and T-glottalling were referred to style shifting, based on the formality of the

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situation for speakers of both Estuary English and Cockney (ibid.), while special intonation characteristics, including prominence on prepositions and auxiliaries beside a characteristic rise/fall pattern and a narrower pitch range than in RP as considered typical by Rosewarne in 1984 (p. 2), were rejected on grounds of their occurrence in further English accents (cf. Maidment 1994: 41). Connecting stylistic considerations with the question whether the new variant was to be regarded as a “dialect” or an “accent” in its own right (see below) or whether it was the formal style while Cockney was the informal one, Wells inferred a linguistic distinctiveness of the accent from the existence of its phonetically non-stigmatized casual styles (without H-dropping) and from the practical inability of Cockney speakers to use standard grammar (cf. 1994 (2): 1 f.). On these premises, he later proposed a definition pinning down Estuary as “standard English spoken with an accent that includes features localizable in the southeast of England” (1998: 1). Although, more recently, Kerswill pointed to varieties of Estuary English “and their counterparts throughout the British Isles” (2007: 50), he, nevertheless, kept to the established idea of its essentially South-Eastern character, definig it as “a set of leveled (relatively homogenized) regional – as opposed to local – accents or dialects as spoken in the south-east of England” (ibid.). The realized variability of Estuary English as a modified and levelled variant has complicated its phonetic description and its sociolinguistic demarcation in the “middle ground” between Cockney and RP. Attempts have been made to make the phonetic task manageable by relating the accent’s articulatory features to its two poles, with particular weight being placed on its Cockney features. The most obvious Cockneyisms considered to mark the accent off from RP were replacement of /t/ by glottal stop /ʔ/, medial and final as in state[ʔ]ment and take it [ʔ] off, as well as vocalization of /l/, mainly word-final or in final clusters, with various vowel mergers like /w/, /u/ or /ɒ/ in milk [w ~ ɒ] or bottle [u] (cf. Rosewarne 1984: 29; Coggle 1993: 29 ff.). And while, in the former case, RP speakers might tap the most t’s and Cockney speakers the fewest, Estuary speakers might find themselves “in the middle range”, tapping certain t’s and dropping others (cf. Coggle ibid. 30 f.). In addition, Yodcoalescence (through assimilation) was found in Tuesday [tç] or Duke [dʒ], Yod-deletion in absolute and assume (Rosewarne 1984: 29; Wells 1997: 2). Cockney vowel characteristics were found to be diphthongization of RP /ɔ:/ to nasal sounding [ɔ:w] in awful, fronted [æ] in come, and lengthening and diphthongization of word-final vowels as in me [əi:] and city [əɪ∙], beside further

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opening of RP /əʊ/ to Cockney [aʊ] in no, and far-reaching diphthong-shift in the vowels of face [aɪ], price [ɒɪ] and goat [ɛʊ] (cf. Rosewarne ibid.; Coggle 1993: 29 ff.; Maidment 1994: 3). At the same time, Estuary English was considered to mark itself off from Cockney, mainly by exclusion of H-dropping in hand, of TH-fronting in think [f] and mother [v], of intervocal /ʔ/ for /t/ in water, and of final G-dropping in ing-endings (cf. Crystal 1995: 2; Wells 1997: 2). Most characteristic Cockney features, such as Yod-deletion, Tglottalling, final G-dropping and certain realizations of glides, were reinforced through the above-mentioned American and Australian influence on young cosmopolitan speech and, with it, on the Estuary accent (American usage in Estuary cf. Coggle 1993: 34 f.; see below). In order to meet the particular requirements of a phonetic representation of the articulatory pattern, an attempt was made by Wells to fix a new standardized transcription especially for application to Estuary English (cf. 1994 (2): 1; 1994 (3): 1 ff.)73.

3.4.2

Origins and distribution

The particular source of origin of what was later labelled “Estuary English” was seen in the post-War uprooting and transplanting of large numbers of Cockney speakers, following the “blitz”74, and subsequent municipal housing schemes between the 1950s and the 1970s on greenfield sites in the Home Counties as well as in the move of considerable numbers of London elderly to the coasts of Sussex, Kent and East Anglia (cf. Coggle 1993: 24; Rosewarne 1994: 4). By the mid-nineties, the results of an extraordinary geographical spread had made the term Estuary English “something of a misnomer” (Crystal 1995: 327; cf. Maidment 1994: 6) for a variant which was not only extending into Essex and Kent in the South East and as far as the coast, but also to the Oxford-Cambridge-London triangle, and from there further northwards and westwards to Norwich and Cornwall so that it could be heard along three other estuaries – of the Humber in the North East, the Dee in the North West and the Severn in the West – and was spoken South of a line from the Wash to the Avon (cf. Rosewarne 1994: 4; Crystal ibid.). The further spread of the variant beyond the borders of the South East was considered to have been enhanced by the mobility of the time, with people commuting for work and moving to “new towns” everywhere in the country as well as by the influence of the media, exhibiting fashionably cockneyfied speech in entertainment programmes and advertisements and in the speech of personalities, so that the accent was considered to be gaining ground through the same channels as RP

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had done in its spread earlier in the past century (cf. Rosewarne ibid. 7; Crystal ibid.). In the youngest generation, the spread of Estuary English was considered to be particularly furthered by children’s TV – “that brassy, relentless patter with its East End flavour” becoming “the voice in which the nation chats up its children” (Ascherson 1994: 1), with the result that children in Milton Keynes were losing Buckinghamshire pronunciation and “melding their speech into uniform, Londonish sounds”, saying “‘ahm’ for arm, ‘naa-it’ for night, and ‘le’er’ for letter” (cf. ibid.; Milton Keynes see 1.1.2). A further explanation for the wide spread of the accent was seen by Maidment in changes in the social meaning of formality and informality and a resulting acceptable tendency to mix accents in this “post-modern” age. (cf. 1994: 6). So, then, why not call it “Post-Modern English” (ibid.) rather than “Estuary”? The complex sociogeographical origin and spread of the variant have been paralleled by considerable diversity in its sociolinguistic definition and interpretation. Due to its position in the “middle ground”, the variant might be considered either “a middle-class pronunciation typical of the Thames Estuary” (Cruttenden 1994: 86) or “a ‘classless’ blend of RP and ‘Cockney’” (Mugglestone 1995: 96). Being regarded as “the aspirant child of Cockney, having emigrated, like its users, from the terraces of the East End” by McKay (1996: 1), it was labelled “a bastardized version of Cockney” by some, and “its educated counterpart” by others (Wells 1998: 1). It was considered to be one of the accents that “originate in the lower classes” (Coggle 1994: 1) as “a marker of social identity” (Bex 1994: 1), chiefly among the young, and looked upon as a variant preserving non-standard features and adding new ones, and as a “particular example of the resistance that dialects show against becoming fully standardized and homogenized”, in “this new development away from RP” (Kerswill 2001: 6) – similar to historical Cockney which once preserved the traditional London dialect in the face of the emerging prestige variant (cf. Smith 1969: 8; see 2.1.2). Viewed from a different angle, the spread of Estuary up north was regarded as a continuation of the historical process of standardization, deriving from the local speech of the Capital and the Court in the Middle Ages and becoming more speedy and obvious under the conditions of modern social mobility, in “a continuation of the long process by which London pronunciation made itself felt” (Rosewarne 1984: 1). Combining the different points of view with emphasis on the popular element, Wells saw in the accent a continuation of the centuries-long “tendency for features of popu-

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lar London speech to spread out geographically (to other parts of the country) and socially (to higher social classes)” (1997: 2). Being, in Kerswill’s words, “a result of greatly heightened mobility … coupled with a change in ideology” (2007: 50), Estuary English, on the one hand, opened non-RP users a range of occupations formally barred to them, such as, for instance, broadcasting (cf. ibid. 51) – on the other hand, with its popular flavor, was accepted and adopted by many of the young educated, be it university undergraduates (Wells 1994 (3): 1) or young actors of the Royal Shakespeare Company (Morrish 1991: 1), and it was soon current among the academic staff across faculties and career structures, even including professors and deans (cf. Coggle 1993: 75). It also became the variant of middle-class speakers and the upper-class young, both moving “downmarket” to avoid the “establishment connotations” of RP, particularly those of what was still considered “conservative” or “advanced” in Rosewarne’s early time and later more generally called “posh” (cf. Rosewarne 1984: 3; Crystal 1995: 2; “posh” see 1.4.3). In its relative closeness to the prestige accent, on the other hand, it was held to stand for lower-class upstarts striving to fit into their new environments by compromising linguistically – self-made young people, well-to-do and upwardly mobile, as represented by the “yuppies” and “Essex man” in the media of the 1980s, correcting their speech and getting rid of the non-standard “defects” of double negatives and dialectal tense forms, avoiding stigmatized pronunciations in ‘ouse (house) and now [æʊ] and replacing intervocal T-glottalling in wa’er (water) by prestigious /t/ (cf. Kerswill 2001: 6, 8). Consequently, Kerswill saw in the variant “not … a reflection of any greater democratic ideology in society, but a brutal result of new power bases (the newly-wealthy) replacing older ones” (ibid. 8), and an arriviste social position was simply referred to by “estuarian” in The Guardian in 1996 (cf. Wells 1997: 1). Suggesting efficiency and success, Estuary made its speakers be widely chosen for advertising as they were considered to appeal more successfully than speakers of RP to the large potential of newly-rich customers of non-exclusive social background, “because of their accents not despite them” (Coggle 1993: 78). The acquisition and spread of the successful variant in young people was traced by Rosewarne (1994: 7), with results reaffirming its socially complex origins and connotations. While secondary school students with local accent backgrounds were reported to adopt Estuary English, rating it more “sophisticated” and even envisioning RP for their later age, those from an RP-speaking background were aiming at “street credibility” through more popular speech,

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helping them to “fit into the group” and “appear tough” (for girls and boys, rsp.; cf. ibid.). Discussing the linguistic results of the mixing of RP and non-RP children in comprehensive and public schools in a “recipe for Estuary English” (ibid.), Rosewarne pointed to large numbers of the comprehensive schools’ pupils in the Southern half of England leaving as Estuary speakers, on grounds of effective peer group pressure exercised on those from RP-speaking families. A most interesting and revealing piece of writing illustrates the social role of Estuary English in the mind of a fifteen-year-old boy of The Kings School, Canterbury (presented in Schoenberger 2001: 3). In the boy’s school essay, the accent appears as a “classless dialect”, spoken by the Princess of Wales as well as by those wanting “to increase their ‘coolness’”, among them some of the upper class who would like to sound “less posh and more cool”, while some of the middle class would rather “prefer to have an upper-class accent”. Viewed from a decidedly democratic and cosmopolitan angle, the accent is ascribed to “whatever class, whatever region (although at this moment it is mainly in the south) and whatever race”, and people are considered “less conscious about what they sound like”. Towards the end of this text, however, the young author seems to be rather concerned about his own usage, admitting: “… every now and again, I miss out letters and also slur words. However, if need be I can speak very pronounced” (ibid.). After this, the existence of Estuary English as a discrete dialect or accent is leading to a particular kind of educated “bilingualism”, at least so in the Southern half of England, similar to style shifting between regional accent and RP as is now common practice among the young generation of traditionally RP-speaking families in the North. Irrespective of the social background and generation of its speakers, Estuary English has always been a compromise between social constraints and the individual identities of those who were, in Rosewarne’s words, “rising, falling or maintaining their position socioeconomically” (1994: 7). As Estuary had become attractive to many – the democratic-minded and those who pretended to be, the lower (middle)-class upstarts and the frustrated upper middle-class shunning “posh” for its social disadvantages – social motivations for its application were manifold, though frequently determined by the aim to exploit the possibilities the variant might offer to disguise one’s sociolinguistic identity in favour of a new and more favourable one. What was most significant was the ease with which top people adopted the accent which “obscure[d] sociolinguistic origins” (cf. Rosewarne 1984: 29), to an extent that made Maidment entitle his 1994 paper “Estuary English: Hybrid or Hype?”. According to

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Forbes’ article in The Express (5/6/98: 10), the variant might be considered an asset of politicians in the eighties and nineties, in a similar way as Harold Wilson, in the 1970s, “talked more Yorkshire when he smoked his pipe in public than when he smoked cigars in private”. Being a vehicle of popular upto-datedness and of professional egalitarianism (in Forbes’ dialectal version: “They don’ talk like they was differen’, see … makes us feel goo’, don’ i’?”), the accent was considered to “[smooth] away old class distinctions” (ibid.). After Forbes, politicians soon discovered the possibility to “slip into it and out of” and were “switching voices to give themselves street cred”, as Maggie Thatcher once did when speaking in the Commons (though, after Rosewarne 1994 p. 1, she never did), and Tony Blair now does when addressing a public meeting, “dropping his h’s and letting consonants die in the air” (ibid.; see 4.4.1). The accent had soon become well established in the Civil Service, the local government and the medical and teaching professions, it was to be heard in the House of Commons and in the Lords, and it was even ascribed to the Archbishop of Canterbury. Prince Edward was claimed to be a speaker of Estuary English, and even the late Princess of Wales “increasingly allow[ed] a touch of Estuary into her voice” (ibid.), though the fashionable Londonisms in their speech might as well be ascribed to upper (middle)-class Sloane Ranger (see 3.3.3), for which Lady Diana Spencer had been considered archetypical before her marriage to the Prince of Wales (cf. Wikipedia 2006: 1, Website). Without question, Estuary became current among business circles of the city – formerly the preserve of RP – in order to be more “consumer-friendly”, it was relied on as an effective medium for advertising on radio and TV, and its fashionable attraction made it the “class-free” accent of stars, disc jockeys and sportsmen (cf. Rosewarne 1984: 29; 1994: 4 f.; Coggle 1993: 77 ff.; Forbes 1998 ibid.). Hence, relying on the TV soap “East Enders”, the accent might be placed just “between Cockney and the Queen” (Rosewarne 1994: 3).

3.4.3

Public criticism and future prospects

Although the fashionable variant became relatively widespread and influential, its success story was at no time complete. While a possible move towards a “future classless society” was, after Crystal (1995: 3), envisioned by newspaper commentators in connection with the spread of the variant in the early nineties and aimed for even by former Prime Minister John Major, there was abundant upper (middle)-class aversion to the accent’s lower-class stigmatized features. Since the 1980s, the variant had been given wide newspaper cover-

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age, in editorials, articles and readers’ letters, with a considerable amount of argument on the “errors” of elision and the explosive issues of T-glottalling and -deletion threatening to “defile” the language “for the sake of fashion” (from The Sunday Express 1984, quoted in Mugglestone 1991: 330), and the Secretary of State for Education was among those who were ardently taking sides with those defying the “erosion of the language” (Bex 1994: 2; cf. Coggle 1994: 1). Safeguarding the “standards” and the “purity” of the language, Estuary English was referred to as “slob speak” and “slack-mouthed patois” (Coggle ibid.), as “horrifying”, “slack-jawed”, “limp” and “flaccid”, and the “allpervading virus of ‘London lad’ speak” (cf. Kerswill 2001: 7). Even the BBC had to take its sentence with a listener stating: “We are plagued with idiots on radio and television who speak English like the dregs of humanity” (quoted by Maidment 1994: 7). In spite of its spread in all kinds of occupations and professions, among upper- and middle-class young people and allegedly even among the younger members of the Royal Family (see 3.4.2), a stereotype assumed that “Estuary English mark[ed] its speakers as members of the lower strata of British society” (Coggle 1993: 85), and conservative speakers felt the standard language to be “usurped by the usage of people who are NOT OUR CLASS” (Maidment 1994: 7). In John Honey’s traditionally middle-class view, the “deep unease” caused by this development was calling for a way of “bringing this new tendency in spoken standard English under control”, be it by “a newly founded Academy or its unofficial equivalent” (1997: 168). A completely different kind of aversion to Estuary English sprang from a Northern rejection of excessive Southern accent dominance arising from too much Cockney in England. Trudgill (1990: 14) suggested geographical borders to the acceptability of the fashion, referring to the “skilled practitioners of Cockey-style conversations”, who might be valued as “amusing and interesting” in London, but were perceived in neighbouring East Anglia as being “arrogant and dominating”. According to Marks (1999: 1), many Liverpudlians were pained by the prospect of becoming a linguistic “footnote”, as Estuary had increased among Merseysiders and also among young Scousers under twentyfive, now saying fink for Northern dialectal tink (thing) and bruvver for traditional brudder (brother) , and Wales (2006: 175) points to an article in the Daily Telegraph of 1 June, 1999, proclaiming “Scouse accent sinking into the estuary” and warning that it was “in danger of extinction from the relentless northward march” of Estuary English. Further to the South-West, in Winchester and Southampton, r-lessness in car and warm had come to be favoured by the young,

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providing a fashionable urban image in contrast to older and rural speech (cf. Coggle 1993: 27), an image of the ordinary and less privileged, of toughness and efficiency as represented by the fashionably popular speech of London. However, when the accent was claimed by Northerners to be “difficult to understand” (McKay 1996: 1), this disqualification will have had less to do with actual intelligibility problems than with Northern aversion to the accent’s connotations of Southern power and superiority. In the same way as earlier speculations on a possible replacement of the RP model by Estuary have found their limitations in the rejection of its decidedly popular character by many of the conservatively educated classes, the traditional accent loyalty in the North has so far prevented a victory of the Southern variant over regional speech. Regarding the future of Estuary English, Rosewarne, in his early speculations on the accent’s linguistic influence, had seen it “in a strong position to exert influence on the pronunciation of the future” (1984: 1), considering it “the new model for general imitation” among the most influential sections of the young generation and expecting it to become the pronunciation of the majority of speakers, the strongest native influence on RP and, probably, “the RP of the future” (ibid. 3). With his conception of the widening social validity of the variant as “a linguistic reflection of the changes in class barriers in Britain”, and, more definitely, as “a sign that class barriers [were] coming down” in result of “the development of less exclusive linguistic networks in Britain” (1984: 1, 1994: 8), Rosewarne himself laid the foundations for recent claims to the accent’s correspondence with the new social atmosphere of gender equality, race relations, and changing moral attitudes on issues like abortion, contraception and homosexuality (cf. Kerswill 2001: 6). Spreading socially and geographically, the mixed variant might, in Coggle’s view, “well become the broad meeting place, the common ground for a coming together in British society” (1993: 87) and, therefore, deserve to be labelled “The new Standard English”, as actually happened in the sub-title of his 1993 book (Do You Speak Estuary? The new Standard English). Two years later, David Crystal confirmed the claim of Estuary to the “phonetic throne”, in his vision of a future “gradual replacement of one kind of standard by another” (i. e. of RP by Estuary; 1995: 365). In his less radical prediction of a further spread of Estuary English, Rosewarne, about the same time, envisioned a future majority of speakers in England – with the exception of the highest and lowest socioeconomic groups – being either Estuary speakers or using “certain features of Estuary English in combination with elements of whatever their regional speech might be” (1994: 8).

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More than a decade later, however, Kerswill, with some caution, reconsidered the “disappearance hypothesis” of RP in connection with the rise of Estuary English as a “popular variety of spoken Standard English” (2007: 49). While it seems doubtful that either current RP or the Northern Standards might be willing to retreat in favour of the successful merger from the South East, the trendy accent may, for a certain time, remain a particularly influential variant of the spoken language, at least as far as England is concerned. Being part of the universal impact of London-based tendencies, its various shades and degrees of mixing between Cockney and RP against the popular background of the Thames Estuary, in combination with American influence, account for its sociolinguistic complexity and for its resulting acceptability among the young of different geographical regions and social backgrounds. Further, due to its successful sociophonetic convergence, it may well function as a new kind of Southern regional standard of wider social validity, while some of its most characteristic features may continue to be adopted and incorporated into the speech of the younger generation everywhere in England. Its term, however, may turn out to be a passing fashion, together with the variant’s further spread and diffusion into ongoing southernization processes in young speech, and become finally neutralized as time goes by.

3.5

New parameters for educated speech

3.5.1

Educated acceptability

In a time when Ferguson’s definition of a “standard” was still related to its most controversial aspects of being “the ‘best’ form of the language – rated above regional and social dialects” (1968: 248), the growing currency of regionalisms and popular fashions in England was beginning to initiate decisive changes in the conception of educated speech. Sociolinguists were defending the justification of a side-by-side of old and new pronunciations, of varieties and traditions, and of divergences from an accepted norm. Arguing against a “single ‘correct’ English” or a “single standard of correctness” (1968: 16), Quirk was favourable toward a widely admissible mildly regional usage in what he later described as “the living spoken English of educated people” (1972: 98), where the acceptability of regional features had become “a question of more or less” in a wider range of permissible style shifting (cf. ibid. 42). Pronunciation became regarded as a matter of style and fashion, like

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wearing “the right clothes in the right situation” (Brook 1979: 25; cf. Quirk 1968: 67), or as a question of “linguistic table-manners” or “linguistic tact” (Boomer 1976: 18; Quirk 1968: 120), and articulatory fashion changes were considered a “triggering” factor in a set of deeper-rooted sociolinguistic tendencies (cf. Aitchison 1981: 115). In correspondence with the general trend towards the colloquial and the casual, an exaggerated articulation was held to be “beyond the requirements of speech as a means of communication” (Quirk 1970: 3): it was no longer correctness but acceptability that mattered in an English which was “appropriate to its purpose in a particular situation” (Brook 1979: 144) and in which usage was considered “the only test of correctness” (ibid. 140; cf. Hughes/Trudgill 1979: 5). As all English dialects were regarded as “equally good”, with standard English being “simply no better and no worse than any other dialect” (Trudgill 1970: 23, 27) so that there was “no such thing as the English language” (Trudgill 1975: 27; cf. Macaulay 1977: 18 et al.), Atkinson advised all teachers of English to accept any consistent reproduction of any other accent beside RP and to acknowledge that “the standard within any of these accents [was] the educated speaker” (1975: 71). Focusing on the less exclusive and more generally acceptable, new conceptions of a non-regional standard language were proposed, which was deliberately related to a socially non-committed education without traditionally prestigious social background or upper-class cultural heritage. In the series of “Authoritative Talks” (or “Fireside Talks”), given by linguists on the BBC in the early 1950s, David Abercrombie had seen RP “in strong contrast to all other ways of pronouncing Standard English” (1951: 585), later pointing to the new situation in which there was “no acknowledged standard of pronunciation” (1956: 46) and “some of the most learned men and women in the country” were often applying some other accent than RP (ibid. 52). For him, standard English was “a language, not an accent” (1965: 10), valid only for grammar and usage, not tied to any region and used everywhere by educated people, being “the official form of English … maintained as a standard by the needs of commercial, literary and scientific communication” (1956: 44). Similarly, Peter Trudgill’s conception of standard English was confined to a variety of grammar and lexis, “usually used in print, … normally taught in schools and to non-native speakers learning the language … normally spoken by educated people and used in news broadcasts and other similar situations” (1974: 17), and he, too, considered it “possible to speak Standard English with any regional or social accent” (ibid. 19), except, however, the most localized and

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least educated ones. On the same assumption that standard English was “not associated with a particular accent”, O’Donnell and Todd (1980: 41) suggested social variation in the pronunciation of a standard being “spoken with a modified version of the locally prestigious dialectal pronunciation in a continuum of variation up the social scale” (ibid.). Besides, however, the idea of a standard pronunciation remained awake and continued to be advocated in models close to RP, included in the conception of a socially and linguistically wider-based standard language. Randolph Quirk saw a large variability within “this relatively narrow band which [was] loosely called ‘Standard’” (1968: 155), being, in his view, a normal English with a high degree of regional and social neutrality, and drawing “least attention to itself over the widest area and through the widest range of usage” (ibid. 95). The “norm” being conceived as “a complex function of vocabulary, grammar and transmission” (ibid.), RP was included as “a normal or standard English in pronunciation” (ibid. 87) in his otherwise new and deliberately democratic concept of a neutral standard language. The persisting sociocultural dominance of London and the South East led Charles Barber (1964) to conceive a widened Received Standard as a “new national standard” for pronunciation (ibid. 28 f.), based on the “most populous and influential” Southern Regional Standard (see 3.2.1) and including, beside RP, a strong London and South Eastern popular element until then considered non-standard. Being no longer the speech of the English gentry but of “the educated classes of the south-east of England”, it might come to be recognized as “a new national standard, perhaps coalescing with the present R. S. in the process” (ibid.). In a very similar conception, Halliday described an informal educated spoken Southern British, varying “from ‘received pronunciation’ in the strict sense, with no observable regional characteristics, to a form recognizably southern but still clearly acceptable as ‘standard British’” (1967: 7). Being still “roughly the range of Daniel Jones” (ibid.) and overlapping with updated conceptions of RP by Gimson and Lewis (see 2.5.2 and 2.5.1, respectively), the Southern-based variant was traditionally considered the basis for the teaching of English. Following the general tendency, Gimson, too, predicted the possible emergence of “a new standard with a wider popular and regional base” in his 1970 IPE (p. 86), and Wells foresaw a possible future replacement of RP by “some new but more democratic standard”, having “risen from the ashes of RP” and being based on popular London English (1982 pt. 1: 118). In their 1997 edition of EPD, Roach and Hartman suggested “a more broadly-based

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and accessible model accent for British English”, with BBC English taking the place of RP (cf. p. V; see 2.5.2). Being based on the editors’ phonetic intuitions and on observations, particularly of broadcast English and the educated pronunciations of colleagues and acquaintances, the chosen variant was declaredly intended to function as a “standard accent” (cf. ibid. VI). The educated background and wider relevance of the new type of a prevailingly southern-based “standard” pronunciation were again nourishing the notion of a standard’s high prestige, quality and correctness. Again, “standard” meant power, if no longer on the basis of traditional social privilege, so on grounds of the exceptional education and social standing of the members of a new democratic elíte. After Quirk, educated speech – “by definition the language of education” – tended to gain “the additional prestige of government agencies, the learned professions, the political parties, the press, the law court and the pulpit” (1972 (1): 16), thus being surprisingly close in its definition to Alexander Ellis’ nineteenth century conception of a “received pronunciation” (cf. 1869: 630; see 2.5). Embodied by BBC English, the educated language was “accorded implicit social and political sanction” and therefore “referred to as Standard English” (Quirk 1972 (1): 16). In his abovementioned conception of “normal English”, it was the people who wrote books and who lead the cultural, educated, political and religious life that constituted the “major centre of imitation in language, in the sense that it [was] these people’s English that [was] thought to be best by society as a whole” (1974: 168). With direct reference to social power, Trudgill later regarded the “standard” as the speech of “the most educated and powerful members of the population”, totalling from twelve to fifteen percent in England and from seven to twelve percent in Britain (cf. 1990: 2). In the same way as Barber had considered the epithet of “educated” (versus “uneducated”) to be “merely a euphemism for ‘class’” (1964: 18), Leith saw a standard language as the product of political centralization in a society, with different linguistic variants playing their part in the “symbolism of social class” (1983: 2). Haugen went even further, considering a standard language the instrument of an authority such as a government, offering its users “material rewards in form of power and position” (1972: 119). Further links were drawn between the standard language and political power concentrated at the top of the social hierarchy, when James and Lesley Milroy (1985: 26) considered the mechanism of standardization to be based on “acceptance (mainly by the most influential people) of a common core of linguistic conventions”, and when the idea

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of power in language was generalized by Giles and Ryan (1982: 208) concluding that “dominant groups tend to determine that their characteristic speech varieties are the norms”. A complex image of social prestige, educational relevance and official authority was serving to sustain and promote new ideas of a standard language not only for England, but also for Britain and for the whole English-speaking world, similar to conceptions of RP as pronunciation standard (see 2.6.1). While Halliday considered his “informal educated spoken Southern British” in pronunciation “clearly acceptable as standard British” (cf. 1967: 7), social and regional neutrality were complementing each other in Hughes’ and Trudgill’s conception of a “standard English” in grammar and usage, being “not the dialect of any social group but of educated people throughout the British Isles” (1979: 12). Abercrombie and others, again, were postulating an “international standard of English” in grammar and lexis with insignificant national differences and an “astonishing homogeneity the world over” (Abercrombie 1957: 45; cf. Strevens 1964: 26), and O’Donnell and Todd later considered the wide use of English as a lingua franca to be based on the prestige of the “standard” language (1980: 99). Within Quirk’s definition of a “normal English”, a “standard” (including pronunciation) was conceived as “basically an ideal, a mode of expression, which we seek when we wish to communicate beyond our immediate community with members of the wider community of the nation as a whole, or with members of the still wider community, Englishspeakers as a whole” (1968: 95). Though favouring RP as a “standard English in pronunciation” for the country (ibid. 87; see 2.6.1), he pointed to “its rightful place as just one of the acceptable ways of speaking English” (1972 (2): 73), in connection with the growing international importance of American English and its tendency to remain the “linguistic centre of gravity” for the English speaking world well into the twenty-first century (ibid.; cf. O’Donnell/Todd 1980: 99). About two decades later, Crystal considered British English to become “a minor dialect of World English” (1995: 365), not least on grounds of changing norms for foreign language teaching. Barber, however, ignoring the linguistic competition between the two main denominators among the world’s Englishes, recognized “a solid core of common usage”, justifying the conception of a “standard world English” with practically the same structure and negligible differences in vocabulary, as long as its definition was confined to “a formal style of written language” (1993: 261). Therefore, he saw “a standard literary language” being “very much the same

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throughout the English speaking community”, and, in his conception, it was this which “deserve[d] to be called Standard English” (ibid.). Accepting the challenge, recent editions of dictionaries began to include in their largely traditional definitions the new sociolinguistic conceptions of “educatedness” and “acceptability”. So the Concise Oxford Dictionary of 1990 defined a “standard (of language)” as “conforming to established educated usage (Standard English)” (p. 1188; cf. Oxford Dictionary and Thesaurus 1997: 1516), and the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of 1992 registered a “standard (of spelling, pronunciation, grammar, etc.) widely accepted as the usual form: standard English” (p. 890). With additional reference to the traditional concept of “correctness”, the Longman Dictionary of English Language and Culture of the same year defined a “standard” in language as what was “generally recognized as correct or acceptable … standard spelling/pronunciation/standard English/ = as used by educated speakers” (1992: 1293), while Collins English Dictionary (1992), less explicitly, conceived the “standard” as “denoting or characterized by idiom, vocabulary, etc. that [was] regarded as correct and acceptable by educated native speakers” (p. 1505). The Cambridge International Dictionary of English for Advanced Learners of 1995 included BBC English in its definition of the “standard”, stating that “Language described as standard is the form of that language which is considered acceptable and correct by most educated users of it: Most announcers on the BBC speak standard English” (p. 1411). Thus, apart from the increasing application of the criteria of “educatedness” and “acceptability”, definitions of the “standard” language in dictionaries remained largely traditional in their reliance on the “established” and the “usual”, their reference to “correctness”, and their inclusion of “pronunciation”, the latter being explicitly defined as “standard” under the entries on “Received Pronunciation”, “Oxford English” and “BBC English”. When, however, around the turn of the century, conceptual changes were setting in with new definitions of RP and the occasional omission of the latter terms from the list of items, Standard English also ceased to be noted as an individual term in the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of 2000, in Collins Cobuild English Dictionary for Advanced Learners and The New Oxford Dictionary of English, both of 2001, and in the Concise Oxford English Dictionary of 2004 as well as in the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of 2005, which may indicate a beginning reassessment of English language functions and qualities. Among other items registered under the term of “standard”, the 2003 Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary defined “Language described as a stand-

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ard” as “the form of that language which is considered acceptable and correct by most educated users of it”, adding “Most announcers on the BBC speak standard English” (ibid. 1239; see above Cambridge International Dictionary 1995). The 2005 Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary offered its definition of a standard language in the “language” section, under “varieties of language”, suggesting “a variety of a language that people generally accept as normal and correct: standard language” (Oxford Advanced Learner’s Compass). The problem, however, was still unresolved when, in connection with the definition of Received Pronunciation, the traditional links between RP and the BBC were reaffirmed as follows: “Standard English, the form of English grammar considered correct, is, when spoken with an RP accent, sometimes called BBC English, Oxford English, or the Queen’s/King’s English” (ibid.; RP and the BBC see 2.6.2).

3.5.2

Educated standards and the EEE model

Recent discussion of language acceptability and standardization in England was focusing on contradictions between the variability of the spoken language and the norms of a prescriptive standard, whether or not pronunciation was included in the concept. Charles Barber had first stated in the early sixties, and confirmed about thirty years later, that there were changes in the conception of standard English in the post-War period which were linked to changes “in acceptance rather than in actual usage” (1964: 18), and that what had once been considered non-standard might have come to be accepted as standard “because of the changing definition of ‘standard’” (1993: 266). In the early nineties, he saw a new perspective in the tendency “to draw the boundaries of ‘acceptable pronunciation’, and indeed ‘Standard English’ generally, rather wider than formally” and thus to “take account of usages of a larger part of the population” (ibid.). As South Eastern pronunciation had, in his view, become “fairly similar to RP” (ibid.) in a modified accent also used by many radio and television announcers and presenters, he again underlined its tendency to be regarded as a “standard” and, even more significantly, “to replace strict RP as a standard” (ibid. 265). Thus, with its roots between South-Eastern accents and RP and its function as a pronunciation standard in England, his “educated South Eastern pronunciation” came in fact close to the conception of the Estuary accent (see 3.3.3 and 3.4.1, respectively), linguistically and socially as well. Along with his renewed conception of a Southern-based standard of pronunciation (cf. 1993: 265 ff.), he took up the post-War claim for the equality of all regional accents in his prediction of a probable move towards the

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American position, in which it was “normal and acceptable for a speaker to use an educated regional accent and there was “no supra-regional classaccent” (ibid. 266)75. From his typical American angle, however, C.-J. N. Bailey (1987) generally condemned the “inextricably authoritarian sense attached to ‘standard language’ in Europe” (p. 399) and the resulting exclusion of “normal” (i. e. informal) style from the acceptability range, arguing that nobody had the right to decide what should be the “standard”, nor was it possible to lay down firm rules after which anything – from formal style to current fashion – might be considered “standard” usage (cf. ibid. 400). Instead of trying “to define a standard what cannot be a standard”, he suggested a concept of “fashionable English”, including “formal” and “normal” speech as well (cf. ibid. 409), thus neutralizing all standard conceptions of the past. With speech differing not only synchronically with social and regional characteristics, gender peculiarities and personal ideosyncracies, but also diachronically with time and generation, there was, in the Milroys’ view, “no such entity as a standard spoken language” (1985: 26), neither in Britain nor in the English-speaking world, and even so-called ‘standard English’ could be perceived to “incorporate variability and change” (ibid.). A “standard” was seen as “an idea in the mind rather than a reality – a set of abstract norms to which actual usage will conform to a greater or lesser extent” (ibid. 23), or as “a kind of ideal that people have for the language, a homogenized and artificial creation” (Wardhaugh 1999: 99; see also Quirk 1968: 95). Following Labov, who did not see “any marked agreement in the use of the language elements” but “a set of shared norms in evaluative behavior” (1968: 251), Lynda Mugglestone (1995: 55 f.) was pointing to a dichotomy between the less standardized patterns and the more standardized attitudes to usage, on the assumption that “it is … heterogeneity rather than homogeneity, pluralism rather than the monolithic which in real terms will mark linguistic usage in a multi-dimensional society” (ibid. 52). Under post-War social conditions, upward mobility and the resulting language change from below have widened the range of the educated language, socially as well as linguistically, in such a way that educated pronunciation can no longer be measured on its relation to the prestige accent nor be adequately described in terms of the traditional RPorientated concept. Consequently, it is suggested here to transform the traditional idea of a set of governing rules for a standard into a conception of acceptable educated diversity, and thus to replace the traditional prescriptive

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notion of a “standard” for pronunciation by a descriptive conception of pronunciation “standards” as part of the wider educated language. Changes towards a more fluent society and corresponding changes in the educated system have resulted in the permeation of educated speech by forms other than RP and induced a continuum of educated variants reaching from traditionally prestigious articulations to popular features on the other end of the scale. On grounds of the new sociolinguistic diversity, three main branches are proposed for differentiation within a current Educated English English (EEE) in pronunciation. Being based on what is still generally referred to as Received Pronunciation (see 2.5.2) and connected with the traditional image of BBC English, its socially prestigious branch represents the most conservative part of the conception. What marks the variant as exclusive are its specific articulatory choices made on prestigious grounds, its distinctive tone of voice, and its characteristic reflections of the established and the trendy in the speech of different generations. Included in the variant are recent definitions of RP and RP-like accents (see 2.5.1 and 2.5.2) as well as close approximations to RP within the uppermost ranges of Near- and adoptive RP (see 3.1.2 and 3.1.3), with only a very limited set of regionalisms or lower middle-class features in otherwise prestigious speech. Being determined more by age-group than by social affiliation, a fashionably relaxed branch has been conceived, whose London Cockney pronunciations are culminating in the trendy fashions of Estuary English, and whose non-British features and young context forms, supplemented by unconventional prosodic means and paralinguistic characteristics, make it decidedly non-conservative in nature (see 3.3.2 and 3.3.3). The concept and its conception and Origins and distribution). With its focus on young speech, its general openness to novelties of all kinds, including American and Australian influence (see above 3.3.2), and, not least, through its intensive promulgation by the media (see 4.4.1, 4.4.3; 4.5.1 and 4.5.2), the fashionably relaxed variant has proved a melting-pot for current educated features of different social backgrounds and geographical origins. As mildly regional speech is now found in a considerable range of educated applications, a regionally affiliated branch has been conceived for educated regional pronunciation including, among others, English Regional Standards and a wide range of Near-RP accents (see above 3.1.3 and 3.2.1), whose features are now widely accepted outside their areas of origin, as well as the English of ethnic minorities with its particular sociolinguistic implications (see 1.1.2). What is characteristic of the present situation is the great frequency and self-assurance with which mild regional accents are now em-

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ployed even in highly educated speech and in all kinds of radio broadcasts, including the BBC News bulletins (see 4.4.2 and 4.4.3). In order to define the articulatory pattern of educated pronunciation, the distribution of its characteristic features has to be examined more closely. While certain traits are especially characteristic of one particular variant, others are distributed with similar frequency, though with varying phonetic realizations and with differences in their sociolinguistic implications, over two or even all three parts of the continuum. Among the former are those features of the regionally affiliated branch which have remained clearly regional without generally prestigious or fashionable connotations, such as Northern [ʊ] in cut and short [a] in bath as well as fashionably relaxed features in young speech and in the language of media. Generally speaking, however, there is little evidence of articulatory features being limited to only one educated variant. Most other educated features, however, are crossing borders, some with identical articulations, others with variation in their phonetic realizations. There are overlapping features with different social implications, such as Northern regional raised [ɛ(·)] in dance and short [a] in ask as well as Southern [əɨ:] and [əʉ:] in BBC and group, which may as well be heard in fashionably relaxed speech. In the same way, original London and Southern regionalisms such as vocalized [ɫ] in ball [ʊ] have been seeping into prestigious speech, a limited set of non-Southern regionalisms like open [ä] in man and retracted [ɤã] in culture have conquered educated pronunciation, and the recent phenomenon of increasing speech rate has affected young RP and non-RP speech as well. In a considerable number of cases, common features are distributed over the whole educated continuum, again with differing sociolinguistic implications. So Southern regional open onsets as in later [ˈlæ∙ɪtə] and year [jɛə] as well as various degrees of levelling, in examples such as players [ɛ:] and power [a:], are now found in all parts of the continuum so that the most “successful” features and tendencies are, to varying degrees, functioning in the whole range of educated pronunciation. Similarly, the originally Southern context forms of assimilation and elision have become largely generalized, while other features, such as diphthong shift in /i:/ and /u:/, T-glottalling and R-intrusion, have remained a matter of degree, however, being relatively limited in prestigious accents and more favoured in young relaxed speech as markers of regional affiliation and popular attitudes. Thus sociolinguistic strategies may promote trendy fashions and, at the same time, keep up distinctions of social relevance.

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Comprising the whole range of educated pronunciation in England, the concept of Educated English English is based on the idea of an educated continuum allowing for considerable variation around a common core of features. The conception relies on the distribution of articulatory features within an overall pattern, whose individual traits are either part of the common core or characteristic of one or more branches of the continuum of accents, thus serving to maintain the characteristic pattern of each variant. Consequently, educated pronunciation is considered to be based on particular choices from a larger reservoir of features being modified by differences in their final realization and carrying specific social meanings. Educated English English (EEE) is defined as the pronunciation of educated speakers in England, regardless of their social background, sex or regional affiliation. For the EEE model, a core area has been conceived, supplemented by special zones for the three main variants, with their features being either specific or overlapping bordering accents:

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The proposed concept has been designed as a tool for research into the large variety of educated speech forms, unabridged by the constraints of RP-centred issues and methods. It means an alternative to RP insofar as it does not regard the traditional prestige accent as a measure of educated speech nor necessarily refers to its characteristics in order to define educated features or discuss their social acceptability. However, EEE is not meant to replace RP in its function to describe and assess features of socially prestigious speech but includes it in its wider conception of educated pronunciation in England.

3.5.3

Standards in the public mind

Recent developments have not only changed linguistic conceptions but also the public idea of the language, ironing out old contrasts and furthering new ones, and making standard English and RP, in Widdowson’s words, “the subject of lively national debate” (1999: 10). Though ideas of “standard” and “non-standard” and of “good” and “bad” language were persisting well into the 1990s and even beyond (see 1.4.3), the old problems of language standards and local accent relevance began to be viewed from new and different angles. Traditional concerns, such as “good” English, language “errors” and controversial novelties, were complemented by alternative issues as the survival of British minority languages, new conceptions of “Englishness”, and revolutionary visions of non-standard superiority. In a series of articles in The Express, an urgent plea was made for the “oldest native tongues” of Britain, such as Cornish, Manx, and Guernsey French, to be saved and revived in the younger generations of Cornwall, the Isle of Man and the Channel (or Guernsey) Islands (cf. Misty, The Express 3-9/6/2000: 20- 24). Another muchdebated matter, and an extremely controversial one, was the relationship between “Celtic” and “English” accents, implying a rather vague conception of “Englishness”, in contrast to the national identities of the rest of the nation. So, in May 1996, a conference was held at Oxford on the topic “What does it mean to be English?”, an article appeared under the headline of “Focus AngloSaxon attitudes. So what kind of England?” (Heffer, The Observer 31/10/1999: 22), and the Home Secretary’s warning of the “violent nature” of the English was quoted in a contribution entitled “Is the Second English Civil War ready to break out?” (Letts, The Express 11/1/2000: 11). Journalist Polly Toynbee, however, startled and confused by the contradiction between the actual complexity of life in England and the attempt at an abstraction of “Englishness”, finished her review on the topic with the words “So let’s get on with

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being what we are, whatever that is, in all its variety and to hell with this craze for selfdefinition” (Radio Times 20-24/4/1999). Beside other ideas and ideals of the English language, a new and radical desire for variety and freedom from any standard is reflected in the suspicion with which standardization has recently been watched. In a contribution to the The Sunday Times (Brian Appleyard, 12/3/2000: 48), it was argued that “the net advances the global power of the language more ruthlessly than the British Empire ever could”, thus reinforcing English as a world language in the form of cyberspeak and not the “Queen’s English” and accelerating the inclusion of (popular) neologisms in the OED, as revisions go online at once and any edition is out of date the moment it is published. In writer’s view, “this throws out of the window any idea of standard English” so that “purists writing to newspapers to complain about split infinitives have been swept aside by the sheer success of an English that belongs to all users and they can, it seems, do what they like with it” (ibid.). Anyway, it seems as if the tensions between persisting “standard” notions and liberal attitudes will keep English speakers in Britain engaged for generations to come.

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Chapter Four Broadcast English as mirror and indicator 4.1

The post-War revolution in broadcasting

4.1.1

Criticism and change

In connection with the spread of alternative speech habits and new language attitudes, the response of the spoken media to the new situation is of particular sociolinguistic significance. According to Gough (1982: 246), the beginnings of fundamental change towards the relaxed and the popular on the radio are to be looked for in new broadcasting strategies invented during the War, when the radio was a vital link between the country and the servicemen overseas, and “more and more the accents of ordinary people came to be heard on the air”, particularly so in the forces’ programmes. Emerging from the wartime years with their relatively loosened pronunciation standards in situations dramatic and eventful and with a variety of educated accents heard on radio and television for political and academic purposes (cf. Atkinson 1975: 70 f.), the BBC seemed to find its way back to its traditional strategies in the words of its former Director General who, in 1947, saw its “real justification” in that it was “an instrument of social purpose and a means to raise public taste” (quoted in Kumar 1975: 67). Lloyd James, former Chairman of the Advisory Committee in the 1920s and 1930s (see above 2.2.2) and pronunciation adviser to the Board, still equated a “social standard”, a “standard of intelligibility” and an “aesthetic standard” in his justification of RP as the medium for BBC announcements and newsreading (cf. Spencer 1958: 11) in The Broadcast Word of 1953. With the arrival of an increasingly mass audience in place of the largely middle-class listening public of between the Wars, and with the weakening of the traditionally supporting pre-War power groups of the Church and the Oxbridge elíte, new forces had been gaining ground with a less easily definable but increasingly aggressive criticism by politicians, novelists and sociolinguists, and by the wider listening public. With attacks com-

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ing from Left and Right more socially pointed than ever on both sides, the radio’s survival was determined by its ability to adapt to the new situation. Just as in the early years of the BBC, criticism of the language of radio went on two main lines, the one arguing against “posh” and in favour of regional accents, and the other protesting on anything that was considered “nonstandard” (see 2.2.3). When the tradition of broadcast lectures was taken up in the early fifties, David Abercrombie supported a campaign for the recognition of regionally accented speech in a series of “Fireside Talks” on the Third Programme, claiming the social equality of all accents of English and the outdatedness of RP as “an anachronism in present-day democratic society” (1951: 385). M. A. K. Halliday’s radio talk on the use of the English language, published in The Listener in 1966, was pointing to the “socioregional” character of dialects and accents and to their role as “targets for a whole battery of affectation and abuse, mainly abuse” (quoted in Zimmermann 1981: 427; cf. Halliday 1968: 148). Following the general trend among the novelists of his time, George Orwell, in his essay The English People of 1968, was branding the “standard” English of the BBC News bulletins as a “dreary dialect” and “probably the deadliest enemy of good English” (quoted in Zimmermann 1981: 428). Public demands for more popular accents were linked with protests against middle-class-oriented attitudes on the BBC, which was blamed for “driving out good old dialects and imposing a drab conformity” in a letter to The Listener in 1976, while RP was branded “over-refined”, “highbrow” and “unnatural” (cf. Leitner 1983: 68, 70). In letters by listeners, a campaign was started in protest at linguistic “correctness”, claiming that there was “no right or wrong” and “correctness as an absolute” did not exist (ibid. 1/2/79; quoted in Zimmermann 1981: 425). The tenor was decidedly anti-traditional, with the declared intention “not to preserve a heritage, but to reflect something which [was] alive and spontaneously developing” (quoted ibid.) To secure effective communication, services had been reorganised into three after the end of the War on the basis of pre-War audience research and wartime practices, now treating audiences as synonymous with working-class, middle-class and upper middle-class in a new stratification into Light Programme (developed from Forces Programme), Home Service Programme, and Third Programme (cf. Leitner 1983: 56; Marwick 1994: 182). Under consistent pressure from the side of the listening public and a growing necessity of coping with the demands of a mass public – particularly so in connection with the rising competition between commercial television and radio stations

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since the inception of Independent Television in 1955 (cf. Kumar 1975: 78 f.; Leitner 1983: 56; see 4.6.1) – thematic streaming was deliberately underlined by policies on domestic radio offering programmes in an increasingly relaxed and popular manner. The result was a widened range of language styles, including moderate regional accents and educated regional standards beside colloquial and informal RP, in the belief that educated usage no longer required strict conformity. After Kurt Wächtler, the process meant “the BBC’s dissociation from its old image” (1978: 25) through the abandonment of a traditionally conservative language policy in favour of a (though clearly hierarchic) coexistence of more and less prestigious variants for the different kinds of programmes and the respective target audiences. Under the conception of “streamed programming”, Radio 1 was developed into the main popular music channel, particularly for the young, and Radio 2 became the station of light entertainment programmes of all kinds, while Radio 3 remained the channel for minority tastes, such as classical music, jazz and arts (cf. Leitner 1983: 59; McGregor 1987: 55). The radio’s reactions to the tastes and demands of a new, more democratic era were showing early in the most traditional and sensitive field of news broadcasts, where innovation was coming with the newly emerging Independent broadcasting (see 4.6.1 and 4.6.2), the recent spread of television, and, not to forget, post-War cultural influence from across the Atlantic. According to Kumar (1975: 78 f.), the competitive rivalry with commercial ITV (Independent Television) since 1955 was leading to the instalment of a correspondingly relaxed current affairs complex on BBC TV with the launching of the topical magazine-type programme Tonight in 1957. After being firmly established with BBC ONE and TWO TV in 1964, the form was adopted by the radio, resulting in a new and extremely influential combination of straight news and commentaries, started by William Hardcastle in The World at One in 1965. His innovation in broadcasting journalism consisted in the complementation of straight news by commentaries on selected items presented by himself and appropriate experts in spontaneous conversational style – a method vigorously attacked from the conservative side (Lidell 1979: 478; see 4.6.2), but extremely successful in the decades to come. In 1969, the National Network of Radio 4 was constructed around this new current affairs complex covering one third of its daily transmissions in the mid-seventies, and later became the leading station in further types of programmes (cf. Kumar ibid.; MacGregor 1987: 55). Although, after Leitner (1983: 65), the status of RP had traditionally been

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“confirmed in several important functions, especially in the News”, and announcers and professional journalists were, in practice, required to conform to certain tacitly accepted language standards within the range of colloquial or informal RP or some other educated regional standard, there was now “no longer insistence on purely southern usage”, and a strict linguistic conformity was considered by the Board as being “out of keeping” with educated language” (ibid.). Corresponding to the new philosophy of a relationship between broadcaster and audience, it was demanded that care be taken by broadcasters not to use a language “too remote from the language and assumptions of the audience and the times in which they [were] communicating” (ibid. 66). Thus, in the decades to follow, the wider-based, more communicative and audiencerelated approach did not only lead to the emergence of more informal, colloquial and even personal styles of RP (cf. ibid. 67), but also to increasingly relaxed pronunciations in the manner of near-RP or non-RP in announcements, commentaries and reports of the wider news within the current affairs complex and, above all, in the growing range and style of entertainment programmes (see 4.6.1, 4.6.2, 4.5.1, and 4.5.2, respectively). In the course of its immediate post-War development from a primarily educational institution to an entertainment and information medium, the BBC was, in the words of its former announcer Krishan Kumar, “beginning to wear a new face” (1975: 83), taking an increasingly popular stance in place of its formerly aloof manner. Promising that the radio would give its audiences “a clear picture of the prevailing scale of values within society” and “reflect the order in which society as a whole … classifie[d] those values”, the Director General in 1973 openly resigned the old image of authority as, in his view, the BBC would achieve more by “being truthful and responsible … than it could ever achieve by setting itself up as the nation’s guide on matters of taste or morals” (ibid. 67). In contrast to previous metaphors in which John Reith (see 2.2.2) had regarded himself as the chief pilot on board the BBC, and the first Director General after the War, William Haley, had seen the community being activated by the BBC in a “broadly based cultural pyramid slowly aspiring upwards”, the early seventies more moderately saw the BBC as a “great stage” and a “register” of the different voices in society (cf. Kumar ibid. 84). The new metaphor was taken up in an announcement by the Board of 1971, urging the BBC to “throw the stage open to the men behind the scenes” – to newsmen, meteorologists, policemen and further experts who, being “informed and articulate on their own subject”, were able to give the radio “a

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greater sense of immediacy between the listener and those at the heart of the event” (quoted in Leitner 1983: 65). The widened scope of programme outputs made language norms subject to topics, addressees in interviews and audiences, and the widened range of tasks and speakers, including those participating in interviews and expert programmes, was strengthening the more colloquial element against the traditional sense of formality. However, all-tooobviously popular tendencies were supposed to have their limits in the traditional public image of “BBC English”, as Randolph Quirk predicted in 1972 that “a reaction [might] set in before long as people [grew] anxious about unending permissiveness – or [got] bored by it” (p. 72). Whereas the latter never occurred, the former was soon the case, and anxiety about language standards was expressed in a large number of critical voices from the most different backgrounds and angles.

4.1.2

In defence of language “standards”

In the same measure as hopes for a more relaxed presentation and more popular language on the radio were fulfilled, letters of complaint were pouring in, calling for more standards, particularly in the news bulletins, and castigating relaxed speech in other programmes. The main trend of public criticism continued to be against any kind of non-RP influence: in a drive for traditional standards, regionalisms and popular colloquialisms were rejected, such as the lowering of /æ/ in back [a], elision in February [ˈfebri], R-intrusion in awe ÿ rÿ inspiring and T-deletion in last [lɑ:s] year, and anything that did not fully correspond to spelling was stamped “careless” or “slovenly” (cf. Crystal 1981: 37; Leith 1983: 116 f.). In an article in The Sunday Times (Brookes, 13/8/1978: 40), open /æ/ was seen as one of the most serious stumbling blocks endangering the quality of broadcast speech: “But whatever happened to BBC English? All those female interviewers talking about bunk balances and Ufrica. I suppose they all grew up in the Sixties … when working class became beautiful, and everyone from Princess Unne downwards embraced the Flat A” (see 2.3.1). Similar rejection was shown to mannerisms of the media and the show business, such as neutralizations and contractions of sounds in businessm(e)n or af(ter)-noon, the lengthening of the [ðə] to [ði:] and of a [ə] to American-influenced /eɪ/, the overstressing of “wrong” words as indefinite articles, auxiliaries and prepositions, the fronting of word accents (marked a “transatlantic offence”) as well as unaccustomed word usage and syntax, which all came under severe attack (cf. Zimmermann 1981: 430 ff.). In con-

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nection with arguments over pseudo-American accents, particularly in the fashionable speech of disk jockeys but also in protest to “any signs of transAtlantic influence in the English of the BBC” (Gough 1982: 247), there was “a fury with Americanisms” in letters to the BBC complaining about “the bastardization of the English language” and asking whether one had to “suffer such Americanisms in Britain” (cf. Crystal 1981: 38)76 In addition to argument on English regional features, popular Americanisms and trendy novelties of any kind, there were the new issues such as the (non-) acceptability on the radio of features of Estuary English (criticism see 3.4.3) and of British National accents. While Gough considered Scottish English to be “accepted without question” (by the listening public; cf. 1981: 246), Honey referred to some points of argument, such as an “incomprehensibility” of slight Yorkshire and Scottish accents and an “incompatibility” of a mild Ulster accent with the idea of the educated language of radio, concluding that “the social conventions … operate in that kind of place more than anywhere else” (1989: 118). Thus, in his description, stereotypical evaluations rendered Scottish, Northern, Irish and West coast accents “tolerable” in gardening programmes and weather broadcasts, while the most disfavoured ones of London, Birmingham, Glasgow, Liverpool and Belfast were attributed to the humorous language of comedies, to the “comic”, the “yokel” and the “villain”, to beer advertising, and to other kinds of social “disgrace” (cf. ibid. 126 f.). He himself was severely branding regionalisms in the language of local radio news bulletins, being read by announcers “of limited levels of formal education and … unfamiliar with the characteristic intonation and phrasing patterns of reading aloud in standard English” (ibid. 129). The main concern of whatever criticism was put forward from the conservative side, however, was summed up in one anxious question in a letter to The Listener of 1973, asking: “If the BBC is not the Guardian of the spoken word, who is?” (quoted in Zimmermann 1982: 425). When, in the late 1970s, the discussion of the state of BBC English was culminating in the columns of The Listener with critical articles against regional accents and relaxed fashions among newsreaders, commentators and presenters, former newsreader and announcer Alvar Lidell took the side of what he called “plain, straightforward communication” versus “widespread distortion, … arising from insemination and implication” (1979: 478). Referring to the BBC’s founder John Reith and to the speech training he himself had received from Lloyd James, he still considered ideal newsreading to be

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“speaking educated Southern English without affectation or mannerisms or defects, reading accurately and impersonally” (ibid.), and he strongly castigated the innovations in broadcasting journalism as initiated since the middle of the sixties. In his view, “the original sinner was that sparkling and entertaining ‘anti-speech’ merchant, William Hardcastle” whose “net result was distortion”, sounding “abnormally aggressive, … with overtones of ominous content”, attempting to “get away from the written script and to sound spontaneous”, and building on “emphasis on unimportant words, and fractured speechrhythm” by stressing the articles a and the and words like can (cf. ibid). Lidell’s argumentation gave rise to a flood of letters, either supporting his issue or, though more rarely, defending recent changes towards a more relaxed presentation. Complaints were pouring in about mannerisms and slang, misleading pronunciations and loose and colloquial constructions in a speech “reminding of the worst aspects of a dungaree and denim society” (quoted in Burchfield 1979: 6), which finally caused the organizers of the BBC to conduct their own investigations of the standards of broadcast English. An independent panel from outside the BBC was commissioned to monitor domestic networks and programmes for four weeks, including Robert Burchfield, Chief Editor of the Oxford English Dictionaries, Denis Donoghue, Professor of Modern English and American Literature at the University College of Dublin, and Andrew Timothy, an announcer and former Assistant Head of Presentation. They composed a tract entitled The Quality of Spoken English on BBC Radio. A Report for the BBC (1979), complemented by judgements from the Senior Editors of the Oxford English Dictionaries and from BBC newsreaders and presenters. In the Report for the BBC, an analysis of the language of the four domestic networks in the light of their different target audiences was pointing to “aberrances” in pronunciation and prosody beside “errors” of grammar and style, such as clichés, meaningless fillers and currencies. With regard to pronunciation, Chief OED Editor Robert Burchfield’s main criticism included “lapses of the tongue” as in deteriate for deteriorate, “wrong or disputed stresses” as in com’parable and ‘contribute, “meaningless fillers” such as I mean or you know, and misplaced pauses as in a weather forecaster’s “Rain will give way to brighter weather from the West elsewhere”, the last word actually being the first of the next sentence (ibid. 15 f.). Professor Dennis Donoghue’s criticism was particularly directed on emphasis on normally unstressed words as in thee largest as well as on “artificially heightened rhythm”, “breathless interviews”,

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“improbable pauses” before ordinary words – in all on “mannered” and “eccentric” presentation including “errors in taste and judgement” which, though considered rare in news bulletins, were claimed to be frequent in interviews and news-magazine programmes (cf. ibid. 18 f.). Frequent mispronunciations of proper, place, and foreign names were criticized by former newsreader Andrew Timothy, whose comment on the four different versions of pronouncing the name of Ayatollah Khomeini was: “If we are going to mispronounce the name let us at least be consistent” (ibid. 21). In his opinion, the quality of spoken English did “occasionally (and perhaps more often than it should) fall short of the standard which listeners ha[d] come to expect over the years”, why he advised “critical listening” and “regular refresher courses” for the staff (ibid. 21, 23). Concerning mild regionalisms, however, Burchfield regarded most of the transmissions to be “pleasantly presented in a variety of styles, and frequently with excellent regional or modified standard accents” (ibid. 9), and Donoghue, too, saw “no reasonable objection” to regional accents but “indeed … a very strong argument in their favour”, as long as they were not what he suspected to be “bogus” (ibid. 220). Differences in presentation between the four networks were thought justified in favour of a necessary variability: Radio 1 was judged “clearly highly acceptable” and Radio 2 “equally attractive” to the Radio 2 listener, even in the traditional view of Timothy (ibid. 22), as against “highbrow” Radio 3 where, after Donoghue, presenters behaved like “addressing themselves to the members of a superior club”, though he attested to its newsreading the high standards of the World Service (ibid. 20). The idea of language standards or even of a “standard English” was regarded “as reasonable as the desire for the common observance of good manners and courtesy” (ibid. 18), and the BBC was considered to be “setting a standard” by which other speech might be assessed on grounds of its “representative function in regard to English speech, as a tradition within the BBC in favour of excellence as embodied in ‘the tone of the centre’” (ibid. 17). And while, in Timothy’s words, the English language “must change and adapt to circumstances in an ever-changing world”, the BBC had “a clear duty to uphold these standards” (ibid. 24). In obvious contrast to the largely standard-oriented conclusions drawn by the members of the panel, OED editors and BBC staff were overwhelmingly supporting the idea of unconventional language on the radio. Regional variation was judged “most acceptable”, and the stressing of prepositions was accepted as “extremely common and not confined to BBC people”, by OED

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Editors (cf. ibid. 13 f.). The casual style of Radio 1 and 2 found to be “natural” and “pleasantly informal”, in spite of its occasional “hard-sell mannerisms”, and the style of Radio 3 was judged “virtually impeccable”, while Radio 4 was considered “sometimes overpolished” (ibid.). The World Service, which was not officially included in the programme of investigation, was marginally regarded as “slightly old-fashioned” and its style “not fully acceptable nowadays in the home programmes, but would be admired by Alvar Lidell” (ibid. 14). The deliberately popular approach of newsreaders and presenters had been confirmed in interviews with the staff who believed that “much regional variation in the speech of newsreaders and presenters” was “commendable”, and that there were mild Mancunian, Cheshire and Edinburgh accents admitted except on Radio 3, where all presenters used Received Pronunciation (ibid. 11). Fashionable lengthening, as in a [ə] to [eɪ], and recent fronting of stresses were tolerated by many, and in spite of a certain resentment towards the constant imitation of William Hardcastle’s unorthodox style of presentation, some reminiscence of “standards” in the fifties, and a vague notion of language “going to the dogs”, it was agreed that the “portentous manner” of the fifties had become unacceptable and the prosodic emphases of the radio were “a new feature of twentieth century English” (cf. ibid. 12 f.). In summary, the report was the desired vote in favour of the BBC’s policy of a more colloquial and slightly regionally affiliated style containing considerable variation on the different networks and programmes, but also of its traditional model function in educated speech and its presentation of a language in which, after Leitner, there was an “unquestioned acceptance of RP” and variation was “measured from the baseline of Southern educated usage” (cf. 1983: 70).

4.2

Prestigious accents on the BBC

4.2.1

Changing fashions

The most impressive and lasting domain of prestigious pronunciation on the radio were the straight News on the BBC, which continued to be read in prestigious accents, either within the range of RP or very close to it, reflecting principal articulatory changes of the time. Within the National Service of the seventies and early eighties, newsreading on Radio 4 contained a considerable number of features characteristic of single sounds and context forms in a more

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relaxed and wider-based RP (see 2.5.2) where assimilation was frequent within words as suggestion [səˈdʒeʃ`(ə)n] and negotiations [nɪgəʊˈʃjeɪʃ(ə)nz] and also occurred on boundaries as in ten percent [ˈtempə∙ˈsent] and this year [ðɪʃ ˋjɪə]. Elision was widely applied, though almost exclusively within words, as in government [ˈgʌvm(ə)nt] and police [p`ˈli:s], and linking r was prominent in cases as the Tower ÿ of London and later ÿ in the day. Unstressed /ɪ/ was increasingly replaced by /ə/, not only in endings on -less and -ness, but also within words such as damage [-ədʒ] or palace [-əs] and even in -ed-endings as in isolated [-əd] where, in Gimson’s criticism of 1970, “several non-RP announcers on the BBC [had] failed to maintain this distinction” (p. 18). One of the most prominent articulatory novelties in the newsreading of the period was the opening of /æ/ to fashionably open and slightly centralized [ä] in words like and and action, even at the risk of confusion with /ʌ/ which, since the early eighties, was moving towards an increasingly fashionable Northern and Midland-influenced centralized or retracted [ʌã] and [ɤã] for mid-century fronted /ʌ/ ([ä]) as in Southern [ʌã] and results [ɤã]. Other successful trends were the closing tendencies of /ɔ:/ to [oˬ:] and of word-final /ɪ/ to short or slightly lengthened [i(∙)] in words as forward [oˬ:] and politically [i∙]. Trendy realizations of diphthongs and triphthongs included an originally Southern opening of the first elements of /eɪ/ and /əʊ/ (+[ə]) and of /ɪə/ and /ʊə/ as in later today [ˈlæ∙ɪtə təˈdä:ɪ], lower [ˈlɛ:ə], year [jɛ∙ə] and Europe [ˈjɔ∙ərəp], beside monophthongization tendencies of /əʊ/, /ɪə/ and /ʊə/ in unknown [̩ʌnˈnɛ:(ə)n], year [jɛ:(ə)] or [jɜ:] and Europe [ˈjɔ:(ə)rəp], while /eɪ/ largely remained diphthongized in its opener variants. The phonemes most strongly affected by levelling were /aɪ/ and /aʊ/ (+ [ə]), occurring almost exclusively as [a:(ə)] or as homophonous /ɑ:/ or [a:], respectively, in words such as pound [pa:(ə)nd], firemen [‘fɑ:mən] and hours [a:z], so that a misunderstanding might have easily arisen when a newsreader reported on six [ka:z] that were stolen, had she not added “from their stalls yesterday” (24/1/1983). Trendy Southern diphthongization and lowering of /i:/ in by sea [səɨ:] and of /u:/ in soon [səʉ:n], however, remained rare, with their all-too obviously Cockney and Birmingham connotations. While continuing public criticism kept exaggerations and mannerisms within comparatively narrow borders on the national network, the BBC World Service with its traditional prestige was paying tribute to more exclusive fashions and sometimes tending to carry post-War advanced fashions in RP (see 2.4.1) to extremes. It was as if South-Eastern features and mannerisms were

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tolerated here without serious criticism on the part of the Board and the public as well, more willingly granted to a station aiming at overseas audiences than to domestic radio representing what was widely taken as a “neutral national standard”. As early as the 1950s, there had been pronunciations, particularly of glides, with [ɑ:]-monophthongization in triphthongs and extra-open Cockney-based [ɛʊ] for traditional RP [ou] or moderate post-War [əʊ] in words as home, which, indeed, came close to those ascribed by Shaw to Eliza Doolittle, the flower girl in Pygmalion. While later, in the seventies, unassimilated forms in cases such as association and this year were still frequently heard, there was further trendy levelling with elision in Royal [rɔë:l] Family [ˈfämli] and T-deletion in effects [ɪˈfeks]. Glides were levelled and retracted, as in time [ta:m], power [pa:] and sure [ʃɔ:], and extremely open and lengthened /æ/ in matter [ä] and and [ä:] was adding to a touch of fashionable exclusiveness. In spite of the considerable range of advanced eccentricities, the continuing adherence to RP (see 2.6.2) as well as the relatively low speed of a language aiming at audiences worldwide were contributing to the traditional image of linguistic reliability across time and space. According to an article in Miss London, news and features for overseas were for the native listener of the seventies “like slipping back twenty years – wonderful slow, clear voices” (31/10/1977), and, well into the nineties, “for many overseas listeners the traditional BBC voice [was] equated with good English” (McArthur 1992: 109). And even though the World Service began to use announcers and newsreaders with a wider range of accents, following its “new policy” since 1989 (cf. McArthur 1992: 111), there have always been considerable numbers also in Britain listening to news broadcasts on the World Service on behalf of their particular style and clarity of presentation. After a period of relative stability on both Services, the later eighties and early 1990s saw new tendencies beside results of established change, with considerable similarities between domestic BBC Radio 4 and the World Service, which had come closer to each other linguistically. Popular assimilated forms were increasingly heard on both stations, mainly within words such as opportunity [̩ɒpəˈtʃu:nɪtɪ] or questioning [ˈkweʃtʃnɪŋ], though more rarely on word boundaries as in next year [nekst ˎʒeə]. In the same way as elision had become usual both within words and on boundaries in cases such as president [ˈprezdənt], extraordinary [ɪksˈtrɔ:dn`rɪ], last month [lɑ:s` ˋmʌnɵ] and the past six [ˈpɑ:s`ɪks] months, linking r in nature ÿ of the target, after ÿ a gun battle and IRA [ˈaɪ ÿ ɑ: ÿˈreɪ] as well as a fronting of stresses in ˈcampaign, ˈdisappearance

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or (to) ‘transplant had become fully established. The most characteristic realizations of single vowels and glides were, as before, extremely open and prominent [ä] for /æ/ in innumerous instances as Paris, annual, and international, beside levelled triphthongs as in hours [a:z] and required [a∙ə], both being combined in the balance [ä] of power [a:]. Further established fashions and recent novelties were consolidating with trendy vowel realizations, such as close [oˬ:] in reported and centralized [ɤã] in result, with close and slightly lengthened final [i∙] in amnesty, and with contraction in You’re [jɔ:] listening to the BBC (World Service, 5 and 6/9/95). Additional new and disputable features were emerging with an occasional glottal stop for /t/ in department [dɪˈpɑ:ʔmənt], centralized and diphthongized Southern /i:/ in by sea [səɨ:] and correspondingly diphthongized /u:/ in St. George’s School [skəʉ:ɫ], and even North Western preconsonantal r appeared in North [nɒrɵ] or in combination with intrusive r in law and order [ˈlɔ:r ÿ ənd ˋɔ:rdər] (ibid. 24/8/95). On Radio 4, popular-based fashions might at times exceed the limits of RP, with /ʌ/ raised and retracted in multi[ˈmUlti] party talks, assimilation in the Duke [dʒu:k] of York (21/2/98), and with further popular features as combined in the sequence of prominent linking r, far-reaching ɑ:-levelling of /aɪə/ and glottal stop for /t/ in the IRA ceasefire is still intact [ði: ˈa:ɪ ÿ ɑ:r ÿ eɪ ˈsi:sfɑ:ər ÿ ɪs`ˈtɪɫ ÿ ɪn täʔt] (29/10/98). There was, however, the impression at the end of the nineties that features like these were again more frequently heard on the domestic stations, while the pronunciation in newsreading on the World Service kept within more traditional borders, at least as far as non-Southern and all-toopopular features were concerned.

4.2.2

Nostalgic modes and unresolved features

Post-War exclusive fashions and popular features in news broadcasts had never been unchallenged by traditional pronunciations, but when the big move towards the colloquial and the popular had passed its zenith in the later seventies and Gimson’s revised RP-concept was taking shape, relatively moderate or even conservative-sounding forms began to be heard again more frequently than before. In the early eighties, there were again conservative-sounding (see 2.3.1) diphthongs in cases as Friday [eɪ], time [aɪ], local [əʊ] and year [ɪə], though accompanied by fashionable [fa∙ə] and [fa:] for fire in the pronunciation of the same newsreader (Radio 4, 15/8/1984). Unassimilated and unelided conservatisms were increasingly applied in cases such as issues [ˈɪsju:z], associated [əˈsəʊsjeɪtɪd], this year [ðɪs ˋjɪə], question [ˈkwestʃən/ˈkwestjən], 184

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police [pəˈli:s], and most frequently in parliamentary [ˈpɑ:lɪəˈmentəri], overlapping with lower middle-class or adoptive RP spelling pronunciations (see 3.1.2). There were instances of conservative open [ɔ̬:] recurring in caught and altogether in carefully prestigious speakers, mid-century fronted RP /ʌ/ [ä] reappeared in London and government, and conservative elevated /æ/ was heard again in Vatican [ɛ], beside popular Southern (or U-RP?) diphthongization in can [æ:ə] (cf. 2.3.2 and 2.3.1, respectively) and fashionable Americaninfluenced lengthening in West Bank [ɛ:] (Radio 4 and World Service 1995– 1999). It seemed as if nostalgic conservatisms were setting out to reverse established post-War tendencies and, together with certain prestigious novelties, to initiate a new exclusiveness in fashionably prestigious speech, in a possible reaction to half a century of popular language influence and change “from below”. In the course of the 1990s, the reappearance of nostalgic features proceeded to counteract widely accepted post-War fashions with sometimes extreme results, particularly in the News on the World Service. So the post-War weakening of /ɪ/ to /ə/ in final syllables seemed to become reversed as the schwavowel was losing ground against recurring /ɪ/ or even /i/ in words such as practices [ɪz] (pl.) and expected [id], and, analogously, extremely close vowel realizations were heard in MP’s [ị:] and during [ụ:], in obvious contrast to the popular-based tendencies towards diphthongized [əɨ:] and levelled [ɔ:] or [ɯ:]. Post-War extra-open diphthongal onsets had become rarer, being frequently reduced to milder forms in home [əʊ], days [ɛɪ] and year [ɪə], alongside with [ęə], [ɜ:ə] and [ɜ:] in the same bulletin (15/8/94). Full realizations of diphthongs began to be heard again more frequently, often with extremely close elements as in Trade [ẹị] Union and process [ọụ], particularly in female speech, and with prominent lengthening tendencies as in years [ị:ə] and Europe [ʊà:ə]. More recently, /ɑ:/-monophthongs were beginning to be restored into glides as in minor [aɪ], violence [aɪ] and come to power [aʊə] on Radio 4 (21/2/98), and even on Radio 1 the vowels were surprisingly close in PC’s [ˈpi:ˈsəi:z], while particularly close second elements of diphthongs occurred together with moderate onsets in overprized [ai] and unsold [əu] (18/11/98). By the turn of the century, the picture had become extremely varied in that certain traditional articulations of single phonemes and context forms were gaining ground again beside trendy novelties, and what had seemed an occasional conservatism in the later eighties was about to become the usual way in the prestigious pronunciation of BBC newsreading.

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The comparatively wide range of articulatory variability with its resulting divergence between established post-War novelties and recent nostalgic fashions was inevitably leading to inconsistencies in seemingly unresolved articulation. So two different allophones of /æ/ were alternating in a spectacular [ä] bankruptcy [æ] and in angry [æ] reactions [ä], and a post-War open diphthong was confronted with a close nostalgic glide in a long way [aɪ] was undertaken [ei] (World Service 22/2/1994, 26/1/1999, rsp.). Apart from direct phonetic inconsistencies like these, older and younger features were mixing when midcentury established fronted /ʌ/ ([ä]) went together with trendy elision and final tensing of the consonant in number of [ˈnʌmbrəf] or became homophonous with a fashionably open /æ/ in lapse [ä] of judgement [ä]; a close diphthong in state [ei] occurred in a text together with fashionable open [ä] in cabinet, close [oˬ:] in St. Paul’s, extensive levelling in pounds [a:(ə)] and years [ɜ:], elision in political [ˈplɪtɪkɫ], and prominent coalescence in secretary [ˈsekr`tri] (Radio 4, 28/10/98). Over the years, certain contrastive choices in shorter sequences seemed to become generally favoured, with combinations of extremely close and open realizations as in peace [.:] plan [ä∙] and store [oˬ:] managers [ä] and, particularly, of nostalgic close [ẹị] and trendy open [ä] in units as St. James’s [ẹị] Palace [ä], trade [ẹị] sanctions [ä], NATO [ẹị] attack [ä], and the impact [ä] of changes [ẹị] (Radio 1, 2, 4 and World Service between 1994 and 1998). Promoting particular trendy features and counteracting others, tendencies like these have induced unprecedented articulatory constellations in the pattern, and it now seems as if out of these combinations of the trendy and the conservative, the popular and the exclusive, the accepted and the controversial, new prestigious fashions were developing which might indicate new sociolinguistic differentiation in educated speech on the radio as well as outside.

4.3

Recent policies and criticism

4.3.1

Wide acceptability

Throughout decades, organizers of the BBC were continuing to investigate public reactions with regard to opinions on the quality of broadcasting as well as to actual listening habits and choices. By 1986, the “Broadcasting Department’s Continuous Services and Special Projects” section, traditionally looking at audiences’ sizes and reactions to programmes, had built up a yearly

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research monitor of public attitudes to the BBC, resulting in a public image survey on the evaluation of radio networks and TV channels. The 1986 Survey largely confirmed the public acceptance of recent policies, with judgements in questionnaires like “does a good job” and “is part of the British way of life”, scoring fifty-three and sixty-two percent, respectively, of the people questioned, while the statement “has very high standards” got only thirty-five percent (McGregor 1987: 50). Public expectations concerning the outputs of the different stations (“Who’s best at what?”) proved to be generally in line with the expected target audiences, Radio 1 getting best scores on pop and rock music and lowest on classical music, while Radio 3 was rated highest on classical music and arts programmes, and the intendedly popular lower middle class-oriented Radio 2 network got high scores on a number of light programmes, such as middle-of-the-road music, lighter chat programmes, sports programmes and comedy programmes. Radio 4, originally designed for news and current affairs, also scored high at this type of programmes and was also favourably evaluated on plays, education, arts, serious discussion, gospel music and comedy, thus reaching far beyond the range of its original destination (cf. ibid. 55)77. In order to compensate for a loss of audience, particularly on Radio 1, through the successful competition resulting from the instalment of local stations as well as from the rise of BBC TV and ITV (see below 4.6.1) in the 1950s and early 2960s, the new network of Radio 5 was launched in August 1990, successfully catering for children and, increasingly, for young people, with sports, schools and education programmes attracting about five million listeners per week (cf. Paynter 1991: 16 f.). Thus deliberate measures were taken on the part of the organizers to ensure the stability of broadcasting in the face of changing target audiences, new listening habits and attractive novelties from outside traditional BBC Radio. In the early 1990s, the BBC was offering a large range of broadcasting services, including, beside the National Network Radio stations 1 to 578, Regional Broadcasting for the North, the Midlands, the South and West and the South and East, supplemented by thirty-nine Local Radio stations, as well as for the North Regions of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland (cf. BBC Annual Report and Accounts 1991/92: 9 f., 30 ff.; BBC Resources 1996: 11 f.). There was an education section providing Continuing Education and Training, School Radio and TV and the Open University, and there were also arts and education subjects offered by the BBC TV channels, providing mainly news and general entertainment; affiliated was the British Forces Broadcasting

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Service (BFBS), operating in six foreign countries since the end of the War (cf. BBC Annual Report 1991: 58 ff.). Operating worldwide, the BBC World Service was in the early nineties broadcasting from stations in England, the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Arab, Asia, Africa and Latin America as well as from 450 additional rebroadcasting stations79, over six time zones, and to ten million listeners daily (cf. ibid. 50 ff.; World Service Programme Schedule April to September 1995). Marmaduke Hussey, Chairman in 1992, took the occasion of the seventieth Anniversary of the BBC to remember its founder John Reith, who had “established the BBC on principles which ha[d] stood the test of time and which remain[ed] valid into the 1990s and beyond: integrity, independence, the striving for excellence, the provision of the best possible service to the largest number of people …” (ibid. 1). In the tradition of the early years, he again considered the BBC “a strong unifying force across the whole of the UK”, though with the difference that not distinctiveness and quality alone, but also “services which reflect public taste and meet a clear public need” were required, not least “to justify public funding” (ibid. 2). The Chairman’s view was confirmed in an anniversary edition under the title of The BBC: 70 years of broadcasting by John Cain, where Reith’s fundamental aspirations were considered to “still incorporate the essential elements of the public service broadcasting ethic” (1992: 143). Corresponding to general broadcasting policies, the BBC Producers’ Guidelines of 1993 were seeking to “reflect the standards that the BBC audiences expect[ed] of their national broadcaster” (John Birt, Preface). Beside other issues of importance and public relevance, the subject of language was considered “a deep concern of audiences” and “one of the most frequent causes of popular complaint” (ibid. 87), particularly when strong language occurred in the wrong context, outside soap operas or family serials. More detailed and urgent advice on language use was given in the Foreword and first chapter of the BBC News & Current Affairs Stylebook and Editorial Guide of the same year, edited by Tony Hall, Managing Director, Current Affairs. The primarily demand was to be “clear and accessible … using words and ways of speech which [were] familiar to ordinary people … in good, clear, polite, accurate but conversational English” but tempered with “order and precision”, refraining from slang, bad language, profanity, colloquialisms as can’t, won’t, don’t and “errors” of everyday speech (ibid.). The declared aim of “immediate intelligibility” was to be achieved by using short words, separate sentences, active verbs and familiar phrases and by following “the flow, rhythms, pat-

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terns and cadences of everyday speech”, in talking, not in reading out loud (cf. ibid.) – demands that made managers listen out for voices conveying authority and personality, using appropriate intonation and delivering at a moderate pace to ensure comprehensibility, largely irrespective of minor accent differences (cf. Wilby/Conroy 1994: 128). While the BBC Producers’ Guidelines, mentioned above, contained no reference to pronunciation in their language section, the Stylebook devoted to it a brief passage of sixteen half lines, stating that the way words were pronounced could be “controversial” and one should recognize “changes over time”, and demanding a correct pronunciation of place names on the basis of special regulations: “The BBC keeps a pronunciation unit precisely for this purpose. Use it”(part 1, pages unnumbered)80. Abstinence from further phonetic prescriptions for broadcasters may have been the result of earlier frustrating experiences with the regulating activities of the former Advisory Committee on Spoken English and with unending public criticism, but perhaps even more so a necessary consequence of language change in progress and of necessary relaxation of style in order to meet popular tastes and interests. The tacit on pronunciation may also have resulted from a new aversion to RP even among the organizers of the BBC, tending to regard Oxford English as “dangerously elitist and to be avoided” (cf. McKinstry in The Daily Mail 27/1/2000: 12). The traditional conviction of the BBC’s responsibility for the language, however, had survived the times and was confirmed in the 1993 Stylebook’s Foreword, stating: “We may not wish to be regarded as guardians of how the nation should speak, but many of our viewers and listeners regard us in that way, and we have an obligation not to lead them into abuse or misuse of the language”. Modified by a new democratic commitment to the audiences’ expectations and a greater tolerance for the diversity of the language presented by the staff, the tradition of the BBC was confirmed in the words of Managing Director Tony Hall: “Hence this style book. It too will change as time goes by. But the principles behind it will not change” (ibid.).

4.3.2

New horizons

By the turn of the century, the BBC, as before, saw its tasks in providing services of information, education and entertainment and its aims in spreading “highest ethical standards” and thus to “enrich people’s lives” (cf. Chairman’s Foreword to BBC Annual Report 1998/99: 1; comp. Director General’s Statement ibid. 1991/92: 5). In order to avoid undue concentration on the “Centre”

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and to reach the population of the whole country, however, care was taken to broadcast about one third of programmes from outside London and the South East. A wide spread was recorded of BBC educational programmes valued by seventy-three percent of audiences, of resources for schools used by ninetytwo percent of primary and fifty-five percent of secondary school teachers, and of the Open University programme with 2.6 million viewers on BBC TWO TV; an Educational Webguide as well as BBC News were provided online, accompanied by three hundred stories originating each day, two hundred archived stories, and a library of background briefings for video and audio (cf. ibid. 1998/99: 9, 28 f.). In connection with the multinational situation in Britain and corresponding preparations for constitutional change in the late nineties, The Directorate of formerly Regional Broadcasting was renamed National and Regional Broadcasting, “to reflect the importance of the nations and regions in a devolved UK” (ibid. 26). In direct response to “rigorous public debate”, the UK-wide news was to cover main political issues of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and the staff were to be trained to be “more alert to the differences between the nations” (ibid.). In his Introduction to the 2000 BBC Producers’ Guidelines, the Director General again stressed the importance of “reflecting the diversity of the United Kingdom” in a presentation “accurate, precise and consistent” (website). With regard to the national issue of Wales and Northern Ireland, in particular, “national and regional differences and similarities” were to be taken into account by broadcasters (cf. ibid.), and more detailed advice as contained in The Changing UK booklet was recommended (ibid.). Besides, the traditional commitment of the BBC to fundamental editorial values such as “impartiality”, “accuracy” and “appropriate standards of taste and decency” were again underlined, with the claim “to set the standard for broadcasting in all media” (ibid.). In the face of current issues and tensions like these, matters of pronunciation were reduced to a minimum: “Pronunciation of names and places should be correct. BBC Newsrooms and the BBC Programme Unit can give advice” (BBC Producers’ Guidelines 2000: Chapter 19, website). Facing intense competition from commercial services, the BBC has successfully been striving to reach a wide audience at home and abroad, through extended services and improved programming and through application of new technology to both radio and television. In the period between early 2002 and 2003, a number of new national services were launched, with four television channels complementing BBC One and Two and serving all age groups (i. e.

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CBeebies for children under six, CBBC for the six to twelve, BBC Three replacing BBC Choice and aiming at younger adults, and BBC Four offering an eclectic mix of arts, drama, performance and current affairs), and with the new digital radio stations BBC Five Live Sports Extra, 6 Music, 1Xtra, BBC Asian Network and BBC 7; cf. BBC Annual Report 2003: cf. Obj. 3, 4, 9, website). One of the main objectives was to win younger audiences, and new technological potential was exploited to engage those under thirty-five via new media and BBC online, in what was called the “digital broadcasting revolution”. A “new politics strategy” was launched to connect younger people with politics, while the BBC’s “public service duty” was, as before, seen in its “commitment to parliamentary reporting”, in its traditional responsibility to uphold the BBC’s “high editorial standards” as well as in its determination to sustain its image as Britain’s “most trusted News provider”, according to independent industry research (cf. ibid. Obj. 3, 9, 10, website). Further main objectives of recent BBC policies were to meet “the needs of audiences in all nations and regions of the UK” and to seek “new ways of attracting audiences from the UK’s ethnic minorities” (ibid. Obj. 5 and 4, rsp., website). So further weight was placed on regional broadcasting (see below 4.6.1 and 4.6.2) and its special demands for close connections to the public, while ethnic minorities were served either through the targeted services of BBA Asian Network or through ethnic portrayal in mainstream programming, particularly for listeners in London, where, according to the 2003 BBC Annual Report, 46 percent of the UK’s ethnic minority population lived (cf. Obj. 4, website; see 4.6.3). With regard to the BBC’s reach and influence world-wide, the 70th anniversary of its World Service in December 2002 saw the formation of BBC World Service and Global News, a new division bringing together all international news offering on radio, television (as represented by the commercial service BBC World reaching 255 million homes in more than 200 countries and territories) and online, and aiming to maintain the Service’s “reputation as the international broadcaster most recognized for trust and objectivity”, with 150 million weekly listeners (cf. Obj. 10, website; cover page of many voices one world, BBC 2003/04; see Plate 4). Around the clock, special programmes in English were broadcast to South and East Asia, South and Central America, to Canada, New Zealand and the Pacific, to Europe and North Africa, to the Middle East, and to West Central, East and South Africa (cf. many voices one world, BBC 2003/04; for South East Asia see Plate 5), and there were language broadcasts offered in more than 40 languages (cf. BBC World Frequen-

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cies October 2003–April 2004). However, realizing its “unique national role” as a “corporate citizen”, embodied by its new Corporate Social Responsibility Centre since 2003, the BBC’s foremost aim had remained to “make the vision of a One BBC that serves and enriches all our lives a reality” (BBC Annual Report 2003 ibid.). As before (see 2.2.3, 4.1.1 and 4.1.2), response to audience concerns was regarded to be of major importance and listeners’ and viewers’ complaints were taken most seriously by the Board. Ways and means to get in touch were further extended via “Info” address, telephone number, and recommendation of the BBC Programme Complaints Unit and further similar bodies to turn to. New and important in the later nineties was BBC Online, offering complementary information, resources and links concerning the BBC (cf. BBC Annual Report 1998/99: 77). In the years to follow, problematic complaints were additionally dealt with by the Governors’ Programme Complaints Committee consisting of five Governors of the BBC, whose Chairman, Sir Robert Smith, underlined that the Committee had worked hard “to ensure it ha[d] a good understanding of audience views”, both through relevant industry research on audience attitudes and by attending workshops with members of the public “to listen to their views on where they think the BBC should draw the line” (cf. BBC Press Release 30.07.02: 2 and 04.02.03: 2, website; for the Complaints Unit and Committee cf. ibid. 30.04.02, BBC Producers’ Guidelines Obj. 10, website). The BBC’s traditional commitment to the public was emphasized in the introductory passage to chapter 40 of the 2003 BBC Producers’ Guidelines, concerning “Relations with the Public and the Press”: “As a public institution the BBC must account to the public for all its dealings. We have to monitor and respond to public concerns, whether these concerns arise in letters, phone calls or e-mails, are raised through the press or other media, or through more formal means” (website). Analogously, the BBC Annual Report of 2002/3 underlined “the importance of openness to feedback and inviting comment from audiences” in special services and events, such as call centres, online forums, BBC buses offering internet training as well as in public accountability seminars and Drawing the Line Workshops, both focussing on taste and decency, news and current affairs, in order to make the BBC “more accessible to the communities it serves” (Obj. 9: 1; cf. Obj. 5, 9, 10, website). In the same way as investigations began to be increasingly supported by electronic means, as announced by Director-General Greg Dyke in BBC Programme Complaints iss. October 2003 (p. 1), public complaints might, since

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August 2002, be submitted via BBCi online – a fact highlighted by Greg Dyke with the words: “Requiring viewers to register serious complaints exclusively by post would be as quaint as telling them to use a quick pen. So now there’s a page on the BBC website where you can e-mail your complaint direct to the unit” (BBC Press Release 29.10.02: 1, website; cf. BBC Programme Complaints iss. April 2003: 1). Listed up under “Matters of taste and standards”, there were only seventeen complaints over “bad language”, out of a total of 267 to be dealt with from January to 31 March 1999, according to The Board of Governors’ Programme Complaints Bulletins (cf. website). When, during the same period in the year 2003, the number of complaints over language issues rose to 79, from a total of 709 (cf. BBC Programme Complaints iss. April 2003: 2, 5, website), the increase was considered largely due to the new facility for complaints by e-mail (see above Greg Dyke, ibid. 1). The two complaints put forward by two viewers and upheld by the BBC were on “excessive” or “strong” language, which had come without previous programme warning or before 9 p. m. watershed on BBC Two and BBC Choice (cf. ibid. 12). After the sudden uprise in numbers, complaints were decreasing again to 69 (out of 645) between April and June, and further to 23 (out of 289) between July and September 2003 (cf. BBC Programme Complaints iss. July 2003: 2, website and October 2003: 2, website, rsp.). In the former period, three complaints were upheld on “strong” language, which had been put forward by 54 viewers, mainly concerning frequent use of the “f-word” by both a football-star and a presenter on BBC Choice (cf. ibid. iss. July 2003: 11 f.). In the latter period, there were four cases upheld, put forward by nine listeners or viewers, respectively, of BBC Radio 1 and 2 and of BBC Two, again concerning “strong” language as used by a guest in the studio and three programme presenters (cf. ibid. iss. Oct. 2003: 9 f., website). Correspondingly, when language was considered in the BBC Producers’ Guidelines of 2003 (cf. chapter 6.8, website), reference was exclusively made to “strong language”, as exhibited in the abuse of religious concepts, in sexual swearwords, or in abusive names relating to disabilities, which might “cause great offence” (ibid.). Although strong language “might sometimes be used”, producers were reminded to “ask themselves constantly whether its use [would] alienate a large part of the audience”, and “common sense” was demanded in dealing with an issue being “a subject of deep concern to many people and [was] one of the most frequent courses of complaint” (ibid.). As, however, the bulk of complaints, containing

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personal information, was not available on the web (BBC information September 2001, website) and complaints not upheld by the Board remained unpublished in recent bulletins, the question must be left open whether or not accent has actually become a footnote in audience complaints, as compared to earlier public criticism on pronunciation matters directed to the BBC (see 4.1.1 and 4.1.2). Pronunciation in radio broadcasts, however, has also been discussed in other places, with opinions reflecting conceptual changes on the two traditional poles of “standard” and “dialect” and filling the gap between them with new ideas and arguments. Criticism of the “standard” – so far the domain of democratic-mindedness and regional accent loyalty – seemed to have become an outlet of a general aversion to linguistic uniformity threatening in the form of a “bland university-educated standard English”, under whose influence “everybody in radio is beginning to sound the same” (White in The Express 4/6/2000: 15). A new nightmare of a linguistically colourless and socially neutral universal “posh” made a “heavy Bolton accent” on Radio 1 or a “friendly West Midlands accent” on Radio 5 more desirable, and days were remembered when a “heavy Sussex accent” had been heard in the gardening spot of the Today programme, for “even gardeners sound posh these days” (ibid.). Even a genuine “posh” voice like that of “Old Etonian and caricature Conservative” presenter Boris Johnson might occasionally be preferred to the current uniformity, for “What radio needs is more voices like Johnson. Not just posh voices, different voices. Distinctive voices” (ibid.). The expulsion of Eton-educated Boris Johnson from the panel of presenters, “because his voice was deemed too posh”, was severely branded as part of a recent rejection of RP in McKinstry’s article in The Daily Mail (27/1/2000: 12). The affair was related to “a growing dominance of Celtic voices” on the radio, which brought to the ears of the audience the “Celtic cacophony” through an increasing number of Scottish, Irish and Welsh accents”. In the view of the author, a “Celtic invasion of the air waves” was gathering pace, parallel to the recent rise of Celtic nationalism and the appeasing policies of politicians and discriminating against RP and English regional accents as well. So, again, new tones were gaining ground in the public criticism of broadcast speech in connection with the general public debate on the language (see 3.5.3), mirroring the recent diversity of sociocultural issues in England.

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4.4

The language of current affairs units

4.4.1

Relaxation of habits

Since William Hardcastle’s revolutionary news bulletins of the sixties (see above 4.1.1), there had been increasing stylistic variation in the presentation of news programmes, gradually developing into current affairs units with a growing body of commentaries, reports and announcements gaining ground at the expense of traditional newsreading. Stimulated by the influence of postWar American radio and television, innovation in style and manner had, by the mid-eighties, revolutionalized the language together with the programme. Formal announcements of time tended to be replaced by informal its coming up to three minutes past five or twenty-seven minutes to midday, and even political commentaries preferred a more relaxed style, reporting on a European get-together and the two on a table in Geneva on Radio 4. Corresponding to the general style of presentation, the pronunciation of broadcasters contained colloquialisms, originally regional features and fashions of the day on all channels, including the World Service with its outstanding image in matters of pronunciation and usage. Extra open realizations were prominent in and [ä∙nd], actual [ˈäktʃ(ə)ɫ] and Buckingham Palace [ˈpälɪs], and post-War extra open diphthongal onsets and extensive lengthening of the levelled glides in later [ˈlɛ∙ɪtə] today [təˈdä:I], isolated [a:(ə)səleɪtəd] or Home [hɜ:m] Secretary were among the most obvious features. Short /ɪ/ was generally weakened to /ə/, not only in endings but increasingly so in word-medial positions as in you’ll believe [bəˈɫi:v], while /ɪə/ tended to be weakened in period [ˈpərɪəd]. Final /ɪ/, however, still remained relatively open and short, occurring together with fashionable elision in basically [ˈbeɪsɪklɪ] or with spelling pronunciation in parliamentary [ˈpɑ:lɪa `mentərɪ], and there was less closing of /ɔ:/, in comparison to the prestigiously fashionable advanced features in the straight news. However, variation was so considerable that in fifteen minutes’ commentaries by different speakers the word year was overwhelmingly heard with complete levelling as [jɜ:] (eight times), beside a slight glide in [jI ɜ:] (once) and established /ɪə/ in [jɪə] (twice) (Radio 4, 31/12/82), while, on other occasions, there was further fronting in variants as [jɛ:] or [jɛə]. Certain regionally-based fashions occurred earlier, further-reaching and more consistent than in the straight news: Southern popular diphthong shift was heard in an announcers’ BBC [ˈbəɨ: ˈbəɨ: ˈsəɨ:], TV [ˈtəɨ: ˈvəɨ:] and Radio 2 [təʉ:], and Midland retracted [ɤã] became increasingly applied in cases as nothing [ˈnɤãɵɪŋ] and industrial

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[ɪnˈdɤãstrɪəɫ]. Assimilation and coalescence occurred within words as immediate [əˈmi:dʒət] as well as on boundaries as in space shuttle [ˈspeɪʃ`ʌtɫ] and in the different variants of this year and last year, realized as [ˈðɪs ˎʒɜ:], [ˈðɪʃ ˋjɛə] and as [ˌlɑ:st ˋʒɛə], [ˋlɑ:stʒɜ:] or [ˋlɑ:s`çɛ:], re-spectively. Elision and coalescence were frequent within words and on boundaries in examples as necessary [ˈnes`rɪ], peace initiative [ˈpi:s ÿ ɪˈnɪʃ`tɪv] and for one reason or other [̩ri:znˎrʌðə], often in connection with fashionable T-glottalling as in yesterday [ˈjes`ʔdeɪ] and last month [ˌlɑ:sʔ ˋmʌnɵ]. While liaison was prominent in cases as twenty-four ÿ hours, intrusive r as in draw ÿ rÿ it out still remained relatively rare in the BBC News at that time. During the 1990s, the fashionable pronunciation tendencies in announcements and commentaries were continuing on all stations, with context forms in constitution [ˈkɒns`ˈtju:ʃn] and couple of hours [ˈkʌpɫf ˎa:z], with a large number of extra-open diphthongal onsets in examples such as clear [klɛə] and radio [ˈraɪdɪəʊ], with strong levelling in Europe [ɔ:~ɯ:] and European [ɔ:], superpowers [a:], violence [a:], airport [ɛ:], Empire [a:ə] and the Irish [a:], and with prominent diphthong shift in TV [ˈtəɨ:ˈvəɨ:]. Together with open [ä] which, in innumerable cases such as attacks, international and have to happen, had obviously become the most universally applied trendy feature of all, retracted [ɤã] in something, closer Southern-based [oˬ] for /ɔ:/ as in the sequence of talk to all sides as well as close and slightly lengthened vowels in principally [i∙] and politically [i:] had become widespread by the mid-nineties. Some of the most outstanding fashions were only recently combined in the announcement of One [ɤã] Day International [ä] on Radio 4 [foˬ:] (20/7/00). Popular context forms were on the increase also on the World Service: in announcements, levelling was again prominent in Europe Today [ˈjɔ:rəp təˋdɛ:ə] and twenty-one hours [a:z] Greenwich Mean time [ta:əm], T-deletion was leading to coalescence in the next sixty [ˈneks`ɪksti] minutes and seven minutes past one [ˈpɑ:s`ˎwʌn], and long /i:/ was strongly diphthongized in announcements of the News from the BBC [ˈbəɨ: ˈbəɨ: ˋsəɨ:] in 1994. A political commentary (5/9/95) contained a trendy retracted vowel in one [ɤã] UN official as well as a combination of elision, glottal stop and final G-dropping in separating [ˈsepreɪʔɪn], and its relaxed fashions were met by the presenter’s political results [ˈpɫɪtɪkɫ rɪˈzɫts]. While intrusive r began to occur more frequently in cases such as Russia ÿ rÿ is concerned or Australia ÿ rÿ is rambling behind, there was fashionable T-deletion in post[pəʊs`]poned and East[i:s`] European. According to McArthur (1992), the reasons for a loosening of pronunciation 196

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standards on the national channels were to be looked for not only in an increasing use of “speakers with other accents in tandem with a degree of social levelling” and in “changes in the nature of RP itself”, but also in “the limited numbers of RP speakers available for training as broadcasters” (p. 109). However, the fact that fashionable features like these were extensively exhibited even on the traditionally prestigious BBC World Service carrying a particular obligation for general acceptability and intelligibility proves their wide currency by the end of the century. The general relevance of fashionable features in announcements and news presentations was confirmed by contributors and interviewees from outside the radio, among them professionals, politicians, celebrities, and many others. So an editor’s contribution to a Radio 4 Current Affairs programme (10/11/83) contained elision in police[ˈpli:s]man, strong levelling in don’t [ɜ:] and our [ɑ:] beside open [ä] in combination with open diphthongal onset in black[ä]mail [æɪ]. The trendy features were matched by a medical scientist’s levelling tendencies in required [a:ə] and for two hours [a:ə] just as by a local politician’s latest fashions in no doubt at all [nɛ:(ə) ˈda∙(ə)t ÿ ət ÿ ˈoˬ:ɫ], go [ɜ:(ə)] slower [ɜ:ə] and have [ä] a rally [ä] in the same year on the World Service. Personalities of the time were following the general tendency, among them former Labour Minister Denis Healey with Iˈmust [s`] ˎsay and a [eɪ] ‘disad ` vantage in a speech recorded in Parliament (Radio 4, 15/12/77), Prince Charles joined in with contemporary [kənˈtempr`i] and to us all [̩tu∙ʌsˋQ̡:ɫ] (World Service 15/12/82), and former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher drew attention to her deliberate attempts at advanced RP in lower [ɛ:ə], last thing [ˈlɑ:s` ˎɵɪŋ], invest[s`]ment, and be sure [ɔ:] (World Service 30/5/83; Mrs. Thatcher’s style of speech; see 2.4). About the same time, fashions like these were heard in the Defence Minister’s police [p`ˈli:s], lower [lɜ∙ə] and Japan [dʒəˈpä:n], in a Conservative MP’s I don’t [dɜ:nt] think and most [mɜ:st] serious, in a Social Democratic MP’s establish [əˈstäblɪʃ] and in a Labour leader’s I am sure [ʃɔ:]. After relatively traditional RP articulations were heard again from former Prime Minister John Mayor, assuring his listeners that “trust [ʌ] can [æ] grow [əʊ]” (World Service, 31/8/94), his follower in office, Tony Blair, again employed the latest fashions, weakening and shortening his vowels in because [bəˈkɒz] and closing others in needs [ị] and in a way [ẹị] in his speech at a public meeting, recorded by the World Service on 26 January 1999.

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What seems like a paradox, beside popular features and relaxed fashions, even the most informal parts of news bulletins began to contain increasing numbers of traditional pronunciations since the later eighties, corresponding to the above-mentioned nostalgic conservatisms in newsreading (comp. Nostalgic modes and unresolved features). Among them were unassimilated forms and spelling pronunciations in associated [əˈsəʊsjeɪtɪd], question [ˈkwestʃən ~ ˈkwestjən] and parliamentary [ˈpɑ:lɪəˈmentərɪ] as exhibited in commentaries and reports of the later eighties, and the trend was continuing during the early nineties, with soldiers [ˈsəʊldjəz] on the World Service and seisures [ˈsi:zjəz] and defended [ɪd] on Radio 4. There were again fully and more closely realized glides, particularly for /eɪ/, /əʊ/ and /ɪə/ as in later [ei] in the pro[ou]gramme, under control [ou] and recent years [iə]. On the World Service of the mid-nineties, the BBC from London might again be heard as [‘bi:̩bi:ˈsi:], without the characteristic diphthongization of earlier years, Today’s [ei] Major [ei] European [jurəˈpi:ən] Issues (sj] were announced (24(7/95), and Europe Today appeared again as [ˈju∙ərəp təˎdeɪ], with conservatively close glides (15/8/94). In 1999, a political report was given in midcentury traditional RP – with full diphthongs in housing [aʊ] and labour [ei], elevated /æ/ in Sri Lanka [ɛ], fronted /ʌ/ in trumpets [ä], close monophthongal /i:/ in video screens [ị:], and each syllable carefully pronounced in perhaps [pəˈhæps] (ibid., 26/1/99). Similar to the situation in the straight news, “nostalgic” features in otherwise trendy speech might give the impression of stylistic inconsistencies, when fashionable open [ä] was linked with traditional weak [ɪ] in palace [ˈpälɪs] or balance [ˈbälɪns], when a conservative-sounding close glide in point [oˬ:i] was accompanied by trendy vowel realizations in one [wɤãn] and two [təʉ:] in a sports report on Radio 2, or when close glides in suppose [səˈpouz] and series (pl.) [siərị:z] occurred alongside trendy diphthongization in speech [spəɨ:tʃ] and the [ðəɨ:] criticism in an announcement on Radio 4 (both 1994). In one and the same speaker, /ʊə/ might be traditionally close and unlevelled in Europe [ˈju∙ərəp] and European [ju∙rəˈpi∙ən]) but fashionably levelled in reassured [ˌri∙əˈʃɔ:d], two different realizations of the same phoneme might appear in close sequence in a club [ɤã] in London [ʌ] (all World Service 1994), and newly conservative and fashionably popular realizations of the same word were exhibited by one and the same speaker in a new trial [aɪə] and retrial [a:ə] on Radio 1 (18/11/98), and by another one in come to power [aʊə] and power [a:] failure on Radio 4 (19/2/98). Again, as in the straight 198

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news, the favourite pattern consisted in a combination of close nostalgic [ẹị] with recent fashions, as in a diplomatic correspondent’s sequence of indications [ẹị], damage [ä] and this War [oˬ:] and a political correspondent’s international [ä] condemnations [ẹị] (both World Service Sept. 1995) as well as in a commentator discussing matters [ä] put on the agenda in Europe /ɯ:/ and the way [ẹị] Germany was unified [ˈju:nəfaɪd] (Radio 4, 21/2/98). An illustration of the underlying principle was provided by a female arts correspondent whose trendy realizations in shortage [oˬ:], categories [ˈkätəgri:z] and literary [ˈlɪt`ri] were fashionably competing with her mid-century fronted RP /ʌ/ in encouraging [ä], an unlevelled diphthong in years [ɪə] and with nostalgic close glides as in favourite [ẹị] and publication [ẹị] (World Service 26/1/99). Whatever features will stand the trials of time, new patterns seem to be taking shape, some of which may well leave their traces on tomorrow’s educated speech.

4.4.2

Regional features and National accents

A profoundly new tendency was consolidating in the BBC News and information programmes of the 1980s and 1990s with an increasing number of English regionalisms, British National accents and international accents of English in various kinds of reports and information broadcasts. Non-Southern regionalisms were most frequently exhibited in sports reports and weather forecasts, the former containing Northern vowels in several clubs [ʊ] and it’s one [wɔn] nil or a South Western open glide in I saw the game [äɪ], while a weather forecast ([ˈfɔrkæst ~ ˈfɔrka∙st]) exhibited, among others, preconsonantal and final r-realizations in North [nDrɵ], four [fɔ:r] degrees and reoccur [ri∙əˈkɜ:r] (BFBS 1994 and 1991, respectively). Similarly, in a shipping forecast on Radio 4, broad Northern dialect features were heard with trilled r in Wind south four [r] and north [r] east three [r], whereas pronunciation in political commentaries was mainly within the range of Near-RP (see 3.1.3), containing, beside inconspicuous RP features, widely accepted regionalisms as Western [æ] in after all [ˈæftəˈrɔ:l] and Northern [a] in passage [ˈpasɪdʒ] of a bill (both 1995). On more recently-founded Radio 5 (since 1990), however, News Extra Five Live (15/7/01) was announced and a few news headlines read out by a mildly Northern accented voice introducing our [r] social affairs [r] editor [r], whose rhotic Northern speech matched and exceeded the presenter’s with thirty [r] years [r] ago and the un[ʊ]rest is over [r], until the headlines were proceeding with the Grand Master [r] of the Orange Order [r/r]

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and a para[ˈpara]military training camp [a]. On another occasion, the news was presented in fashionable RP, containing extra open /æ/ in passenger [ä], diphthong shift in two [əʉ:], and extensive fronting in the levelled glide of disappearance [ɛ:ə], while traffic information was provided with easily recognizable Northern intonation and the characteristic local pronunciation of Manchester [ˈmançɪstə] (28/8/01). In the World Service News Hour, North Western features such as [ɔ] in another, short [a] in ask and balance [ˈbaləns] and initial dark [ɫ] in even less were to be heard in the presentation by Alex Brody who, according to BBC World Service information of 6 December 2001, described himself as “an all-purpose Northerner”, with a pronunciation influenced by Lancashire where he was born, and by County Durham and East Yorkshire where he grew up. Many years in the South have left further traces, consisting, among others, in trendy elision and T-deletion in political [ˈplɪtɪkɫ] and the next sixty [ˈneks`ɪksti] minutes (5/9/95). Throughout the years, Northern and Southern features have mixed with trendy fashions in his characteristic programme announcement of This is Alex [a] Brody with [ɵ] News [ṣ] Hour [ʔa:ə]. And even though former Director General Greg Dyke was reported to be an Estuary speaker himself, the accent has so far not been encountered in BBC English, as far as the main news broadcasts were concerned (cf. Coggle 1993: 77 f.; Rosewarne 1994: 7; Kerswill 2001: 6). British National accents as accepted on the radio in the early days of the BBC’s regional broadcasting (see 2.2.2) have recently returned into the presentation of the news, this time on the national level. After introducing the main topics and the News [nju:ʒ]reader in the 8 o’clock news programme on BBC Radio 4 (20/7/00), Scottish presenter James Naughtie went on to interview personalities in relaxed style and with his mildly Scottish accent, discussing the government’s [ɔ] plan [a∙], asking whether the right [ɔɪ] amount is payed if this plan [a] works [wDrks], urging you might do far [r] more [r] to get people out of cars [r] into public transport[r], and applying the Northern level tone pattern when suggesting to re’duce the ‘number of ‘people ‘coming ‘into ‘big ˎcities. The presenter’s mildly Scottish pronunciation was met by an even stronger Northern accent in one of his interviewees – a professor – using initial rolled r in on the road and assimilation on word boundary in because you [bɪˈkɔʒʉ∙] know and stating that “the chancellor [a] has announced [əʊ] pedestrians’ [ʃt] facilities based on extra [ʃt] funds” (Radio 4, 20/7/00). In addition to English regional and British National features, there was postconsonantal and final American r used by Southern English speakers, be it in a

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commentator’s coalition partners [r], a correspondent’s papers [r] and under [r] way, or in a reporter’s car [r]. It was heard with American connotations in a reporter’s millions of dollars [r], but also, together with an Americansounding open vowel, in a commentator’s Oxford [ˈɑ:ksfrd], and it occurred in a World Service announcer’s You’re [jɔ:r] listening to the BBC in 1994. A further inclusion of voices of English worldwide, among them those of Americans, French and Germans, South Africans and Chinese, of a Sinn Féin leader on Radio 4 and an Indian correspondent from Baghdad on the World Service, is standing for the new kind of global orientation on the BBC, which does not only broadcast to the world in the Reithian sense, but is also open to its different voices.

4.4.3

Recent fashions and styles

Beside a new openness of the radio to regional features and national accents, the relaxation in broadcasting became accompanied by trendy articulatory and prosodic features in the news programmes on the BBC. One of the most widespread phonetic features on word level was a probably American-influenced fronting of stresses as exhibited with ‘controversial, ‘represent, ‘constitute and ‘boycott in one political commentary on the World Service (18/7/89) as well as in further instances, such as ˈWhite House, ˈresolution and ˈparliamentary session, analogous to American hopefully and very importantly in the idiom of Radio 4 in 1983. On sentence level, context words such as auxiliary words and prepositions were tending to be stressed against the general habit, not only in weather forecasts where sunny intervals ‘will occur81, but also in the recurring programme announcement of ˈOn the ˌHourˎEvery ˌHour and in the three successive points of prominence placed on ˈBˈBˈC. There were pauses inserted in an announcer’s almost forty-five minutes past and exaggerated intonation applied in on ˈWednesday the ˈ6th of Sep↑temˈber (ibid. 6/9/95), beside monotonous strings of semantic units completely devoid of pauses and with unusual intonation patterns, such as the high-level series of stressed syllables of ˈBFBˈS ˈBFBˈO ˈsix ˈteen have a good ↑week bye-ˈbye (21/3/96). Corresponding to young fashions like these, speech rate was found to be relatively high, ranging between fifteen and seventeen phonemes per second in announcements and commentaries, and up to remarkable fourteen phonemes even in the formal style of straight newsreading on the World Service. Presenters’ prosodic novelties, mannerisms and idiosyncracies were, according to Robert Burchfield’s Report for the BBC of 1979, “spreading into

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the formal spoken world elsewhere – in parliament, law courts, public speeches, and so on, and were a new feature of twentieth century English” (p. 12). Recent speech styles on the above-mentioned stations were impressively surpassed on Channels 1 and 2. On Radio 1, with its “racy fashion” and the news introduced by jingles and music since the seventies or even earlier (cf. Burchfield 1979: 11), fantastically distorted voices were in the late nineties leading to a cascade of extra short announcements, slices of commentaries, some two-sentence pieces of straight news, and several interviews and reports. Pronunciation in the short bits of newsreading was in the fashion of the day, containing quasi-cardinal /ä/ in Paris, retracted [ɤã] in governor, close [oˬ:]in former, centralized [əʉ:] in school, levelling and final G-dropping in trying [tra:(ə)n], T-dropping in West [wes`]minster, and a large number of far-reaching assimilations and elisions, as in Welsh Secretary [̩weɫʃ ˋʃekr`tri] and the country’s Royal [ˈkʌntri:ʒ ̩rɔ:ɫ] Network (Radio 1, 9/12/95, 18/11/98). A characteristic feature of this style of presentation was strong personal involvement on the part of the presenter, in contrast to the traditional impartiality of classical newsreading. On Radio 2, high speed and intensive tone movement accompanied the account of an accident that happened as the ˈvehicle arˈrived at ˈCoventry ↑city ̩stadium ˈthis ˈafterˋnoon, so that Nnow it’s ˈcalled for the ↑head of the ˏmission (Radio 2, 31/10/98). Similarly, on Radio 1, involvement was signalled by prosody in a dramatic account of a bomb attack where people were ↑ traumatized by the exˎperience, and ˈtwenty-nine peopleˇdied and ↑↑hundreds were left ˎinjured (Radio 1, 18/11/98). Traditional newsreading on both Stations had dissolved into more or less racy magazine-type news and information programmes, where presenters were deliberately dismissing traditional norms of formality and impartiality together with “received” speech. By the turn of the century, the straight news had quite generally become reduced to a minimum on the National Service, and with it RP. When the 8 o’clock News on Radio 4 was presented by Scottish broadcaster James Naughtie, there was nothing more left of straight newsreading but a few bits lasting around twenty seconds each and serving as gateways into the various commentaries, reports and interviews. This has been reaffirmed by Kerswill (2006: 103), stating that “it is now only newsreaders – and then only on the National networks – who consistently use RP”. In compliance with the Board’s proclaimed aims to reduce the “reading out” of texts in favour of a conversational approach (see 4.3.1), the prestige accent had been confined to rare occasions in the programme, and the general impression of news-based

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BBC English had become determined more by the results of a considerable move towards the unconventional and the popular than by the rare samples of RP exhibited in what had remained of the straight news. Moreover, the World Service was following the trends of the time, with the announcements like ˈBB ˈC onˎline ˈwˈwˈw ˌdot ˈbbˈc ˌdot ˈco ˌdot ˈuˎk, sung out in a kind of rhythmical cyberspeak accompanied by music and jingles (1/12/01).

4.5

Language fashions in entertainment programmes

4.5.1

The trendy and the popular

When, in the BBC Producers’ Guidelines, BBC Annual Reports and official declarations of the Board, matters of entertainment were stepping back behind highly relevant issues of current affairs and educational services, this did not mean that their numbers were reduced or their quality neglected. They were, as before, included in the BBC’s aim to make good programmes, what in the words of the Director General meant to “give satisfaction to our audiences, … please our audiences, excite and delight them” (BBC Annual Report and Accounts 1991/92: 5), and their wide range and resulting linguistic diversity was revealing, also with regard to the educated language. With entertainment broadcasts reaching from classical music, art and literature over pop music sessions and special sports issues to magazine-type phone-in programmes, there was great linguistic diversity, depending on the kind of programme and the individual speaker. On Radio 2 (11/9/94), the pronunciation of a classical music presenter included a trendy close glide in the greatest [ẹị] and fashionable open [ä] in passionate, close /oˬ:/ in recorded and advanced lowered [ɔ:ə] in I am sure, while a music expert on Radio 3 (9/12/95) was exhibiting mildly regional pronunciation with his Northern dialectal dark [ɫ] in light, clear open [a] in atmospheric and prominent sounded r in quarter tones, quarter movement and harmonies. Deliberately careful and, at the same time, deliberately fashionable features were heard from the female presenter of a Young Artists’ Forum on Radio 3 (9/12/95), employing extra open [ä] in fact, close [oˬ:] and prominent linking r in before it [biˈfoˬ:r ÿ ɪt], strong levelling in final [a:] and variety [a:ə], trendy elision in performers [ˈp` foˬ:məz] and retracted /ʌ/ in one [ɤã] problem, accompanied by a return of comparatively moderate glides in scaling [ei] and compose [əʊ]. On the World Service (Nov./Dec. 2001), current fashions were to be heard, with an extremely open vowel in challenge [ä]

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and T-glottalling in what’s [wɒʔs] more, in a cultural report on exotic birds sounds and in the trendy monotony of rhythm and tone in the texts to the music of a rock concert. Besides, there were colloquial RP voices in a feature on Agatha Christie, in a presentation on making up literary works, and in a report on architectural preservation in India, while contributing specialists and interviewees were mainly displaying mild regional accents or, as in the latter case, features of Commonwealth English. Even though the strongly newsoriented presentation on the World Service is still closer to RP, in comparison to domestic radio, current programme organization now renders the general impression fashionably near-RP or mildly regional in the prevailingly cultural and quality entertainment broadcasts. As a result of thematic streaming (see 4.1.1) and corresponding language strategies, regional and working-class accents were increasingly heard in entertainment programmes on channels 1, 2 and 4, following the strategies of television where identification with popular London and Cockney brought long-lasting success to the series “East Enders”, launched on Radio 1 in 1985 and still going on, in answer to the successful urban Lancashire “Coronation Street” series, running since 1960 into the 1980s (cf. Honey 1989: 121 f.). In the same way as working-class accents ceased to be reserved for characteristic parts and were extended to a wider range of social roles in plays and entertainment, the speech of broadcasters, too, was beginning to move away from RP and to show modified features since the later 1970s. The language of radio had become open to limited social variation, and radio producers began to follow the style of BBC weekend TV, where Colin Welland was advocating “the common touch” and “the language of the people” (quoted in Zimmermann 1981: 429). English regional accents were widely favoured by the public – be it a Hampshire voice associated with “the English countryside and village green in summer” (ibid. 125) or the popular tone of quasi-Cockneyspeaking commentator Lorraine Chase, dropping her h’s in ‘e (he) and ‘er (her) and glottalling her t’s in just and bit, and thus, in Honey’s judgement, “perhaps speaking for many more listeners than her critics allowed” (ibid. 118). Producer Paul Vaughan, in The Listener of 25 October 1979, proclaimed a popular strategy in the conviction that “any attempts … to establish fixed standards of orthodoxy [were] doomed” (ibid. 427), and Graham Turner, in his Radio 4 series (class) “Barriers” of 1980, assumed a pronunciation characterized by a contemporary critic as “ambivalent working-class-and-proud-of-itaccent” (ibid.). Further moves from the democratic to the deliberately work-

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ing-class secured Derek Jameson’s “extraordinary voice” half a million listeners to his regular morning programmes in the 1980s, and this not only in result of his Cockney pronunciation (dropping his final g in singin’), but even more so after his deliberately popular confessions of “I can’t say all these h’s” and “I was born ignorant” on TV in 1987 (cf. Honey 1989: 120), being delivered in the declared conviction that his own “Cockney street-trader voice” was meaning “a breakthrough for democracy” (cf. Honey 1989: 119 f.). On recent television, the great covert prestige of Cockney has been exploited in programmes like The Madness of Prince Charming on Channel 4 (17/7/03), where Adam Ant exhibited T-glottalling and deletion, open glides and final Gdropping in see you later [ˈsi:j ˈlaɪʔə], Broadway play [a∙ɪ], no [na∙ʊ] words to find and getting out of my wits [ˈgetɪn aʊ ÿ əfma: ˈwɪts], in a film about a pop star of the 1980s, and thus fully in line with the new popular tradition. Favourite among all age groups of varying social backgrounds were magazine-type entertainment programmes, where a particular topic is kept up through various kinds of short contributions, interviews and phone-ins, being interrupted by news headlines and weather information, some music, sport, and topics of current interest. For at least half of its time, the three hours’ morning programme Radio Five Live (28/08/01) was centring round the problem whether or not, under the particular political conditions, a British cricket team was to go to Zimbabwe, while its latter half was filled by interviews with popstars and pieces of their music. Voices in favour or against the main issue, coming from all parts of Britain, Africa and Asia, made the picture extremely complex not only linguistically but also culturally, with their sociolinguistic diversity and their cosmopolitan flavour. Throughout the time, the presenter was aiming to adjust her style to the different issues, callers and interviewees, becoming more colloquial and increasingly familiar in her style as the programme proceeded. In the lighter second part, her fashionable RP was at times converging to non-RP, when the vowel became retracted in one [wɤãn] more question, trendy T-glottalling was applied in just one [ˈdʒʌsʔ ˋwɤãn], and a whole series of glottal stops occurred in Let’s [leʔs] talk a bit [bɪʔ] about [əˈbaʔ] music. Linguistic choice was obviously not a question of standard or non-standard, RP or non-RP, but of fashionable up-to-dateness, far-reaching relaxation of style and usage, and of appropriateness to the situation. When, however, in a different programme, a horse riding enthusiast was talking about her horses [oˬ:], applying only a slight indication of fashionable opening in happy [æ] and of lowering in sure [ɯ:ə] and avoiding linking r, either by use

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of a vowel glide in in favour of [ˈfeivə ÿ ɒf] or by slightly sounded final r in combination with initial glottal stop in easier for us [fərʔʌs] (Radio 4, 21/2/98), the conspicuousness of the accent explains the rarity of its occurrence, particularly so in the deliberately democratic world of the media.

4.5.2

Approaches to youth culture

There was even less tradition and more relaxation of style and manner in magazine-type programmes for younger audiences of varying cultural and educational backgrounds. In the 1970s and early 1980s, a caller might be welcomed to a phone-in programme with a relaxed How are you doing?, listeners were offered a heart-to-heart talk, and others were thanked for coming in or popping in (BFBS 1975, 1983, 1984). Americanisms spreading with hopefully and importantly, and non-standard grammatical forms as How comes it and It will be more easier (all 1983) were adding to the popular style of presentation and promoting young fashions. In programmes on BFBS in Germany in the 1980s, there were trendy diphthongal glides and extra open onsets in forms such as clear [klɛə], today [təˈdæ:ɪ], radio [ˈraɪdɪəʊ] and in sleigh [slaɪ] bells in the snow, and levelling was as strong in the presenters’ hallo [hæˋlɛ:] and bye-bye [ˈbɑ: ˏba∙ɪ] as in a caller’s you are in [ˈjɔ:r ÿ ɪn] my heart. Long vowels were fashionably diphthongized in yes indeed [ˈjes ÿ ɪnˋdəɨ:d], and a characteristic set of latest tendencies was exhibited in the repeatedly good wishes for a happy [ˈhäpi] New [nu:] Year [jɛə/jɜ:] in December 1982. There was plenty of assimilation, elision and T-deletion within words as good-bye [ˈgʊbˏbaɪ] and necessary [ˈnes` rɪ], and on boundaries as in last year [ˈlɑ:s`çɛə] and What’s your [ˈwɒtʃəˏneɪm] name. Cockney-based glottal stop was frequent in cases as current [ʔ] favourites and about [ʔ] country music (December 1984), and Northern [ʊ] appeared in let’s have a cup [ʊ] of kindness yet, on 25 and 31 December 1982. During the mid-nineties on BFBS, the same trends were continuing with influential Southernisms, such as diphthong shift in very much indeed [ɪnˈdəɨ:d] and with devoicing, Yod-dropping and closing of final /ɪ/ in absolutely [̩äpsəˈlu:tli∙]. On Radio 2 (10/9/95), there were far-reaching assimilation and T-dropping in the promise of next [ˈnekʃ] record next [ˈneks`] week, while, in addition to young fashions in British English, Americanisms were colouring the picture in a Jazz Request Programme on Radio 3 (10/2/95), being introduced with trendy Hallo [̩hæ\\lɜ:ʊ] and proceeding with characteristic Americanisms in the records of last [æ∙] week, Ella

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Fitzgerald’s shiny stockings [ɑ∙], and in a report on one who had been an amateur [r] for [r] years [r]. Throughout recent decades, much of the language of popular entertainment broadcasts meant a more or less conscious approach to youth culture, and the younger the issue, the closer the language of broadcasters was to young speech. Young tastes and fashions have been elaborately exploited by John Peel – most influential since the 1970s with his avantgardistic music on Radio 1 and on BFBS, and “National Broadcaster of the Year” in 1993 – using his effective mixture of popular English fashions and trendy Americanisms with utmost success throughout the decades. In a series of presentations in autumn 1995, beginning with his characteristic welcoming formulae like Hello again, pals/boys and girls or a big howdy again, brothers [ɤã] and sisters, he was shifting artfully between popular contraction in This is [ðɪs`] another John Peel’s music, fashionably Southern English open diphthongal onset in anyway [aɪ], Cockney glottal stop in so what [ʔ] and H-dropping in he’ll [i:ɫ] play it on the one hand, and American pretty [ˈprɪt̮ i], forget [fərˈget] and goin’out as analogous to popular English G-dropping on the other (BFBS 28/10, 11/11, 18/11/95). No wonder John Peel’s magazine-type entertainment on Radio 4 became so popular among all age-groups (native-speaker informant) as his pop music presentations had been for decades among the shifting generations of fans. Welcoming his huge audience to the Great Hall of the National [a] Maritime Museum, Tim Marlow, presenter of Kaleidoscope Live on BBC Radio 4 (20/10/95), was exhibiting fashionable articulatory, prosodic and paralinguistic features with assimilation in Breakfast Show [ˈbrekfəʃ`əʊ], retracted /ʌ/ in Radio One [ɤã], and a fully stressed, diphthongized and lengthened vowel in the [ˈðəi:] result. Corresponding to recent tendencies in young speech, accents in programmes for young listeners were deliberately democratic, open to English regional features, and cosmopolitan in their acceptance of trendy Americanisms. The attraction of young fashions was great, and the desire to “belong” was put into words by one of the BFBS Top Friday Night presenters asking his guest in the studio: “How would we greet them that other people would regard us as trendy and young things?” (BFBS, 15/3/96). In favour of fashionable unconventionality, prosodic features as unusual stress and tone patterns and unsemantic or missing pauses were exploited for effect and underlined by additional articulatory peculiarities, when stresses were shifting together with articulatory fashions in ˈthe [ði:] Continental Hotel and ˈa [ɛ:ɪ] bartender, when vowels were extremely lengthened in and

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[æ:nd], yes [jɛ:s], know [nɜ:], and when schwa was added word-final in and [æ:ndə] and from [frɒmə] Tennessee [əi:], the latter with an extra long final glide. Trendy repetitions were heard in a disc jockey’s question Did he – did he – did he work with people, in an interviewer’s Is – is – is [ˈʔɪz ˈʔɪz ˈʔɪz] that the sort of thing, and in a presenter’s You know I – I [ˈʔaɪ ˈʔaɪ] I think it’s cold (on BFBS 21/3/96). Hesitation phenomena like schwa-/ə/ and its lengthened counterpart /ɜ:/, mostly in connection with the glottal stop as in a disk jockey’s E – e ([ˈʔə ˈʔə or ˈʔɜ: ˈʔɜ:]) it was, seemed to be a “must” in unconventional speech on the radio in the mid-nineties. In addition to deliberate slips of the tongue like these, there were various idiosyncratic vocalizations, like a presenter’s long surprise sound in number seven – ah [a:], or the four laughs in any ideas – [@@@@] (BFBS, 15/3/96), all indicating fashionable unconventionality and relaxation. In a programme on Radio 1 (9/12/95), familiar style and personal approach were signalled by That will be Tom Patty, and I warn you intensively, before a deliberately monotonous and incongruent discourse was started with ˈChristmas will ˈcause inˈcreasing ˈnumbers beˈfore – eh – the ˈshow beˈfore ˈChristmas ˈEve and ˈon ˈChristmas ˈEve and on the ˈshow be ˈfore ˈChristmas ˈEve. Assuring his listeners excitedly that ˈHere you are ˈgoing to ˈget it before ˈanybody ↑else ˎdoes [dʌzə], the text continued with an aggressive-sounding sequence of stressed syllables in ˈ0 ˈfive ˈo ˈone ˈten ˈone ˈhundred from ˈlast week. ˈWhat are the ˌfirst ˌwords ˌspoken in a ˌRocky ˌHorror ˊShow? What ˋother ˌwords are ˌspoken in an ˌRocky ˌHorror ˊShowˈ? In spite of time-consuming stress patterns, vowel lengthening, repetitions and hesitation phenomena, the speech rate was scoring up to nineteen phonemes per second in pop-sessions and phone-in programmes, in a time when young and fast speech was standing for competence (for RP cf. Giles 1991: 199; see 1.4.3).

4.6

BBC Local Radio and Independent Radio stations

4.6.1

New ways

With the aim of avoiding a solely London-oriented service, a new regional structure of broadcasting had been established in 1945, being later replaced by Local Radio stations since 1964 (cf. Leitner 1983: 56, 59; Wilby-Conroy 1994: 273). Stimulated by the necessity to compete with the more popular language in television since its reinstalment in 195082 and the first commercial 208

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radio stations after 1955, their services were rapidly increasing. By the midnineties, their number had risen to a total of forty-two premises in England and Wales, and by March 1999 they had been reorganized into thirty-eight main premises including 153 sub-stations (cf. BBC Resources 1996: 11 f.; BBC Radio Transmitting Stations. Reception Advice (1999): 20 ff., see Plate 6). According to the 1998/99 BBC Annual Report (p. 27), BBC Local Radio was received by seventeen percent of the population, and surveys showed that local stations were those people would miss most after BBC 1. Locally-based programme making and close contacts with audiences have been the particular advantages of local broadcasting, deliberately exploited in the schedules and in public relations activities. Announcing itself as “Radio West Yorkshire”, “West Yorkshire News Radio”, or, more fashionably in diction, as “News Talk Radio for West Yorkshire” and “The Great Music Station” in the mid-nineties, BBC Radio Leeds was focusing on a wider regional validity, a reliance on the spoken language (in contrast to most music-based Independent Local Radio stations, and on ready compliance with young tastes and fashions. Covering all issues from current affairs to music programmes, it was offering a full schedule between 6 am and the 1 am World Service News in 1997. Attention was given to a wide range of popular tastes and to the interests of different social groups and generations, with the favourite magazine-type Breakfast Shows (analogous to TV), a gardening programme on Saturdays, a whole Saturday afternoon of West Yorkshire Sport, and a wide choice of music including country, blues, pop and evergreens over the weekend and as part of the Night Network on weekdays. According to the Programme Schedule for the week from 27 September to 3 October 1997 (see Illustration 10), News were presented half-hourly from 6 am to 7 pm and then hourly until midnight. Longer current affairs programmes were offered with an hour’s News Talk including phone-ins in the morning News Watch in the afternoon, and full BBC World Service News after midnight. To strengthen public relations, further phone-ins were offered regularly as part of the daily Midmorning Show, as Gardener’s Direct Line leading up to the gardening programme on Saturday mornings, and as Problem Line on Sunday nights. In an information brochure of 1997 with the title of 10 Reasons Why You’d Enjoy Programmes on BBC Radio Leeds (see Plate 7) the Station recommended itself not only for its “unique blend of local, national and international news”, its original local reports, traffic and weather news and live sporting events, but also for its service to “a multi-cultural and cosmopolitan county” accommodating various

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local minority groups and religious communities, and for the opportunities it offered its listeners to participate in phone-ins and to profit from expert knowledge on topics of general interest. The appearance of the first commercial pirate stations after 1955 had marked the beginning of a new era in broadcasting when the so far unquestioned monopoly of the BBC was broken by a quick and ready exploitation of the market. Whereas Independent Television was licensed as early as 1955, Independent was not officially established until The Sound Broadcasting Act of 1972 and consolidated one year later by The Independent Broadcasting Authority Act of 1973/74 (cf. Annan Report 1977/78: 7), under the roof of The Independent Broadcasting Authority (The Radio Authority since 1991). By 1990, commercial radio accounted for one third of all radio listening, while the BBC’s radio share had declined and further continued to fall, particularly on the so-called “plebeian” channels 1 and 2, constituting the most obvious target audiences for Independent Local stations (cf. Paynter 1991: 14). Relations were further specified in an investigation of 1986, where the latter clearly outscored the BBC in local news and current affairs, all night programmes, consumer and advice programmes83 as well as in popular and rock music, sports and lighter chat programmes (cf. McGregor 1987: 54 f.). Along with a continuing reliance on regional broadcasting, Radio Authority premises, operating from London, were installed in all parts of Britain (see Plate 8), and in the early nineties Independent National Radio stations were founded with Classic FM and Virgin 1215, broadcasting classical and rock music since 1992 and 1993, respectively. A few years later, in 1995, they were supplemented by Talk Radio offering a speech-based service – a novelty in usually music-based Independent broadcasting (cf. Radio Authority Pocket Book 1998: 4). By the end of the century, there were a total of 237 Local Independent stations, beside Independent Television, including thirty in Scotland, four in Northern Ireland and nine in Wales, as well as London Greek and Turkish Radio, Sunrise Radio for Asian listeners with affiliated stations all over Britain, and seven special news services (cf. ibid. 4, 18 ff., 78). Within the last few years, the number of analogue stations has risen to 251 and digital licences got under way, which are now rapidly expanding on the national and local levels (cf. Pocket Book 2001: 4 ff.). Since the early years of Independent Broadcasting, audience connections catering for issues of complaint and regular public meetings as well as for continuous audience research were considered vital by the Board (cf. Annan

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Report 1979: 5), and the main priority continued to be given to close relations between broadcasters and the listening public. In a recent information brochure, distributed under the title of How do I complain? and bearing the subtitle Keeping an ear out for you (Radio Authority 2001; see Plate 9), listeners and viewers are assured that full reports of all complaints are sent quarterly to all stations, and public cooperation is encouraged with the words: “All comments are useful in helping the Authority do its job … Attitudes to language and subjects covered in programming often change over the years, and listeners’ and viewers’ comments are invaluable in establishing what is generally accepted”. As to the language of presentation in the programmes of commercial radio stations, however, no prescriptions have been made in recent Radio Authority Programme Codes, except the urgent demand to avoid “offensive” or “bad” language, unless “defensible in terms of context and authenticity” (cf. 1998: 4). For public inquieries and contact, the Radio Authority now offers its six different broadcasting sections and seven other affiliated bodies catering for advertisement, audience research, TV communication and other issues, as well as a special association called “Voice of the Listener & Viewer”, representing the citizen and consumer, and editing a quarterly News Bulletin (cf. Radio Authority Pocket Book 2001: 11 ff.).

4.6.2

Language features

In connection with attractive programme making, relaxed presentations, and close contact with the respective audiences, local stations were winning their listeners not least through their popular style of speech in which regional accents were employed in various kinds of programmes. In 1996, the language of news programmes on BBC Radio Leeds was found to be in a range between mildly regional speech and fashionable near-RP accents, employing Northern [ʊ] in Republican and short [a] in the past beside trendy T-deletion in next [neks] Monday. Between News Talk on the one end and pop music on the other, a large variety of magazine-type information, sports and entertainment programmes contained local accents in News from Humberside [ʊ] University, a report on special activities of young [ʊ] artists, and the announcement of an event on 28th [ˈtwɔni-] of July in the City Hall, being very much [ʊ] the people’s palace [a] (12/7/96). In deliberately familiar style and with a high degree of personal involvement, a commentator was asking his listeners to imagine [a] a countryside [ʊ] where somebody bundles [ɔ] you into a bus [ɔ] with machine guns [ɔ] pointed at the scene and others covered

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[ɔ] up [ʊ], interrupting his account by colloquial you know and finishing with I can’t imagine [a] how it can happen [a]. After promisin’ you an evenin’ of top gospel, soul, rap, anˈ dance [ɛ∙] at the White [ʔ] Theatre, East Street [ˈi:s` tri:t], local advertising (11/7/96) was offering a sale that would start [ɔˬ:] on Monday [ɔ], a new travel [a] line, a summer [ɔ] bargain, a magic [a] after[ɛftə]noon with a music programme and new sportswear for those who wanna [ˈwɔnə] be up [ɔ] to standard [a]. On BBC Radio Leicester (5/11/95), the news were announced with News[ʒ]reader just in, whereafter some moderately RP-pronounced bits of news were alternating with commentaries and short contributions of diverse kinds. In one of the latter, practical advice on how to deal with unpleasant intruders was given in characteristically popular style and manner with Just pick’em up [ʊ] an’ chuck [ʊ] ‘em out an ‘shut [ʊ] your door. Among the Independent Local Radio stations of the South, Capital Radio London was most successfully linking local aspirations with recent language fashions in a wide spectrum of music presentations, talk programmes and current affairs units, with a Board decidedly anti-RP (“none of us here are familiar with the term ‘conservative RP’”; quoted in Leitner 1979: 92), aiming at a clear articulation in a “colloquial spoken English – the art of good radio” (letter of 25 April 1994). In the mid-nineties, there were prominent popular London features, such as T-glottalling, diphthong shift, levelled glides and far-reaching context forms beside universally fashionable vowel realizations. After the station had been announced as Capital [ä] FM London [ɤã] on 3 May 1995, there were trendy assimilations in tube [ˈtʃu:b] lines and this year [ˈðɪʃ` ɛã:], diphthong shifts in prove [əʉ:] and team [əɨ:], nostalgic close glides in delays [ẹị] and told [ọụ], and an American-sounding elevated and lengthened vowel in can[ɛ∙]cellations was heard beside open realizations of the phoneme as in battle [ä]. T-glottalling was frequent in examples as expect[ʔ]ing and we haven’t [ʔ] got [ʔ] anything in all parts of the programme, including the news. In The Way It Is, the London [ɤã] look for the nineties was presented and the world’s best[sˌ]selling software advertised, and it was announced that a puppy [ʊ] survived in a card-board box. In a sports report on Copenhagen, similarly fashionable features were exhibited with open vowels in travelling [ä] fans [ä] and a close vowel in waters [Q̡:], with fashionably retracted realizations in Columbian [ɤã] and front [ɤã] cafés and prominent opening and levelling of glides in play [æɪ], players [æ:ə] and training now [a:ə]. Exceptional prosody was adding to the intended effect when the level intonation of The ˈevening 212

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ˈlights ˈstill ˈstrong, ˈsplashes on the ˈgreen ˈbronze ˈrooves of the ˈRoyal ˈPalaces was contrasting with the heightened rhythm of a ro↗ mantic ˈcity with the ↑touch of the ˎmagical. Consonants were lengthened for effect by adding schwa, as in the announcement of Capital FM [ˈemə], or aspirated as in a sports correspondent’s picking up a strike force. In the words of the Board, it was the style of “the young popular contemporary hit music station”, which was successfully beating “commercial rivals and all BBC stations” (letter 25/4/94). In the North of England, bits of popular music and advertising were alternating on Hallam FM, covering the Sheffield area. Against a background of mystically merging voices, sounds and noise, a clearly distinguishable announcement assured the listener: “This is the radio station that’s officially rated number one in South Yorkshire and the North Midlands” (20/7/00). Suggesting immediateness and familiarity, the news was introduced with This is Hallam FM – first with your News, and two extremely youngsounding female voices were exceeding each other in exclaiming the most recent pieces of news about government plans [ˈgɤãvmənt ˈplänz] to solve Britain’s traffic [ä] problems, about Mick Jagger [ä] and events in Birmingham tonight [təˈnaɪʔ], and about December two [təʉ:] thousand and two [təʉ:] – altogether fashionable, young and fast, and corresponding in style and manner to what Radio 1 is doing for the BBC (see 4.4.3). On Independent National Radio, presentations were in line with those on the Local stations, and thus might include anything, from popular regionalisms over young and sometimes extreme fashions to RP-like accents or inconspicuous RP. So Classic FM (18/7/00) presented its News against a mystical background of sound and music, with items announced in dramatically whispering voices. Scraps of about two or three sentences were read in fashionable near-RP accents, containing features such as moderate assimilation in issues [ˈɪʃju:z] and a mildly retracted vowel and elision in government [ˈgɤãvmənt] and alternating with various kinds of five-minute reports or commentaries until the final weather-forecast was given in perfect RP. In a magazine-type advertising programme (20/7/00), a piece of music by Tchaikovsky (just majestic!) was followed by fashionable RP-speaking promoters of more pools, more health drops, more golf-courses, of Best Western Hotels and Singapore’s mystical traditions. FM Holiday Services, however, encouraged listeners to be among the first [r] one thousand people to book and receive tickets to a classical concert [r]. Results were announced of last [læ:sʔ] week’s Classic Countdown, and a title’s last four [r] steps to number [r] one were predicted

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for the Saturday Show. After If You Love Me and the urgent plea Please, don’t drink and drive, the Midday Programme’s Countdown on Virgin Radio was announced in a fashionable whisper on 31 December 2000. More music, weather and traffic announcements followed, and travel [a] News included up[ɤã]dates on cars and the prospect of an anti-corrosion guarantee [əɨ:] for the UK [aɪ], in a fashionable mix of the North and Estuary. After further music and advertisements, another mystically veiled voice (obviously a must in trendy broadcasting) announced: “… across the UK – this is Virgin News”, and a quick and breathless female voice was presenting news on anti [a] Arab [a] military action [a] … this [ʃ] year [ęə], on smoking cannabis [ˈkanəbɪs] and a show making half a million pounds [ã:], on a footballer losing fifteen tests [tes`], and on the worst [wɜ:sʔ] performance of the year. In order to avoid any formality and make them real scraps of news, the presentation was, after a few sentences, interrupted by a male voice and some music and finally broken off just in the middle of the (presumably) last sentence for Super [u:], another piece of rock music to fill the final part of the programme. After successful years of Independent National broadcasting, however, a new concentration on regional and even “small-scale” services was on the agenda again in the late nineties (cf. 1997 Radio Authority, BBC Annual Report p. 5, 10 f., 21), true to the early conviction that “local relevance” was “the main strength of radio in a television age” (Annan Report 1979: 10). In the language of both BBC Local Radio and Independent Local Radio stations, mildly English regional and British National accents of broadcasters were matched by the speech of contributors of various backgrounds and professions. As English regional and British National accents were providing important stimuli for the further adherence to local lore and language, particularly in Northern England, Wales and Scotland84, it was as if local radio programmes were publicly considered the proper place to exhibit local speech at its best and thus, more or less consciously, to justify the Station. In an interview on BBC Radio Leeds (11/6/96), a local theatre director was talking to the public [ʊ] of great advantages [ɛ∙], of people struggling [ʊ] and things surprising [ɔɪ], and of a play rooted in the past [a], which went right [ɔɪ] in the heart the way it was done [ɔ]. An artist in an interview was doin’ a lot, preferred the red one [ɔ] for practice [a] and was convinced that he was right [ɔɪ], while his colleague invited people to come [ʊ] down and watch. Similarly, on BBC Radio Wales (10/9/96), a Sheffield writer applied his native pronunciations when reading from his novel, using the Northern vowels in grandmother

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[ʊ], uncle [ʊ], one [ɔ] hat and happy laughter [a∙]. On Classic FM (20/7/2000), British Rail offered its customers a chance to save money [ɔ] by getting one [ɔ] pound off all train tickets, through a service that would save them from queueing, frustration [ʊ] ‘n fuss [ʊ], while home insurance facilities were advertising with the serious warning Don’t [ʔ] waste your [ˈweɪçʒɔ:] money. When, on the same day, the Hollywood film The Perfect Storm [ˈpɜ:rfeks`ˈtoˬ:rm] was recommended on Hallam FM, the traditional Northern accent was modified by fashionable glottal stops when the picture ÿ of the year [r] was advertised, with the prospect to get [ʔ] this from any agent. Trendy South Eastern features in the speech of broadcasters were matched and even exceeded when London museum workers were applying context forms and Tglottalling in collections [ˈklekʃənz], opportunity [ˈɒpəˈtʃu:nɪtɪ] and objects [ˈɒbdʒeʔs], and when a cosmologist exhibited a large number of glottal stops in his otherwise standardized speech, in positions as ob[ʔ]viously, at [ʔ] that time and dispite [ʔ] the fact, beside T-deletion in effects [ɪˈfeks] and at least [ˈli:s`] (BBC Radio Wales 8/9/96). Only recently, a Cabinet Office Minister was pointing to difficult issues [ˈɪʃu:z] and to one [wɤãn] of the troubles, and a Conservative leader applied the fashionable retracted [ɤã] in government and popular T-dropping in What [wɒ∙ʔ] we really need (Classic FM, 18/7/00). As Kerswill has underlined, “doctors, scientists, lawyers, teachers, lecturers, industrialists and politicians who appear in the media can be heard using mild Estuary English or another mild regional accent, whereas 30 years ago that would have been the exception” (2001: 6).

4.6.3

Broadcasting for ethnic minorities

In the time of Paul Donoghue’s Report for the BBC (1979), Britain might already be considered “an elaborate mixture of races and traditions no longer ‘English’ in any narrow or unified sense” (p. 20), and local broadcasting saw an additional task in providing facilities for the immigrant population from the West Indies and from various parts of South East Asia and Africa. Beside economic considerations in connection with the opening of a new market for broadcasting, the declared idea was to contribute to the process of integration, as expressed in a BBC Radio London statement of 1979: “we concern ourselves with the social issues that we know press on so many people, and we fulfil an important community service through our advice and help facilities and the many programmes we make that identify the interests of London’s various minority groups” (BBC Local Radio Action Stations 1979: 39). In the

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mid-seventies, several BBC stations had begun to broadcast programmes for ethnic minorities from London, Leicester, Birmingham and other industrial cities in the North West. Listeners were generally supposed to follow the presentations in English, although, by 1990, no more than two-thirds of Asian listeners in a survey used English as their main language, and only fourteen percent spoke it at home (cf. Graham 1991: 70). Shorter Asian language programmes were offered only occasionally: by 1979, BBC Radio Merseyside provided a weekly news bulletin in Chinese, and in Nottingham “several thousand Asians tune(d) in each week to Nawrang, a programme tailored especially to their interests” (cf. BBC Local Radio Action Stations 1979: 44). It was not until the later eighties that Hindi and Urdu News originating from the World Service were included in the programmes of BBC Radio Leicester (cf. Graham 1991: 73). Ten years later, in 1998, the station was providing a daily Asian Current Affairs programme in Hindi and Urdu (beside English) as well as various magazine-type programmes in Hindi, Bengali and Guyarati, in Urdu (for Muslems), in Punjabi (for Sikhs), and in Hindustani being a widely understood mixture of Hindi and Urdu. When, as a station with a long tradition and a large listening public, BBC Asian Network Leicester could announce itself as “The voice of Asians in the Midlands” (Programme Schedule 1998; see Illustration 11), it was not least on grounds of its flexible policies in favour of ethnic language programmes. Other BBC stations had followed the example, among them BBC Radio Leeds, which in 1998 broadcast an Asian current affairs programme each weekday in English, Hindi and Urdu, a onehour magazine-type programme per week in Bengali, and two others in Urdu and Punjabi each on Saturdays. In addition, there was an Asian youth programme in English on Sundays, and special English language programmes were provided for West Yorkshire’s African Carribbean community (information BBC Radio Leeds, May 20, 1998). Programme schedules on the larger Asian radio stations of the later nineties did not differ substantially from those of other BBC Local Radio stations (see above BBC Radio Leeds and Leicester), with the exception that the transmissions were deliberately adjusted to the interests of the immigrant population. Beside specifically Asian folklore, religion and news broadcasts, magazinetype English-based programmes were offered in which styles and languages were combined in particular ways. In a Mid-Morning Show on BBC Asian Network Leicester (28/4/98), the presenter’s announcement in English of a discussion programme was followed by a brief news bulletin, read out with a

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recognizably Asian English accent and intonation and repeated in Hindustani. The bilingual presenter’s English exhibited fashionable pronunciations, including open [ä], elision and final close [i∙] in family [ˈfämli∙] as well as current characteristics of the language of the media. Speed and hastiness were deliberately suggested by swallowed syllables and missing pauses between sentences and sentence parts, and there were hesitation phenomena, repetitions and slips of the tongue which, together with stressed prepositions as in start inˈto the debate ˈfor this morning and dispensable adverbs as first of all, but, now were signalling familiarity and fashionable unconventionality. In spite of the deliberately mixed-language request for listeners’ response, however, all participants were contributing in English (cf. also Graham 1991: 70), possibly corresponding to the perceived official role of the radio requiring the national language. The varying stages of perfection in more or less educated immigrant speech, reaching from broken English over fluent speech with an Asian accent to native-like conversational style in an obviously highly educated contributor, were reflecting the current language situation among the younger generations of immigrants, with English taking the functions of a lingua franca or even of a first language, particularly so among the educated part of the population. Characteristically, an increasing number of teenagers preferred listening to the general programmes of the BBC in the later nineties so that the future of stations for ethnic minorities was seen in new waves of immigrants expected to arrive from countries such as South Africa, rather than in constant numbers of Asian audiences (information BBC Radio Leeds September 1998). However, according to the latest edition of the BBC’s Radio Transmitting Stations of 2001 (p. 22), a separate Local BBC Asian Network station had been launched with four sub-stations by March 1999, in order to respond to further demands. In contrast to BBC Local Radio, the commercial radio stations had from the start been working with immigrant speakers, broadcasting in Asian languages beside English since the 1950s. Their ready response to the needs and expectations of minority-groups – be it Chinese programmes for the Liverpool area or Cantonese and Greek ones for London (cf. Annan Report 1979: 38) – had been the cue to their immediate growth and success. By the later nineties, stations such as Asian Sound Radio in East Lancashire, Sabras in Leicester and Radio XL in Birmingham offered regular twenty-four hour programmes for the large Asian communities of the respective regions. Similar whole-day programmes were provided by London Turkish Radio and London Greek

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Radio, while Spectrum International Radio covered a wider range of ethnic demands for the Greater London area (cf. Radio Authority Pocket Book 1998, alphabetic order). By 1998, Sunrise Radio London (see Plate 10), the largest Asian radio station in Britain, could pride itself of three major and 119 minor premises in Great Britain and of 1.200.000 listeners in Great Britain and Europe (Sunrise Media Pack information 1998). Following the principle of Asian unity, English as the most important lingua franca, in combination with widespread Hindustani, was now forming the basis of about fifty percent of Sunrise programmes (see Illustration 12), in order to secure wide intelligibility among an all-Asian listening public (closer investigations cf. Wotschke 2001: 14 ff.). While immigrant culture was still conceived as “Asian culture set in a western context” and immigrant life in Britain as “a way of life preserving identity and culture” (ibid.), a new orientation was added with the declared aim of “bringing together a community diverse in language and culture” and summarized in the programmatic declaration of “Sunrise Radio believes in one Asian community” (ibid.).

4.7

The language of radio: its influence and feedback

Opinions have been different among linguists with regard to the sociolinguistic role of the language of radio, traditionally seen as the language of BBC News and announcements in England. On the basis of his research into New Zealand broadcast speech, Allan Bell regarded the language of newsreading as “the embodiment of standard speech” reflecting “the language evaluation of society at large” (1983: 29), but later pointed to a special character of broadcast speech, as, on grounds of their particular authority, news media “form a kind of speech community producing their own variety of language” (1991: 9; cf. Leitner 1979: 127). Postulating that the language of news broadcasts was felt by audiences and staff to reflect and express the values and to meet the demands of the issue, Bell considered the psychological background the main factor giving radio news its particular authority and, in the eyes of both media organizers and audiences, to make it “the primary language genre” within the media and “the focus of media content” (1991: 1). In England, questions have repeatedly been asked about a possible standardizing influence of the largely news-orientated language of radio, generally called “BBC English” (see Chaptr Two, RP and the BBC), on the language outside. After Daniel Jones

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had doubted the radio’s influence in the face of “countless other ways of pronunciation” (EPD 1937: X) and The New Oxford Dictionary Supplement allowed for “modification, individual or local” in the educated language (see 2.2.3), Gimson later considered it influential in view of a wide public acceptance of RP (cf. 1962: 83) and, in the decades to follow, the persistent reputation of the BBC as well as its increasing number of stations, programmes and target audiences gave rise to further positive assumptions. Being linked with high intellectual competence in the public mind, the radio seemed to do for RP traditionally prestigious speech what general schooling had been doing for the spread of language standards a century before: being carried to every corner of the country and confronting listeners with what was “right” or “wrong” in the spoken language, BBC English was considered to create an image of the “best”, the most “correct” and the most “beautiful” form of speech (cf. Hughes/Trudgill 1979: 3) and to be accepted by many as “the authentic sound of perfectly spoken English” (O’Donnell/Todd 1980: 89). On grounds of its high social prestige, it was held to encourage modifications to RP and RP-like speech, thus ironing out differences between regional variants and making accents less broad in the younger generations (cf. Barber 1964: 18; Brook 1979: 24 et al.), and it was made responsible for the fact that RP was most commonly described and traditionally taught to foreigners (cf. Gimson 1970: 18, 1980: 84; O’Donnell 1980: 91 et al.). Crystal (1981), however, found the BBC’s role to be “much overestimated” and its influence on general usage “probably minimal if it exist[ed] at all” (p. 38), and Trudgill, in 1988, saw no primary influence except the consolidation of ongoing phonetic changes in the form of a “softening-up process produced by the engendering of favourable attitudes” (quoted in Foulkes/Docherty 1999: 15). Similarly, Lynda Mugglestone (1995) saw the standardizing effects of BBC Radio in “a wider awareness of notions of ‘talking proper’ … rather than that convergent linguistic behaviour on a national scale” (p. 327), but again underlined its “role as a ‘norm’ confirming its status as the ‘best English’ of the ‘best’ speakers” (p. 328). The standardizing function of BBC News and announouncements was terminologically emphasized by Roach and Hartman in their 1997 EPD with the conception of a wider-based BBC English, extending beyond RP (cf. 1997: 5) and being the model for pronunciation and the basis for all ultimate phonetic decisions: “The model used for ‘British English’ is what is referred to as BBC English; this is the pronunciation of professional speakers employed by the BBC as newsreaders and announcers

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on BBC 1 and BBC 2 television, the World Service and BBC Radio 3 and 4, as well as many commercial broadcasting organisations such as ITN”85 (p. VI). Although the inclusion of the latter is reducing the term to absurdity, the vote is clearly in favour of a “standard” for pronunciation set by the BBC. News presentation – be it traditional newsreading of the innovative current affairs complex – had remained the focus of discussion of the radio’s qualities and influence, and this with a clear weight on the productions of the BBC. In connection with a series of post-War sociocultural changes and with corresponding changes in the general organizations of broadcasting services and individual programme-making, however, the focus of the discussion of broadcast speech was beginning to shift from the traditional issue of a news-centred BBC English to the wider language of radio and to aspects of mutual correspondence and influence in the form of an “infectious feedback” (Zimmermann 1982: 426) in the relationship between broadcast speech and the language outside. As Crystal stated in 1981 “BBC English is not an entity that can be defined independently of society at large: it is a reflection of the speech of society” (p. 38), Leitner saw it function “within the context of the wider sociopolitical, technical and economic circumstances and the sociolinguistic structure of the speech community” (cf. 1983: 50). When Mc Arthur regarded RP and Near-RP accents as “no longer exclusive for announcers and continuity on radio and television” (1992: 109), he saw the reasons in the changing scope and nature of RP itself as well as in “a degree of social levelling” leading to “a gradually increasing national use of speakers with other accents” and in the competitive rise of local radio and TV “with a demotic style in which RP might be a handicap” (ibid.). The erosion of social-class boundaries, accompanied by general loosening of speech habits and corresponding changes in the acceptability of the educated language (see 3.5, and especially 3.5.1, 3.5.2, and 3.5.3), had been among the main factors provoking decisive measures on the part of the BBC and also determining the way in which the newly emerging commercial stations were to develop, in answer to the demands and expectations of a mass audience. After public criticism had always been encouraged and observed by the broadcasting media, recent years saw public complaints being dealt with in an increasingly comprehensive manner, regarding responsibilities, control and realization through respective institutions, detailed publication of results at regular intervals as well as a growing range of activities in establishing direct contacts with audiences (see 4.3.2, 4.6.7). In return, new ways in broadcasting on the BBC and Independent Ra-

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dio as well, such as the increasingly relaxed kind of news bulletins, the educated diversity of quality entertainment, the fashionable up-to-datedness of programmes for young people and, not least, the immediateness of magazinetype programmes with their variety of contributions, interviews and phoneins, will have promoted the acceptability of forms other than the “standard” and modified the public notion of what might be considered “good” and “correct” English – and this not only in the sense of a more relaxed RP as still suggested by Leitner in 1982 (p. 103 f.), but of a wider, socially less committed educated language. With the emergence of popular features in all kinds of programmes on the BBC and with the spread of Local Radio stations in particular, Giles and Powesland regarded the radio as no longer an exclusively standardizing influence but a medium which was “promulgating regional accents throughout the nation” (1975: 27), in the same way as Bell considered the local media to be “as powerful promoters of local dialect as national media were of the standard” (1983: 40). Spurred by the innovative competition of the newly emerging commercial radio stations and of the new medium of television, and strengthened by the explosive expansion of services, the effect of the new popular orientation of broadcasting is indeed likely to have superceeded any standardizing influence of what had remained of straight newsreading, the traditional focus of linguistic interest and discussion. Furthering the spread of what Dwight Bolinger called “a speech more and more liberated by audio and video” (1980: 51), broadcasting in the late twentieth century will have loosened social bonds and encouraged growing accent tolerance, socially as well as regionally, thereby promoting the consolidation of a wider-based educated language in England. And with audiences becoming ever younger, not least through the great variety and attraction of offerings for children of different age groups, early and therefore lasting influence of the new kind of broadcast speech on the coming generation has to be taken for granted. This is not to overestimate the influence of the media but to underline their role in the give and take of a highly mobile social world, in a period when popular fashions are leading the way and deliberate unconventionality is reflecting the spirit of the time.

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Conclusion

In the post-War development of educated pronunciation in England socioregional accents were acting as important factors in processes of innovation and change. Being rooted in traditional grounds and modified by current developments, they proved to be highly sensitive markers of their speakers’ personality and social background, affecting personal interaction in the same way as wider opportunities in education, occupation and integration on all levels. With its psycho-social implications, speech accent might be an anchor or a barrier, (dis) qualifying individuals with corresponding effects on their personal self-esteem, (dis)connecting people’s relationships to each other, or marking them as members of a (dis)qualified social group. Answering the social challenge, there might be examples of deliberate accent loyalty among members of the same speech community on the one hand and instant aversion to speakers of accents diverging from the familiar model on the other. Linguistic self-hatred among speakers of broad socioregional accents in the face of prestigious speech, however, indicated the tenacity of long-standing accent prejudice caused by the existence of the strongly traditional, institutionally standardized prestige variant of RP. With its roots in aristocratic London society, a prestigious pronunciation had grown, in deliberate contrast to socioregional speech and in correlation with the developing standard language, making any study in educated pronunciation appear more or or less closely related to the prestigious Southern variant. Although, in more recent times, new linguistic conceptions began to reach beyond the traditional borders of RP, pronunciation features have continued to be viewed in relation to their proximity to or deviation from the traditional “focus”, and leading dictionaries have almost unanimously proceeded to define a “standard” pronunciation of RP in correlation with standard English and BBC English. And even though, in the eyes of many, the claim of RP to a standard function increasingly lost its sociolinguistic justification towards the turn of the century, there has never been any serious doubt about its exceptional role in the world of power and prestige. It was the tension between standard-oriented linguistic self-condemnation and regional accent loyalty that determined the ways in which educated pronunciation was developing in the second half of the past century. On the one hand,

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there were different kinds of approximation to prestigious speech, including locally affiliated Near-RP accents as well as eagerly adoptive lower middle class variants. On the other, increasing penetration of traditionally educated pronunciation by regional accent features on grounds of post-War democratic measures in education and resulting sociogeographical mobility were making regional speech forms socially acceptable in the same way as their carriers were accepted in the world of the educated and successful. Resulting mergers between socially contrasting accents were exemplified by the extraordinarily influential variant of Estuary English, a case of successful sociolinguistic convergence between Cockney and RP. Most substantial changes in the pattern of educated pronunciation, however, were caused by those questioning traditional conventions and refusing to abandon their local accents in favour of the prestige variant. At no time were the justification of a standard language for the country and of binding articulatory norms for educated speech so seriously questioned and at no time were regionalisms so deliberately cultivated and proudly defended as in the second half of the twentieth century. In connection with fundamental changes in the sociolinguistic determination of educated pronunciation in England, a development had set in after the War in which the old question about the hegemony of one particular accent became irrelevant in the face of a new diversity, and the idea of a prescriptive “standard” had to give way to generally acceptable “standards” of pronunciation. Under the new conditions of unprecedented variability in the educated language, any further attempt at the description and definition of its articulatory pattern had necessarily to be based on complex sociolinguistic grounds, in order to meet the realities of current usage. As RP could no longer be regarded as an equivalent to educated speech, there was the challenge to develop and establish a realistic concept allowing for systematic description and unbiased discussion of educated pronunciation features and tendencies. The proposed concept of an Educated English English (EEE) in pronunciation allows for variation within the educated norms, with its model representing the socially prestigious, the fashionably relaxed and the regionally affiliated centred around a common core and being, at the same time, open to overlapping features between the variants. Including trendy fashions and mildly regional accents beside traditionally prestigious speech, EEE offers an alternative to previous conceptions in so far as it does not treat RP as a criterion of articulatory acceptability, but considers it part of an overall pattern of educated pronunciation in England.

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Since the invention of broadcasting, the spoken language has become continuously recorded in the media, mirroring established features and indicating current changes in language habits and acceptability. When, in a kind of compromise between traditional strategies and public criticism, the conservative language policy of the early BBC was abandoned in favour of a more widely acceptable usage and local and commercial radio stations were spreading beside television, broadcast speech came to reflect the whole diversity of the educated language. Revolutionizing the news bulletins, focusing on young fashions, and giving regional accents a chance also in national broadcasting, important changes were creating a situation in which research into the sociolinguistic role of broadcast speech had to exceed the borders of classical newsreading and to include those other kinds of programmes where the overwhelming proportion of the language of radio was presented. Intensive public awareness and criticism continued to confirm the persisting model function of broadcast speech which, through a new variability of styles and accents, has become much less standardizing than before. Thus, with its wide reach, its great prestige, and its close connections with the public, the language of broadcasting may be considered not only an indicator but also a motivator of language change. However far the influence of the radio may have gone on the language attitudes and habits of the listening public, broadcast speech in England traditionally means high perfection and, consequently, implies linguistic authority, if no longer socially exclusive so perfect in the sense of current cultural patterns. After hundreds of years of permanent development of a London-based aristocratic “standard” of pronunciation and almost a hundred years’ growth of an (upper) middle-class prestige accent, accompanied by the virtual exclusion of popular speech and its speakers from the realms of established prestige, the second half of the twentieth century was an extraordinarily dynamic time, with social borders becoming fluid and linguistic demarcation lines increasingly hard to draw. A new acceptability of socioregional accents, in connection with cosmopolitan tendencies in young speech, has put an end to the educated exclusiveness of RP, and easily recognizable regional affiliations have become involved in the patterning of a wider educated language. The pluralistic society has created its linguistic pluralism of which historical traditions, established features and recent fashions are integral parts, each in its own right.

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Notes

............................................ 1

The dialect structure of England was described on a two-dimensional pyramid, the vertical plain standing for “class” and the horizontal one for “region”, with regional differentiation being widest on the base and diminishing along a social scale towards the apex of the cone (cf. Halliday 1964: 148; Trudgill 1979: 11; Wright 1974: 4).

2

Features like these may be considered as a continuation of the Great Vowel Shift, surpassing the stage of the modern RP vowel system, in a development unabridged by the necessary conservatism of a social prestige variant (cf. Arnold/Engel 1978: 48 ff.).

3

For a large number of further slang expressions with references to origins and meanings cf. Franklyn’s Dictionary of Rhyming Slang (1991).

4

The Survey’s material was compiled since 1945 and completed between 1962 and 1971 by Harold Orton, Eugen Dieth and eleven field workers, providing the basis for The Linguistic Atlas of England, later edited by Harold Orton, Stewart Sanderson and J. D. A. Widdowson in 1978 (cf. Orton 1962: Preface; Orton et al. 1978: Foreword).

5

According to Widdowson (2005: 13), 700 ways of saying play truant, 480 expressions for cold and 240 words for left-handed have, among others, have been collected in the Voices project.

6

North-South divides differ with the different articulatory criteria of the Severn-Wash line as referred to by Wells, Trudgill’s North West – South East distinction basing on divides in Hdropping, in-endings and sounded final r, and Preston’s “southwards slide” reflecting the pull of London and the Home Counties and resulting in a division reminiscent of Old English dialect areas (cf. Wales 2000: 14).

7

About 1970, the spread of intrusive r was regarded as “quite recently” by Wells (cf. 1970: 241), while Ellis still considered it to be mainly confined to the South East and the Middle of England, being “a regional usage common in the local speech of Warwickshire and the South East Midland counties from Northants to the Thames” (1972: 877).

8

In Cardiff (Welsh) English, glottallization came to be prestigious rather than stigmatized, decreasing down the scale, with its spread being lead by young middle-class females deliberately approximating to London metropolitan fashions and Estuary English (cf. Mees/Collins 1999: 192 ff., 201).

9

/f ~ v/-replacement is also found in the Cockney-influenced vernaculars of various Englishspeaking countries, among them working-class New York speech and Harlem Black English (cf. Labov 1966: 244 ff.; 1972: 265).

10 Concerning comparative tendencies in the USA, the “student’s right to his own language” was claimed, in protest to an exclusion of the “Black experience” from the socialization process (cf. Colquit 1977: 17 ff.), and a “non-directive approach” was demanded to prevent an eradication of ethnic speech and the ambiguity of bidialectalism (cf. Baron 1975: 176 ff.). 11 The situation in England is comparable with that in the USA, where the social and educational problems surrounding Blacks in the North had created, in the minds of most Americans, a “direct connection between nonstandard English and ineducability” (Smith/ Lance 1979: 131). 12 In Bernstein’s Class, Codes and Control (1971), an elaborated code with a “relatively extensive range of linguistic alternatives” was distinguished from a restricted code with a range “often severely limited”, and both defined as “functions of a particular from a social relationship or, more generally, qualities of social structure” as represented in middle-class and working-class children (p. 76 f.; cf. p. 84 ff.). 13 For reactions in Edinburgh school children, see language judgements of eleven year olds on posh and non-posh as quoted by Euan Reid: “some girls … when they talk to their teacher they talk a sort of posh … and when they talk to their pals they talk just normal”, for “if you talk with the same accent as they do they will just think … you’re one of us in a way” (1984: 169 f.). The final

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........................................................................................................................................................................... result of the schools’ standardizing endeavours was summed up by one of the boys: “you just keep your mouth shut and you don’t say much” (ibid. 170). 14 Similar alternatives, reaching from compensatory language programmes for lower-class (mainly Black) children over liberal conceptions to extreme positions in favour of ethnic and linguistic diversity, were discussed in the USA about the same time, accompanied by scepticism concerning the effects of standardization measures. (Smith/ Lance 1979: 134 f.). 15 Based on ideas of social equality in education, the first comprehensive schools were built in Coventry in 1954. After controversial discussion, the comprehensive system was generally adopted since the end of the sixties, largely replacing the old tri-partite system of elementary, secondary and grammar schools by the mid-eighties (cf. Burgess 1994: 128, 132 ff.). 16 In American English, arbitrary sensitivities were, after Milroy, and Milroy, concerning change of rhotic speech from low to high prestige within living memory (cf. 1985: 20, 96 f.). 17 The language situation in Scotland was traditionally characterized by a relatively high prestige of Scottish regional accents in middle-class “hybrid” speech, coexisting with Educated Scottish Standard English as an accent favoured by either middle class or other educated speakers mainly for official purposes, and an increasing commitment to historical literary Scots in the form of New Scots (in contrast to broad Scots; cf. Aitken 1984: 521 ff.). 18 An upgrading of RP in terms of prestige and competence against non-standard varieties was also found in Australia and New Zealand (cf. Edwards 1982: 25) and generalized in the diglossic relationship between a “purer” and “better” High language and a socially “unifying” and “separatist” Low language by Fasold (1984: 158). 19 Spencer (1958: 9) presented a selection of popular terms for RP, such as “talking lah-di-da” or “posh”, “cut-glass accent”, “Oxford accent”, “B.B.C.voice”, “Queen’s English”, “public school accent”, and “talking like a gentleman”. 20 While a broad Welsh English accent was a sign of national identity and its speakers were upgraded on most personality traits, including trustworthiness and kindness as well as intellectual competence, RP-accented Welshmen were rated highly on “conservatism”, “snobbishness” and “arrogance” (cf. Elyan/ Smith 1978: 123; Giles/ Powesland 1975: 76 f.; et al.). 21 According to Morrish (1999: 1), a collection of authentic tapes at the British Library going back to the late nineteenth century contains specimens of numerous subclasses of a hundred years’ variation in “posh”. 22 Similar effects of sociolinguistic conditioning were, among others, reported from French speakers in the Montreal of 1960 where, at the same time, English speakers were not only judged more intelligent and more dependable but also taller and better-looking, on grounds of a “communitywide stereotype” (Lambert et al. 1960: 44 ff.). 23 Negative attitudes like these were reported from Cardiff where broad Welsh English varieties were regarded with approbrium, particularly by the working class itself, and radio presenters overwhelmingly use RP or adjacent accents without Welsh associations (cf. Mees/ Collins 1999: 201). 24 See Gimson’s post-War stratification of traditional RP into conservative, general and advanced (1962 : 84 f.), his concepts of a revised standard (1979: 155 f.), a wider-based RP (IPS 1980: 362) and a High Acceptability RP (ibid. 307 ff.) as well as similar conceptions by Wells, Quirk, Lewis and others. 25 The fact, however, that “conservative” was not necessarily identical with RP was underlined in Honey’s description of regional affiliations in the speech of Conservative politicians of the 1970s and 80s (cf. 1989: 142 ff.). 26 Catering for 5 percent of pupils at normally £ 2,000 (Morgan/ Morgan 1980: 85) or £ 3,000 (cf. Herbst/ Roe 1982: 72) a year in the early 1980s, public schools were said to number 200 by Bourke (1979: 18) and 460 or 470 by Herbst/ Roe (1982: 70, 72), with the first number probably referring to public boarding schools and the second including both boarding and day schools. 27 There is good reason to assume that early medieval prestige varieties, particularly of the written language, had been arising in the time of the Anglian and Mercian overkingships between 700 and 850 as well as during the West Saxon hegemony under King Ælfred (849–899); (cf. Bailey 1991: 17; Barber 1993: 105 f.).

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........................................................................................................................................................................... 28 Speaking English beside French, the King’s brother Richard, Earl of Cornwall, was elected Emperor of Germany partly on account of his ability to speak a language which was then considered similar in sound to German (cf. Baugh/ Cable 1978: 136). 29 The reason for the ready East and South Midland influence on the developing London standard may, after Wales (2000: 8), be looked for in their relative linguistic proximity to each other on grounds of an early divide as a result of King Alfred’s truce of 878 with the invading Danes, through which England was put on “a kind of North-East/ South-West axis”, with the resulting Danelaw/ Watling Street line probably making the West Midlands become linguistically distinct from the East Midlands and East Anglia. 30 Chancery English or Chancery Standard being “terms for the written usage of the clerks of Chancery in London, who prepared the King’s documents” (McArthur 1992: 207). 31 First mention of the creative power of the poet is found in the beginning sentence of The First Booke, Of Poets and Poesie, by reference to the Greek word ποιειν (make): “A poet is as much to say as a maker … in that he makes and contriues out of his owne braine both the verse and matter of his poeme, and not by any foreine copie or example as doth the translator”(ibid. 1). 32 Cockney probably derives from Middle English cokene (gen. Pl.) ey, and with its meaning of “small” or “unshapen”, was attributed to a pampered child or an effeminated townsman, especially to one born in the city of London (cf. Hoad, [Dictionary of] English Etymology 1993: 82). Though both parts of the word can be referred to Old English origins (cocc, kok-eaʒə; cf. ibid. 8), its semantic and acoustic closeness to French acoquiné, also meaning “spoilt” and referred to a child or a youth (cf. Arnold 1978: 47), might point to direct borrowing or at least to reinforcement from French usage. 33 In their earlier development, the old public schools like Winchester (founded in 1382), Eton (founded 1440) and Harrow (founded 1571) had been intended for the benefit of the “poor and needy”: there were still a son of a barber-surgeon, a black-smith, a bricklayer and a cook beside nineteen sons of gentleman among the alumni in the mid-seventeenth century, and even in the time of increasing social hierarchy around 1700 and after, there were still boys of “comparatively plebeian origin” (cf. Mugglestone 1995: 260, 270). 34 In the nineteenth century, there had been repeated claims for “provincial dialects” as “remnants of the Anglo-Saxon tongue” (Bosworth 1838) and “true and good forms of Teutonic speech” (Barnes 1862), and Ellis (1869-89) had been pleading for the “National English Pronunciation” having been “handed down historically” (Sources cf. Crowley 1989: 139 ff.). 35 In Smart’s own words, his phonetic confidence sprang from the fact that he was “born and bred in the west end of London” and had been a “leader of elocution in the finest families of the kingdom” (1836:xi). 36 In his comprehensive five-volume work, written in the years between 1869 and 1889, Alexander Ellis frequently used the term “received pronunciation”, mostly with lower-case initials and also referring to American and Irish pronunciation, while glossing its abbreviation RP as “received pronunciation or that of pronunciation dictionaries and educated people” with reference to the English prestige accent (cf. Lewis 1985: 245). 37 After appearing as An English Pronouncing Dictionary between 1917 and 1944, the Dictionary changed its title into Everyman’s English Pronouncing Dictionary in 1950 (appearing in the Everyman’s Reference Books series, London) and, with one interruption in 1955, was kept as such until 1989. Since the 1991 Re-edition, provided by Susan Ramsaran (Gimson and Ramsaran), the Dictionary appeared under the title of English Pronouncing Dictionary. 38 Coinciding with the use of the epithet in Wyld’s Received Standard or Received Standard English, rsp. (cf. 1914: 236, 1920: 2), Jones’s term may have been based directly on the more or less terminological usage of “received” by Wyld in an article of 1913, recommended by Jones to the interested reader for the conception of “Standard English pronunciation” in his 1914 Outline of English Phonetics (cf. footnote 1, p. 4). Both applications may also have gone back to Alexander Ellis’ Early English Pronunciation of 1869–89, where “received” and “educated” were alternating (cf. pt. 1, p. 23). 39 First Chairman of the Committee was poet laureate Robert Bridges, and its members originally included, among others, Professor Daniel Jones, Arthur Lloyd James (later professor of phonet-

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........................................................................................................................................................................... ics), the dramatist George Bernard Shaw, and a representative of the Society of Pure English (cf. Ferris 1977: 820 f.; Lidell 1979: 478). 40 Further editions of Broadcast English included collections of English (II, 1930), Scottish (III, 1932) and Welsh (IV, 1934) placenames. 41 McArthur reports the instalment of the BBC Empire Service in 1932, developing into the BBC’s Overseas Services and then into the BBC World Service (1992: 152). 42 Sir Henry Newbolt (1862–1938) – a poet, barrister, novelist, member of the English Association and controller of wireless and cables during World War I – was Chair of the Government Commission of 1919 which produced The Teaching of English in England, published in 1921 (cf. Giles, Middleton 1995: 153). 43 According to Wyld (1934: 615), The Tract was written in defence of Standard British English against the attack of an American linguist, Dr. Vizetelli, who had described it as “a mixture of some of the worst types of vulgarism, and of preposterous affectations”. 44 A. S. C. Ross, author of Linguistic Class Indicators in Present-Day English (1954), was disputable in his time mainly on grounds of his conservative social attitudes and judgements (cf. Vachek 1960: 227), equating upper class (U) with “correct, proper, legitimate, appropriate (sometimes also possible)” while labelling non-upper-class speech “non-U, incorrect, not proper, not legitimate, etc.” (Ross 1954: 21). 45 Wells referred U-RP in-endings to an eighteenth century fashion preceeding -ing as an innovation on grounds of a spelling pronunciation from the 1820s onwards (cf. 1982: 262). After Wardhaugh, -in always existed alongside -ing and, though widely replaced by it in the seventeenth century, did not vanish completely but survived until the 1920s or 1930s when it was still heard from older U-RP speakers (1999: 64). 46 Sloane Ranger takes its first element from Sloane Square in the prestigious area of Kensington (West London) and combines this in a pun with the second element of the TV character of The Lone Ranger, here embodying masked Cowboy-assuming people (further information cf. Wikipedia: 2006, website). 47 While, after Gimson, loss of phonemes and obscuration of vowels in weakly accented syllables had been traditional since Old English (cf. 1980: 234), elision may be considered one of the most influential characteristics in the development of the London-based standard variant since the fifteenth century and assimilation will have been influential since about 1700 (cf. Barber 1964. 44; Wardhaugh 1999: 62). 48 According to Wells, intrusive r became characteristic of London speech after the middle of the eighteenth century, first mentioned by Sheridan in 1762 and encountered in RP since the nineteenth century (cf. 1982: 227). Gimson saw it as an “analogous formation” to linking r, e. g. in far ÿ of, being extended to all [ɑ:ə]- and [ɔ:ə]-endings, even those without historical (i. e. spelling) justification (cf. 1980: 208). 49 The general absence of glottal features in Australian English, whose main origins are to be looked for in the eighteenth century London or Cockney English, led Cruttenden to assume that T-glottalling most probably originated in London Cockney within the last two hundred years (cf. 1994: 157). 50 Scouse being usually defined as the working-class accent of Liverpudlians (cf. McArthur 1992: 910; et al.), the variant was seen by Knowles as Liverpool speech with Anglo-Irish influence, characterized not only by its particular articulatory features but also by a distinctive tone of voice and a range of peculiarities in intonation (cf. 1978: 80 ff.). 51 Both developments have been considered continuations of the Early Modern English Great Vowel Shift of predominantly the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The former was based on a renewed shift of the close vowel monophthongs in the direction of the (as before “non-standard”) diphthongs [əɪ] and [əʊ] (cf. Barber 1993: 269 f.); the latter consisted in a closing and rounding of the Middle English diphthong [ɑu] and its possible variant [ɑ:] (e. g. in law and water; cf. Gimson 1980: 118) and an additional lengthening of short [ɔ] in horse together with the loss of postvocalic r during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, rsp. 52 Until 1970, final close /i:/ had been confined by Gimson to “certain kinds of London and Australian English” in the 1962 and 1970 IPE (cf. pp. 97 and 102).

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........................................................................................................................................................................... 53 The hesitant character of the process is seen in the light of historical judgements by Robert Bridges, then President of the Society for Pure English, who in 1913 judged coalescence “established” in nature and happening in cases such as Tuesday, tune and Don’t you (cf. Ramsaran 1991: 187). 54 The special phonetic transcription used by Wells has been adapted here to the inventory of the current alphabet of the International Phonetics Association. 55 /ɪ/ was, nevertheless, still regarded as “weakly dominant” over /ə/ in -less, -ness endings as in careless, goodness, and the change was not considered relevant for endings on -age as in average and for endings on -ed and -es, where schwa might lead to homophony in cases as chatted/ chattered and races/ racers (cf. Gimson 1970: 18; 1979: 156: 1984: 52). 56 “Mid-Atlantic” was, after Honey, the result of the spread of the “Sunbelt accent” from the Appalachian Mountains over the whole of Middle America after 1945 (cf. Honey 1989: 66 f.). 57 After Beal (2000: 483 ff.), however, happy tensing in Northern accents may be considered to have been an acceptable feature for more than two hundred years and not necessarily a recent innovation from the South. 58 Charles Barber saw Yod-dropping as the continuation of a process of redistribution of /ju:/ and /u:/, starting about 1600 when the Middle English falling diphthong [ɪʊ] became [ju:] or [u:] as in new and June, rsp., while, in words such as suit, lute and enthusiasm, the case remained unresolved (cf. Barber 1993: 270). 59 Until then, a considerable number of ambiguous terms had been used for RP, including “Educated English”, “Southern English”, “London English”, “British English”, “Standard English”, “Oxford Accent”, and “King’s or Queen’s English” (cf. Germer 1966: 11 f.; Spencer 1958: 9). 60 In the USA, however, the term General American had been unfounded and denied by a number of linguists, in favour of either a division into major and minor speech areas (cf. Smith/ Lance 1979: 131 f.) or the principle of grouping mainly after colours and minorities (cf. Giles/ Powesland 1975: 38 ff., 45). 61 Cf. RP being “no longer the preserve of the social elíte”, but “the standard accent of the Royal Family, Parliament, the Church of England, the High Courts, and other national institutions”; “found … anywhere in the country”, but “associated with the south-east” (Crystal 1995: 365). 62 For American English, Bailey described the phenomenon as the “crossover of the second-highest class”, whose speakers are even exceeding those of the highest class in their extensive use of prestigious speech forms (cf. 1973: 176 ff.). 63 A new approach to the problem was presented by Mathisen (1999), arguing that innovation in the adoption and spread of glottallization and T-glottalling was lead by middle-class female speakers and in-endings were promoted particularly by teenage girls approximating to the local prestige norm (cf. pp. 113 f.). 64 According to McArthur (1992), modified accents in Ireland, Scotland, Australia, Newzealand and South Africa were also found to be referred to as “near-RP” (p. 851). 65 Treating Emily Brontë’s classic as a written source of the original Haworth dialect, a critical investigation of its spelling, pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary by K. M. Petyt was published by the Yorkshire Dialect Society in 1970 (see References 1). Further investigations into Northern dialects in modern fiction were led by K. E. Smith and Brian Spencer on J. B. Priestley and Elizabeth Gaskell, rsp., and presented in the Transactions of the Yorkshire Dialect Society 2001 (p. 8 ff., 40 ff.). 66 H-dropping rates were varying between 12 percent and 28 percent (upper and lower middle class, rsp.) in London and between 6 percent and 14 percent (middle middle and lower middle class, rsp.) in Norwich, in comparison to between 67 percent and 93 percent and between 40 percent and 61 percent, rsp., among the upper and lower working class of the respective places (cf. Hughes/ Trudgill 1982: 7; more recent findings cf. Foulkes/ Docherty 1999: 9). 67 After Giles and others (1975: 57), downward convergence might either be “integrative” (“convergent”) or “dissociative” (“divergent”), that means either claiming membership in the subordinate group (cf. ibid. 191) or signalling divergence from the superior group (cf. Bradac/ Giles 1991: 4; Fasold 1984: 1919.

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........................................................................................................................................................................... 68 In this connection, Widdowson reminds us of the long-standing use of isn’t it as a tag question in Welsh speakers, although he believes that the present tendency in English English has different origins. 69 According to Wells’ 1990 Pronunciation Dictionary, preferences by poll panels were 15 percent in favour of ‘increase, 38 percent for ‘dispute, 20 percent for ‘research, 56 percent for con’troversy and 46 percent for for’midable. 70 Cf. the retracted /ʌ/ in Daniel Jones’s Outline of English Phonetics (1922: 17). Historically, the centralization and retraction of /ʌ/ marks a turning point in a century-long lowering and fronting movement with its climax in the strongly lowered and fronted post-War realization of the phoneme approaching Cardinal [a] (cf. Gimson IPE 1980: 110 f.). 71 After Wells, [su:t] was preferred over [sju:t] by 72 percent to 28 percent of a British English poll panel (1994 (1): 4; cf. Pronunciation Dictionary 1990: 689). 72 Cockney expressions, together with their corresponding pronunciations, were exported to Australia by British convicts whose main roots were in the South East of England, since the First Fleet had arrived in Port Jackson in 1788 to establish the first penal colony (cf. McCrum et al. 1986: 307 ff.). 73 The phonetic symbols used by Wells (cf. 1994 (2) and (3)) have been replaced here and in further quotations by their equivalents in the alphabet of the International Phonetic Association. 74 Once widespread for German airraids on British cities in World War II (cf. “blitz attacks”; Longman Dictionary of English Language and Culture. Harlow 1992: 118). 75 Being based on the written language, Standard American English was described by Smith and Lance as a norm applying almost exclusively to morphology and syntax, with very few lexical items considered as stigmatized and pronunciation being largely a regional matter, its variants being generally tolerated or even expected (cf. 1979: 179, 129 f.). 76 Criticism of that kind is not new in Britain: In “A Plea for the Queen’s English” of 1864, Henry Alford had complained on “The process of deterioration which our Queen’s English has undergone at the hands of the Americans” (quoted in Crystal 1981: 38). 77 Table of scoring rates for different stations and subjects cf. McGregor 1987: 55. 78 Programmes provided primarily for the national regions were controlled by Regional Broadcasting Councils in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland in cooperation with TV (cf. BBC Report 1991/92: 40 ff.). 79 For the reorganization of the World Service in the early nineties (cf. Walker 1992: 156 ff.). 80 Having been formed at an uncertain date in the 1940s to replace the Advisory Committee on Spoken English (suspended in 1939), the Unit’s tasks are “not to promote a standard BBC accent but to decide on “the pronunciation of individual words and names” (McArthur 1992: 112). 81 Similar habits have recently gained ground in German radio broadcasts, with stresses on prepositions particularly in announcements (‘in der nächsten Stunde) and in weather forecasts (der Himmel ‘über Frankfurt am Main), but also in reports and commentaries in regional and national broadcasting, for instance on Deutschlandfunk and Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk. 82 BBC Television had been launched on 2 November 1936, offering a wide variety of programmes, including news, plays, ballet, opera, concerts, magazine programmes and others, and reaching about 20,000 households in the London area until 1939 (cf. Cain 1992: 31 ff.). 83 According to the BBC Producers’ Guidelines of 1997, advertising was prohibited as “programmes should never give the impression that they were endorsing any product” and “BBC core services … must not carry paid advertising” (p. 212). 84 After Welsh language programmes had been transmitted by BBC Radio and Television since 1967 (cf. Khleif 1979: 63), half the Welsh speaking population voted for daily programmes in Welsh to prevent a further decline of the language and of traditional social and cultural values (cf. Bellin 1984: 470). 85 ITN (Independent Television News) is a news service providing news reports for Independent Television (cf. Longman Dictionary of English Language and Culture 1992: 698).

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BAUGH, A. C.; CABLE, Thomas, A History of the English Language. London, New York, Sydney 1991. BEAL, Joan, Happy-tensing: A recent innovation? In: Bermudez-Otero et al. (Eds.), Generative Theory and Corpus Studies. A Dialogue from IOICCHL. Berlin 2000. BELL, Allan, Broadcast news as a language standard. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 40, 1983. _____, The Language of News Media. Oxford UK and Cambridge MA 1991. BELLIN, Wynford, Welsh and English in Wales. In: Peter Trudgill (Ed.), Language in the British Isles. Cambridge 1984. BERNSTEIN, Basil, Some sociolinguistic determinants of perception, an inquiry into sub-cultural differences. In: J. A. Fishman, Readings in the Sociology of Language. The Hague, Paris 1968. _____, Class, Codes and Control. London 1971. BLOUNT, G. B.; SANCHES, Mary (Eds.), Sociocultural Dimensions of Language Change. New York 1977. BOLINGER, Dwight, Language – the Loaded Weapon. London, New York 1980. BOOMER, Gerth; SPENDER, Dale, The Splitting Image. Reflections on Language, Education and Social Class. Adelaide, Sidney etc. 1976. BOURHIS, Th. J.; GILES, Howard; LAMBERT, W. E., Social Consequences of Accommodating One’s Style of Speech: A Cross-National Investigation. Journal of the Sociology of Language 6, 1975. BOURKE, J. B. A Short History for Students of English. München 1979. BRADAC, J. J.; GILES, Howard, Social and Educational Consequences of Language Attitudes. Moderna Språk. Vol. LXXXV. No. 1, 1991. BRIDGES, Robert (1929) see below, page 246. BROOK, J. L., Varieties of English. London 1979 (1st ed. 1973). BRITAIN, David (Ed.), Language in the British Isles. Cambridge 2007. BURCHFIELD, R.W.; DONOGHUE, Dennis; TIMOTHY, Anthony (1979) see below page 246. BURGESS, Anthony (Ed.), The Riverside Chaucer. Oxford 1988. BURGESS, R. G., Aspects of education in post-war Britain. In: James Obelkevih; Peter Catterall, Understanding post-war British Society. London 1994. BURNLEY, David, The History of the English Language. London, New York 1992. BURROW, J. A.; TURVILLE-PETRE, Thorlac, A Book of Middle English. Oxford 1992. CAMPAGNAC, E. T. (Ed.), Mulcaster’s Elementarie. Oxford 1925. CHAPMAN, R. W., Oxford English. S. P. E. Tract No. XXXVII. Oxford 1932. CHAUCER, Geoffrey, Troilus and Criseyde (1382–87?). In: Anthony Burgess (Ed.), The Riverside Chaucer. Oxford 1988. CHESHIRE, Jenny, Linguistic variation and social function. In: Suzanne Romaine, Sociolinguistic Variation in Speech Communities. London 1982. COGGLE, Paul, Do You Speak Estuary? London 1993

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ELLIS, Alexander, On Early English Pronunciation with Especial Reference to Shakespeare and Chaucer. Parts 1 and 2. London 1869. ELYAN, Owen; SMITH, Philip; GILES, Howard; BOURHIS, Richard, RP-accented female speech: The voice of perceived androgyny? In: Peter Trudgill (Ed.), Sociolinguistic Patterns in British English. London 1978. ENGLAND, Gerald; SMITH, K. E. (Eds.), Words Throo ‘t’ shuttle ee. An Anthology of Industrial Dialect Verse from Victorian South and West Yorkshire. Published by the Yorkshire Dialect Society. Ilkley 1983. ESLING, John, Everyone has an Accent Except Me. In: Laurie Bauer and Peter Trudgill (Eds.), Language Myths. Harmondsworth 1998. EUSTACE, S. S., Present Changes in English Pronunciation. Proceedings of the 6th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. Prague 1967. FASOLD, Ralph, The Sociolinguistics of Society. Oxford 1984. FERGUSON, C. A., Language Development. In: J. A. Fishman, C. A. Ferguson and G. Das Gupta (Eds.), Language Problems of Developing Nations. New York 1968. FERGUSON, C. A.; DAS GUPTA, G. (Eds.), Language Problems of Developing Nations. New York 1968. FINEGAN, Edward, Unconscious Attitudes Towards Linguistic Variation. In: Greenbaum, Sidney, The English Language Today. Oxford, New York 1985. FISHER, John Hurt, Chancery and the emergence of standard written English in the fifteenth century. Spectrum 52 (1977). FISHMAN, J. A. (Ed.), Readings in the Sociology of Language. The Hague, Paris 1968. _____, Contributions to the Sociology of Language. The Hague, Paris 1972. FORSTER, Ben, The Changing English Language. London 1968. FOULKES, Paul; DOCHERTY, G. J., Urban Voices. Accent Studies in the British Isles. London 1999. FRIES, Udo; MÜLLER; Viviane; SCHNEIDER, Peter (Eds.), From Ælfric to the New York Times. Studies in English Corpus Linguistics. Amsterdam 1997. GERMER, Rudolf, Wesen und Wandlung der ‘Received Pronunciation’ seit Jones. Neusprachliche Mitteilungen 1, 1967. GILBERT, Martin, The Routledge Atlas of British History. New York, Oxford 1993. GILES, Howard, Evaluative Reactions to Accents. Educational Review 22, 1970. _____, Ethnocentrism and the Evaluation of Accented Speech. British Journal of social and clinical Psychology 10, 1971. _____, Patterns of Evaluation in Reaction to R. P., South Welsh and Somerset Accented Speech. British Journal of social and clinical Psychology 10, 1971. _____, Evaluation of Personality Content from Accented Speech as a Function of Listeners’ Social Attitudes. Perceptual and Motor Skills 34, 1972. _____ (Ed.), Language, Ethnicity and Intergroup Relations. London etc. 1977. _____, Social Psychology and Applied Linguistics: Towards an Integrative Approach. ITL. Review of Applied Linguistics 1977.

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Special: JONES, Daniel, An English Pronouncing Dictionary. London, New York 1917; Everyman’s English Pronouncing Dictionary. London, New York 1960 (repr. of 11th edn 1956); Everyman’s English Pronouncing Dictionary. Ed. by A. C. Gimson, London, New York 1977; English Pronouncing Dictionary. Re-ed. by A. C. Gimson and Susan Ramsaran, Cambridge 1991.

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English Pronouncing Dictionary. Re-ed. by Peter Roach and James Hartman, Cambridge 1997. WELLS, J. C., Pronunciation Dictionary, London 1990. FRANKLYN, Julian, A Dictionary of Rhyming Slang. London, New York 1991 (1st publ. 1960). HOAD, T. F. (Ed.), The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology. Oxford 1993.

BBC and Radio Authority publications and documentations (chronological) BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation): JAMES, A. Lloyd, Broadcast English I. Recommendations to Announcers Regarding Certain Words of Doubtful Pronunciation. London 1928. BRIDGES, Robert, The BBC’s Recommendations for Pronouncing Doubtful Words Reissued with Criticism. S. P. E. Tract No. XXXII. London 1929. ABERCROMBIE, David, The Way People Speak. The Listener 6, London 1951. FERRIS, Paul, English as she is broadcast. The Listener, 22–29 December 1977. LIDELL; Alvar, Newsweeding. The Listener, 5 April 1979. BURCHFIELD, R. W.; DONOGHUE, Dennis; TIMOTHY, Anthony, The Quality of Spoken English on BBC Radio. A Report for the BBC. London 1979. BBC Local Radio Action Stations! (anon.). With a Foreword by Aubrey Singer (Managing Director BBC). London 1979. McGREGOR, Robin, The Public’s Image of the BBC. Annual Review of BBC Broadcasting Research Findings. No. 13, 1987. SHAW, Irene; McCRON, Robin, Radio Listening amongst the Asian Community in Leicester. Annual Review of BBC Broadcasting Findings No.13, 1987. DOCHERTY, David, Consuming Citizens: Public Attitudes and the BBC. Annual Review of BBC Broadcasting Research Findings No. 17, 1991. GRAHAM, Clive, BBC Radio Leicester’s Programmes for Asian Listeners. Annual Review of BBC Broadcasting Research Findings No. 17, 1991. PAYNTER, Ian, Radio Trends in the 1980s. Annual Review of BBC Broadcasting Research Findings No. 17, 1991. BBC Annual Report and Accounts 1991/92 and Guide to the BBC. London 1992. CAIN, John, The BBC: 70 years of broadcasting. London 1992. BBC News and Current Affairs. Stylebook and Editorial Guide. Ed. by Tony Hall (Managing Director Current Affairs). London 1993. BBC Producers’ Guidelines. Ed. by John Birt (Director General). London 1993. BBC World Service Programmes in English for Europe, the Middle East and North Africa 1 April to 30 September 1995. BBC Radio Leeds programme schedules for 27 September to 3 October 1997. 10 Reasons Why You’d Enjoy Programmes on Radio Leeds. Information brochure 1997.

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BBC Asian Network Leicester programme schedule 1998. The Board of Governors’ Programme Complaints Bulletins (January-March 1999) iss. April 1999. BBC website. BBC Annual Report and Accounts 1998/99. London 1999. BBC Radio Transmitting Stations. Reception Advice. London 1999. BBC Producers’ Guidelines. Ed. by Greg Dyke (Director General). London 2000. BBC website. BBC Press Releases 30.04.02, 30.07.02, 04.02.03, 29.04.03, 29.07.03, 28.10.03. Press Office, BBC website. BBC Programme Complaints iss. April, July, October 2003. BBC website. BBC Annual Report and Accounts 2002/03. BBC website. BBC Producers’ Guidelines. Ed. by Greg Dyke (Director General). London 2003. BBC website. World Frequencies. BBC World Service October 2003-April 2004. Many Voices One World • BBC World Service English Programme Schedules November 2003-April 2004.

Radio Authority: Independent Broadcasting Authority Annual Report and Accounts 1977-78 (Annan Report). London 1979. Radio Authority News and Current Affairs Code. London January 1994. Radio Authority Programme Code 2. London May 1995. Radio Authority Annual Report and Financial Statements for the Year Ended 31 Dec. 1997. London 1998. Radio Authority Programme Code. London March 1998. Sunrise Radio London Media Pack 1998. Sunrise Radio Programme Schedule 1998. How do I complain. The Radio Authority information leaflet 1999. Radio Authority Pocket Book. London June 1994, 1998, 2001.

Radio and television stations BBC: BBC Radio 1-5 BBC Radio Leeds BBC Radio Leicester/Asian Network Leicester BBC Radio London BBC Radio Wales BBC World Service BFBS (British Forces Broadcasting Service) in Germany BBC 1 TV

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Radio Authority: Classic FM (Independent National Radio 1) Virgin 1215 (Independent National Radio 2) Talk Radio (Independent National Radio 3) Capital Radio London National Hallam FM Sheffield Sunrise Radio London Sky 551 Discovery Channel

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