Modern English Language and Usage
Unit – 1:
Introduction
The evolution of Standard English
To mention the subject of Standard English is almost inevitably to invite criticism and controversy. What does one mean by that term; is there in fact, such a thing; and is it desirable that there should be? These questions have been discussed and debated ad nauseam so it is not proposed to go into all the pros and cons once again, for no useful purpose would be served by doing so. Those who disapprove of the idea of a ‘standard’ language point out that such a language is theoretical rather than real; that each person considers his own particular brand of English to be ‘standard’ and all derivations from it to be either affectations or dialects; that though with normally educated people, grammar, and to a large extent vocabulary also, is uniform throughout the country, pronunciation varies from locality to locality, and even amongst ‘good writers’ and others to whom one might reasonably turn for guidance there is often disagreement. What one will regard as Slang or Barbarism other will admit as part of vocabulary English. Words and phrases which to the younger generation is forceful and expressive, to the older is linguistic outrages. There are words over the pronunciation of which the ‘authorities’ themselves are perpetually wrangling. Amidst such diversity and confusion how is it possible to fix a standard or to pretend that one does or even can exist? Whom or what are we to take as our criterion of correctness? Any ruling that we may lay down will be purely arbitrary; and in any case it is unscientific and against all the natural genius of language to imagine that it can be fixed in this way. A standard speech is an artificial speech, and therefore unstable and without vitality. So argue the opponents of Standard English.
Granted all these objections; yet they do not dispose of the question. Every one of them could be challenged and contested, though it is not proposed to contest them there. The great fallacy in them seems to be that ‘standard’ speech is being confused with ‘standardized’ speech. It is true that there is not, and never could be, standardized English; but there is such a thing as Standard English. It is not easy to define, but we all know what it is, we all realize that it exists, and most of us can recognize it when we hear it, as we can detect deviations from it whenever they occur. It is not rigid or inflexible. Within its framework there is room for a certain amount of variation, and variety, and even of local and personal colouring. Like everything that is typically English, it is marked, within limits, by a spirit of tolerance and compromise and strict rigidity is alien to its nature. It accepts alike the Southern long a and the Northern short a in such words as bath, past, plaster; though it prefers the accent on the first syllable in controversy it will recognize it as permissible to place it on the second if we so desire, (this pronunciation is coming increasingly to be used even by educated people); and although it regards It is I as being the grammatically correct form, it does not absolutely rule out It is me. We may use any or all of these variations and alternatives and still speak Standard English; but there are certain things which we must ot say. The Cockney line (for lane) is definitely not Standard English – just as definitely as the Yorkshireman’s and Lancashireman’s pronunciation of stud as though it were the past tense of the verb stand isnot. It will not recognize childer as the plural ofchild, though historically it is more correct thanchildren, and we cannot say Them books are mine(as there is a tendency to do amongst uneducated folk), or He was sat by the fire, as a number of otherwise well spoken people do in the North and the Midlands. In short, we all know that mere is a generally accepted form of English that every educated person aims at speaking, from whatever part of the country and from whatever social class he comes: that though it does not impose strict uniformity, so that distinctive regional characteristics are not altogether obliterated, it does stand above the various regional dialects, and that people who speak this are intelligible to each other as they would not be if they spoke in their local variants. This is what we mean y Standard English. It is the linguistic currency of the realm, the Queen’s English.
So much, then, by way of explanation of what is meant by Standard English. Next we must say something on why it arose: for it is not, as some folks are apt to imagine, a mere arbitrary invention of a class or a clique that wish to impose their own particular way or speaking upon others. Though as we shall see later, there are very good utilitarian reasons why a standard speech should be cultivated, it has come about mainly as a natural product of certain historical, cultural and social factors. We have already noticed in Chapter III how, as far back as the Anglo-Saxon period, the dialect of Wessex gradually became the pre-eminent one and attained to something of the dignity of a literary dialect, chiefly through the accident that Wessex had a cultured and scholarly king in Alfred the Great, who encouraged letters and was himself both author and translator. In the Middle English period Chaucer and a number of contemporary writers gave the East Midland dialect a literary prestige, and the fact that Caxton used the same dialect for his early printed works established it more firmly still. The invention of printing, in fact, was one of the most influential factors making for the emergence of Standard English. It could not, of course, influence pronunciation but it did stabilize, within limits, spelling, grammar, syntax and vocabulary. Dialects was still widely used in speech and even in correspondence, but they tended increasingly to be regarded as an inferior sort of English. The particular dialect that was the ‘official’ dialect of printing attained to a respectability and a prestige that the others did not enjoy, and as printed works circulated far and wide throughout the country, and even abroad, it soon spread beyond its original bounds and became a national tongue while others were only regional ones.
Now it so happened that the East Midland dialect was also that spoken, with slight modifications, in London, and the political consolidation of England, with the centralisation of government and of national life in London during the time of the Tudor monarchs, not only meant that the need would be increasingly felt for a ‘national’ language by a people that was becoming more and more conscious of its national unity, but it also helped to assure a supremacy for the English of the capital. The influence of the Authorised Version of the Bible (1611) must also be taken into consideration, and, about a century and a half later, Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary, which performed a double service, viz. (i) it reduced a rather chaotic spelling system to something like order and virtually ‘fixed’ English spelling from that time onwards; and (ii) by distinguishing between reputable and ‘low’ words (sometimes rather arbitrarily and capriciously, it is true) it established the notion of a cleavage between what was ‘good English’ and what was not. Amongst later influences must be counted the increased social contract which modern methods of travel have brought in their train and the spread of reading and of education amongst all classes, with a consequent elevation of Standard English at the expense of regional varieties, advent of wireless and television (at least in their early days). And finally we must not discount the part played by the more utilitarian and that, in these democratic days, if one would ‘get on in the word’ one must take care to speak good English. Savoir dire (to coin a phrase) is just as important as savoir faire.
Professor H. C. Wyld, writing some years ago in his Short History of English, defined Standard English as that which was ‘spoken within certain social boundaries, with an extraordinary degree of uniformity, all over the country’: and it is true that, in all probability, the distinction between those who spoke Standard English and those who did not was originally a social one. To some extent it still is so today. Certainly the old and more rigid social barriers are breaking down, so that in a strict sense Wyld’s definition is no longer valid. The son or daughter of a working man may, and very often does, speak as good English as a peer of the realm, so that Standard English is no longer the monopoly or distinguishing mark of one social class – unless, indeed, we modify the significance of the term and claim that the typist or shop assistant who speaks the same kind of English as the peeress is, ipso facto, in the same class, and that possibly the incentive to speaking ‘good English’ is a mild so harmless form of snobbery and social ambition – a desire to gain admittance to that ever broadening circle. But however we may view the matter, certainly the negative aspect of Wyld’s definition still holds good: the speaking of non-standard English definitely places a person outside the social class in question. In other words, Standard English carries with it and confers on its speaker a certain social prestige; any other brand of English does the opposite.
Another authority of the English language, Professor Daniel Jones, is more explicit. What we call Standard English, he says, ‘is that most usually heard in everyday speech in the families of Southern England whose men folk have been educated at the great public school.’ It will be noticed that he states more definitely than does Wyld what the social class is, and he also adds the qualification as to locality; but again the same objections would seem to apply. Jones, however, though his definitions may be rather faulty when judged by the distribution of Standard English at the present day, has hit upon the two most important facts about its origin; viz, it is based on (a) the English of Southern England, and (b) the language of the cultured and educated classes of the region.
Why the dialect of the South rather than that of the North should have gained this pre-eminence has been discussed already; viz, for courtly reasons, reasons of government, trade and commerce, foreign travel, etc. As early as 1589 we find George Puttenham, in his Art of English Poesieadvising poets not to take the terms of the Northern men, nor any speech used beyond, the river of Trent. ‘But ye shall take the usual speech of the Court and that of London and the shires lying about London within sixty miles, and not much above…… Herein we are already ruled by the English dictionaries and other books written by learned men, and therefore it needed none other direction in that behalf.’ Puttenham, it is true, was speaking for the written literary language rather than for the spoken word, but where literature lead, the speech of the polite society followed and from polite society it slowly but gradually percolated through the lower strata. It was, of course, influenced in subtle ways by political, religious and social development, and each age has made its own contribution.
One feels that the debt we owe to the Commonwealth period in the matter of the evolution of a standard language has never been sufficiently recognised. By the fact that it sets its face against courtly affectation and cultivated a dignified mode of speech it helped to mould the character of the language for the next two hundred years; and by the emphasis that it placed upon the reading and study of the Bible it did a great deal to combat the earlier tendency towards Latinism and to ensure a predominantly Saxon basis for the mother tongue. If in many respects the Renaissance enriched the language, it also the provided the possibility for the emergence of an artificial pseudo-classical style. The development of this was very largely checked by the Puritans. Those Puritans represented the predecessors of the very families whose speech Jones had in mind when he laid down the definition of Standard English quoted above: the upper middle class, who for two whole centuries were the backbone of England and the most important class socially as well as politically. As their religious and moral outlook influenced English life and thought right up to the end of Queen Victoria’s reign, so did the character of their speech influence the future developments of the language.
England has never had an Academy of Letters, as France has, but towards the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century many writers felt that there was a need for one so that some standard of language and vocabulary could be fixed by an authoritative body. In this age, the age of the Merry Monarch, of Queen Anne and the first two Georges, with their galaxy of courtiers, politicians and literati, polite society and the world of letters were even more conscious of the distinctiveness of the London and southern dialects than their predecessors had been, and one of the most frequent subjects of ridicule in a number of plays and minor novels of the day was the Yorkshire squire, with his uncouth manners and his barbarous diction. It was felt that a very valuable purpose would be defining once for all what was to be considered good English, and giving a rule on what words were admissible into polite language and what were to be regarded as slang. When Johnson undertook the compilation of his Dictionary he had something of this object in view, but he quickly abandoned it, becoming convinced that such a project was not feasible, and soon he opposed the established of any kind of Academy as being alien to the spirit of English liberty. Nevertheless, the dictionaries of the eighteenth century did attempt to lay down an approximate standard in that they not only distinguished between what words might be used by those who wished to be considered ‘correct’ and what might not, but many of them marked accent and vowel quantities in order to guide to pronunciation, about which, apparently, there was still a great deal of doubt of doubt and disagreement.
The contribution of the eighteenth century to the development of Standard English, then, is beyond question; but for all that, what it achieved it achieved in spite of itself. The attitude it adopted was one which was fundamentally unsound and unscientific. For the eighteenth century, and especially the first half of it, was the great classical age of English letters. It laid down the rules to which literature was expected to conform, and it sought to do the same for language. It believed that the dictionary and the grammar book should be the authorities on ‘correctness’ and that usage should be made to conform to precept. Writers strove to establish for England a style and diction worthy of their country and its traditions as the style and diction for Latin were worthy of the traditions of Rome. But the great mistake they made was in assuming that the classical tongues of antiquity, by which they set much store, had remained fixed and static. The eighteenth century was unfortunately deficient in philological knowledge, or such an assumption could never have been made. It believed that Latin and Greek owed their vitality and the immortality of their literature to the fact that they had been standardised, or, as Pope would have put it, ‘methodised’, and the desire to do the same for the language and literature of their own country was the main motive behind the attempts of a number of authors to establish a ‘standard’ for English.
The next hundred years was the age of individualism and laissez faire, of the doctrines of evolution and the survival of the fittest, and in these circumstances we should hardly expect the idea of an academy to gain much sympathy. Matthew Arnold, who in many ways had affinities with the mid-eighteenth century rather than with his own generation, flirted with it, but in an essay on The Literary Influence of Academies (published in his Essays in Criticism, Series I) he finally rejected it. “An Academy quite like the French Academy, a sovereign organ of the highest literary opinion….we shall hardly have, and we ought not to wish to have it”, he wrote: but he was in favour of what he termed “influential centres of correct information”, an ideal which to some extent has since been realised.
The nineteenth century, too, was a great period of English expansion and Empire-building, as well as of commercial development, and these characteristics had a twofold effect upon the language, an effect which was at once broadening and restrictive. The vocabulary was considerably enlarged through foreign contacts, while the development of science and social theory led to new recourse being had to the classical tongues for the confirmation of words of an academic and technical nature. The abstract element in English became more marked: this was the age when so many of our -isms were born. But side by side with this, and partly as a reaction from it, there also arose a movement for the purification of the language by the exclusion of foreign tongues and their replacement by words of native origin wherever possible. No doubt the national consciousness which usually accompanies a nascent imperialism, and of which we have recently seen instances in other countries, partly accounts for this development; and partly too, it is explained by the renewed reverence for the Bible and ‘Bible English’ which was so marked a characteristic of the period. To the Victorians the Bible became not only a book of devotionbut a text-book for scholars in the day and evening schools. Many a writer like Ruskin was steeped and saturated in its style and its phraseology, and people were taught that it was of value not only for its religious and moral precepts but also because it was written in the best, the simplest, the purest and the most euphonious English of all time. Nor must we overlook the influence of the Germano-phile tendency which grew up just before the middle of the century through the study of the German philosophers and the writings of Carlyle, and finally through the Queen’s marriage to a German prince. True, the classical tradition still dominated the educational system from the grammar schools upwards, but all these factors were counteracting influences.
The movement toward a ‘purer’ English is seen most markedly in Tennyson, the representative poet of the age. Eschewing words of foreign origin as far as he could, he attempted to give currency to some of the ‘good old English words that had long since become archaic. One thinks of brand (sword), boon, purblind, spate, knave (in its original sense of boy), deem, seer, thrall, etc. If one excludes the words of a religious significance – chapel, cross, chancel – which are of necessity derived from Norman-French, the first dozen lines of Morte d’Arthurconsist almost entirely of English or at least Germanic words, and the statistics given on page 36-37 show that on an average about eighty-eight per cent of Tennyson’s diction is of native origin. William Morris, too, with his cult of medievalism and his dislike of innovations in language as in social life, was another of the purists. He went even further than Tennyson and suggested that such well-established words as omnibus and dictionary should be replaced by folkwain and word-book.
Though this purist movement may possibly have had a sobering influence on the development of the language in so far as it tended to preserve the existing predominance of native elements and to check the unnecessary recourse to foreign terms or to the gowth of a markedly foreign style, few of the actual revivals were permanent. Morris’s drastic reforms were foredoomed to failure, and almost all his coinages proved abortive. Tennyson’s gained a limited currency for a while, but were still regarded as poetic eccentricities and never really absorbed into the spoken tongue or even into the diction of written prose. A few words likehandbook (in place of the older manual) foreword(instead of preface), which both belong to this period, have survived, but even so they have not ousted the alternative terms.
Now to any language are four distinct aspects, viz., (i) vocabulary, (ii) spelling, (iii) grammar, and (iv) pronunciation. For obvious reasons the earliest move towards standardisation took place in the first three of these. It is only comparatively recently that pronunciation has become more or less uniform. Of course, there always have been, and there presumably always will be, two tendencies at work: on the one hand the conservative, which is averse to change and looks askance at innovation as two great latitude as being destructive of all that is best and most characteristic in the speech that has been handed down to us by the past; on the other the progressive, which holds that by welcoming innovation we are not only enlarging the bounds and the possibilities of the language, but are actually preserving the spirit and tradition of the past, since the English tongue has only become what it is today because our ancestors adopted no narrow attitude but were ready to accept and naturalise foreign elements and to tolerate new tendencies in style, grammar and pronunciation. With this clash of opinion is bound up the whole question of the relation between grammar and usage. It is not proposed to debate it here; suffice it to say that the present age seems to have adopted an attitude of compromise, which is, perhaps, the common sense one. While admitting that ultimately precept is determined by practice, grammar by usage, and not vice versa, it takes up a position which is still fundamentally conservative, though conservative in the enlightened sense. It will not give way to passing whims and fancies or tolerate arbitrary departures from what has been long accepted as ‘correct’, when it is clear that a particular innovation is not merely a passing whim or eccentricity, but has come to stay, it will recognise it as legitimate English. Frequently there is an intermediate stage, when the old and new are regarded as equally acceptable. Hence the alternative spellings judgement and judgment and the alternative pronunciations of controversy, respite, etc. at the present time.
Of recent years there has been a reaction against the idea of Standard English, perhaps as part of the reaction against authority in general, perhaps on the principle that ‘Jack is as good as his master’. Then, as a further reaction against this, there arose a an interest in ‘U’ and ‘non-U’ English. (‘U’ stands for upper-class, or the aristocracy, and ‘non-U’ for non-upper-class’, i.e. the rest of us). Note-paper is non-U: the U term is writing paper. Mirror is non-U; the U speaker uses looking glass (except for a driving mirror and a shaving mirror). A U speaker will refer to a lounge in a hotel or a club, but not in a private house. Coverlet is non-U; its U equivalent is counterpane. Only non-U speakers take a bath, a U speaker has a bath. Radio is non-U, the U equivalent is wireless. Interest in the subject was first aroused in 1954, when Professor Alan Ross, of the University of Birmingham, contributed an article on it to the Finnish philological journal Neuphilologische Mitteilungen. A shortened version of this article later appeared in Encounter. Miss Nancy Mitford joined in the discussion, and for a while there was a good deal of argument and controversy. The original article was meant as a social study, not as an indicator of what was linguistically ‘correct’ and what ‘incorrect’, though there was at the time tendency to interpret it that way. Today we scarcely hear it discussed, though it has been the terms of ‘U’ and ‘non-U’ for things other than language. Perhaps the reason against the idea of Standard English will be similarly short-lived, though if it is, the Standard English of fifty years hence will not be in all respects that of today.
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